A software tool to ensure your Recruiters don’t approach candidates working for off-limits companies; such as your existing customers

Are there companies you cannot headhunt from?

Such as your existing customers? Companies you’re in talks about acquiring? Subsidiaries of your parent company? Part of the same VC portfolio?

Recruitment Leaders, perhaps you instinctively know who these companies are, but does everyone in your team?

If they don’t, Bycatch flags off-limits candidates by placing a notification on their LinkedIn profile. We built it for our own internal use, at Hawkwood, and are hoping to share it with some of you.

The Problem:

Assuming there are particular companies you cannot headhunt from, these names are likely stored in a central list somewhere — perhaps on a Google Sheet.

But the issue is, when sourcing for candidates on LinkedIn, Recruiters are usually trawling through hundreds of LinkedIn profiles at a time, often across many browser tabs.

To ask them to click back and forth between a Google Sheet, to search out the company name in question before sending a message, is a method that is time-consuming, fiddly and, therefore, prone to failure.

Sometimes, candidates are going to receive messages who shouldn’t…

What solution does LinkedIn offer?

TL;DR: it doesn’t work…

LinkedIn Solution: Adding “Notes” to their LinkedIn profile within Recruiter Pro

Why this doesn’t work:

1. “Notes” have to be individually added to every single person working within a company, which is incredibly time-consuming
2. As new people join the company (likely each month), these notes will need to be added continually
3. The notes remain on the LinkedIn profile, even if the candidate has since left to join another company (one which may not be off-limits)

The Solution:

Bycatch is a Google Chrome Extension that integrates with LinkedIn. If you install it now, it’ll only take 2 minutes to set-up.

To mark a company as “off-limits”, you navigate to their company page on LinkedIn and click on the “Mark as off-limits” button.

From there, the LinkedIn profile of all people working for that company will display this “Off-limits” notification prominently on their profile.

Once you have inputted your off-limits companies, you can invite your recruitment team, and you will all have visibility over all off-limits candidates.

What’s next?

You can try Bycatch for free via: https://www.bycatch.app/

We built this tool to solve our own internal problem, at Hawkwood.

Having initially thought other Recruitment Agencies would be the target customer, we’ve discovered that this is a problem experienced by some Internal Talent Acquisition teams also.

"Bycatch has made it super easy to identify when sourcing companies in which we cannot target talent from, globally! Not only is it super easy to use – the Global Talent Team can add & remove to/from the list making the upkeep super easy. The widget is so handy! Thank you!"

Cara Lewis - Talent Acquisition Lead, Legend

If you’ve got this far, give Bycatch a try and we'd love to hear your feedback.

Who knows, LinkedIn may add this as a feature before long, meaning you can cancel your subscription with us and save some money. Until then, we’re here to help you solve a mildly irritating problem, for a fairly reasonable price.

Thanks for reading.