“What’s Context Scout? Oh, did you mean contact scout? Or content scout? Just get me the contact details and let me get on with my job.”

Context Scout’s mission is to make social profiles more intelligent for recruiting. It’s a Chrome extension that detects when you are on a candidate’s LinkedIn profile page and searches the web for extra information about them. In many cases this is as basic as email addresses, personal websites and links to social profiles. For technical candidates, this is looking at their GitHub profiles to find evidence of programming ability. It’s determining cultural fit by categorizing their interests based on their tweets or blog.

Context is everything the candidate didn’t write on their LinkedIn profile. Context is reading between the lines, separating out fact and self-inflated fiction. There are three problems with only basing decisions on a candidate’s profile or CV:

  1. It has been written by the candidate, so it is inevitably biased.
  2. It is out of date the moment the candidate finishes editing it.
  3. It is a representation of only their professional self, not their personality or interests or anything that can help you decide if they have the right cultural fit.

Savvy recruiters and hiring managers use LinkedIn as a springboard, the start of their information gathering process, a Google search and 10 or 15 minutes of looking through various websites and social data. Looking for context. We’re trying to eliminate those 15 minutes and let you get back to the more important parts of your job.

We find extra information from a number of different social and technical sources such as Twitter, GitHub and even a candidate’s personal homepage (if they have one). From each source, we extract only the information that’s relevant i.e. tweets about work are more relevant than tweets about cats or football. And finally, we enhance the LinkedIn profile by seamlessly blending this information in.

Sign up to our trial and find out what context means for the roles you’re trying to fill and find how much time you can save with Context Scout.