Capture from LinkedIn today, connect Recruiter when access is granted

In the meantime, sourcing from LinkedIn runs through the Surhires Chrome extension, and the important word is user-initiated. You are on a public profile you have chosen to open. You press the extension. It reads the page you are already viewing, fills a candidate record with name, headline, location, current employer and the skills the profile lists, checks that record against your existing database for a duplicate, and either creates the candidate or opens the one you already had.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A sourcer working a brief will re-find the same twenty people across a fortnight, and without a duplicate check at capture time you get four versions of the same person with different notes on each. Capture through the extension writes to one record.

The extension also lets you drop the person straight into a talent pool or a live requisition, add the first note while the profile is still on screen, and set a follow-up task. That is the loop a sourcing day is actually made of.

Surhires does not automate LinkedIn connection requests, does not send messages through a logged-in session, and does not crawl profiles in the background. Those features exist in other tools and they are the reason recruiters lose accounts.

Consider what a restricted account actually costs a desk. The seat is expensive, the InMail credits attached to it are gone, the saved projects and the message history go with it, and the recruiter's professional network, which is a personal asset, is caught in the same restriction. On an agency desk that is not an inconvenience, it is a severe incident: the person cannot work their pipeline, the candidates mid-conversation go quiet, and the account is one appeal away from being permanently gone.

So the line we hold is simple. A human opens a page, a human presses a button, and the tool records what the human saw. Anything that turns your recruiter's session into a robot is a liability we will not sell you.

There is exactly one legitimate way for a CRM to send LinkedIn messages on your behalf, and it is the official API, under the terms of the partner programme, using the InMail entitlement attached to your own Recruiter seat. Any other method is a session-hijack dressed up as a feature.

That is the path the in-build connector targets. When partner access is confirmed, InMail sent from Surhires will consume your own credits, appear in your own Recruiter history, and write the message and the reply back to the candidate's activity stream so the conversation is not stranded in a tab.

Until that access exists, InMail is sent in LinkedIn. You can log the outcome on the candidate record in a few seconds, and the sequencing tools in Surhires will happily run the email and WhatsApp legs of a multi-channel sequence around a LinkedIn step you send by hand.

The build targets the things a Recruiter seat holds that a CRM cannot see from outside: projects and the candidates in them, InMail send and reply through the official entitlement, application data from jobs posted through the API, and a two-way link between a candidate in your database and the profile they map to.

Written in the future tense deliberately. None of it works now. When it does, the badge on this page changes, the change appears on the changelog, and the trial account gets it without a conversation about tiers.

The one thing the connector will not do, even with full partner access, is give you a bulk export of LinkedIn. Partner terms do not permit building a shadow copy of the network in your own database, and a vendor who tells you otherwise is describing a risk they intend to hand to you.

Plenty of desks are LinkedIn-first and cannot wait. The working pattern is: source in LinkedIn, capture with the extension, and run every subsequent touch from Surhires where it is recorded, reportable and visible to whoever picks the desk up next.

In practice that means the second and third touches move to email and WhatsApp, which are channels you own and which the sequencing engine can run properly. It also means source attribution stays honest, because the record says the candidate came from LinkedIn even though the placement conversation happened elsewhere.

The desks that struggle are the ones that keep the whole conversation inside LinkedIn messaging. When that recruiter leaves, the pipeline leaves with them. Capturing early is the fix, and it does not require any partner programme at all.

LinkedIn is one source. The Candidate Sourcing Agent searches your own database before it suggests you go looking outside it, which is the cheapest sourcing you will ever do and the reason a clean database earns more than a bigger seat allocation.

Board integrations for Indeed and ZipRecruiter are in build for the same Wave 1 release, and the CV-Library, Naukri and Seek connectors follow their own partner processes. Every one of them has a state on its page, and the states are not decoration.