The check that protects the fees you already earn
Most outreach mistakes are survivable. A weak subject line costs a reply. Writing to the head of talent at a current client to ask whether her engineers are open to a move costs the account. So does approaching someone who is at second interview through your own colleague, or emailing a person who asked to be left alone last spring.
Every agency has these rules. They tend to live in a partner's head, a spreadsheet nobody has opened since January, and a flag in the CRM that half the team uses. The check itself is a recruiter scrolling a list by eye the evening before a send. This play makes it a gate with a paper trail: any list, from any source, passes through it before it goes near a sequencer.
It is not a sourcing play. Sourcing from named competitors builds a shortlist with the screen folded in. This one takes a list that already exists, whether it came from a search, an event, an export or a colleague, and clears it for outreach.
What you get back
Three files in your working folder. The cleared list, in the same columns it arrived in. The removal report: every row taken out, the rule that caught it, and the value it matched on, such as the domain or the profile link. And the unresolved pile, with the reason each row could not be settled.
The counts per rule sit at the top, so a list that lost a third of its rows to one rule is obvious at a glance.
Variations worth knowing
Block and flag are different. A current client blocks outright. A prospect another consultant is working may only need a flag. Say which rules remove a row and which annotate it.
Screen in both directions. On a candidate list, the client and agreement rules apply to the current employer. On a business development list, they apply to the company you are pitching.
Carry it forward. The cleared list is a ready input for building an outreach sequence, and the removal report is what you show a client who asks how their people are kept safe.
Where this goes wrong
A rule nobody supplied. The screen cannot enforce an agreement it was never told about. Missing lists are named in the report as not applied.
Personal email addresses. A personal address says nothing about the employer, so candidate rows are matched on the employer field and the profile link. If those are stale, the match is too.
Opt-outs spread across tools. Someone who unsubscribed in a sequencer you left last year is only caught if that export is in the file you hand over.
A job move nobody recorded. A row that still shows the old employer clears the screen. Check the top of a candidate list by eye before the first message goes.
