Best Candidate Sourcing Tools - 2023

It's still incredibly difficult to find the best talent in many demographics: engineers, diversity candidates, experienced sales reps, etc.

Over the past decade, many companies have developed internal recruiting and sourcing functions to find the right talent.  As the market got tight, companies could either rely on expensive third party recruiters or start to do the work themselves.

However, even these internal teams can be stretched thin as the demands of a growing organization take their toll on your recruiting team.   This is where sourcing tools come in, and recruiting software in general.  This software/services category is all about building the top of your recruiting funnel with quality passive applicants.

Some of these tools are trying to be better and/or cheaper than a LinkedIn Recruiter license.  Some are trying to be your outsourced sourcing team.  And some are doing both.  All of them are what we’d consider to be part of an elite group of the best candidate sourcing software.

Regardless, these tools are all looking to increase your ability to build relationships with and hire the right people for your hardest to fill roles through AI sourcing, social media, .recruitment marketing, and various other talent sourcing methods.

If you’re looking to buy a tool or service to augment your sourcing capability, here are our thoughts on how to calculate the return on investment.  Some key points in this calculator:

• How to capture increases in recruiter productivity
• How decreases in time to fill affects the organization
• How sourcing tools can decrease agency fees

We highly suggest your use the video to the right in order to best understand how to use our calculator!

You can make your own copy of this google sheet here, or download in excel here.

Beyond the dollars and cents, there are also some non-economic benefits of using talent sourcing tools.  For example, the vast majority of recruiters we talk to do not like sourcing.  The idea of sending cold emails, and then playing phone tag with the people who are interested is very unappealing.  Optimizing or outsourcing these tasks means more time for your team to do the things they like, as well as think strategically.

If you’re looking at buying a new sourcing tool, or using one of the managed services we have listed, you need to stay organized.  Chances are, you’re going to do at least 3-5 demos.  Unless you have a perfect memory, it’ll be tough to remember which tools have which features.  

Taking notes is great, but we recommend you do it in a structured way that objectively captures which vendors have which features that matter to you.  So, we’ve put together the below spreadsheet that comes with some sample questions, along with an easy to modify structure that will allow you to pick the right candidate sourcing tool for your business.

You can download the spreadsheet here.

• Where do you get your data?  Is your service GDPR and CAN SPAM compliant?
• Is this a tool or a managed service or both?  What is the pricing difference between the two?
• What automation features do you offer once candidates have been identified?
• How do candidates/applications get into my ATS?
• What are your response rates, and interview rates from candidates?  Put another way, what percent of candidates that we’ll be reaching out to respond positively, and what percent want to interview?
• How will applicants interact with this software during the hiring and onboarding processes?
• How does the tool know about open positions and prioritize which ones should be actively sourced?
• Does this solution help with interview scheduling, or integrate with an interview scheduling platform?
• How will this tool integrate with the rest of my tech stack?
• Can I use semantic search to query the database to find relevant candidates?
• What analytics are reported to human resources/talent acquisition and on what frequency?
• How does machine learning and/or AI sourcing play a role in this product?
• Is your product able to use the analytics from our talent management platform to understand what types of candidates do well in our company?
• Does this platform leverage social recruiting as one of the sourcing strategies?

There are two main ways that vendors in this space help with your top of funnel recruiting.  Some of these companies offer tools that your recruiters and sourcers can use to find and engage with potential hires.  These tools are very similar to LinkedIn Recruiter, but rely on emails vs inmails.

The second way companies in this category can help is by providing a managed service to drive more quality applicants into your pipeline.  You tell them the profile you’re looking for, and they do most of the work until the candidate is ready to interview.  The candidate either shows up in your inbox, or on your calendar.

While I think most of us would want to simply have calendar invites appear with the right candidates, there are some tradeoffs to the managed service approach.  The first is price.  The second is a potential loss of control in your process and how your employer brand is being portrayed.  However, we don’t believe this is a major concern as every vendor we talked to wants to work closely with their customers to ensure the right messages are being sent to the right people in order to preserve employer branding.

Here’s What HR Needs to Know About Sourcing Tools

Here are some of the points that we found (some) practitioners don’t understand when they first hear about sourcing tools:

• These solutions can help you build relationships with D&I candidates by searching specifically for people that meet various criteria.
• Hiring managers can also use these tools to streamline their own recruiting process, assuming they are taking an active role in top of funnel recruiting.
• Companies that hire 10-100,000 people per year use recruiters.  Similarly, sourcing tools can help companies of almost any size.
• No, candidates haven’t opted into this outreach.  Just like sales people can email you out of the blue as long as they follow various regulations, you can (and probably are) reaching out to candidates that haven’t “opted in” to your communication.  This tactic is the best way to get in touch with passive candidates and is very common across internal and external recruiting teams.
• Utilizing a candidate sourcing tool in concert with other recruiting technology such as video interviewing or employee referrals can greatly magnify the effectiveness of your overall recruiting process, and therefore you should be thinking holistically about how you want your talent acquisition tech stack to look.
• Many applications will not convert down the funnel into hires.  Employers that use a recruiting CRM can re-engage and nurture these applicants until they are a good fit for an open role.
• These solutions can be a replacement for agencies and LinkedIn recruiter licenses. But, it’s more likely they’ll augment your other efforts than totally replace them.
• A well run sourcing mechanism is great for getting people into your funnel.  But, if you have a poor candidate experience, onboarding, or culture generally, you will constantly be trying to fill a leaky bucket.

What is candidate sourcing?

Candidate sourcing is the act of proactively looking for potential candidates to fill open positions, oftentimes using recruiters or software platforms. 

Are there different solutions for sourcing candidates?

Yes, there are multiple different solutions for sourcing candidates. You can outsource sourcing to a recruiting firm, hire full-time recruiters to source for your company, or purchase a candidate sourcing software solution. 

What is a candidate sourcing platform?

A candidate sourcing platform is a software solution designed to make your sourcing process more efficient by automating or outsourcing the parsing of job boards, databases, employee networks and social media websites. 

How can candidate sourcing tools enhance the recruiting process?

Candidate sourcing tools make the hiring process much more efficient. By automating or outsourcing the busywork of scouring networks and databases for the best talent, your HR team will save lots of time. In addition, your team will see a decrease in time to fill thanks to a wider talent pool from sourcing efforts.