How an Australian IT recruiter ended up building a LinkedIn app
knowhash didn't start as a product. It started because I was tired of doing the same thing by hand, over and over, inside LinkedIn.
I run Team Employment, an IT recruitment agency here in Australia. We built our own in-house recruitment platform to run the business — tracking candidates, opportunities, the whole pipeline. At some point we added smart messaging to it: type a message once, and the right fields fill themselves in for whoever you're writing to next. It saved a genuinely stupid amount of time.
The obvious next question was: why doesn't LinkedIn work like this? Every day I was messaging candidates directly inside LinkedIn, and every day I was doing the same manual find-and-replace I'd already solved everywhere else. So I built the same idea, but for LinkedIn itself — a small browser extension that reads the profile you're already looking at, and fills your template in for you. No new tab, no CRM, no account to set up.
Why "knowhash"
The name is a small joke that turned into the whole philosophy. Templates on LinkedIn are usually built around clunky placeholder syntax — hash symbols, curly braces, parameters you have to remember. knowhash means no hashing about: no fiddly syntax, nothing hashed together. Just a message that fills itself in properly, because it's reading the actual page in front of you.
Turned out it was bigger than messaging
Once the messaging side was working well, the next problem was obvious too. I wasn't just messaging people on LinkedIn — I was trying to keep track of who I'd spoken to, what they were suited for, and where they'd gotten to, all without a second system to keep in sync. So knowhash Recruit became the natural next step: the same "reads the page you're already on" idea, turned toward actually managing a candidate pipeline from inside LinkedIn itself.
What's in knowhash Recruit
- Reads the profile for you. Name, headline, company — captured straight from the LinkedIn page, no re-typing.
- Simple tagging and classification. Mark someone as a candidate, rate them, tie them to an opportunity — right where you found them.
- kSIP. A way to request exactly the details and files you actually need from a candidate, without asking for more than necessary.
- Ready-made shortlists. Turn a set of candidates into a clean, branded summary you can share, in a format that's already sorted for you.
- The original knowhash messaging. Still there, still free, still the same idea that started all of this.
knowhash Prospect is next — the same approach, turned toward finding customers instead of candidates. We've been using an early version of it ourselves for over a year. It's not ready for anyone else yet, but it's coming.
That's the whole story so far. If you're a recruiter and any of this sounds familiar, give knowhash Recruit a try — I'd genuinely like to know what you think.