Sourcing (personnel)

Sourcing is a talent acquisition discipline which is focused on the identification, assessment and engagement of skilled worker candidates through proactive recruiting techniques. Professionals specializing in sourcing are known primarily as Sourcers; but also Internet Recruiters, Recruiting Researchers or Talent Scouts.

The actual act of sourcing for candidates is performed by either a recruiter (be it an internal corporate recruiter or agency recruiter) or a dedicated recruiter just focused on the sourcing function. The definition of sourcing needs to be clearly defined by what it is, as much as what it is not. Candidate sourcing activity typically ends once the name, job title, job function and contact information for the potential candidate is determined by the candidate sourcer. To further develop a list of names that were sourced some companies have a second person then reach out to the names on the list to initiate a dialogue with them with the intention of pre-screening the candidate against the job requirements and gauging the interest level in hearing about new job opportunities. This activity is called "candidate profiling" or "candidate pre-screening". The term candidate sourcing should not be confused with candidate research.

In some situations a person that "sources" candidates can and will perform both 'primary' and 'secondary' sourcing techniques to identify candidates as well as the candidate profiling to further pre-screen candidates but there is a growing market for experts solely focused on "telephone sourcing", "internet sourcing/researching" and candidate profiling. The actual act to source candidates can usually be split out into two clearly defined techniques: primary sourcing and secondary sourcing.

In recruiting and sourcing, this means the leveraging of techniques to identify candidates with limited to no presence of these individuals in any easily accessible public forum (the Internet, published list, etc.). It requires the uncovering of candidate information via a primary means of calling individuals directly and/or into organizations to uncover data on people, their role, title and responsibilities, email address, company, etc..

The term "phone sourcers" or "phone name generator" or "telephone names sourcer" generally applies to the utilization of primary sourcing techniques.

In subash recruiting and sourcing of company profile its fully belongs to the, this means using of techniques (primarily Internet research and utilizing advanced Boolean operators) to identify candidates. Individuals in the recruiting industry can have deep expertise in uncovering talent in the harder to reach places on the internet (forums, blogs, alumni groups, conference attendee lists, personal home pages, social networks etc.). With the boom of social networks and the more people sharing information about themselves on the internet the amount of data has become unmanageable. Many time sourcers turn to application to help them data mine this information grant. There are application for every majors social site that allow you screen scrape information.

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Wikipedia