Sourcing

Posting a role and waiting has a ceiling you cannot get past. The people who see a posting and apply are the people currently looking, which is a very small fraction of any discipline. Someone who is doing fine where they are does not open a jobs site.

How well known the company is stacks on top of that. Pagedeck opened a senior engineering role and waited six weeks. Four applications arrived, none of them overlapping the requirements. The posting wasn't badly written and the terms weren't poor. The people who fit the role simply hadn't heard of Pagedeck.

Waiting carries one more problem. Choose only from what comes in and the team's composition hardens along paths already known to it — the same communities, the same backgrounds, the same few companies people moved from.

Sourcing inverts the direction to get past that ceiling. You find people who match and tell them the role exists. The cost is effort: twenty messages producing two or three replies is normal, and roughly one of those enters the process. Those ratios are what make it a scheduled activity rather than something squeezed into spare hours.

Six steps.

1. Narrow what you're looking for to one line. Take the tightest of the required qualifications from the job description — the document setting out what the role does and what someone needs to be able to do. "Backend engineer" isn't searchable. "Has built a payments system from scratch" is.
2. Decide where to look. Engineers live in public repositories and technical blogs, designers in portfolio sites, salespeople in conference speaker lists. Ten people from each of three places widens a list more than thirty from one.
3. Build the list. Twenty to thirty names per role is enough to start. Next to each name, write one line about why this person — the project, the talk, the repository. That line gets used directly in step 4, so a name you can't write a line for doesn't belong on the list.
4. Write the first message. Five sentences at most, covering why you contacted this person, what the role is, and what you're proposing as a first step. The line from step 3 becomes the opening sentence, and a message without it reads as a mass send.
5. Follow up once if there's no reply. A week later, two or three sentences. The reason this step exists is that reply rates on the second message run close to the first. There is no third message; past two, the exchange stops being an invitation.
6. Talk with whoever replies. Not an interview — an introductory call. Describe the company and the role, and listen to their situation. A "not right now" goes into the talent pool, the list of candidates kept for later.

Building lists and sending messages belongs to a recruiter — the role that finds candidates and carries them through to hire — or to someone in HR. But two places need the hiring manager personally: setting the one line in step 1, and any part of the first call where the conversation turns technical. The hiring manager is the person who needs the role filled and makes the final call.

Messages from someone in the same discipline get higher reply rates than messages from HR. From the receiving end, one is a note from a peer and the other is a note from a recruiter. So engineering roles tend to have engineers sending a handful directly. Since that work sits on top of their actual job, the volume gets fixed — two hours a week, say. Left unfixed it becomes zero messages during a busy week, and sourcing is the kind of activity where a week skipped shows up as an empty week three weeks later.

The start date is the same day the posting goes up. Begin sourcing only after waiting for applications and six weeks are gone. First replies take one to two weeks, conversations and process another three or four, so sourcing started today generally produces a result about six weeks out. Knowing that delay pushes teams toward building lists before the role even opens, which is the cheapest version of the work.

"Waiting for applications won't fill this one. I'm building a list and starting this week."

A judgment that the inbound path won't produce candidates here, made early enough to still matter.

"If the first sentence isn't about this specific person, it doesn't get read."

An unpersonalized message gets treated as a mass send, and mass sends are deleted unread.

"You said the timing doesn't work, so I'll keep you in our pool and reach out in six months."

Treating a decline as a record rather than an ending, with a date attached so it actually happens.

Pagedeck changed approach after those six weeks. Grace narrowed the criterion to a single item — has built a payments system from scratch — and a list of twenty-six names came out of public repositories and conference materials.

Twelve messages went out in the first week and two replies came back. A week later a short follow-up went to the ten who hadn't answered, and two more replies came from that. Four calls happened and two people entered the process. Of the remaining two, one had timing that didn't work and stayed in the pool — and reached out first, five months later, for a role that had not been posted yet.

The most common misreading is that sourcing means sending a lot of messages. Reply rates are low, so volume looks like the fix. But what determines the reply rate is the accuracy of the list, not the size of the send. Message a hundred people who don't match and almost nobody answers, and the ones who do consume time on both sides partway through the process before the mismatch becomes obvious. As more organizations work by volume, the same candidate receives ten identically shaped messages, and the reply rate for the entire channel falls with it.

The other mistake is reading silence as disinterest. Silence is usually about timing: something has to ship this quarter, they moved six months ago, the day the message arrived was a bad one. Left in place, this assumption gets people deleted from the list after one non-reply, and six months later the same role starts its list from zero. It's also part of why employee referrals move faster — a referral is a colleague introducing someone they know, and the person referring often already knows where that person stands.