Hiring well means more than reading whatever applications show up. For plenty of roles, the people you most want are happily employed and not applying to anything. Reaching them means digging through LinkedIn yourself, checking your applicant tracking system (ATS) so you don't approach someone who's already in your pipeline, and writing a note that mentions their real experience rather than a copy-paste template. Doing that properly eats hours for each role. When the week gets busy, it doesn't happen, and the seat stays empty for longer.

So an agent on Machine handles the searching and the first draft, every day. For each open role it finds people on LinkedIn who fit, checks Greenhouse so it never brings back anyone already in the pipeline, and writes a personal outreach email that draws on each person's actual background. Its job is to find and draft. The recruiter reads every draft, and no email goes out and nobody lands in the ATS unless they do it. This is how we build our own outbound pipeline.

The problem

Outbound hiring is research first and writing second, and neither part keeps up when done by hand. Hunting LinkedIn for people who truly meet a role's bar takes time, and doing it properly for several open roles every day is more than one recruiter can keep up. On top of that comes the duplicate check. Did this person apply already? Did someone reach out before? Were they turned down in an earlier round? Skip it, and a candidate gets the same cold email twice, which looks careless at the very least.

The common shortcuts only add to the mess. A typical sourcing tool spits out a list of profiles that knows nothing about your pipeline, so recruiters keep finding people who are already in Greenhouse. A template email goes to the whole list with only the name changed, and anyone who gets a lot of these can spot one at a glance. Moving faster won't solve either problem. Linking up the systems that already know the answers will.

What we built

A daily timer on Machine wakes an agent. It opens a session, a fresh cloud computer (a sandbox) used only for that run, focused on a single open role. The agent searches LinkedIn for people who fit the role's profile and checks that role's Greenhouse pipeline so it never suggests anyone already there. For each new match it writes a personal outreach email that mentions the person's real background instead of a template. Every draft goes to the recruiter's inbox to be reviewed. The agent never emails a candidate and never makes changes in Greenhouse.

How it works

The pattern

A daily cron opens a fresh session for a single open role, with connectors into LinkedIn for finding people and Greenhouse for skipping duplicates. The role profile and outreach angles live in skills and memory. The agent writes email drafts and stops there. The recruiter reviews, sends and owns the ATS.

Guardrails

This agent can look up real people and could reach out to them, so the line between drafting and sending is the control that counts:

• Isolation. Each run happens in its own sandbox, focused on one open role. The drafted emails are the only thing that leaves it.
• Scoped secrets. The Greenhouse and LinkedIn credentials are stored encrypted in the Secrets Manager, delivered into the sandbox when the run starts, and only handed to the agents you grant them to.
• Human approval gate. The agent never sends outreach and never adds a candidate to Greenhouse. Each draft waits for the recruiter to review, change and send, and keeping the ATS up to date is their call.
• Dedupe before draft. Before writing a word, the agent checks the role's Greenhouse pipeline, so nobody who has applied, been contacted or been turned down gets approached twice.
• Everything is code. The role profile, the outreach angles and the permissions for each system are files in your repo. They're versioned, and you change them through a reviewed change request, not a dashboard toggle.

The outcome

Sourcing for an open role now begins with a batch that's already been searched, checked against the pipeline and drafted with a genuine nod to each person's background. The recruiter starts the day reviewing instead of digging, and every email sent and every change in the ATS is still theirs to make.