For recruiters and search firms
The engineer you want hears from recruiters every week and answers almost none of them. Icebreakly takes another route. You choose the candidates and hiring managers worth a long game. It comments on their LinkedIn posts in your voice, one post at a time, until your name is familiar. Then you write to them yourself. It does not find candidates and it does not send messages. Its job is to make the people you already picked willing to read yours.
Recruiting runs on two clocks. The fast one is the open req that needs a shortlist by Friday. The slow one is everyone else: the staff engineer who is happy where she is this quarter, the product leader you will want next year, the hiring manager who has not chosen a search partner yet. Search licenses and paid message credits serve the fast clock. Very little serves the slow one, so it gets done in spare minutes, which in a busy month means it does not get done. Icebreakly keeps the slow clock running. It watches a list you choose, drafts a comment in your voice whenever someone on it posts, and counts every touch. On the day a role opens, you are writing to people who have seen your name a dozen times.
Effort is not the issue. Arriving as a stranger with a request, in an inbox full of strangers with requests, is.
Strong passive candidates are approached constantly, and most approaches look alike: a job title, a pay band, a request for a quick call. A stranger with a req is easy to archive. A person whose comments they have read under their own posts is not a stranger any more. That difference is the whole reason to warm someone before you write.
Every recruiter has one. Last spring’s silver medalist. The designer who said to try again in a year. The director who was flattered but busy. Keeping them warm means reading what they post and saying something worth reading, week after week, for months. No one sustains that by hand through a heavy hiring quarter.
For agency and search recruiters, new mandates seldom come from a capabilities email. They go to the person a head of engineering has watched make sense in public. If the only time you appear is when you want a job order, you are one of several firms who sent the same note that morning.
No placement statistics below. These are plain descriptions of how the work changes once staying in touch no longer depends on your spare time.
When a role lands, open the warming tracker before you open a search. The people at Trusted or Warm have seen you a dozen times or more. Write to them first, by hand, and refer to what you discussed under their post.
A candidate writes about a migration her team just shipped. Icebreakly finds the post on its daily check and drafts a reply that deals with the migration, not with you. Your comment is there within about a day, and you never had to open her profile.
You stop opening profiles to see who has posted. Drafts come to you in a single review queue, each labeled with its touch number, and you approve, edit or skip.
Guardrails in your Voice keep open roles, pay and availability out of every comment. What gets posted is a peer responding to a peer. The conversation about a job happens later, in a message you write.
Five steps, most of them done once. The trial is long enough to run all five with ten people.
Make a candidate list and a hiring-manager list. Candidates are the people you would place tomorrow if they were open to it. Hiring managers are the ones whose next search you want to run. Choose them with whatever you source with today. Icebreakly starts after that choice is made.
Paste the LinkedIn profile URLs, or upload them as a CSV. On a paid plan each list can be its own comment campaign, so the two audiences get different Voices and schedules. The free trial gives you one campaign and ten leads, which is enough to test the idea on your ten hardest-to-reach people.
Give it your tone, your usual length, a few comments you have really written, and guardrails. A useful guardrail for recruiters: never mention roles, salary or whether someone is looking. The comment answers what they wrote. The req stays out of it.
When someone on the list posts, a draft appears under “Needs your review” with its touch number. Approve it, change it or skip it. Skip the post about a bereavement or a redundancy round if a recruiter turning up underneath would feel wrong. That judgment stays with you.
Stranger, Familiar, Trusted, Warm. Once someone passes a dozen touches they appear on the ready list. Send the invite or the message yourself, from LinkedIn or from Recruiter. You are no longer a cold approach. You are the person from the comments.
Short descriptions here, with a longer read behind each link.
Icebreakly checks the profiles on your list every day and drafts a comment on each person’s latest post. It follows people, not keywords, so nothing arrives in your queue from someone you did not choose.
Listening to people, not keywords →Tone, length, style notes, sample comments, language, emoji preference and hard rules. Set it once per audience: one Voice for engineers, another for the executives who hire them.
Comment automation for the people you choose →In Approval mode every draft waits for you. In Autopilot it posts inside your guardrails without asking. Many recruiters will want Approval for candidates permanently, because one tone-deaf comment costs more than the time saved.
What a comment campaign is made of →Each person has a touch count and a stage. Around 5 touches is Familiar, around 12 is Trusted, 20 or more is Warm. The ready list shows everyone past 12, which is the list to work when a req opens.
Warm-up automated, outreach kept human →Icebreakly does not send InMail. If your license comes with credits, they go further on people who recognize the sender. Warm the shortlist first and spend the credit second.
InMail credits and response reality →On Pro, several recruiters connect their own LinkedIn accounts to a shared workspace. Each comments as themselves on their own candidates, and the team sees one dashboard.
Warming from several LinkedIn accounts →It suits recruiters whose placements depend on relationships that take months to build. It does not suit high-volume hiring where you need hundreds of applicants this week, and it will not replace your search tool, your ATS or your messaging. If you need to find people or send follow-ups automatically, keep the tools that do that. Running both is reasonable: source and message as usual, and warm the short list of people who matter most.
Most recruiter automation tools automate sending: bulk invites, follow-up messages and sometimes InMail. Icebreakly automates something different. It monitors the LinkedIn profiles you choose, drafts a comment in your voice on each new post, and tracks how many times each person has seen you. It does not send connection requests, direct messages or InMail.
No. Icebreakly does not search for, scrape or source candidates, and it has no candidate database. You bring the LinkedIn profile URLs of the people you want to stay close to. Keep using LinkedIn Recruiter, referrals or your ATS to decide who goes on the list.
Not if each comment is about what they wrote. A thoughtful reply to a post about a hard technical decision reads as a peer taking an interest. A comment that hints at a vacancy reads as a pitch. Add a guardrail to your Voice that keeps roles, pay and availability out of comments, and stay in Approval mode so you read every draft before it posts.
Icebreakly counts touches per person. At around 5 touches a lead is marked Familiar, at around 12 Trusted, and at 20 or more Warm. People with 12 or more touches appear on a ready-to-reach-out list. The calendar time depends on how often they post, because Icebreakly comments about once per lead per day at most. Someone who posts weekly takes roughly three months to reach Trusted. Someone who posts most days gets there in a few weeks.
Yes, and it is worth keeping them apart. On Standard or Pro, put hiring managers in their own comment campaign with their own Voice, since what you say to a VP of Engineering about team structure differs from what you say to a candidate about their work. The free trial allows one campaign, so start with whichever group matters more.
No. There is no integration with LinkedIn Recruiter, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby or any other ATS or CRM. Icebreakly connects to a LinkedIn account and comments from it. The integrations that exist are an MCP server for Claude and other MCP clients, Slack notifications, and an optional proxy you supply per LinkedIn account. You paste profile URLs in and read warming stages out.
Commenting on public posts at a human pace is one of the lower-risk things to automate on LinkedIn, although no automation is free of risk. Icebreakly paces activity at about one comment per lead per day with no bursts, and it works through a dedicated cloud browser session for your account instead of raw API calls. You can attach your own proxy. Approval mode keeps a person in the loop on every comment.
Then there is little for Icebreakly to do for that person, because it can only comment when someone publishes a post. Plenty of senior people post a few times a month, which is enough to become familiar over a quarter. For people who never post, use a referral or a carefully written direct message.
The free trial lasts 7 days with one campaign, ten monitored leads, one LinkedIn account and Approval mode. Standard is $49 a month for one account and up to 100 monitored leads, with both Approval and Autopilot. Pro is $99 a month for three LinkedIn accounts, up to 300 monitored leads, unlimited campaigns and a team workspace. Extra accounts on Pro are $40 a month each.
Add their profiles, connect your LinkedIn account and read the first drafts in Approval mode. The trial lasts 7 days and covers ten monitored leads. Compare the plans.
