Candidate Sourcing: 10 Methods And Expert Advice
Candidate sourcing is sometimes the only way to find candidates to fill an open position.
However, discovering and engaging new candidates can be one of the toughest challenges in the recruitment process.
Here are a few tips and tricks from someone who has tested a myriad of candidate sourcing tools and methods.
Let's dive in.
What Is Candidate Sourcing?
Candidate sourcing is the art and science of finding and engaging quality candidates. It forms an essential part of any recruitment process, as it means you're not just waiting for the right candidates to apply for a role.
To highlight the potential of sourcing, it's estimated that around 36% of candidates are actively looking at one time but 90% are willing to hear about new opportunities.
Some companies employ professional sourcers, but anyone in your organization can help with finding new employees.
What Does Candidate Sourcing Comprise?
Typically, the candidate sourcing process comprises several key components:
- Identifying talent pools: The first stage of sourcing involves identifying places, real and virtual, where potential candidates are likely to be found. This can include online job boards, professional networks like LinkedIn, social media platforms, industry-specific forums, academic institutions, and even competitor companies.
- Outreach: After identifying likely sources of candidates, it’s time to reach out to them directly. As many qualified candidates may not be actively seeking new jobs, sourcing efforts often focus on engaging these passive candidates through personalized outreach and building long-term relationships.
- Building and maintaining talent pipelines: It’s easier to reach out to candidates you’ve already prequalified or had interactions with. This necessitates building a candidate database, usually in the application tracking system but could be in specialist recruiting database, as your own pool of potential candidates.
- Screening and pre-qualification: Sourcing can also include initial screening to ensure candidates meet basic qualifications. This step helps in shortlisting candidates who are more likely to pass interviews.
- Networking and Referrals: Building relationships within the industry and encouraging employee referrals are also key components of candidate sourcing. These methods often yield high-quality candidates who may not be actively looking for new opportunities.
5 Candidate Sourcing Benefits
Sourcing can require a substantial investment of time and resources, but there are a few reasons organizations go to the trouble and even hire specialists:
- Access to a broader talent pool: Sourcing expands the reach beyond active job seekers to include passive candidates who might not be actively looking for a job might be open to new opportunities. This broader access increases the likelihood of finding highly qualified and potentially ideal candidates.
- Faster hiring process: By proactively building a pipeline of potential candidates, sourcing helps organizations quickly identify and engage suitable candidates when job openings arise. This preparedness can significantly reduce the time-to-fill for positions, ensuring that critical roles are not left vacant for long periods.
- Improved quality of hire: Sourcing allows recruiters to focus on unearthing quality candidates targeting specific skills, experiences, and qualifications. This targeted approach can increase the chances of hiring candidates who are a better fit for the company’s needs and culture, leading to improved employee performance and retention.
- Competitive advantage: In a competitive job market, being able to source and attract top talent efficiently gives companies an edge over their competitors. Organizations that excel in sourcing can secure high-quality candidates before they are approached by other companies.
- Strategic workforce planning: Sourcing provides valuable insights into market trends, talent availability, and skill gaps. This information can inform strategic workforce planning, helping organizations prepare for future hiring needs and market changes.
10 Candidate Sourcing Methods
When my teams and I are on a sourcing mission, here’s where we’ll generally search:
1. Other organizations
When going out to the wider market, I normally start by going through a list of companies as targets for my sourcing. Perhaps companies in the same space as you, or competitors/companies with similar products and tech stack.
2. LinkedIn
No doubt you’ve had a few people reach out to you over LinkedIn before. It's a very good general social media platform for all kinds of roles and also to research companies you would like to target.
If you have a LinkedIn Recruiter license you get to see the full list of people. With Premium, you get to see 3rd-degree connections and with a Regular account only 2nd-degree connections.
If you do not have access to a recruiter license, a well-placed boolean search in the Regular offering. LinkedIn search box can help.
3. Careers sites and jobs boards
There are heaps of jobs boards out there. The trick is identifying which ones work best for specific niches. For example:
- Creatives. You can use places like Dribbble or Behance. You can both browse profiles and post your roles on them.
- Startups. AngelList is a good resource.
- Remote. Places like RemoteOK have both job boards and also a candidate discovery and message board.
- Diversity-specific platforms. Places like RemoteWoman, She Can Code, or RemotePOC to name just a few.
4. Candidate database
As mentioned above, it pays dividends to build you own candidate database you can use for sourcing as well as recruitment marketing.
5. Employee referrals
It is so often overlooked to just ask people to reach out to their network, or post things on their socials etc, about the roles you have. Referrals are a great source of candidates—and a source of referral bonuses for current employees!
Employee referral platforms can automate the referral process and make it easier for workers to refer qualified candidates for open positions within the company.
6. Boolean search
A good tool to have in your arsenal is a boolean search. Many platforms have it built into their search, but it is always good to have an understanding of how it works.
Operators for Boolean searching:
AND—includes both (or all) of the keywords. The search terms that follow the AND must appear in the search results.
OR—either terms. All combination possibilities will come up.
NOT—so specific search terms do not appear in the results. This will prevent the terms from coming up.
Quotation marks “”—when users want to search for an exact phrase, they use quotation marks around that phrase.
Parentheses (): placing parentheses allows separation of the terms and preference to be given to specified ones.
Here is an example of how a search above may work. (Software AND (engineer OR developer)) AND (React OR Typescript)
7. X-Ray searching
X-Ray searching is the application of Boolean searching in a Google search engine.
If you really want to go a lot deeper you can program your own search engine here using Google’s step-by-step guide, so you can specify results in only specific sites. recruitin.net is another resource that is already programmed for LinkedIn and Dribbble.
However, exercise caution when creating X-ray searches, they’re not suitable for all roles and may end up wasting time.
A prime example is if you are searching for a common junior position e.g. Sales Development Representative (SDR).
Because an X-ray search is difficult to program for current roles only, the results of more senior candidates may appear because they started as SDRs.
8. Specialized recruiting tools
Since sourcing is such a specialized area, it’s no wonder an abundance of specialized recruiting tools have popped up to help with that—be it through artificial intelligence (AI) or a meta-base approach.
AI tools have been popping up quite a bit. Some help personalize your outreach messages.
Some are aggregate tools (metabases) that try to find you the right candidates using filters that vary in sophistication e.g. Amazing Hiring and Fetcher AI.
They usually use sources like Linkedin, Github and Twitter to gather candidate information and collate it to get you the most detailed information about a candidate and give you an idea of whether to approach them.
When using metabases, look at their GDPR compliance, they should display where they get the candidate’s emails.
A while ago a lot of email scraper tools we used to use in recruitment had to be scrapped because of the rules on privacy and GDPR.
I am based in a jurisdiction where data privacy laws are very strict, so I can’t recommend those. Many people are mindful of their data these days, so be mindful that an approach over email can be considered too aggressive.
The most common tool approach nowadays is to create a community and a platform for companies to access candidates—active and passive in this community.
This is how places like Hackajob, Cord, Talent.io, and Otta operate—somewhere between a community and a marketplace model.
9. Events
Attending jobs fairs is a nice way to source candidates and build your employer brand.
You can also highlight the expertise of your team by hosting an event where you can share knowledge and use it as a networking opportunity. These can be in-person or virtual.
10. Communities
Reddit and other communities are great for finding people who are engaged in their area of expertise, although they tend to be the most passive candidates. For developers and techies, Github or Stack Overflow are similar communities.
Slack/Discord communities are especially good for connecting with specialists in the area and also for posting roles. Many have specific channels for job hunters too.
Bonus: external recruiters
As sourcing can be so time-intensive, especially if you're new to the practice, some organizations choose to outsource recruiting, especially sourcing, to external recruiters.
These will normally charge a set fee of around 20% of a successful candidate's salary. They can help with interviewing and collecting candidate feedback too.
Candidate Sourcing: 3-Step Process
1. Define your search criteria
Before thinking about the sources of qualified candidates, it’s important to first be clear about the skills and experience required.
For this, it’s useful to start with a breakdown of the role and the skills.
A good idea is to make a table in Excel, Sheets, or Notion where all the sourcing information goes and keep it with the rest of the role information.
Something like this:
Creating such a framework helps you quickly decide whether to add someone to your longlist or not.
Depending on the org, the sourcers might be separate from the recruiters and only handle outreach and maybe screening.
If this is the case, then they have to make sure that they’re still fully aligned not just with the hiring manager but also with the recruiter.
They need to be totally in sync to give the candidate consistent and great experience and also for the recruiter to have all the information they need to close the candidate eventually.
The best way to get that is to regularly discuss the talent market, the pipeline, and the status and motivations of each candidate.
The sourcer should also, in my opinion, be in every conversation with the hiring manager to understand the needs of the team and what the manager is looking for beyond what is passed on by the recruiter.
2. Find candidates
Now you have your ideal candidate it’s time to find them using a mix of the methods outlined above.
As you go, make a note of which sources bear the most fruit and try to add anyone you’ve reached out to in your candidate database software. This way, if you have multiple people sourcing, you don’t end up spamming people with multiple messages.
3. Engage
Once you have found the candidates you’d like to approach, it’s time to think about messaging them.
A word of caution when approaching candidates—it’s always good to strive for balance. You don’t want to become a stalker!
Often, at sourcing conventions and gatherings of sourcing specialists, the zeal to find new and creative ways to discover candidates can lead to an overbearing approach.
For example, I once heard someone advise to contact candidates 8 times and find them on Facebook or Instagram. That’s far too invasive!
Going for the more official channels like LinkedIn and other recruitment platforms is always a safe approach. People expect to be approached for a legitimate job opportunity via those methods.
While job advertisements on Instagram or TikTok are becoming more prevalent, actively approaching someone there is still likely to be met with distrust.
Crafting an outreach message
Outreach—it’s all about the message!
All the advice out there will say that personalizing the message is the key, but before we get onto that I want to make the case for the informative message.
The informative outreach message
It may seem like a basic thing, but make sure that your message not only “sells” but also informs on the opportunity. It should give people the chance to discover more about your company and why the role is important.
A great way of ensuring this is by including links to the job description, careers pages, or a video or article on your company.
While a call to action, e.g. “book in a time to chat”, is a great technique borrowed from sales, don’t make the entire message about just that. Let people discover information on their own too.
After this, we can talk about personalization.
2. Personalized outreach message
If you’re messaging people on a large scale (e.g. you have multiple roles to fill) you can either break them down into smaller batches or create groups of people you want to message.
A good practice is to create a tagging/notes system to keep track on LinkedIn or your ATS on what message you want to send to each person.
For example, if you have a few people with similar experiences, message them one type of message acknowledging that experience.
If you have a few people who have signified they are open to work, group them together and message them based on that.
Monitor your open and engagement rate metrics and optimize as you go.
Some new, more engaging ways I have found is to send a Loom/video link to a message you or the hiring manager has recorded about the role and/or the company.
Even more exclusive, if you want to truly engage a specific person, send them a personalized video!
Be authentic
Authenticity is key—highlight your employer brand!
Many candidates get approached by a lot of recruiters for job opportunities on a daily basis, so it can understandably be overwhelming for some. You don’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons.
Being quirky can be great but can also backfire or be quite exclusionary e.g. if you start with a culture-specific joke or pun. There are ways to show you and your company’s personality without excluding people who may not understand or engage with that.
Make sure you put on display all the great things about your team and company but also highlight that you are curious about them as a person and their accomplishments so far.
Example:
Hi [Name],
Noticed that you’re open to new opportunities so I thought I’d highlight our role to you!
We’re looking for a Head of Marketing to help us build out our marketing function, level up the brand, and help us [insert company vision].
Our mission is to…
Over the last few years, we’ve raised X and grown from X to Z team members! This role is critical because…
Some more information about the role and our mission:
- Link
- Link
- Link
Let me know if this is of interest, would love to catch up in more detail!
Best,
[Name]
Follow-up messages
You may want to create a follow-up message structure. Make sure that:
- You're adding something new to your follow-up messages not just saying, “Hey are you ignoring me?”
- You space the messages apart by at least 3 days to start with and, if you send a third message, send it a week after the second.
- You vary your approach. If they have not responded to your email, send them an invite on LinkedIn. That should count as your second approach.
Candidate Sourcing Metrics
It’s important to track what’s working and what isn’t. While response rate is important, I like to split it into two categories: source and content.
Source
Nowadays we have many platforms to potentially reach candidates, but not every platform will work for every role.
Things to pay attention to are:
- Volume of candidates (ideally over a 3-4 weeks period to see how many new candidates there are and if there is a turnover).
- Engagement of candidates: Are you getting responses or are these candidates that registered a long time ago and just didn’t log back into that platform again?
If you’re getting good candidates from one platform, check if you can double down on it and maybe partner with them to see if your company can get featured.
The best applicant tracking systems will have hiring dashboard to help you see what’s working and what isn’t.
Content
I always keep track of version control for every message I send. If you’re not getting responses, before moving off of the platform you’ve chosen, try rewriting your message and making it more engaging. Don’t forget to mention something specific to each candidate.
It might help to paste the message you write in ChatGPT and see if that gives you some ideas of what else you can change.
Sometimes it takes a bit of time for the right message to hit the right people in the right way so keep A/B testing. Pro tip: I always write [Position] V1, [Position] V2 etc.
Some platforms offer guidance on what’s good on their platforms. For example, on LinkedIn depending on the role it can be as low as 20%.
If it’s less than that, try something new.
How To Make Candidate Sourcing Easier
Sourcing candidates will not be easy. Both finding the right people and getting them to respond will be tough, so here’s some advice for making both easier:
Finding the right people
- Start with other companies. Sometimes it’s helpful if you start with the companies you want to target and go through their teams, especially if the teams call their employees by unique titles that you may have not thought of.
- Look at people’s past titles. Don’t forget to look for people’s past titles, it can help with seeing how they've progressed in their careers even if their current title is unique.
- Diversify platforms. Don’t just stick to one platform. Depending on the role there may be specialized groups, websites, or newsletters you may want to be a part of.
Increasing response rate
- Invest in building a strong employer brand. The more people recognize you as a good employer the more likely they are to respond.
- Invest in good candidate material. This can include a careers page, an external-facing Wiki, or great job description—anything that can help candidates find out more about you and learn without necessarily speaking to you.
Candidate Sourcing Is About Momentum And Authenticity
Sourcing is an essential recruiter skill and can be a lot of fun. You can often find yourself spending hours finding more and more candidates and one leads to another leads to a third.
It’s important to distance engagement from stalking, and an authentic approach from aggressive salesmanship.
With that in mind, sourcing can be an instrumental part of finding new employees, especially when combined with strategic recruitment marketing activities and the right recruiting platform for small businesses.
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