BreakLine Data Extension
BreakLine's sourcing team worked on LinkedIn but answered to a database that didn't follow them. The gap exposed BreakLine to legal risk: junior recruiters reaching out to do-not-contact participants 2-3 times a week, with $1M+ partner contracts at risk per incident. I designed a Chrome sidebar extension that validated every LinkedIn profile against the platform. Mistaken outreach to do-not-contact participants dropped to zero.
The Short Version
BreakLine is a career acceleration platform that helps military veterans, first responders, and student athletes transition into careers at top companies.
BreakLine matches around 600 candidates per week to partner companies like Stripe, Airbnb, and Anduril.
The Chrome extension addressed a specific business pain: BreakLine’s source of truth lived in the platform, but the sourcing team worked on LinkedIn. The bridge between them was a stack of brittle integrations and manual entry, and the gap was costing BreakLine legal exposure and missed opportunities.
Junior recruiters were reaching out to do-not-contact participants 2-3 times a week, each incident putting partner contracts worth $1M+ in annual revenue at risk per partner. On the other side, a $10K quarterly LinkedIn API sync was catching partner-company joiners late, leaving $40K-$90K in finder’s fees uncaptured per missed detection. Two failure modes, one root cause: the team was working in LinkedIn, the data lived in the platform, and nothing connected them in time.
I designed and owned the PRD end-to-end for a Chrome sidebar extension that reads any LinkedIn profile, validates it against BreakLine’s database in real time, and surfaces the recognition state the sourcing team can act on. Among plugin users, mistaken outreach to do-not-contact participants dropped to zero almost immediately on release. The extension shipped to the Chrome Web Store and was mandated for the sourcing team’s daily workflow.
The deeper win was access. Sourcers stopped tab-switching between LinkedIn and the platform. They stopped holding participant history in their heads. They started finding participants who’d been invisible under the old workflow because the data the team needed was now in the place the team was working. The plugin trusted the platform. The team trusted the plugin. Trust at the data layer became the gate every later action passed through, and every later BreakLine tool I designed inherited the same pattern: validate before you act.