So, you might have heard about the tremendous impact Sourcers are having on talent functions across the globe, and you might find yourself wondering: “What exactly is it that Sourcers do?”.

With a turbulent hiring market, overstretched internal recruiters, and relentless hiring goals, talent teams globally are looking for a solution to plug the painful financial leak going to external agencies, ensuring they meet their hiring goals, all without sacrificing on quality. And it was this need that has led to the rise of the Sourcer.

Sourcers are becoming the most strategic asset for recruiters. Sourcing is the top-of-the-funnel activity of the talent function – aimed at approaching potential candidates to build a talent pipeline. A sourcer’s job is to ensure that only qualified and engaged candidates are moved forward to recruiters – similar to SDRs in Sales. 

Recruiters are responsible for screening, shortlisting, interviewing, and hiring candidates. With all these responsibilities, it is often hard for them to build a sustainable talent pipeline with quality candidates. Sourcing is time-consuming, and you can’t expect recruiters to do all of it alone. 

With the fear of simply overcomplicating things, let’s look at time investment into searching for candidates from both a Recruiter, and a Sourcer:

• Recruiter = up to 10 hours a week
• Sourcer = 40+ hours a week

So given that the skill set was equal across the board, that would be four times as many candidates sourced and contacted each week. Four times! And, the skill set is not equal across the board, at least when it actually comes to Sourcing.

So, Sourcers not only amplify recruiters by building significantly larger talent pipelines for the Internal Recruiters to screen, but they play a vital role in improving the quality of hires coming into the company also. By utilizing a vast range of platforms beyond LinkedIn, sourcers uncover the hidden talent that was previously unreachable. 

So, more candidates, of a higher quality, in less time, enabling your Internal Recruiters to screen more, hire more, and focus on what they do best.

But the question in hand is, how do sourcers actually do it? What is the secret sauce that makes them so important? In this guide, we will try to answer similar questions. We will explore what exactly a sourcer does – what are their job responsibilities are, and how they approach them. (This brief blog certainly will not do justice to the amount of work, research, and training that goes into being a world class sourcer).

Deep Diving Into Talent Pools to Uncover Hidden Talent 

A typical recruiter primarily depends on LinkedIn to find candidates. In most companies (who wants to be “most companies”) setup, a recruiter is the only person handling all the sourcing, screening, and interviewing – full end-to-end hiring.

And you cannot rely on inbound – research shows that nearly 42% of resumes HR receives are from non-qualified candidates. 

The first thing successful sourcers do is to deeply understand the roles they are sourcing for – even if it requires them to study a highly technical area to be able to source the candidates who actually have the skills and experience to excel in the role.

However, it doesn’t mean that sourcers act like they are software engineers. It means that they know enough about the role and how it fits in the organisation. It helps them find the right candidate for the job. 

Sourcers go beyond the traditional platforms to source candidates – simultaneously increasing the quality and quantity of the candidates. With the out-of-the-box approach, sourcers tap into talent pools previously unreachable to recruiters. It isn’t just a case of contacting ‘more’, it is a case of contacting ‘different’ – the candidates your Recruiter wouldn’t be able to find.

They target and approach the passive talent – people who are not actively looking for a job but are willing to explore new opportunities – again, widening the talent pool

Using specific tools and techniques like Boolean Search and Google X-ray search, as well as an arsenal of alternative job boards, talent pools, communities, and using multiple social media platforms, Sourcers hunt candidates from a wide array of talent pools. Seriously, the impact of diversifying where you’re sourcing your candidates from cannot be overstressed.

Amplify Recruiters

If your recruiter is Batman, then the Sourcer is their Robin. Sourcers and recruiters go hand in hand. The whole hiring process can be broken down into two parts – sourcing and recruiting. It is similar to the sales process. 

Just like SDRs take care of finding and approaching qualified leads, sourcers do the same with talent. When a Lead is qualified, SDRs forward it to the BDM – sourcers forward the engaged and qualified candidates to the recruiter. As a result, the quality of talent coming into the company improves at scale. 

The skillset required for successful sourcing is different from that of a recruiter. The ability of sourcers to explore a vast range of platforms is way beyond what recruiters can do. And the changing dynamics of the talent market push sourcers to upskill themselves constantly. Upskilling takes time recruiters don’t have, and in-house knowledge and resources many companies lack.

Solo recruiters aren’t as effective as ones with a dedicated Sourcer. And a Sourcer without a recruiter is, of course, limited, But together, their combined skill sets are more than a match for any villainous market conditions or competitive hiring markets they might come up against.

Recruiters and sourcers combined can improve your time-to-hire and bring diversity to your startup. Since sourcers have access to a wide variety of talent pools, workplace diversity gets boosted to a significantly greater extent. In addition, the time-to-hire decreases because Sourcers have ensured that all the candidates in the pipeline are engaged and qualified, and your recruiter can focus on the candidate experience, minimising candidate drop-off, and running a more efficient process.

Focus on Diversity & Inclusion

Recruiters have their back up against the wall, and as a result, the sourcing digs just beneath the surface, shortlisting and contacting the most readily available candidates. But, the most readily available candidates will, over the long term, lead to a lack of diversity and inclusivity within your company.

As your Sourcer’s sole focus is on sourcing candidates, they can dedicate the time to plunge to the depths of all of the available talent tools to find the best candidates for the role, factoring in your diversity and inclusivity goals. And, here is one very important point – they have the skills to do it.

Sourcing for overlooked talent is, by its very nature, difficult – as these candidates are overlooked. But truly world class Sourcers have the domain experience to not only find incredible candidates, but present diverse talent pipelines to your talent team.

Now, there are many reasons how this is done, be it adding a string of female first names into the advanced search options for tech roles, running multiple searches around different pronouns, using diversity focused conferences and communiti – the tactics are many, but the outcome is a d

Increased Quality and Quantity of Candidates

As a result, the cooperation between sourcers and recruiters improves the quality and quantity of the candidates. Deep diving into all the available talent pools, sourcers bring in a higher number, of better candidates, for each role you’re hiring for.

With deeper and wider talent pipelines, your recruiters have a vast number of qualified candidates to screen, and eventually, hire. All of this supercharges your talent function and results in less reliance on agencies to hit your hiring goals. 

If you’d like to find out more about working with a Sourcer, simply CLICK HERE, complete the short form, and a member of the Kandidate team will be in touch.