The Cognitive
Free · 10 Claude skills · tested on a real role
10 Claude agents that do a sourcer's whole job.
Paste a job ad and they hand it to each other: brief, titles, companies, searches, hidden pools, ranking, timing, first message, follow-ups and a weekly check. Each one is a recruiter's playbook written as a Claude skill.
Where the shortlist comes from
Claude prepares and follows up. The searching across real profiles happens in The Cognitive.
Agents 01 to 05 prepare
Job ad in. Out come brief.md, the titles, the company map, the searches and the hidden pools.
Paste brief.md, get the shortlist
It searches the market on your 5 lines and ranks people, each with the line from their profile that made them a match. The overnight scout keeps adding new people while you sleep.
Get your shortlist free7 days free · 100 search credits · no cardAgents 06 to 10 close it out
Rank anyone you add by hand, pick who to message first, write the messages and the follow-ups, and check the numbers each week.
One real role, start to shortlist
A Controls Engineer in Columbus, Ohio. The searches below were run in Google on 13 October 2026. The results are what page 1 showed.
01 Brief Writer
The 5 lines
02 Title Finder · 03 Company Mapper
Who else does this work
Ring 2 for Columbus: food and beverage plants, plastics, building materials, data centers. Ring 3: system integrators and packaging-machine builders.
04 Search Writer · search A
The obvious search
The trap the agent warns about: a quoted city also matches past jobs. Always read the location line.
04 Search Writer · search B
The people search A missed
Found at a resin maker, a plastics manufacturer, food plants, integrators and a warehouse operator. None of them use the title the hiring manager asked for.
03 Company Mapper · 05 Hidden Pool Finder · search C
The pool nobody in manufacturing is calling
The Columbus area has a large data-center cluster. Its controls engineers run building and power systems (BMS and EPMS) with the same PLC skills. A plant recruiter searching "controls engineer" plus their own industry never sees them.
Proof · 13 Oct 2026
We ran the agents on a real job ad, in a fresh Claude session
A real Columbus posting: Senior Controls Engineer, $115K to $130K, 7+ years, Allen-Bradley, Siemens and Omron, EPLAN, 25 to 50% travel. The 10 skills were installed as files and nothing else was given.
Dropped salary and benefits. Moved "authorized to work without sponsorship" to the screen, not a filter. Read "controls" as plant automation, not finance.
6 core and 8 adjacent titles, plus 9 false friends, including vehicle "controls engineers" at car R&D sites.
Found the car-plant supplier corridor, fulfilment-center maintenance engineers and the data-center cluster on its own, and flagged its list as unverified until checked.
7 searches. We ran two in Google. The car-plant search: 10 of 10 in central Ohio. The integrator search: about half in scope, the case its own first-page rule says to fix before reading on.
On the 10 car-plant profiles: 0 Strong, 5 Possible, 5 No. It rejected 4 vehicle-controls engineers and one who lives 110 km away, then wrote the search fix: require PLC words and exclude powertrain, chassis and brake.
"You ran PLC, HMI and motor control upgrades as a controls engineer in the stamping department. It's a Senior Controls Engineer job at a Columbus manufacturer, $115K to $130K, with 25 to 50% travel. Would you want to get back into hands-on controls engineering?"
Not run in this test: Hidden Pool Finder, Timing Reader, Follow-up Writer and Pipeline Coach, which need your outreach data or more profiles. Names are left out on purpose.
The 10 agents
Each is a SKILL.md file. Pick one to read it, copy it, or copy all 10 at once. Each agent saves a file the next one reads.
Set up in 5 minutes
Pick the way you use Claude.
Make a folder per agent named as in its first lines (brief-writer, title-finder…) with the text saved inside as SKILL.md. Zip each folder (the zip holds the folder, not the loose file) and upload it in Claude's settings under Skills. Needs a paid plan with code execution on.
Quickest way to try. Create a project called "Sourcing team" and paste all 10 into the project instructions with Copy all 10. Every chat in the project can use them.
Save each one as a SKILL.md in its own folder:
~/.claude/skills/brief-writer/SKILL.mdThen start every role with
Here's a job ad. Run the sourcing team on it, one agent at a time, and stop after each so I can check the file: [paste the job ad]
What Claude can't do on its own
The agents write the searches and the messages. Running them across thousands of profiles, finding emails and sending sequences needs a sourcing platform behind Claude.
The Cognitive
The same team, already running
Use it in Claude too: create your free account, then in Claude open Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector and paste https://app.thecognitive.io/mcp. The agents' "With The Cognitive" steps then run for real.
Run your hardest role through the team.
7 days free, 100 search credits, no card. Paste the brief your agents wrote and see who comes back.