Outreach with the extension, day to day¶

This is the practical guide to the part of the Chrome extension that does LinkedIn outreach work: reading a search into a list, reading people's profiles, and working through the queue of connects, messages and checks that METIS has lined up.

If you only want to look people up while browsing, Using the Chrome Extension covers that and is all you need. This page is for the days when the extension is doing work for you.

The one rule to remember: the extension drives your own browser, using your own LinkedIn account. Everything it does, LinkedIn sees as you doing it. That is why it is slow on purpose, why it holds one tab, and why there is a ceiling on how much it will do in a day.

The two halves of the work¶

It helps to know which half you are looking at, because they behave differently.

	Your browser	The METIS queue
Does what	Reads LinkedIn search pages and profile pages	Connects, messages, connection-state checks
Runs when	You press start, and only while the tab and panel stay open	You press start, then it works at the pace METIS sets
Needs you	Yes — it is your window it is driving	Only to start it and leave it be

Both are started from the same place: the play tab in the panel.

Opening the panel¶

The panel has two tabs:

the eye — what METIS knows about the page you are on right now (a person, a company, an email thread);
the play triangle — what there is to do, and the buttons that do it.

The play triangle tells you things without being opened. It pulses while work is running, sends out a slow ring when work is waiting for you, and carries a count of what is queued. Amber and still means there is work but today's allowance is spent — it will carry on tomorrow.

A typical day¶

1. Find people: read a search into a list¶

Run a people search on LinkedIn, as you normally would — keywords, filters, the lot. With the results on screen, open the panel's play tab and press Read this search.

The extension then walks the result pages one at a time, saving everyone it finds into METIS as People, gathered on a new Outreach list. You will see it move: the page counter, a running tally of who is new to METIS and who was already known, and a live list of names as they land.

Leave the tab in front while it reads. Chrome slows and sometimes misdraws pages in background tabs, and a misdrawn page is a page read wrong. Put the window aside and use another window if you want to carry on working.

When it finishes you have a list — Outreach → Lists in METIS — full of candidates with whatever the search results showed: name, headline, location.

2. Decide who is worth reading¶

Search results are thin. The full profile — experience, education, skills — is a separate page per person, and opening one is a visit LinkedIn shows to its owner. So METIS never opens them off its own bat: you choose the people on the list's page in METIS, see exactly how many profiles that is, and confirm it.

That confirmation creates a profile-reading pass: a queue of people, in the order METIS will work through them.

3. Read the profiles¶

Back in the panel's play tab, the pass is now the thing on offer:

Read 84 profiles from Impact investing Holds this tab while it runs. 40 left in today's allowance; the rest continues tomorrow.

Press it and the extension takes the tab to LinkedIn and starts working through the queue. It opens one person, reads what it was asked for, pauses, opens the next. The pauses are not padding — they are what keeps the pattern human — so a pass of a hundred people is a background-of-the-morning job, not a two-minute one.

While it runs, the panel shows you:

Now — whose profile is open this second, and what it is doing with it;
Done — a progress rail, tallies (complete, partial, blocked, remaining), and
People read — the last few people, newest first, each with a word for how it went.

That last list is worth watching for a moment when you start a pass. If people are appearing with not read against them, the pass is opening profiles and getting nothing from them — and after three of those with nothing read at all, it stops itself and says so rather than spending the day's allowance on pages it cannot use.

4. Pause whenever you like¶

Pause sits at the top of the panel, beside the clock.

It keeps everything read so far and leaves the rest of the queue exactly where it is. The panel returns to the play tab and offers the same pass again — same people, same order — so pausing costs you nothing but the time you were away. Closing the panel or the tab does the same thing: the pass simply stops moving.

Pause is the strongest thing the extension can do to your queue, on purpose. The extension works through what METIS has lined up and never decides that work should stop existing. Clearing a queue is a decision you make in METIS — select the rows on Outreach → Actions and cancel them there.

5. Work the queue¶

Connects, messages and connection-state checks are queued in METIS — by you, by a campaign, by a colleague. The play tab offers them together:

Run 12 queued actions Connects, messages and state checks, at the pace METIS sets.

This one also drives your browser, so the same rule applies: leave it in front. It ends on its own when the queue is empty, when the day's allowance is spent, when it reaches its time budget, or when you press stop. Whichever it was, it tells you which — and offers the move that follows from it. If work remains and the day allows, starting again is one press. If the day's allowance is spent, or LinkedIn is throttling the account, there is deliberately no start button and a sentence saying so instead: pressing on would only make it worse.

A message always waits for you. When the next action is a message, the run stops before it opens anybody's page and shows you the draft. Edit it, send it, or skip this one — skipping cancels that message and the run carries on with the next person. Nothing is sent until you say so, and your edit is saved on the action, so closing the panel mid-draft does not lose it.

Stopping a run ends the shift, not the work: anything still queued stays queued and is there for the next run. As with a paused pass, removing queued actions is done in METIS.

You can see the same queue any time at Outreach → Actions — Up Next for what is coming, History for what happened.

6. Watch the allowances¶

Done today on the play tab shows what has already been used: profiles read, connection requests sent, and so on, each against its ceiling.

These are per person and they reset on their own. Most are daily — connection requests are weekly, because that is how LinkedIn itself rations invitations, and a week's worth spent by Wednesday is still spent on Thursday. Each meter on Up Next says which period it counts over.

Hitting a ceiling is not an error and nothing is lost: the remaining work simply carries on when the allowance comes back — tomorrow for a daily one, Monday for connection requests. A queue deeper than one allowance is a perfectly ordinary thing to have.

When something is wrong¶

The panel tries to tell you plainly. The ones you are most likely to meet:

"Could not open LinkedIn" — the tab did not get there, usually a sign-in wall. Nothing was started and nothing in METIS changed. Open LinkedIn in that tab yourself, sign in, and the waiting pass is offered again.
"Bring this LinkedIn tab to the front" — LinkedIn will not draw a profile page in a background tab, so METIS waits rather than record a blank page as a blank profile.
People appearing as "not read" — LinkedIn served a page that could not be used. A few scattered ones are ordinary (deleted accounts, hidden profiles). All of them, one after another, is a fault: the pass will stop itself, and the blocked rows on the list say why.
"Nothing waiting" — genuinely nothing to start here. If you expected work, check Outreach → Actions; a pass that is stopped or needs attention shows on its list in METIS.
"Log in to METIS" — the panel becomes this one screen whenever your METIS session has ended, whether it expired while the panel sat open or you were never signed in on this browser. It replaces everything, on purpose: nothing the panel shows — your lists, the queue, the count on the play tab — means anything without a session, and a leftover count is worse than no count. Press the button, sign in, then I have signed in.
An update warning on the settings gear — a newer extension is available. METIS will refuse to hand work to an out-of-date one rather than let it act on rules it does not know.

Things people ask¶

Can I use the computer while it runs? Yes — just not that window. Move it aside and work in another window. Minimising it or switching to another tab in the same window pauses progress.

What if I close the panel by accident? The run stops. Nothing already read is lost, and the rest is still queued.

Can two of my windows run at once? No — one queue run per account, deliberately. Two windows pacing the same LinkedIn account is a rate nobody can see or control, so the second one is refused and told which tab is holding it. A profile-reading pass works the same way: it belongs to the browser that picked it up.

Does anyone else see this work? LinkedIn sees profile visits and connection requests as yours, exactly as if you had clicked them. Colleagues in METIS see the lists, the queue, and who ran what.

Someone else queued the pass — can I run it? Yes, if you can edit the list. It then counts against your allowances, because it is your account opening the pages.