LinkedIn outreach

Outreach is how candidates enter your pipeline. You tell Scout who to contact, Scout reaches out as you on LinkedIn, and the people who reply are asked for their email and CV and sent the interview. An owner or admin controls all of it.

Who to contact

Scout works from people you give it, or people already in your pipeline.

• Paste LinkedIn profile links in a message, up to 50 at a time.
• Upload a list as a CSV, text, PDF or Word file with LinkedIn URLs in it.
• Ask for suggestions: "suggest candidates for the SDR role" ranks everyone already in your pipeline against the role.
• Add candidates on the dashboard under Candidates, one at a time or in bulk from CVs, then queue them.

Scout shows the batch and asks you to confirm:

Anyone on your do-not-contact list is left out of the batch automatically.

Go live

Say go live in Slack - Scout confirms with a card that spells out what it will do, and starts on Confirm - or press Start outreach on the dashboard's LinkedIn page. Either way it is an owner or admin's decision, and Scout tells your Slack channel.

From then on Scout:

1. Sends connection requests each day, with a note of 200 characters or fewer in your voice, up to your daily limit and shared fairly across your live roles.
2. Checks for replies about every two hours during your working hours, plus a daily catch-up.
3. Replies as you. An interested candidate is asked for their email and CV together.
4. Emails the interview, or sends the link as a LinkedIn message. On a CV-review role it collects the CV and posts it to you instead.
5. Escalates any question it cannot answer from your company knowledge to your Slack channel as "Needs a human answer".

Temporary failures are retried up to three times. A connection request that is not accepted is left alone.

First contact is always a connection request, or an email. Scout never opens with a LinkedIn direct message, even to someone you are already connected to: that request is recorded as failed ("already connected") and skipped. LinkedIn direct messages are coming soon.

Company lists

Under Outreach Agent then Behavior you can keep a company exclusion list and a company priority list; both apply to every role. Nobody currently working at an excluded company is contacted: if Scout already knows their employer when you queue them it drops them and says so; otherwise it checks the employer right before the send and skips them, with the reason on the Outreach page. People at priority companies are contacted first and ranked higher in suggested candidates. The checks look at a person's LinkedIn profile from your account, so Scout only looks up people it is about to contact.

InMail follow-up

Optional, and off by default. When it is on, a connection request that has had no answer after a number of days (1 to 14, default 3) gets one InMail from the same account, using the subject and message you set. Scout sends it only when your LinkedIn account has InMail credits or the person is an Open Profile member, who can be InMailed for free; a free account with neither sends nothing. Before each one, Scout checks the profile, and a request that turns out to have been accepted is marked as such instead. At most your daily cap per account (default 10), never to anyone on the do-not-contact list, and every InMail is logged word for word on the Outreach page. Set it up under Outreach Agent then Behavior; see Outreach Agent settings.

Pause and resume

"Pause outreach" stops all sending and replying at once, with no confirm card. Nothing is lost: the queue and every conversation stay where they are. "Go live" resumes. The LinkedIn page has the same Pause outreach and Start outreach buttons.

Pausing applies to your LinkedIn account, so it pauses every role. To stop one role, mark it filled or archive it; see Roles.

Test it first

Before the first real batch, Scout offers an end-to-end test on a friend or colleague:

1. Create a channel called #scout-agent-logs, invite Scout with /invite @scout, and run /scout notify in it.
2. Give Scout the colleague's LinkedIn profile as a batch of one.
3. Say "run it". Nothing is sent until you explicitly say so.

You then watch the whole loop in the channel: the connection note, the reply, the request for email and CV, and the interview email. Test mode speeds replies up to every ten minutes, around the clock, for two hours by default and up to 24, so you are not waiting on the normal two-hour cadence.

Seeing what happened

• Slack channel. Every exchange is mirrored as it happens: what the candidate said, what Scout replied.
• Outreach page. The queue, the full message log, and the do-not-contact list. See Message log and do-not-contact.
• Pipeline digest. Sourced and contacted, in conversation, screening started, screening completed, by role.
• "How's outreach going?" in Slack gives the sender's status and today's numbers.

Who can run outreach

Queueing, cancelling, going live, pausing and test mode are for owners and admins. Members can see everything and review candidates.