What is candidate sourcing?
Candidate sourcing is the proactive search for people who could fill a role, done before or instead of waiting for them to apply. A sourcer finds potential candidates in profile databases, portfolios, communities and referrals, makes first contact, and hands interested people to a recruiter. It is the top of the recruiting funnel, aimed at people not currently looking.
In recruiting, sourcing means the search and first-contact stage, distinct from the screening, interviewing, offer and closing stages that recruiting covers end to end. Large teams split the two into sourcer and recruiter roles; small teams have one person do both. Talent sourcing is the same activity described from the market side: mapping where a kind of talent sits, at which companies and in which cities, and building pools before a requisition exists. Inbound recruiting relies on job postings and employer brand to bring candidates in; sourcing is the outbound half.
Sourcing changes recruiting in three ways. It shortens time to fill, because the pipeline exists before the requisition opens. It raises the quality of the slate, because sourced candidates are chosen for fit rather than self-selected by who happened to see the posting. And it reduces dependence on boards and agencies for roles where applications are thin, such as senior, specialist and niche technical work. The cost is time: sourcing is slow, manual and hard to scale, which is why the tooling market around it is large and why the target-company step is worth automating first.
Posting data supports sourcing at the company level rather than the person level. A query to POST /v1/jobs/search with skills_or or job_title_or returns the employers currently hiring for a profile, which is where people with that profile already work; a query with status closed shows who just took a similar role off the market. The company field on each row is the target list, and technology_slugs tells you the stack, so an outreach message can name it. The candidates themselves are found in your own sourcing tools; postings hold jobs, not people.
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Related questions
What is sourcing candidates?
The act of going out to find people for a role rather than waiting for applications: searching profile databases, portfolios and communities, working referrals, and making first contact. It is the same thing as candidate sourcing, and in most teams it is measured by how many qualified people it brings into the pipeline and how many of them reply.
What does sourcing mean in recruiting?
The first stage of the recruiting process, covering search and first contact. A sourcer's job ends when an interested, plausibly qualified person is handed to a recruiter or hiring manager; everything after that, from screening to offer, is recruiting. The term is borrowed from procurement, where sourcing means finding suppliers before negotiating with them.
What is talent sourcing?
Candidate sourcing seen from the market side. Rather than filling one requisition, talent sourcing maps where a kind of talent is concentrated, which companies employ it, what it costs and how it moves, and builds pools ahead of demand. Posting data is a direct input, since a company hiring for a skill is a company where that skill already works.
How does sourcing affect recruiting?
It shortens time to fill by having candidates ready before the requisition opens, improves slate quality because people are selected for fit rather than self-selected by the posting, and reduces reliance on boards and agencies for hard roles. It also raises the cost per hire in recruiter time, which is why sourcing is reserved for roles where inbound applications are thin.
What tools are used for candidate sourcing?
Profile search tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter, sourcing intelligence platforms such as SeekOut and Findem, and the ATS or CRM that tracks outreach. Underneath them, posting data from an API such as JobsPipe supplies the target-company list: which employers are hiring the profile now, which just closed a role for it, and what stack each team runs.
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