Candidate sourcing is a process with a lot of repetitive steps.

Think about it, every time you want to find, screen and engage candidates pro-actively, you go through an almost fixed set of activities to reach your goal.

Finding candidates: listing keywords, including (Boolean) search operators, correcting keyword typos, including keyword synonyms, setting filters

Screening candidates: validating the matching quality of the search, checking for information you couldn't filter on, analysing skills

Engaging candidates: finding contact details, writing your outreach message, sending your message at the right time, checking for deliverability and replies

Often all manual activities.

The promise of AI Sourcing tools and technologies is that these manual processes can be automated, at least for a big part.

The introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI Agents have made the sourcing process for a big part autonomous, meaning the repetitive tasks are mostly executed on by autonomus AI systems.

And next to efficiency, AI sourcing can also bring a more data driven way of working to the recruiter, which can mean more informed and smarter decisions about which candidates to reach out to, when and with what kind of messaging.

In this guide we’ll walk you through the following topics:

1. What is AI sourcing?
2. Why is AI sourcing getting more important?
3. How to start using AI Sourcing
4. AI sourcing tool overview

1. What is AI Sourcing?

In short, AI sourcing is the use of artificial intelligence to help find, screen and engage talent. AI sourcing tools search the internet for potential candidates, using parameters like job titles, skills, keywords and location to find the best matches for your open positions.

Once the pool of candidates has been narrowed down, AI tools typically help you to contact potential candidates in a partly automated way.

AI sourcing tools are becoming increasingly popular in the recruiting world because they take a lot of the legwork and guesswork out of finding candidates. 

Manually searching for qualified candidates can be extremely time-consuming, and often results in recruiters only being able to reach out to a small number of people.

With AI sourcing, on the other hand, you can quickly and easily identify a large pool of qualified candidates, which gives you a much better chance of finding the right person for the job.

Additionally, because AI tools can automate many of the manual tasks associated with recruiting, such as building searches, screening applicants and sending messages, they free up the recruiter’s time to focus on the work where they can make good use of their brain and interpersonal skills, like talking to candidates.

2. Why is AI sourcing getting more important?

There are a few reasons why AI sourcing is becoming more important for recruiters. 

First, recruiting is becoming increasingly competitive. With more demand than supply of quality talent, recruiters need to find smarter and more efficient ways to source candidates. Recruiting methods that used to work don’t work anymore. Candidates respond differently to outreach. Expectations in terms of candidate experience, speed and job offering are higher than ever. You need to be able to reach and convince the 0.0001% that is best suited for the job that you have to offer.

Second, the rise of social media has made it easier for candidates to research open positions and apply. This has led to an increase in unqualified candidates applying for jobs, which causes job boards to become increasingly saturated and job posts less effective. In order to find the best candidates, recruiters need to be able to source them pro-actively from a variety of different places. AI-powered sourcing can help by scraping the internet for data on potential candidates and delivering it directly to recruiters. This allows recruiters to search in a more targeted way and reach passive candidates who they may not have otherwise found.

Finally, with the remote trend the talent market has become a global market where the entire world has become the available talent pool. Making data even more important to narrow down candidates to a shortlist. With an ever-growing pool of candidates to choose from, resume screening has become a time-consuming process that often yields subpar results. With AI the pre-screening can be done more effectively so a smaller and more accurate selection of candidates is left for the recruiter to review.

AI sourcing is a growing trend in the recruiting industry that shows no signs of slowing down. As the global talent pool becomes more competitive and people are more easily connected to each other, it's increasingly important for recruiters to find efficient ways to source qualified candidates.