Hours of Sourcing, a Handful of Candidates

You spend most of the week searching and reading profiles, and end up with a few people worth calling.

The short answer: Searching by hand means reading every profile and hunting down every email yourself. The hours go into finding people, not talking to them.

Why it matters

Every hour spent searching is an hour away from candidates and clients.

Searches slow down, and slow searches lose candidates to faster ones.

And the more roles you carry, the less time each search gets.

What’s usually behind it

A LinkedIn search returns hundreds of possible matches with no ranking you can trust, so you open profile after profile and judge each one yourself.

Then you find contact details for the few worth calling, often one at a time, in another tool.

Every step is manual, and every new search starts the same way.

Reading every profile isn’t thoroughness. It’s work a tool should be doing.

Signs this is what’s happening

  • You review hundreds of profiles to find a handful worth calling.
  • You switch between LinkedIn, a spreadsheet and a contact finder for every search.
  • Each new search starts from a blank search box.
  • You spend more hours searching than talking to candidates.
  • You put off sourcing for one role to keep up with another.

What you’re feeling

What’s causing it

Finding candidates eats your week.

See what’s really going on, and your options for fixing it for good.

Candidate Sourcing

Other possible causes

  • The role is genuinely rare. For some roles, there just aren’t many people to find.
  • Your tool’s data is thin. Some markets and functions are poorly covered in profile databases.
  • You’re carrying too many roles. No sourcing method keeps up when the desk is overloaded.

Something else going on?

If this doesn’t sound like your search, tell us what’s happening. A real person reads every one.