Backchannel

Application number forty has met the same silence as number one, and someone in your LinkedIn contacts might have passed your name along. That list is too long to judge by eye, so you cannot tell who could help. Backchannel takes the contacts file that LinkedIn lets you download and scores every person in it against the role and city you name.

The result is one readiness score, split across five kinds of access: people in the role, decision makers, company insiders, gatekeepers and the wider industry. A low one shows which kind of person you are missing. Relevant contacts appear in ranked order with a written reason for each. LinkedIn's export stops at your direct connections, so possible introductions are inferred and labelled with how sure the tool is.

Each contact also gets a message of two or three lines, which you copy and send from your account. The privacy page says the file is read in your browser and only structured rows reach the database, with the raw CSV never uploaded. Contacts and analyses can be deleted in the settings.

A separate community lets you leave your contact details so that recruiters can write to you. The site advises anyone with under 50 connections to wait until they have more. It also promises a refund if you send 30 of its messages in 30 days and nobody replies. The terms rule out any guarantee of a job, an interview or a reply.