Two lists, and the second one protects the first
A competitor search brief always arrives as a pair. "Go and get people out of these firms" and "never touch these firms" are said in the same breath, because the second list protects the fees you already earn. A major player in a niche can be your best talent source and a company you would never pitch. A client is a source for nobody. Anyone already in process is out of bounds wherever they work.
A database search knows none of that. It returns whoever matches, and the off-limits check becomes a recruiter scanning a spreadsheet by eye after the contact credits are spent. This play turns the order around. The screen is a free filter that runs before anything is enriched, and it reports back, so you can see that it ran and what it caught.
It is the narrow sibling of turn a job spec into a ranked shortlist. That play searches the market and ranks competitor people higher. This one does not search the market at all.
What you get back
A CSV in your working folder with one row per candidate: name, current title and employer, the source company they came from, the dated history they were scored on, the score and the reason, the personal email where one was found, and the LinkedIn profile.
Beside it, the exclusion report: every person and company that was dropped, the rule that dropped them, and what the match was made on. That file is what you show a client who asks how you keep their people safe.
Variations worth knowing
Keep tiers, not one list. Existing client, prospect and do-not-contact are different rules. Say which tier blocks sourcing outright and which only needs a flag, and the report keeps them apart.
Seed the list from your CRM. With a recruiting CRM connected, your client companies can be read from it and merged with the list you typed, so the screen does not depend on anyone's memory.
Ask for the bench count. A count of qualified people per source company shows which firm is the deepest pool before you decide where the contact budget goes.
Where this goes wrong
A name match alone leaks. Trading names and group brands do not share a spelling. The screen matches on domain and known variants, and lists what it could not resolve.
Parents and subsidiaries. Ownership is not in a people database. If a client's sister company is off limits, name it. The screen is best effort on what it has been told.
Stale employers. The second screen catches a move that shows in the dated history. It cannot catch a move nobody has recorded yet, so check the top of the list before you call.
Small source firms return little. A boutique competitor may have almost nobody in any database. The play reports that per company and does not pad the list from elsewhere.
