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AI Browser for Consultancies: Candidate Sourcing

How consultancies run candidate sourcing in Strawberry. Surfaces, signals, real output, and tradeoffs for consultancies.

This guide is for consultancies that run candidate sourcing. It names the surfaces a consultancy typically uses, where the friction sits, and how an AI browser like Strawberry runs the workflow without forcing the team to learn a new stack.

How consultancies approach candidate sourcing

A consultancy runs this work in a specific way: deliver strategy, transformation, and ops work for client companies on a project or retainer basis. The current pain is concrete - every engagement repeats the same research, framework selection, and reporting work but for a different client. The reason an AI browser helps here is that consultancies already touch many surfaces (Google Workspace, Slack, Notion or Confluence, Looker Studio or Excel, LinkedIn), and the bottleneck is the human moving data and context between them.

What a good candidate sourcing run looks like for consultancies

The goal is to build a shortlist of 10-30 candidates who match the role and have at least one signal of openness. Success metric: 30% reply rate to first outreach, 5+ first-call conversions per 30 sourced. In an industry context that means: deliverables that look like a senior consultant wrote them, in less time, and easier to update mid-project.

Buying signals candidate sourcing should react to

The signals that should trigger candidate sourcing for a consultancy include: client growth-stage shift, regulation change in client industry, leadership team change. Strawberry watches the public web (LinkedIn, news, job boards, the company's own site) for these and pairs them with whatever lives in the team's existing tools.

How Strawberry runs candidate sourcing for consultancies

  1. Connect the existing stack (Gmail, CRM, sheets, Slack, etc) so Strawberry can read in-place.
  2. Define one sentence of what 'done' looks like for candidate sourcing in your specific consultancy setup.
  3. Ask Strawberry to read the relevant context, then research the gaps via the browser.
  4. Strawberry produces the candidate sourcing output in the shape your team can use immediately.
  5. A human reviews before any external action (send, update, post) goes out.
  6. The approved output gets logged back into your system of record so the next person sees it.

A real candidate sourcing output for consultancies

This is an example of the shape, not your literal team's output - swap the specifics for your context:

  • Role: Founding Engineer (Stockholm or remote EU)
  • Candidate: Marek Novak - Senior Engineer @ Klarna, 4 years
  • Fit: 5/5 (worked on payment systems, contributed to Rust open source, recent talk on type-safe APIs)
  • Opening line: noticed his RustConf talk on type-safe API contracts and our backend lead's tweet about Marek's library
  • Contact: LinkedIn DM + GitHub email

When this is right for consultancies, and when it is not

This workflow is right when consultancies have multiple recurring instances of candidate sourcing to run each week, and when the existing stack is mostly online and connectable. It is the wrong fit when candidate sourcing happens once a quarter or requires deep domain expertise the agent does not have. In that case, the consultancy should run it manually and capture the playbook for the next iteration.

Three mistakes to avoid

  • Spray-and-pray DMs that mention nothing specific
  • Missing the obvious signals (someone just posted 'thinking about a change')
  • No quality bar - putting 200 names on the list to look productive

Caveats

Strawberry holds back on sending email, updating CRM records, or changing shared systems until a human approves the action. Treat the agent as a fast first-draft author, not an autopilot.

Consultancies + Strawberry running candidate sourcing

1 Inputs

Stack

Typical consultancy surfaces: Google Workspace, Slack, Notion or Confluence.

2 Triggers

Signals

Watch: client growth-stage shift, regulation change in client industry.

3 Output

Compose

Synthesise into the candidate sourcing shape.

4 Review

Human

Approve before external actions; log to system of record.

FAQ

Does this work for small consultancies?

Yes - the workflow scales down to a 2-person consultancy. The smaller the team, the more leverage an AI browser provides because the same person owns multiple surfaces.

Which tools do consultancies need to connect?

The most common stack: Google Workspace, Slack, Notion or Confluence, Looker Studio or Excel, LinkedIn. The browser handles everything else without setup.

What is the biggest mistake to avoid?

Spray-and-pray DMs that mention nothing specific.

Run candidate sourcing in 10 minutes with Strawberry for consultancies

  1. Pull live context

    Open Strawberry and let it read what is already on the screen plus the tabs you usually work from. Someone at a consultancy should not have to re-type the company name, stage, or stack - the browser sees it.

  2. Name the candidate sourcing target

    Tell Strawberry the specific subject of this run: the prospect, account, candidate, or partner you want to source candidates. One sentence is enough; the agent asks back if the scope is unclear.

  3. Let the agent gather signals

    Strawberry walks the public web and the connected stack and pulls the signals this workflow actually needs:

    • current role and tenure
    • recent role changes (often visible on LinkedIn)
    • GitHub or content output for technical roles It keeps source links so consultancies can verify before shipping.

  4. Review the draft

    Strawberry returns the output in the exact shape consultancies can ship: A shortlist with one row per candidate: name, current role, target role fit (1-5), one personalised opening line, contact link. No padding, no buried "I could not find" sections - missing signals get flagged explicitly so you can decide whether to push back or accept the gap.

  5. Approve and log

    Nothing external goes out until consultancies approve it. Send the email, update the CRM, post the message - whatever the next step is - then Strawberry logs the run so the next candidate sourcing on a similar subject reuses the context.

Paste-ready prompt for candidate sourcing with Strawberry as consultancies

You are helping a team at a consultancy source candidates.

Subject: [name of the company, person, account, or partner]
Goal: build a shortlist of 10-30 candidates who match the role and have at least one signal of openness
Definition of done: A shortlist with one row per candidate: name, current role, target role fit (1-5), one personalised opening line, contact link

Inputs you can use:

- public web (LinkedIn, company site, news, job boards, podcasts)

Signals I care about:
- current role and tenure
- recent role changes (often visible on LinkedIn)
- GitHub or content output for technical roles
- company stage match (someone leaving a Series B is more likely to talk to a seed-stage co)
- geo match for hybrid roles

Output format (mirror this shape):
- Role: Founding Engineer (Stockholm or remote EU)
- Candidate: Marek Novak - Senior Engineer @ Klarna, 4 years
- Fit: 5/5 (worked on payment systems, contributed to Rust open source, recent talk on type-safe APIs)
- Opening line: noticed his RustConf talk on type-safe API contracts and our backend lead's tweet about Marek's library

Constraints:
- do not send email, update CRM, or post anything until I approve
- use the live tabs I already have open as primary context
- if the subject is ambiguous, ask me one question instead of assuming
- flag anything you cannot verify - do not guess to fill the shape

Copy into a fresh Strawberry chat. Replace the bracketed bits with your real subject.

When this is NOT a fit for consultancies

This workflow earns its keep when consultancies run candidate sourcing more than once a week and the stack is mostly online. Skip it when the run depends on hand-held context Strawberry cannot see - private investor calls, off-the-record conversations, paywalled databases consultancies have special access to. Run it manually those times and capture the playbook for the next iteration.

The other anti-pattern: the workflow requires deep context Strawberry cannot see. Consultancies that scale this workflow always pair Strawberry with a sharp opinion or hypothesis consultancies bring. The agent is great at gathering. It is not great at picking a fight on your behalf.

3 mistakes that kill the run

  • spray-and-pray DMs that mention nothing specific
  • missing the obvious signals (someone just posted 'thinking about a change')
  • no quality bar - putting 200 names on the list to look productive

Honest tradeoff

Strawberry will not invent missing signals. If a subject does not have a public hiring page, the agent says so - it does not pad the output with guesses. That is the right behaviour, but it means consultancies sometimes see a shorter output than expected. The fix is upstream: feed it better sources, or accept that this subject is information-sparse and move on. Pretending the signal exists is what gets consultancies into trouble; an empty section is a feature, not a bug.

What a finished output looks like

Consultancies should be able to send the result to the next person in the chain (buyer, manager, client, hiring partner) without a major rewrite. If the draft needs more than ten minutes of editing, the input scope was too broad or the wrong signals were prioritised. Re-run with a tighter subject. Concretely, a strong candidate sourcing brief includes:

  • Role: Founding Engineer (Stockholm or remote EU)
  • Candidate: Marek Novak - Senior Engineer @ Klarna, 4 years
  • Fit: 5/5 (worked on payment systems, contributed to Rust open source, recent talk on type-safe APIs)
  • Opening line: noticed his RustConf talk on type-safe API contracts and our backend lead's tweet about Marek's library

Anything thinner than that and the run is not done.

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