Why sourcing tools get accounts restricted
The tools that get recruiters in trouble all share one trait: they operate on linkedin.com itself. They inject buttons into LinkedIn pages, auto-visit profiles, scrape search results, or send automated connection requests. LinkedIn detects that activity — it happens inside their site, under your login — and restricts the account it's logged in as. For a working recruiter, losing a LinkedIn account (or an $8,000+/year Recruiter seat) is a business emergency.
What Sourcer's Desk does instead
It never touches LinkedIn. At all. For anything.
- Your searches run on Google and Bing — the public search engines, which index LinkedIn's public profile pages like any other website. This is the classic "x-ray search" recruiters have run by hand for two decades.
- The extension reads only the Google/Bing results page you are already viewing to show its capture buttons.
- When you open a profile, you click the link and read it in your own browser, logged in as yourself — exactly as you would without the extension. The extension is not loaded on that page and cannot see it.
- Candidate details reach the Desk only through what you capture from search results or highlight and send with your own right-click.
The technical guarantee — enforced, not promised
Chrome extensions can only run on, read, or contact the sites listed in their
manifest.json — a plain-text file the browser treats as law. Sourcer's Desk's
manifest lists Google, Bing, a DNS service, and three public company-data sites.
linkedin.com appears nowhere in it.
Because of that, the browser itself blocks the extension from LinkedIn — it isn't a policy we follow, it's a capability the extension does not possess. There is no automation to detect, because none exists.
Verify it yourself — under a minute
- Open
chrome://extensionsand enable Developer mode (top right). - Find Sourcer's Desk → Details → scroll to Source / inspect the extension's files.
- Open
manifest.json— it's readable text. Look athost_permissionsandcontent_scripts. - Search the file for "linkedin". You will find nothing.
No other sourcing tool invites you to check. We insist on it.
What this means if you hold a Recruiter seat
Keep the seat — Sourcer's Desk works with it, not instead of it. LinkedIn's own search shows you what its algorithm chooses; the search engines rank the same public profiles by different rules, so different people surface. And the same x-ray technique reaches where no seat can: open-web resumes, GitHub, portfolios, niche communities. You get a second, independent draw from the deck — with zero risk to the seat you're paying for, because nothing this tool does happens on LinkedIn.
And your data?
Same philosophy: everything stays in your browser, on your machine. No account, no cloud, no analytics. The complete details are in the privacy policy — including the full list of the only things that ever leave your computer (company names and domains for lookups you click — never candidates, never notes, never selected text).
Built by a 20-year recruiter whose own LinkedIn account and Recruiter seat depend on this being true. ← Back to Sourcer's Desk