Top Talent Hunters Share 4 of Their Sourcing Secrets

As any good recruiter knows, limiting your search to active candidates won’t get you very far. About two-thirds of the global workforce are “passive,” according to LinkedIn research, meaning they’re not actively looking for jobs. Ignoring this group means you’re likely missing out on some of the best prospects for open positions.

By definition, a passive candidate is harder to find and engage with than an active job seeker. With many recruiters using the same playbook these days, uncovering hidden gems is more challenging than ever. 

We asked two prominent talent sourcers, Alla Pavlova and Vanessa Raath, to share some of their secrets for recruiting passive talent. 

Based in the Netherlands, Alla has been building teams for tech startups since 2008 and is currently an interim recruiter at Riot Games, where she’s recruiting for the video game company’s studios in Hong Kong and Singapore. She runs free talent sourcing workshops for her peers and was named “most influential sourcer” in the Netherlands by Dutch recruitment agency EmploIT.

A former teacher who taught middle school kids in London and gave scuba diving lessons around the world before becoming a recruiter, Vanessa is the founder of South Africa–based The Talent Hunter. She trains talent sourcing teams around the world and offers freelance sourcing services. Engaging and insightful, Vanessa regularly delivers keynote addresses at talent industry conferences around the world and is a frequent guest on HR podcasts.

Read on to learn some of Alla’s and Vanessa’s top sourcing tips.

1. The best talent hunters have great personal brands 

It’s a classic problem that recruiters face when sourcing passive talent: How do you spark the interest of someone who’s never heard of you and isn’t looking for a new role? 

Step 1, Vanessa says, is cultivating a powerful personal brand that will set you apart from other recruiters and make candidates much more likely to respond to your outreach.

“These people don’t know you from Adam,” Vanessa says. “But if you’ve got a good online brand and they go and Google you, you will stand out as a good recruiter that it’s worth their time to answer.”

Vanessa’s own LinkedIn profile offers a prime example of what recruiters can do to build a positive image online. In the “About” section, she highlights her world travels and unique backstory, establishing herself as an interesting person worth getting to know. Vanessa identifies both her work passion, “elevating the standard of sourcing globally,” and her favorite pastime, “having a vegetarian braai with family and friends in the bush or at the beach.”

She posts frequently, conducting a running dialogue with her target audience of talent professionals. In a recent LinkedIn post Vanessa posed a “can you relate?” question to her followers, comparing the practice of conducting due diligence on candidates to “stalking.”

“Please tell me,” she writes, “that I am not the only person who has had this thought when chatting with a new prospect?”

2. Establish strong community ties

If you focus on a particular industry, raising your profile in that world is essential, Alla says. “All passive candidates one day will be active candidates,” she says. “I need to be there when they want to be active again.”

One of the most important ways to improve your visibility is by providing help on a consistent basis to the community you’re targeting. Alla serves as the volunteer chapter leader of a tech-focused Slack group in Amsterdam and is active in several other online developer communities. She builds goodwill by offering developers free mentoring, resume writing tutorials, and interview guidance. 

This same approach can also help recruiters find more diverse candidates. Vanessa encourages employers to provide support and assistance to groups that cater to people from underrepresented backgrounds. A company she’s working with, for instance, wants to hire more women to fill tech positions. She’s identified a Muslim women’s football team in London and is recommending that her client sponsor the team.

“There are a lot of Muslim females who enjoy coding,” Vanessa says. “You need to think about the communities that are out there who you can reach out to and collaborate with.”

3. Start your outreach — before there’s any job opening

Alla compiles lists of passive candidates she believes would make great future hires and tries to engage with them one-on-one. The goal is to create a pipeline of potential recruits. She keeps the tone of her outreach casual and friendly, sometimes sending people company swag. 

“I congratulate them on a promotion,” she says, “or I’ll wish them happy birthday.” 

Another way to break the ice, Alla says, is to ask for advice. For instance, she might ask a senior developer if they can recommend candidates for a junior role she’s filling or whether they might have time to help her master a tech skill.

Whether she’s reaching out to make an initial connection or to see if a candidate might be interested in a job, Alla makes sure to research the person first. She then weaves personal details about their background into her messages. Personalization pays off: LinkedIn data shows that InMails sent individually see response rates roughly 15% higher than InMails sent in bulk.

Alla acknowledges that working for a well-known company like Riot Games helps open doors. Nonetheless, she encourages recruiters to start talking to people they might recruit in the future. “I can name at least 10 people,” she says, “very senior, that we hired just because we kept in touch.”

4. Widen your search horizons 

If you’re hunting for “purple unicorns,” aka perfect, hard-to-find candidates, you need to go to places your rivals have overlooked.

Vanessa recommends conducting searches on multiple sites, including platforms that aren’t professional networks or job boards. Depending upon the type of candidate you’re looking for, it’s worth tapping social networks that focus on specific industries or groups. Keep in mind, finding candidates on these sites often requires advanced search training.

Among the many sites Vanessa says are “underutilized” for talent searches are GitHub, the software development platform that has more than 100 million developers using its service; Behance, where creative professionals can display their portfolios; and Meetup, the social networking site that organizes meetings for people with common interests. Alla, meanwhile, sources candidates on Discord, the fast-growing voice, video, and text chat app popular with tech communities. 

Vanessa also considers Facebook fertile hunting ground. While the giant social network is much better known as a place where individuals share details of their personal lives, not their resumes, that’s changing.

“During COVID,” Vanessa says, “people spent time updating their Facebook profiles and telling us things like where they work and what’s their job title. There are close to 3 billion people on Facebook. It doesn’t make sense to ignore it.” 

Final thoughts

Following Alla’s and Vanessa’s recommendations will likely mean more work on your part. You’ll have to pay more attention to building your personal brand, cultivate ties to prospective recruits, and brush up on your search techniques. But the investment could be well worth your time.

“The world of recruitment has changed,” Vanessa says. “If you don’t keep up and don’t change with the times, you’re going to find yourself out with the dinosaurs.” On the flip side, she says, “if you upskill, you’re going to ensure that you’re actually future-proofing your career.”