beat the bushes

Example: “The company is beating the bushes for new software engineers.”

Origin: Traces to medieval bird and boar hunting in Britain, where landowners hired men called beaters to walk through dense undergrowth striking it with long sticks, driving whatever animals were hiding there out into the open for hunters waiting with nets, falcons, or guns. The Book of St. Albans records a version of the phrase as early as 1486, and the poem Generydes, from around 1440, already has "some bete the bussh and some the byrdes take" — someone doing the unglamorous work of flushing game out while someone else took the credit, or the catch. Beaters famously struck around the bushes rather than directly into them, since the same cover sheltering birds could just as easily be hiding something far more dangerous, like a wild boar or a disturbed nest of bees.