Candidate Sourcing

Klyver Hire

August 2026 · 4 min read

Sourcing vs. passive recruiting

Posting an opening and waiting for applications is passive recruiting. Sourcing is actively going to find people who are probably not even looking at job boards: on LinkedIn, GitHub, industry communities, or referrals from your network.

Main channels

LinkedIn Recruiter and boolean search are the most common starting point. For technical roles, GitHub and specialised communities give a better signal of real skill than a resume. Referrals still convert best, even at lower volume.

When to invest in sourcing

If an opening has gone 2-3 weeks without qualified candidates from direct applications, that is the sign you need active sourcing, not more time on the same posting.

Frequently Asked Questions

They are close. Headhunting usually means direct contact with very specific profiles, sometimes employed at another company.

It depends on volume. On small teams the same recruiter does both; on large teams the roles split.

Between 15% and 30% is reasonable, depending on how personalised the message is and how specific the profile.

Related terms

A real search, step by step

Example with illustrative numbers, not from a client.

Role: data engineer with streaming experience (Kafka or similar), remote from LATAM. A starter boolean string on LinkedIn: ("data engineer" OR "ingeniero de datos") AND (Kafka OR "Kinesis" OR "Pulsar") AND (Python OR Scala) AND (México OR Colombia OR Argentina). That yields 60 profiles; sourcing is choosing the 15 that really fit and writing them something that does not read like a template.

The channel mix matters: LinkedIn gives volume, and LinkedIn Recruiter requires you to keep an InMail response rate of at least 13% (see the reference below); GitHub gives fewer names but a better signal of real skill for technical roles; a referral from your network tends to arrive with more trust even if you only have two. If a role goes 2-3 weeks without qualified candidates from direct applications, the answer is not to wait longer with the same posting; it is to start active sourcing.

External reference

LinkedIn Recruiter calculates InMail response rate as the messages that received a reply out of the total sent (only replies within 30 days count), and its policy requires at least a 13% response rate in every 14-day period with 100 or more InMails sent. It is the floor the platform sets, not a market average.