# How we source candidates for open roles The outbound-sourcing agent we run on Kortix — daily, it finds candidates on LinkedIn for each open role, checks Greenhouse so no one already in the pipeline gets a duplicate reach-out, and drafts a personalized email for the recruiter to review and send. Canonical page: https://kortix.com/use-cases/candidate-sourcing Filling an open role isn't just reading the applications that arrive — the best candidates for a lot of roles aren't applying anywhere, they're already employed and not looking. Finding them means searching LinkedIn by hand, checking the ATS to make sure whoever you found isn't already in the pipeline, and writing an intro that actually references their background instead of a generic template. Done well, it's hours of work per role. Done under time pressure, it gets skipped and the role stays open longer. We run a candidate-sourcing agent on Kortix that does the search and the first draft every day. For an open role, it finds matching candidates on LinkedIn, checks Greenhouse so it never resurfaces someone already in the pipeline, and drafts a personalized outreach email referencing each candidate's actual background. It sources and drafts only — the recruiter reviews every draft, and nothing sends and no one is added to the ATS without them. This is how we source our own outbound pipeline. - **Team:** Kortix - **Runs on:** Daily cron - **Connected systems:** Greenhouse · LinkedIn · Email - **Mode:** Sources and drafts only · recruiter reviews and sends ## The problem Outbound recruiting is a research problem before it's a writing problem, and neither half scales by hand. Searching LinkedIn for candidates who actually match a role's real bar takes real time, and doing it well across several open roles at once is more than one recruiter can sustain daily. Then there's the dedupe check: has this person already applied, already been contacted, already passed on an earlier round? Skipping that check means a candidate gets the same cold email twice, which reads as sloppy at best. The usual shortcuts make it worse. A generic sourcing tool exports a list of profiles with no reference to the pipeline, so recruiters re-discover people who are already in Greenhouse. A templated outreach message goes out to everyone in the list with a name swapped in, and candidates who get a lot of these can tell instantly. Neither problem gets fixed by working faster — they get fixed by connecting the systems that already have the answer. ## What we built On Kortix, a daily cron triggers an agent. It spawns a fresh session (a cloud sandbox) scoped to an open role, searches LinkedIn for candidates matching that role's profile, checks the role's Greenhouse pipeline so it never proposes someone already there, and drafts a personalized outreach email for each new match — referencing that candidate's real background, not a template. Every draft lands in the recruiter's inbox for review; the agent never emails a candidate and never touches Greenhouse. ## How it works ### Run on a daily cron A **cron trigger** fires the agent once a day. Each firing spawns a fresh **session** in its own sandbox scoped to one open role, so every day's batch is sourced and deduped against the current state of the pipeline — nothing carries over from the day before. ### Give the agent the role's sourcing profile What "a match" means for this role — the title, seniority, skills, and any other criteria worth searching for — lives as **skills** and **memory** that travel with the agent, alongside the outreach angles that make a message worth opening instead of ignoring. When the role's bar changes or a message pattern gets better replies, we write it down and the next day's batch reflects it. ### Connect Greenhouse, LinkedIn, and email Through scoped **connectors**, brokered server-side so no raw token reaches the model, the agent can: - **Search LinkedIn** — for candidates matching the role's sourcing profile. - **Check Greenhouse** — the open role's pipeline, so anyone already applied, contacted, or passed on gets skipped rather than re-surfaced. - **Draft to email** — a personalized outreach message per new candidate, referencing their actual background, held for the recruiter to send. ### Set the guardrails The agent's job stops at the draft. It never sends an outreach email itself and never adds, moves, or tags anyone in Greenhouse — sourcing and drafting only. Credentials are encrypted in the Secrets Manager and injected at runtime, scoped to the agents you grant them to. ### Hand the batch to the recruiter With that in place, each morning brings a small batch of new candidates for the open role, each with a drafted email that references their real background and a note on why they matched. The recruiter reads each one, edits where they want, and sends it themselves — or adds the candidate to Greenhouse themselves, if they choose to. Nothing is written back out except the drafts. > **The pattern** > A daily **cron** spawns a fresh session scoped to one open role, with > **connectors** into LinkedIn to source and Greenhouse to dedupe. The > sourcing profile and outreach angles live as **skills** and **memory**. The > agent drafts to email and stops — the recruiter reviews, sends, and owns > the ATS. ## Guardrails The agent can search for and contact real people, so the boundary between "draft" and "send" is the control that matters: - **Isolation.** Every run happens in its own isolated sandbox, scoped to one open role. Only the drafted emails are written back out. - **Scoped secrets.** The Greenhouse and LinkedIn credentials are encrypted in the Secrets Manager and injected into the sandbox at runtime, scoped to the agents you grant them to. - **Human approval gate.** The agent never sends outreach itself and never adds a candidate to Greenhouse. Every draft is held for the recruiter to review, edit, and send — and the ATS is theirs to update. - **Dedupe before draft.** The agent checks the role's Greenhouse pipeline before drafting anything, so a candidate already applied, contacted, or passed on never gets a duplicate reach-out. - **Everything is code.** The sourcing profile, outreach angles, and per-system permissions are files in the repo, versioned and changed through a reviewed **change request** rather than a dashboard setting. ## The outcome - **Every day:** New candidates sourced and deduped per open role - **Zero:** Duplicate reach-outs to candidates already in the pipeline - **3 systems:** Greenhouse, LinkedIn, and email in one agent Sourcing for an open role now starts with a batch already searched, deduped against the pipeline, and drafted with a real reference to each candidate's background. The recruiter's day starts with review instead of research, and every send and every ATS change still stays with them.