Sourcing Tools to Find and Engage the Best Candidates

About the experts

Tali Rapaport is the co-founder and CEO of Puck, a people-first CRM. She became passionate about recruiting technology while she was at Lyft, where she was a VP of Product. As Lyft onboarded one million drivers and her team headcount grew by 100, she spent much of her time looking at recruiting technology, saw opportunities for improvement, and answered the call with Puck. 

Sarah Ruth Hendrix is the founder of cambre, which connects aligned talent with top-tier startups and venture funds. She has almost a decade of experience as a recruiter and talent advisor, much of it in healthcare technology, and specializes in early-stage companies.

Sourcing tools for candidate engagement

One of the biggest challenges in sourcing today is candidate engagement. There is a 20% chance that your email will be opened by a candidate. When they do open that email, the amount of time they will likely give its content is less than one minute: the average adult attention span on a screen is 47 seconds.

With so little time to make a good impression on candidates, you have to make it count. What sourcing tools can you use to draw candidates in?  

Not with job descriptions that look like this:

What’s the problem with this (beyond its dry appearance and overwhelming text?) While it may contain important information about a role, such as responsibilities and salary, it doesn’t provide a look at the people already at the company.

Rapaport believes that candidates are excited about joining teams and people, not just taking on roles and titles. Accordingly, a company’s employer brand should center its people, but it’s hard to do so using the format above. 

Rapaport’s solution is to highlight employees and their stories, from founders and C-suite execs to first-years, using audiovisual content as sourcing technology. Puck interviews a company’s people to produce audio episodes that are featured alongside job postings, so that candidates can hear directly from the people they would be working with.

Hendrix also finds candidate engagement to be one of her primary sourcing challenges, especially when working with very early-stage businesses (such as those in stealth mode or series A.) In 2021, she became Director of Recruiting at Thyme Care, which guides cancer patients through the complexities of the healthcare system. 

Founded in 2020, Thyme Care had no brand recognition, and very little media coverage or web presence. To take on what she calls an “incredibly competitive” recruiting market, Hendrix prioritized “the reality of who we are as an organization from more of a holistic brand perspective.” 

“A lot of these organizations don't have the clout or the capital,” she says. “So we have to sell that mission, and we really have to sell the team that folks will be working with and supporting.”

Talent attraction: how to entice the best candidates 

For organizations without brand recognition or resources, talent attraction can be an uphill battle. How do you pitch your company to the best candidates without, as Hendrix says, the clout or the capital? 

To set up for sourcing success, Hendrix carefully tailors her pitch to each candidate. To do so, she researches their online presence: looks through their portfolio, listens to podcasts that they have been featured on, and reads their Substack. “I want to get to know the person,” she says. “That helps me identify, hopefully, whether or not they're aligned with the mission, aligned with the values of the organization that I'm supporting.” 

Hendrix then plucks bits of information from her research to use in her email, like mentioning a book she thinks would be compelling to the candidate. She believes this specialized, personal outreach content makes a candidate more likely to both open and respond to her email––an essential step in improving upon the 20% open rate. 

‘Why should this candidate be interested in the first place?’ is the question Hendrix asks herself as she drafts her emails. Then, when candidates ask her why they should be interested in a role, she has a prepared and honest answer. “Folks can sniff out that authenticity really quickly,” she says. 

She also views personalizing outreach as an investment in candidates who may be interested in the company later on. To keep candidates warm, she checks in on them periodically and sends them company announcements she thinks they’d find relevant. “Relationships aren’t just one-offs,” she says. “They should be built over a long period.”

How to approach working with hiring managers‍

Working with hiring managers is a key part of the recruiting process. How can you most effectively work with hiring managers to search for the best candidates, and agree on who they are?

When Hendrix first began recruiting, she would rush to begin the process. “I would be pretty fast to dive in: getting a job description, editing that, and going to town,” she says, in pursuit of finding the perfect person for the job. 

Eventually, she realized that there are no perfect candidates, “but you can find folks who are going to be fantastic and unexpectedly incredible.” To find these premier candidates, Hendrix works with hiring managers to define a set of desired outcomes and competencies. 

Hendrix and the hiring managers she works with agree on the most important qualities and performance they would like to see from a candidate before beginning outreach, often including standards they want candidates to meet by six, 12, or 18 months after beginning their role. 

“Oftentimes, we'll come up with a couple of archetypes for a particular role that might be the best fit, and we don't have to have the perfect answer,” Hendrix explains. This helps her clarify her go to market strategy. “We can try a couple of those profiles, stay as connected as we can to share information back and forth to make sure that we both are aligned, so I know how to make sure the candidates coming in are meeting those particular expectations.”

The more aligned Hendrix is with the hiring team, the more she feels she can accurately represent the role in the marketplace, helping her tailor her message to candidates. “People aren’t really motivated by hearing that you need to be able to answer emails,” she argues. Instead, they need to understand what it takes to be successful in a given role.

How to handle requests for unicorns

Hiring managers sometimes expect “unicorns”: rare candidates with domain knowledge that may not exist. How should you manage those expectations?

Hendrix is used to fielding requests for unicorns, especially from early-stage businesses that may not have the resources to attract them. In those cases, she often begins by retrieving market data to show that this type of candidate may cost more than the company budget allows for. 

She has also found that her searches for unicorns often result in a pool of candidates with vastly differing skill sets. To circumvent this, she asks hiring managers to choose three particular needs that they want the candidate to fill. 

“Maybe we won’t find someone who’s tenured in this particular area or has subject matter expertise,” Hendrix says, “but let's think through those core skills that we could give someone a case study [on] to see how they could meet that need.”

According to Rapaport, sometimes the best candidates are so exceptional because they have experiences across roles and industries, not limited to a linear career path. Switch your focus from specific tasks to desired outcomes, and give your candidates a chance to prove that they can deliver on outcomes, even if they’re not the strongest on paper. Some of the best candidates, as Hendrix has found, are “unexpectedly incredible.”

Want more sourcing tips and tricks?

If you’re hungry for more expert insights into sourcing strategies, check out 9 more ideas. In the meantime, you can stay tuned for more advice from Puck and other industry experts.