Background Research — public-sources profile research
Give it a name and it compiles what is publicly knowable about that person into a consistent structure — professional background, digital footprint, public records, and what could not be found. Built for sales research, candidate sourcing and due diligence, where the alternative is twenty browser tabs and no notes.
What it produces
The output shape is fixed, which is the point. Every profile comes back with the same sections: the identity anchors it used to confirm it has the right person, professional background, digital footprint across public profiles, anything in the public record, and an explicit list of what it looked for and could not find.
That last section is the one people skip and the one that carries the most information. Ad-hoc research produces whatever the first three search results happened to contain, and you have no way of telling the difference between “this person has no public writing” and “I didn’t look”. A defined output shape makes the gap visible, and a visible gap tells you where to look next.
Disambiguation comes first, and it is most of the job
Before it goes wide, the skill runs an anchoring pass: search the name with whatever context you gave it, then find at least two confirming data points — a photo and an employer, or an employer and a city — before accepting that it has the right person. It notes name variants, maiden names and handles along the way.
If several people plausibly match, it stops and asks you which one rather than guessing. This is deliberate. Two people with a common name merged into a single profile is both the most likely failure and the most damaging one, because the result looks completely coherent while being wrong about half its claims. Nothing downstream of a bad anchor is worth reading.
What it will and won’t touch
Only publicly accessible sources: no login walls, no paywalls, no circumventing access controls, no scraping restricted systems. Search engines are the access layer, which keeps it to material the subject published themselves or that is a matter of public record.
It covers North American and EU contexts, and flags where a finding may carry GDPR implications rather than presenting everything as equally fair game. If the subject turns out to be a private individual with a thin public footprint, it says so and limits how hard it digs instead of scraping the barrel to fill the template.
How to use it well
Give it more than a name. Company, location, role — any one of these turns the disambiguation phase from a guess into a lookup, and the quality of everything after it depends on that step landing. If you have a handle, an email or a profile URL, lead with it.
Where it falls short
Public sources are stale and incomplete. Job titles lag reality by months, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — plenty of accomplished people have almost no public footprint.
Verify anything you plan to act on. And to be explicit: this is not a background check in the legal sense. For anything employment-related, the regulated process exists for good reason, and a research profile is not a substitute for it.