- Your own old applications and your team's referrals are the two cheapest places to source from, and most companies work neither.
- Write the three things a candidate must have before you open a single profile, or you will lose the week to resumes that were never going to work.
- An hour of in-house sourcing runs about $39 once the employer's payroll tax sits on top of the middle pay for the job.
- Hand sourcing off when the hours cost more than the help would, and keep the must-have list and the training on your side either way.
What candidate sourcing is, and how it differs from posting a job
Candidate sourcing is the part of hiring where you pick the people and you make the first move. You build a list of people who already do the job, and you write to each of them whether or not they are looking for work.
- Posting a job is the opposite shape. You put the role somewhere public and wait to see who applies, so the only people you meet are the ones who happened to be job hunting that week.
- Most of the people you want are passive candidates, meaning they are good at the job and are not trying to leave it. A job ad never reaches them.
- Sourcing ends once you have a name, a job title and a way to reach the person. Recruiting is everything after that: the screening call, which is a short phone call to check somebody fits, then the interviews and the offer.
Where that split comes from: it is how we run a search for a client, and every staffing firm divides the work the same way inside its own team. When you read an agency proposal, check which of those two halves you are being quoted for.
A job post and a sourcing pass, meaning one round of searching for one role, are not rivals, and you want both running. The post catches the people looking this week. The pass goes after everybody else. Roles that stay open for months are usually hard for that exact reason: the right person is already employed and content.
Where the names actually come from
The names come from five places. Most lists of candidate sourcing strategies are really lists of places to look, so here they are, roughly in the order I would work them.
- The applications you already have: Somebody who applied for a similar role last year is the cheapest name you will ever find. They know your company, and whatever made you pass may not apply now. Hardly anybody looks here.
- Your own team's contacts: Ask the people doing the job now who else they would happily work with. A referral arrives already judged by somebody whose judgment you trust, and it costs you one message.
- A professional network search: LinkedIn and the sites like it filter by job title, employer and location. Boolean search helps here, which just means joining your words with AND, OR and NOT so a search for a bookkeeper does not return every office manager in the country.
- The places the work gets talked about: Industry Slack groups, GitHub, Behance, a trade association's member list. Narrower than a job board, and the people there care about the craft.
- Events, online and in person: A conference attendee list or a meetup group is a list of people who all do one thing, sorted in advance.
Keep every name in one place, including the people who said no. That list makes your second search faster than your first.
How to source candidates: one pass, start to finish
A pass is one role, worked end to end. Here is the order to take it in, and it fits inside a week.
- Write the three must-haves: Sit with whoever the person will report to and get three things on paper: what they must have done before, what they must do on day one, and what you are willing to teach. Everything else is a nice-to-have. Skip this and you will judge a hundred profiles by a hundred slightly different standards.
- Turn those into the words people use about themselves: Nobody describes their own work the way your job post does. Write down the titles the right person has actually held and the tools they name. Those words are your search, not the ones in the ad.
- Open profiles and sort them fast: Two piles: worth a message, and not. Do not read deeply yet. You are checking against the three must-haves and nothing else.
- Write to each one like a person: Short, their name, the one thing in their background that made you stop, and what the job is. Put the pay range in it. A message that could have gone to anybody gets answered by nobody.
- Screen the people who reply: Twenty minutes on the three must-haves and on what they want next. Checking that the person is who they say they are belongs here, before anybody books an interview.
Then hand the hiring manager your shortlist, which is just the three or four names worth their time, with your notes on each. Follow up once with everybody who did not answer, about four working days later. That second message is free and almost everybody skips it.
What an hour of sourcing costs you
Sourcing candidates yourself is not free. You pay for it in the hours of whoever does the searching, and those hours have a price you can look up.
Start with the pay. O*NET publishes the Bureau of Labor Statistics median for human resources specialists, which is who does this work in most companies: $36.51 an hour, or $75,940 a year, in 2025. Then add what you owe on top as the employer. The IRS puts your share of Social Security at 6.2 percent and Medicare at 1.45 percent, so 7.65 percent goes on every dollar of that pay. Call the real figure $39 an hour.
Now multiply that by the hours a search takes. Most of the week goes on reading profiles and writing messages, and both of those grow with the number of names you need. A cheap search that ends in the wrong hire is the expensive one, because you pay for it again in the second search and in the months the seat sat empty.
Those hours are the part people forget to count, and they come out of running the company, not out of a budget. If you are the founder they are worth more than $39 an hour, not less, because nobody is doing your job while you read profiles. The column on the right is the same work done by somebody whose only job it is, for money in the same range. Our savings calculator runs the same sum for any seat.
Which sourcing numbers are worth watching
Four numbers tell you whether a pass is working. Here is what each one catches.
- Reply rate, meaning how many of the people you contacted wrote back. When it is low the problem is the message, not the list.
- Messages per screening call, which tells you how long next week's list has to be.
- Screening calls per hire, tracked per role, because a bookkeeper and a senior developer are not the same search.
- Which of the five places above produced the person who started. Of the four numbers, this is the one that changes what you do next.
You can do all of this without software. A spreadsheet with one row per person and a column for what happened will carry you through the first year.
When to hand sourcing off, and what stays yours
The decision is less about money than about whose week it is. Sourcing expands to fill the time it is given, and it usually goes to somebody whose week was already full.
Hand it off when two things are true at once: you are filling more than one seat, and the person searching has a day job that is visibly suffering for it. One role, worked by somebody with room in their week, is a search worth keeping.
That handover is the whole of what we do. Our sourcing service comes in two shapes: we send resumes for your roles on a rolling basis and you screen them, or we screen them against your list first and send you a shortlist each month. Both are a flat monthly fee rather than a cut of anybody's salary. If you would rather be handed the finished hire, direct hire is a flat 25 percent of first-year salary with a 30-day replacement guarantee. For the whole function rather than the searching alone, that is talent acquisition outsourcing.
What never moves, whoever does the searching: the three must-haves, the yes or no on each person, and the training once somebody starts. Expect about two weeks of ramp before a new hire is any use, and plan for their manager to spend those two weeks on them. Underestimating that is the most common mistake I see on a first remote hire.
Tell us the role you are trying to fill
If a seat has been open too long and the applications are not the people you need, tell us the role and the three must-haves. We send vetted candidates in 2 to 4 weeks, at 50 to 70 percent under a US hire, and if your own search is nearly working I will say so on the call rather than sell you something. Explore your options with us.
