People search for recruiting

A referral is a name, not a person

Recruiting research usually starts as a Slack line: “You should talk to Alex Chen — they were at the payments company, spoke on latency.” Or a forwarded email: “Maria Garcia, someone from the Denver event, data.” That line is a ticket. It is not a confirmed identity, and it is not permission to run a screen.

The job in the next ten minutes is narrow. Confirm you have the person the referrer meant. Pull what they have said or shipped in public. Write a first note that could only have been written about them. Do not build a dossier. Do not open a people directory. Do not paste a summary into the ATS as if it were a background check.

LinkedIn is still where you message and where the graph lives. A sourced brief is what you read before the InMail so the first sentence is specific and the profile view — if you even need one — is a choice, not a panic tab-binge. See OneSearch vs LinkedIn if you are deciding which tab is the job. This page is the method for the brief.

The ten-minute ticket

Write the ticket before you search. Trigger, what you already know, what the brief must answer. If you cannot fill those three lines, you are browsing, not researching.

The brief must answer two questions and only two: (1) is this the Alex or Maria the referrer meant, and (2) what public work can I cite in a first note without guessing. Everything else — compensation bands, “flight risk,” family, a directory age — is off the ticket. If your hiring manager asked for a screen, that is a different process with a different vendor. Point them at FCRA and legal use and stop this lookup.

Confirm before you write

Common names are the default in recruiting, not the exception. Engineering orgs are full of Alex Chens. Spanish-speaking markets and US metros are full of Maria Garcias. If you write the outreach before you pick a card, you will eventually congratulate someone on a talk they did not give, at a company they do not work for. That message is worse than a generic one. The generic one is lazy. The wrong-talk one is a tell that you did not look.

Confirmation needs three agreeing signals: employer or role, a place or org, and one unique public artifact. “Engineer in fintech” is not a signal set. “Staff engineer at this payments company, San Francisco, latency talk on this YouTube page with this face” is a signal set. If the referrer did not give you the company, ask them before you invent one. A thirty-second Slack reply is cheaper than a wrong brief.

Practice the card pick on Alex Chen until it is boring. The SF engineer with the latency talk is the referral. The NYC quant with a faculty PDF is a serious person and still wrong. The Austin founder with a podcast is loud and still wrong. A confident brief on the wrong card is a professional error. Confirm or stop. The same gate is written up as a standalone method in confirm the right person.

Worked example: Alex Chen, referred for a staff role

Referrer: “Alex Chen, payments, spoke on latency last year. Might be open.” You are hiring a staff engineer on a payments platform. You have twenty minutes before you owe the referrer a “reached out.”

Minute 0–2 — lock the ticket

Write: Alex Chen. Payments (unconfirmed). Latency talk last year. Job this brief is not allowed to do: hire/no-hire. You will not search “Alex Chen engineer” and take the first LinkedIn. You will search the talk.

Minute 2–5 — find the artifact, then the person

Search the talk, not the name: “Alex Chen latency” plus the year plus “payments” or the conference you already know. Open the talk page. Read the bumper or the speaker bio for an employer. That employer is now a breadcrumb with a URL. Only then search the name + that employer. If three Alex Chens still appear at adjacent companies, compare faces and the talk. If you cannot tell, Slack the referrer a link: “This talk?” Do not guess.

Minute 5–9 — public work only

Open the company team or engineering blog. Open the talk. Open a public GitHub org that matches the employer, and only commits that are clearly theirs. Write four lines: current title as stated, talk title and year, one sentence they said about latency, one public artifact (a post, a repo, a panel). Date each line. If the team page and the talk disagree on title, keep both dates.

Minute 9–12 — the note, then stop

First note cites the talk and one concrete sentence. It does not cite “I saw you might be looking.” It does not mention the referrer if the referrer asked to stay quiet. It does not mention anything you could not open. Send. Close the tabs. Do not reward yourself with a directory search “just to be thorough.” Thorough, in this job, is the four lines and the confirm. Extra attributes are a different product and a different legal lane.

Worked example: Maria Garcia, inbound from an event

You ran a booth in Denver. A badge scan says Maria Garcia and a personal Gmail. The scan does not include an employer. Your CRM will happily create a candidate record on that Gmail. That record is not a confirm.

Pull the event program. Find every Maria Garcia. There may be one, or a speaker and a volunteer with the same name. Match the badge company if the scanner caught one; if not, match the session she asked you about — you wrote “municipal data” on the back of the badge sticker, or you did not, and now you have to say so.

Suppose the program lists Maria Garcia, director of data, city vendor, Tuesday panel. The vendor team page shows the same name and a headshot that matches your memory of the booth. Confirm that card. The brief is: vendor, title, panel title, any public writing under that byline. The first note can reference the panel and the product question she asked, if you wrote the question down. If you cannot confirm — two Marias, no headshot, no company — do not send a “loved your talk” email to the Gmail. Send “I want to make sure I have the right Maria from the Denver municipal data panel.” That is recruiting, not research theater.

If this Maria later becomes an applicant, the event brief does not travel into the hiring file as a screen. You may remember she spoke. You may not treat a public panel as a character reference or a criminal record. When the process turns into eligibility, hand it to a CRA. The event page stays conversation context.

Worked example: Jordan Okonkwo, marketplace backend

Slack: “Jordan Okonkwo — backend, used to be at the marketplace company, wrote about queueing. Might chat.” Marketplace alumni are a collision set. There is a Jordan Okonkwo who shipped consumer-marketplace infra and posted an engineering-blog piece on delayed jobs. There is another Jordan Okonkwo who is a product manager at a different company and writes essays about “the marketplace opportunity.”

Search the blog post, not the name. Open the post. Capture the employer on the byline and the year. Then open that employer’s eng or team page and match the name. If the PM Jordan is louder this week, you will still see the post first if you searched the artifact. If you cannot find the post and the referrer cannot paste a URL, ask before you write a “loved your queueing piece” note to the PM.

The brief, once confirmed: last stated employer and title (dated), the queueing post title and URL, one sentence they wrote about the failure mode, current public seat if a newer team page exists. First note cites the post and the role you are hiring. It does not cite the PM essays. Jordan is a different collision than Alex (talk + payments) or Maria (badge + event): the artifact is a byline, and the loud namesake is in a different function.

Talks, repos, writing — what you are actually looking for

Recruiters over-collect profiles and under-collect artifacts. A public talk is worth more than a second social URL. A repo with their name on the commits under the employer org is worth more than a skill list. A byline on an engineering blog is worth more than a directory current-city field.

Work the stack in order. Company or team page first — it is the least glamorous and the most likely to be the person you meant. Talks and podcasts second: they give you a sentence you can quote without inventing interest. Public code and public writing third. Press last, and only when the employer or the artifact matches. Press is where homonyms hide.

What a talk is allowed to do

A talk lets you ask a better question. “You said the tail latency was a coordination problem, not a hardware problem — is that still how you would frame it?” is a question. “Saw your talk, would love to connect” is a template. If you did not watch enough to ask one specific question, do not pretend you did. Cite the title and ask about the problem space you are hiring for. Honesty travels. Fake homework does not.

What a repo is not

A public repo is not a take-home test you grade in secret. It is a signal that they work in public on a topic. Do not write “code quality seems uneven” into a brief you will share. You are not their reviewer. You are trying to confirm identity and find one sentence for outreach. If you need a work sample, ask for one in process, with their knowledge.

The first note

The brief exists to make the first note shorter, not longer. Four parts, in this order: who you are and the role, the confirm artifact (talk, post, panel), the reason that artifact connects to the role, a clear ask. No biography of the candidate. No “I came across your profile.” No directory facts.

For Alex Chen: you are hiring a staff engineer on payments infra. You watched the latency talk — or you read the abstract and the first ten minutes, and you say that. The role includes the same class of tail-latency problem. Ask if they are open to a conversation this month. For Maria Garcia: you met at the booth, you confirmed the Tuesday panel, you are hiring a data lead who has worked with city vendors. Ask if she wants the description. Stop.

If the public web is quiet — no talk, no byline, a thin team page — the first note should be quieter too. Cite the referral or the event, not a fiction. Quiet candidates are not worse candidates. They are worse to fake-research. See when the public web is quiet.

What never goes in the ATS

Your ATS is an official file. A sourced brief is a personal prep note. Those two objects should not collapse into each other. Do not paste an unverified summary into a candidate record as if it were a screen. Do not store directory phones or “possible addresses.” Do not record inferences about protected characteristics you pulled from photos or posts. Do not file a public tweet as a reason to advance or reject.

What may belong, depending on your counsel and your process: the fact that a referral named them, the fact that you spoke, the fact that they applied, links they handed you. What does not belong: a people-search product used like a CRA. If a hiring manager asks you to “just run them through OneSearch before we decide,” the answer is no. Point at people search is not a background check and use the vendor you already pay for regulated screening.

Sourced prep can still live in a private notes field if your policy allows conversation notes — “cited their 2025 latency talk in outreach, link X.” That is a CRM hygiene line, not a consumer report. If you cannot tell the difference in the sentence you are about to paste, do not paste it.

Private for a reason

Passive candidates notice profile views. They notice InMails that arrived after a week of visible stalking. A public-web brief that does not ping them is the point. OneSearch does not notify the subject. Your lookup history stays on your account. That is not a license to be creepy. It is a license to confirm the person and read public pages without announcing the funnel.

Privacy on your side does not change their privacy. Public pages are public. Do not scrape what is not public. Do not ask a friend to forward a non-public doc and then file it as “research.” Do not use a brief to rehearse personal details in the first call (“I saw your kid’s school…”). If it would sound like surveillance in the room, it does not belong in the brief.

The eligibility stop

The moment the question is “should we hire them,” you are out of this product. Public posts, talks, and repos can inform how you talk. They cannot be the record on which you decline someone as if you had run a consumer report. Criminal records, credit, driving, employment verification — that is CRA territory, with disclosure, authorization, and adverse-action steps where they apply. OneSearch is none of those things. Employers who do use consumer reports should read the FTC’s Using Consumer Reports: What Employers Need to Know; this product is not that process.

Agency recruiters and in-house talent share this line. The agency temptation is to attach a “research packet” to a candidate submission. If that packet includes directory attributes or a vibe paragraph from a people-search tool, you have handed the client something that looks like a report. Do not. Send the public links you would be comfortable showing the candidate, or send nothing but the resume they approved.

Run it without a product

You do not need OneSearch to run this ticket. You need a notes file and the discipline to confirm first.

1. Write trigger, breadcrumbs, and the sentence “this is not a screen.”
2. Ask the referrer for one artifact if company or city is missing.
3. Search the artifact (talk, event, employer blog), then name + employer — never name alone as the first query.
4. Pick one card with three agreeing signals, or stop and ask again.
5. Open team page, talk, public code or writing, then press. Four lines, dated, each with a URL.
6. Write the first note from those four lines. Close the directory tab if you opened one by habit.
7. Keep the note out of the eligibility file. When the process turns official, use the CRA.

OneSearch is the same sequence with the confirm gate in the product and the follow-ups attached to the page. Use it when you have a stack of referral names and you keep briefing the loudest namesake. The method is in people search, without a dossier dump. The meeting version of the same discipline — useful when a hiring manager is in the room with you — is research someone before a meeting. Founders running the same confirm-first pass on an investor name should use the founder brief, not this outreach template. Salespeople writing a first-call brief should use the sales version. Writers who need a citation trail rather than a first note should use sourced people research.

If your actual job today is a conversation, go to LinkedIn after the brief, not before it. If your actual job today is a page you already have, stay in Google. If your actual job today is a decision the FCRA cares about, stop.