AI Browser for Pr Agencies: Candidate Sourcing

This guide is for PR agencies that run candidate sourcing. It names the surfaces a PR agency 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 PR agencies approach candidate sourcing

A PR agency runs this work in a specific way: earn coverage for clients in trade press, mainstream media, and analyst circles - and brief executives for interviews. The current pain is concrete - journalist research, story-pitch matching, and tracking placements happen across many surfaces with no unified view. The reason an AI browser helps here is that PR agencies already touch many surfaces (Cision or Muck Rack, Gmail, Google Docs, Notion, LinkedIn), and the bottleneck is the human moving data and context between them.

What a good candidate sourcing run looks like for PR agencies

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: every pitch references a real, current angle and goes to the right journalist with a track record on the topic.

Buying signals candidate sourcing should react to

The signals that should trigger candidate sourcing for a PR agency include: expanding to a new market, client IPO or funding round, key executive change at the client. 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 PR agencies

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 PR agency 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 PR agencies

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 PR agencies, and when it is not

This workflow is right when PR agencies 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 PR agency 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.