Sourcing is two jobs at once: deciding who is worth approaching, and the list-building, note-taking and follow-up around it. The second job is the one to hand over.
Key takeaways
Open LinkedIn Recruiter, run a search, open twenty profiles, decide which eight are worth a message, write eight slightly different messages, note who you contacted, then remember to follow up in five days. Repeat on Indeed. Repeat next week for a different req, on a list that overlaps with the first one.
Only one step in that sequence is skilled work: deciding which eight. Everything around it is administration that happens to be performed by an expensive person.
A sourcing automation builds and maintains the list, matches it against candidates already in your applicant tracking system so you do not approach someone a colleague spoke to last month, and de-duplicates people who appear on more than one platform.
It then drafts the first-touch message from the role brief in the recruiter’s own voice, holds it for approval, tracks who replied, and surfaces the follow-ups that are due. The recruiter reviews and sends. The system remembers.
The first is the platform. LinkedIn Recruiter, Indeed and the rest set terms about how data may be exported and what automated access is permitted, and those terms are the boundary regardless of what a tool is technically capable of. Use the platform’s own integrations where they exist.
The second is that a candidate’s profile data, notes and contact details are personal information, and Canadian anti-spam law governs commercial electronic messages. Volume is exactly what turns an individual judgment call into a pattern, so if automation is about to multiply your outbound messaging, that is the moment to take proper advice rather than after the first complaint.
Deciding who to approach, reading whether a passive candidate is genuinely movable, and knowing when a message should be a phone call are the parts of sourcing that are worth paying for. None of that is improved by automation and some of it is damaged by it.
The measure of a good sourcing automation is simple: the recruiter is having more conversations this month than last, with the same hours in the week.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether AI pays for itself here.
