11 Best Candidate Sourcing Software and Tools for Recruiters

Algorithms and humans share the spotlight in recruitment these days and finding that sweet spot between them isn't easy. Our ‘tour’ with Fetcher showed that the tool strikes that balance flawlessly.

Unlike Rolebot, which is fixated on giving 15 candidate profiles daily, Fetcher lets us decide how many profiles we want per week, meaning we can tweak this number anytime to meet our recruitment goals.

Fetcher promises 1-2 business days for the first batch of profiles, and it delivers: We submitted requirements on one day and received our profiles the next afternoon. Our favorite part, though, was that we got to provide feedback on these profiles—whether they’re qualified or not—within the system or by contacting Fetcher staff. Well, we actually did both and Fetcher didn’t let us down with the next batch: it arrived the following day with notably improved candidate quality.

For those knee-deep in sourcing day in, day out, you know the time it swallows! 20 profiles every 1-2 days is a can-do number with traditional, manual sourcing approaches, but being able to deliver that with better results over time requires a great deal of time and effort, not to mention what to do next with these leads—how to approach, nurture, and convert them—is not easy. Fetcher's ability to harness AI for these soul-destroying tasks while preserving a human touch makes it unbeatable in the sourcing tech domain.

We were also happy to find that Fetcher is very accessible for startups and SMBs: It now offers a free plan, a free trial, and clear pricing on the website. However, the free plan may only prove helpful for teams hiring 1-2 people per year, as it caps the viewable profiles at 50 per month and provides no integration support at all. As much as we love Fetcher's constant improvements, glitches and bugs still affect our system once in a while, especially when we source candidates from its database or request profile refreshes.

Fetcher is used by over 500 businesses worldwide, including Andela, Frame.io, Magnite, Foursquare, and CarGurus.

Fetcher has four plans:

• Starter is free and lets users access 50 profiles per month.
• Growth costs $149/user/month and provides integrations and access to 4,000 profiles per year.
• Amplify costs $549/user/month and includes everything in Growth, plus talent sourcers, a US-based success team, and 1,000 human-sourced profiles.
• Custom pricing for large companies and staffing agencies.

If you’ve researched ATS, you've likely come across Manatal. The tool is renowned among SMBs for its wealth of features, boasting connectivity with 2500+ job board integrations, a branded career page, a LinkedIn extension, and a referral program—all at a surprisingly low cost. But rather than resting on its laurels in the ATS domain, Manatal keeps its feet on the ground and offers a handful of features for sourcing within the user’s existing candidate database.

We were initially drawn to Manatal's AI-powered recommendation engine. The AI made no mistakes as we challenged it with our Sales Executive job descriptions (JD): It scanned the JD, dug into our candidate database, and presented us with a list of candidates matching in quality and skills—all within a few seconds without any glitches. We can imagine how helpful this tool will be for teams with a large existing talent pool, especially staffing agencies, to make the most of their own resources.

One of the troubles of maintaining a self-built talent database is that you have to ensure all the info is up-to-date over time by yourself. That's why we were thrilled to find out that Manatal can auto-enrich candidate profiles with data from social media accounts. Yes, auto-enrichment!

But let’s be honest: limiting the candidate search within the existing database means you won’t find the talent you’ve never engaged unless you pair Manatal with a sourcing tool like Fetcher or HireEZ. This sort of integration likely won’t come cheap either, as such sourcing tools aren’t within Manatal’s pre-built integrations and, to access its API and Zapier integrations, you have to opt for its highest-tier plan.

We also should warn you that while Manatal’s AI recommendation tool works with English resumes, it doesn’t work as well with resumes in other supported languages.

10,000+ organizations, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Panasonic, Ogilvy, and Toyota.

Manatal has four plans. Here is their pricing when billed annually:

• Professional plan: $15/user/month for up to 15 jobs and 10,000 candidates, with unlimited guests.
• Enterprise plan: $35/user/month for unlimited jobs, candidates, and guests.
• Enterprise Plus: $55/user/month and includes all Enterprise features, user groups, open API access, SSO log-in, priority support, and access to Beta features.‍
• Custom plan: Custom features and support. Pricing upon user request.

If you'd met Rolebot pre-2022, you'd see how much it's grown since then. It barely scratched the surface at the time—only U.S. searches, basic filters. Now it rivals, if not surpasses, LinkedIn Recruiter in certain areas. Global talent discovery, company-specific targeting, the ability to sidestep unwanted company profiles, nifty filters for tech roles, and a wealth of diverse data sources, it's all there.

The way Rolebot harmonizes AI and human expertise in candidate sourcing might remind you of vendors like Fetcher—rooted in passive recruiting, where AI lays the groundwork and humans add the finishing touches. But the software sets itself apart by taking on outreach entirely and delivering an average response rate of 30% compared to LinkedIn InMail’s 18-25%.

Rolebot handles the open-ended searches by crawling structured and unstructured data from public sources like blog posts, social media profile updates, conference attendee lists, press releases, and media mentions, to curate candidate profiles resembling mini-resumes and social links. Every 24 hours, you get a fresh batch of 15 candidates based on your filters. Thumbs up or down lets you signal your preferences. Rolebot uses this feedback to sharpen its AI, similar to what we’ve seen in Fetcher.

When it comes to outreach management, Rolebot takes full ownership. The vendor has an in-house dedicated TA team that spends a good two to three weeks engaging preferred candidates for initial client interviews. It's a win-win in many respects—Rolebot lifts the outbound recruiting off clients' shoulders. Yet, this hands-off approach might not suit those seeking complete control. Due to the system’s design, opting for DIY outreach means you won’t get any built-in features like the custom drip campaigns usually found in vendors like HireEZ or SeekOut.

While we appreciate Rolebot's efforts to expand its integrations over time, the available options still lag behind competitors like Loxo or SeekOut. You can only find a few prominent ATSs: Greenhouse, Lever, SAP, and iCIMS, meaning you must either use Rolebot as a standalone tool or manually import candidate data from the platform in Excel and then upload it to your HR systems. Additionally, though the vendor suggests that 15 candidates per day are optimal based on their testing, we empathize with those feeling constrained, as there are no available options to adjust this number. Unreviewed candidates from a day won’t vanish, but without review, the AI won’t have enough data to learn and improve future results. Thankfully, Rolebot—both the system and CSM—has a knack for sending timely reminders to ensure users finish their homework.

50+ organizations, including Snowflake, Cornerstone, and Dentsu.

Rolebot's enterprise plan starts at $3,000/month for 5 roles, with unlimited users, a dedicated customer success manager, and monthly billing. Free trials are not yet available. Additionally, those with multiple team members involved in hiring will find Rolebot’s unlimited seats offering a true gem, as whether you need one seat or twenty, you get the same bill.

AmazingHiring has made a good impression on us since we began using it for tech recruiting a few years back. But seeing it today makes us realize how far the sourcing tool has come.

Like almost any other sourcing tool, AmazingHiring offers options for manual or AI-assisted sourcing. Technically, its filters are quite similar to what we’ve seen on LinkedIn but are visualized with histograms and bar graphs, which definitely makes the whole dry, complex filtering look more interesting. What really impressed us, though, was the real-time market insights it provides here for each search. Unlike LinkedIn, which only offers profile counts per parameter set, AmazingHiring gives users a downloadable report that breaks down the talent pool size by location, experience, seniority, company size, and six categories more.

If you have multiple sourcers or recruiters doing the searches simultaneously, you’re also going to love the LinkedIn views feature. It enables users to exclude or include LinkedIn profiles that have been viewed in the last 30 days.

Automated candidate recommendations aren’t new in this space, and compared to competitors, AmazingHiring was quite slow when rolling out this feature in summer 2023. However, the way recommendations get updated every time a new candidate is added and look-alike pipelines are auto-built based on user preferences compensates for this delayed release.

For those with candidate databases that haven’t been updated for a while, AmazingHiring’s Data Enrichment is worth considering. This feature requires a separate purchase but contacting the vendor’s sales rep can fetch you 150 free credits.

This sourcing platform is also one of the very few we’ve reviewed that provides a free extension non-users can opt for. It’s not as powerful as the paid one but this freebie gathers all links to candidates’ Github and StackOverflow, which can be pretty helpful for researching examples of their code and ranking on these sites.

When it comes to AmazingHiring’s integration, we were a bit put off. The sourcing tool has a limited list of ATSs and recruiting software it can connect with. Except for its integration with SmartRecruiters, the rest is one-way. For example, the system can’t auto-update profiles in Workable, and Teamtailor integration doesn’t allow candidate resumes to be exported.

10,000+ companies, including EPAM, Akamai Technologies, Alexander Mann Solutions, Dell, and ABBYY.

AmazingHiring pricing is undisclosed on its website. Our research indicates that all AmazingHiring’s contracts are annual and start at $4,800 per seat. Enriching contacts is charged separately if you want to take advantage of that feature. The vendor also offers custom pricing for individual freelancers who want to use the platform.

Arya by Leoforce is excellent for many reasons, including its AI candidate matching, open web and user ATS/CRM sourcing, a multi-channel candidate engagement suite, and a chatbot that can ask candidates screening questions and schedule calls with qualified ones. However, for us, regular product advancement is its strongest USP. If we compare Leoforce's investment in developing new features with other sourcing platforms we’ve tested, there are very few that match this tool.

The latest enhancement to Arya’s capabilities is the Scouting Agent—an AI-assisted search agent introduced in December 2023. What makes this feature exceptional is its ability to search for new candidate profiles added or updated within the previous 24 hours in the user’s selected sourcing channels or integrated job portals with Arya.

Users can create not just one but multiple Scouting Agents per job description, each using different search parameters to broaden the candidate pool. We only need to set these agents up once, and in return, the AI makes sure the searches will be automated and ongoing—no new profiles will go missing.

Given the quality of Arya’s new Scouting Agent, we expected nothing less from other fresh features like the Score Details tab within the Candidate 360 view. And it didn’t disappoint.

On this tab (head to a candidate profile, then the Score Detail tab, click the link ‘Why this rating?’, and you’ll get there), the system displays a detailed breakdown of how and why a candidate received a particular score relative to the role. There is also a graphic alongside showing what the candidate has to offer compared to the job description and other relevant candidates.

We think this level of transparency and visibility will be loved by recruiters and hiring managers alike: They get the data needed to make informed shortlisting decisions and have good materials for personalizing candidate outreach.

However, we don’t think teams prioritizing great flexibility and customization will be fond of Arya. The sourcing tool’s workflows are fixed in a set order—they cannot adapt to your workflows, so you have to adapt to theirs, unfortunately.

Another trade-off for Arya’s advanced AI features is that the vendor no longer discloses its pricing and has also discontinued its free trial. They only accept annual subscriptions, and pricing can be around $3,000—not very exciting news for SMBs, eh?

Lenovo, American Century Investments, PeopleScout, Ecotalent, Polaris Alpha

Arya by Leoforce has four custom-priced products: Arya Quantum, Arya Fusion, Arya Concierge, and Arya Applicants on Demand. No free trial is available.

We’ve tested dozens of sourcing options: hireEZ is one of the few vendors offering both the traditional Boolean search and well-built AI sourcing tools (rather than just the AI).

Using Boolean in hireEZ is just as easy as LinkedIn, and the candidate results are just as good, if not better, with much more detail on candidate profiles. For those aiming to take their searches further, hireEZ’s AI searching tools offer over twenty filters with intelligent learning and contextual search capabilities.

While both LinkedIn Recruiter and hireEZ let you find candidates with specific sourcing criteria like past and current job titles, companies, and years of experience, only hireEZ has capabilities for diversity sourcing and rediscovering potential talent within users’ ATS database.

Like SeekOut and Fetcher, candidate profiles sourced through hireEZ equip recruiters with insights on the candidate’s job availability scores, average market values, technical repositories, and social media links—ranked by relevance to their search queries. The sourcing tool’s advanced AI filters also make searching for talent in tech, healthcare, clearance, and academia easy.

hireEZ’s engagement features are on par with peers like Fetcher and Gem. It only took us a few minutes to get an email sequence ready and we can imagine how efficient it would be for recruiters to reach out to hundreds of candidates at once with the pre-built email templates and the bulk actions provided.

Our biggest concern with hireEZ is the lack of human oversight. There are modern AI sourcing and recruiters’ beloved Boolean strings. But is there human spot-checking of the results produced by hireEZ’s algorithms? Not that we could see. Moreover, some GPT features, such as the email generator, frankly speaking, weren’t particularly strong. It basically produces the same results you could find by giving ChatGPT the same prompts.

It shouldn’t be necessary to onboard both hireEZ and LinkedIn Recruiter for candidate sourcing, but, if you plan on doing so, prepare for some hiccups. While hireEZ showed no flaws when we connected with different ATSs and CRMs like Greenhouse, Lever, or JazzHR, it performed rather poorly when paired with its rival LinkedIn.

Over 600 companies have used hireEZ. Examples include Nike, Continental, Wayfair, Intel, Ceridian, and Novo Nordisk.

hireEZ doesn’t disclose its pricing. You need to contact them for an exact quote.

You might have noticed that most candidate sourcing tools focus on passive talent recruitment. So, it’s refreshing to see Underdog taking a different approach—assisting U.S.-based tech companies in finding in-demand talent who boast years of experience in startups and are actively looking for jobs.

One recurring issue with sourcing from major job boards like Monster, Indeed, and LinkedIn is that job seekers tend to apply to everything and anything. This makes niche sites like Underdog more valuable. Signing up to join this network takes only 1-2 minutes, but they aren’t guaranteed to get in. All applicants within Underdog’s community undergo human vetting by the founders and an HR rep. The qualified ones must be seeking full-time positions and either already reside in the U.S. or possess transferable visas. The platform also looks into the job seeker’s background and work experience to match client needs. While this whole process takes a week, and the number of supplied applicants is smaller, those received applicants are usually much closer fits.

It’s also nice to see that after pre-screening, Underdog makes sure clients get full control over how they further vet and select talent. Recruiters can access applicant profiles and message potential candidates directly on the tool’s dashboard or via email. Since Underdog’s proposed candidates are active job seekers, they tend to be much more responsive to recruiter outreach.

Underdog’s founder recently announced they will launch Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) services and Delightful—a curated job board connecting tech job seekers with startups. It's too early to comment on these tools, but we’ll be sure to give them a thorough test and keep you posted.

Despite Underdog's pre-screening capabilities, we totally relate to those feeling that waiting a week for a new talent batch is too long, especially compared with other tools: Rolebot takes one day, Fetcher two days at most. We also hope that improving integration is on Underdog’s to-do list as, for now, it can only connect with 4 ATSs—quite disappointing, isn’t it?

On another note, Underdog makes it clear that it’s not for staffing firms. If that’s your field, you’re better off with alternatives like hireEZ, Fetcher, SeekOut, or Loxo.

Over one hundred companies, most of which are startups, have used Underdog to hire tech talent. Lattice, Airtable, Aircall, Teachers Pay Teachers, and Foursquare are some of them.

Underdog.io allows users to choose whether to go with pay-per-hire or subscription pricing.

We think SeekOut is one of the finest candidate sourcing tools out there—its search capabilities in particular are just ridiculously good.

Let's kick off with one of its latest features—SeekOut Assist. While many platforms offer AI-powered sourcing (hireEZ, Rolebot, and Arya, to name a few), SeekOut Assist strikes a pleasing balance between powerful algorithms and human touch.

We fed in our job description (JD), and the AI instantly broke it down into search criteria like job title, required skills, and preferred skills. Then, it started screening profiles in its talent database based on customizable criteria. That flexibility extends to email engagement, too. The AI crafts personalized outreach messages based on each candidate’s profile and JD while giving users options to tweak them further as they wish.

Advanced filters for niche talent sourcing also make this tool hard to beat. For example, you can search healthcare professionals by license type and status and look into expert talent’s publications and patents. You can also filter profiles based on whether you have viewed or reached out to them or if they are already in your ATS. You can even use Smart Match pre-built filters for quick searches.

Another new feature SeekOut just released is Pipeline Insights. AmazingHiring offers a similar tool, yet SeekOut’s version impresses us more for both appearance and functionality. Insights provides critical data on the talent pool size per filter set and real-time talent pipeline performance. These insights are downloadable and tailored to users’ roles (hiring managers and recruiters).

However, if your primary talent search isn't focused on the U.S., picking SeekOut might lead to disappointment. We noticed fewer profiles and less accurate contact info when searching for Europe-based candidates. SeekOut seems aware of this, though, and has added an option for users to report incorrect contact data.

We also feel that SeekOut doesn’t shine when it comes to engagement tools. We don’t expect live chat services like Entelo has, but basic channels like SMS or InMail outreach should be available.

The biggest problem with this sourcing tool is that its reply tracking system can sometimes mess up and send scheduled emails even after the candidate has replied. We found ourselves in this awkward position once during testing.

1,000+ companies, including VMware, Salesforce, Merck, UiPath, and Anaplan.

How much does SeekOut cost? SeekOut has three plans (Premium, Premium Tech, and SeekOut Expert) that have undisclosed pricing. Our research suggests plans start at around $3,500 per year, and only annual payments are accepted.‍

Does SeekOut have a free trial? Yes, it does.

Entelo’s candidate database, with 550 million candidate profiles, might not stand out compared to Fetcher’s 800M+, hireEZ’s 800M+, and Loxo's 1.2B+. However, this sourcing software is top of the class when it comes to diversity sourcing capabilities.

Many tools in this space offer some form of diversity elements, whether in filtering or reporting but none we've seen come close to Entelo’s Unbiased Sourcing Mode. This feature mirrors what we’ve found in leading ATSs such as Pinpoint, Teamtailor, and Lever. It allows masking and anonymizing candidate data linked to various biases (like headshots, names, and genders) before conducting searches or sharing review queues with hiring managers.

Entelo’s Inclusive Language Alerts for email communications reminded us of Textio—a diversity recruitment tool that has a knack for providing inclusive language guidance to talent acquisition and retention. As we crafted an outreach email, the system automatically highlighted non-inclusive language and offered suggestions for improvement, making it easy to work with.

Outreach is a breeze, too. When we were about to schedule a campaign, Entelo gave us a hint on which send times are likely to yield the highest open rate for our recipients. You may be wondering, how accurate are such estimates? We did too, so we ran an AB test. Following Entelo’s scheduling advice, we saw a 15% increase in open rate which we must say, was pretty cool.

Entelo’s candidate self-scheduling and video interviewing capabilities are also high quality. Unlike Gem’s rather basic scheduler, Entelo’s works for round-robin, group, and sequential interviews as well as 1:1s. The system supports both on-demand and live video interviews and covers all the essentials, from branding to multiple customizable interview formats and collaborative interview assessments.

The only thing we dislike about this feature is that it requires an app download from candidates to take the interviews. Considering how most modern interview video solutions today have already gone browser-based/app-less, we think users are in the right to complain about this.

We wouldn’t recommend Entelo for teams seeking talent sourcing tools with continued improvements. Since joining the talent acquisition suite Rival (formerly SilkRoad Technology), there has been no progress in terms of its feature enhancements, let alone new feature updates. Entelo’s website footer also still says 2022 while its latest blog post was from December of the same year. It could really use some updates.

Entelo customers include Wayfair, Sony, Lyft, Asana, and Comerica Bank.

The pricing of Entelo’s plans and services isn’t disclosed on their website. Contact their sales team for a quote.

Gem stands shoulder-to-shoulder with peers with the automation, personalization, and AI it brings to the table. One feature that stood out, though, was the reminder embedded in Gem’s Chrome extension. This handy tool lets users set reminders for specific dates and leave a note for context, ensuring you won’t miss a follow-up.

Gem’s Canned Response is another gem! This feature allows you to save frequently used responses as templates. Better yet, these canned responses are easy to personalize thanks to the included variables. We tried it and totally loved it. When a candidate replied to our outreach saying they wanted to chat, a simple click on our saved screening canned response prepared an email reply ready to go.

Collaborative teams will love Gem’s Resume Review. It lets recruiters send candidate batches to hiring managers with additional context while managers can rate candidates and leave notes in Gem's review section. Once reviews are complete, Gem takes care of logistics by auto-emailing the recruiter with ratings and notes.

Gem’s deep ATS integration is tough to beat. Users can cross-check, import candidates from Gem to an ATS and vice versa, and even utilize the sequence feature to engage candidates directly within a plugged-in ATS.

However, unlike Loxo, Gem provides no SMS or voice calling outreach options. It primarily focuses on email and InMail. We also noticed a decline in Gem's ability to find email contacts for non-U.S. candidates compared to U.S. ones. Speaking of which, while it's normal for sourcing systems to find a candidate’s work email, it would be nice if Gem enabled users to filter out all work emails when they do outreach.

We had high hopes for Gem’s native scheduler. Unfortunately, it failed to communicate well with our ATS, causing our system to not auto-update booked calls. If you also travel frequently, be aware! This scheduler won’t auto-adjust to your time zone. You’ll have to go into settings and manually fix it.

1,200+ companies, including Coinbase, Slack, Asana, Dropbox, Lyft, Indeed, Pinterest, and Doordash.

Gem’s pricing is undisclosed. You need to reach out to their sales team for a quote.

If we line up the number of candidates accessible through some leading sourcing databases: Loxo: 1.2B +, SeekOut 800M+, and hireEZ 800M+, it becomes apparent: Loxo's talent database is vast!

Loxo doesn’t offer human spot-checking after AI sourcing as Fetcher does, but it provides matching candidate profiles much faster—within seconds vs. 24-48 hours. Two things stood out to us when checking out Loxo Source. First: The filters are remarkably precise. It even includes niche filters for talent in hard-to-fill sectors like tech and healthcare. Second: The AI now functions with job descriptions (JDs) regardless of their length (previously, it was picky about minimum word requirements for a JD).

Loxo Outreach lived up to expectations with its multichannel engagement campaigns. You can email, SMS text, InMail, and even voice call candidates—at scale. Another cool touch is the auto-fetch contact information: it lets users specify when the system should automatically retrieve candidate contact details, which could save recruiters from another round of tedious tasks.

The Outreach GPT feature left a strong impression on us. Besides offering pre-built templates for engagement campaigns, users can request the AI to generate content for them. We tested it out, and wow! Within seconds, the AI produced email content and sequences for us to review and edit.

Loxo Boost, introduced in May 2023, can auto-define the best job boards for specific roles. After you set a budget and hit Start, it automatically posts your job to relevant boards based on the job's criteria. Getting five matching applicants for $150 spent on our test wasn’t bad at all, but what impressed us more was the option to set a monthly allowance across all jobs—a blessing for those who like to stay safely within budget.

Unfortunately, Loxo’s mobile app is not so impressive—we had a hard time searching for candidates through our people database on the iOS app. Navigation was cumbersome and hiccups kept happening as we tried to edit candidate profiles.

While we appreciate Loxo’s pricing transparency, we feel that its breakdown of offerings into several add-ons can make things unnecessarily complicated.

13,000+ companies, such as Amazon, Randstad, Cigna, Lockton, and CT Assist have used Loxo for their candidate sourcing.

• Free lets you access Loxo’s ATS, recruiting CRM, and Chrome extension. It allows for an unlimited number of seats and jobs. However, additional add-ons are not included in this plan and must be purchased separately.‍
• Basic has two sub-plans—Basic Limited costs $119 and Basic Unlimited costs $169 per seat per month when billed annually.‍
• Professional and Enterprise have custom quotes.