Backchannel: Who Actually Knows This Candidate?
Find which coworkers crossed paths with anyone in your pipeline.
You’re evaluating a candidate. Maybe they just hit your pipeline, maybe they’re about to get an offer. Either way, you want to know: has anyone you trust actually worked with this person?
The challenge: cross-referencing their work history against your LinkedIn network by hand takes forever. Did anyone at your company overlap with them at Stripe? What about that consulting firm from 2019? You’re fifteen browser tabs deep before you give up.
Backchannel does the cross-referencing for you.
What It Does
Import your LinkedIn connections. Paste a candidate’s profile URL. Backchannel shows you which of your colleagues worked at the same companies during the same time periods.
The real use case: filter to your current coworkers and see if any of them crossed paths with this candidate before. Early in the pipeline, that’s intel. Late in the pipeline, that’s your shortlist for a trusted reference.
Use Cases
Early pipeline signal. A resume looks good, but you want to gut-check before investing interview time. See if anyone at your company has actually worked with this person.
Backchannel references. You’re about to make an offer. Instead of relying on the names they gave you, find colleagues who crossed paths with them and can give you the real story.
Pattern recognition across candidates. When you’re evaluating multiple people from the same company or era, quickly see which of your coworkers might have context on any of them.
How It Works
You export your LinkedIn connections (Settings → Data Privacy → Get a copy → Connections). Backchannel enriches them with work history, then matches against any candidate profile you paste in. Everything runs locally on your machine — your data stays yours.
When you find overlaps, you can draft outreach emails directly from the tool.
The Backstory
Google’s internal ATS had a feature like this around 2006 — it surfaced coworker overlaps with candidates automatically. I always wished external tools had the same capability. Twenty years later, I finally built it myself.
The code is at hirefrank/backchannel. Setup takes about five minutes.
If you try it, I’d like to hear how it goes.