The Cognitive

Your open roles, sourced while you sleep

A Claude scheduled task can work every open role each night and leave you a report by morning. Below is the full setup: the folders, the nightly prompt with its guardrails, the report format and the ten-minute morning routine. Then the one thing it can't do alone.

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One example night · roles and people made up · drag the hour
8:00AM
11P12A1A2A3A4A5A6A7A8A
Nightly task · every open rolestarting
WHAT IT DOES AT 11 PM
CLAUDE ALONE works with Claude and your filesCONNECTOR needs a people search, from The Cognitive
Morning list ready · ranked, with reasons

Set it up

Six steps. You do the first four once, and the last one each morning.

Make one folder per open role

Claude reads these every night. Keep the names plain so the report is easy to scan.

roles/ report-format.md controls-engineer-columbus/ role.md seen.md search-log.md senior-accountant-dallas/ role.md seen.md search-log.md

Write role.md for each role

The brief is one or two sentences, the way you'd brief a colleague: the job, the place, what they must have done. Must-haves are things a profile can prove. A must-have nobody can see on a profile ("great communicator") belongs in the interview, not here.

# Controls Engineer · Columbus, OH · on site Brief: Someone who writes PLC code for packaging or food lines and has been on site for a line start-up, living within an hour of Columbus. Must-haves (each one must show on the profile): - Has written PLC code, not only maintained it - Has been on site for at least one line start-up No-gos: - Works at [client name] now. We can't approach them. - Panel building only, no programming Pay: $95k to $115k Hiring manager's words: [paste the one line they said that matters most] Status: OPEN (change to PAUSED to skip this role)

Start seen.md empty, or paste in everyone you have already talked to. One line each:

[Name] · [employer] · [date] · kept / dropped / contacted · [one-line reason]

Add the morning report format

Save this as report-format.md in the roles folder. Questions go first, because a role with a question has stopped until you answer.

# Morning report · [date] Spend: [searches run] of [cap] searches. Stopped early: [no / yes, why] Nothing revealed. Nobody contacted. ## Questions for you - [Role]: [one question, with the two answers you think are most likely] ## [Role] · [place] Search sentence used: "[the sentence]" New people: [count] 1. [Name] · [title] · [employer] · [town] Why: [one sentence tied to a must-have] Quote: "[the line from their profile that proves it]" 2. ... Skipped: [count] already in seen.md Dropped: [Name], [the no-go or the must-have with no proof] (one line each) One question for you: [the thing that would make tomorrow's search better]

Create the nightly task in Claude

Claude has scheduled tasks. Create a new one, give it your roles folder, set it to run every night (11 PM works), and paste the prompt below as its instructions. If the task runs on your own computer, leave the computer on and awake overnight.

You are my night sourcer. You run once a night, alone. Nobody is awake to answer you, so never wait for an answer. FILES - Open roles are in the folder "roles". One folder per role, each with role.md, seen.md and search-log.md. - Skip any role whose role.md says Status: PAUSED. RULES. Never break these. 1. Never message, email or contact anyone. 2. Never reveal an email address or phone number. Contacts wait for the morning. 3. Spending cap for tonight: at most [6] searches across all roles, and at most [8] new people kept per role. When you reach the cap, stop and say so on the Spend line of the report. 4. Anyone in a role's seen.md is skipped. Do not list them again, even if they look better now. 5. If a role.md is unclear, do not guess. Unclear means: no place, no must-have, or two must-haves that fight each other. Skip that role and write one question for me in the report. 6. Never invent a person, a fact or a quote. If you can't quote it from their profile, it is not a reason. FOR EACH ROLE, IN ORDER a. Read role.md. Write the search as one or two plain sentences, the way I'd brief a colleague: the job, the place, what they must have done. Put a no-go in the sentence only if it decides who fits. b. Add tonight's date and the search sentence to search-log.md. c. Find people. If you cannot search for people and read their profiles, write a Boolean string and three other job titles these people use into search-log.md, mark the role "strings only" in the report, and go to the next role. d. For each person, check every must-have against their profile. Keep them only if every must-have has a line you can quote. Drop anyone who hits a no-go. A quote from a job that ended more than [5] years ago does not count. e. Rank the people you kept, best first. For each: one sentence on why, and the quote. f. Add everyone you looked at tonight to seen.md, kept and dropped, with the reason. THE REPORT When every role is done, write morning-report-[date].md in the roles folder, using report-format.md. Roles with a question go first. Keep it short enough to read in ten minutes.

Know why each guardrail is there

Change the numbers in brackets to your own. Keep the rules.

No messages at night

A message can't be unsent. You want to read the person and the reason before your name goes on anything.

No reveals at night

A reveal spends and can't be taken back. Most nights, some of the list will be wrong. Reveal the right ones in the morning.

A cap you choose

An unattended run with no limit will keep going. The cap is the most you're willing to spend before you've seen a single name.

Dropped people go in seen.md too

If only the kept ones are written down, the same wrong people come back every night and you read them again.

Stop on an unclear brief

A guess at 2 AM spends the night's cap on the wrong people. One question in the morning costs you a minute.

Quote or it doesn't count

A reason with no line from the profile is a guess. The quote is what lets you check a person in seconds.

The ten-minute morning

  • Answer the questions at the top. Write each answer into that role.md so tonight's run sees it.
  • For each role, read the top three. Read the quote first, then the why.
  • Strike anyone wrong. If the same reason keeps coming up, add it to role.md as a no-go.
  • Pick who to contact. Reveal and message them yourself, in daylight.
  • Check the Spend line. If it stopped on the cap and the list was good, raise the cap.

The wall

Claude can think, but it can't see people. A scheduled task in plain Claude has no profiles to search. It can write search strings all night. In the morning someone still has to run them, open each profile and paste it in, one by one. Drag the hour with "Claude alone" on, and every blue line above turns red.

That is not overnight sourcing. It is overnight homework for you.

The same night, two ways

Plain Claude, every night and morning

  1. Keep role.md and seen.md current for every role.
  2. The task runs at night and writes search strings. That's all it can do.
  3. In the morning, run each string yourself, role by role.
  4. Open each profile, copy it, paste it into Claude.
  5. Ask Claude to check each person against the must-haves.
  6. Add everyone you looked at to seen.md by hand.
  7. Find each email and write each message yourself.

Same job in The Cognitive

  1. Add The Cognitive as a connector in Claude: https://app.thecognitive.io/mcp. Make a free account, sign in on the Connect page and allow it.
  2. The same nightly task now runs a real search for each role. Every person comes back ranked, with the reason quoted from their profile.
  3. Claude asks before anything that spends credits or contacts someone. To run unattended, always allow searching only, and keep your cap in the prompt. Reveals and messages stay for the morning.
Put this line in step c of the prompt, in place of "Find people.":
Find people by running the search sentence in The Cognitive. Searching is allowed. Revealing contacts and sending messages are not.

Connect Claude to The Cognitive tonight

Make a free account, add the connector, allow searching. Tonight's task runs a real search for every open role, and tomorrow's report has people in it, each with the line from their profile that proves the fit.

Try it free →Book 30 minutes
7-day free trial, 50 sourcing credits, no card.