Like a good carpenter, recruiters need a variety of tools to get the job done. And like good carpentry tools, sourcing tools make the job of proactively finding the right talent easier and more efficient.
There are dozens of sourcing tools on the market. Some are free, though they limit the number of searches or the amount of information they provide. The more powerful and effective tools can cost from a few dollars a month to enterprise versions costing well into the hundreds.
There are specialty tools for tracking down email addresses and phone numbers, sourcing top tech talent, identifying the best candidates among the resumes already in your ATS or CRM and others that will search the internet, social media or just specific sites.
We’ve compiled a list of some of the more useful all-around sourcing tools, and, for good measure, a couple specialty tools. Most offer a free trial or have a freemium version, perfect for recruiters who actively source just a few positions.
Hiretual
Imagine having a highly skilled researcher at your elbow. That’s Hiretual, a 2018 product of the year.
What makes Hiretual a standout is that it employs artificial intelligence to analyze a job description using its contextual understanding then sift through hundreds of thousands of candidate profiles to find the right match. Hiretual’s ready database contains more than 750 million profiles with information aggregated from dozens of networks and social platforms and the open web. It has specialty search solutions for tech and healthcare professionals, and searches for candidates based on their patents and academic and professional journal publications. Its Chrome extension provides additional insights and contact details right from candidate profiles on several professional networks.
SeekOut
Only four years old, this sourcing platform already has 600 million profiles in its database. Each is compiled from a broad variety of sources to create, as the company says, a 360 degree view of a candidate. Besides providing all the basic, resume essentials about experience and education, SeekOut’s profiles include enhanced details about skills, interests, talents, diversity and professional contributions gleaned from more than three dozen social and professional networks, publications and public profiles. Like other AI sourcing tools, SeekOut has a Chrome extension to enhance Google candidate search results with supplemental information.
HiringSolved
The company was one of the early pioneers in candidate profiling, aggregating data from multiple sites to build profiles far more detailed than any resume or LinkedIn profile. Last year, it announced it would focus on searching only internal databases, which may well be the most underutilized sourcing resource at any company.
HiringSolved’s AI search engine now will quickly surface the silver and bronze medalists and others with the required skills that already exist in every company’s ATS or CRM. Matching can be by keyword, Boolean string or uploading a desirable resume or the job description itself.
Humanpredictions
Any recruiter ever tasked with sourcing tech professionals knows how hard it is just to find the right talent, let alone convince them to become a candidate. Humanpredictions simplifies the first part of that job.
Focused exclusively on the tech industry, the company builds candidate profiles from a variety of sources and especially the open source code sites like GitHub and StackOverflow. That much it shares with the general sourcing platforms. Humanpredictions, however, goes a step further, logging changes to each professionals public profiles to predict who among them might be or might soon be starting to look for another job or who are at least most likely to respond to a cold call or email.
Using Humanpredictions is pricey when compared to other sourcing tools, but then, hiring tech professionals is highly competitive so getting an edge can be well worth the cost.
Swordfish
This is one of the simpler, yet powerful tools for finding individual contact information. It’s a browser plug-in that will search for email addresses and phone numbers for profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and a few others, including Bing and Google. Besides business email addresses and business phone numbers, Swordfish will also list cell numbers and personal email addresses. The free version provides for five lookups a month.
Lusha
More limited than Swordfish, Lusha works exclusively with LinkedIn profiles. As a Chrome extension, one click yields not only contact information, but also, for the premium version, some details about the company where the person currently works. Five lookups are free each month. Paid versions allow for many more, and export as a CSV or into a CRM.
Your results with each tool will vary, try the free versions before you buy and then determine which sourcing tool is best for your team.
