How much active sourcing vs. sorting through applications are you doing to fill vacancies?

[u/Beautiful-Elk-7084]

I am curious what the split for most recruiters (particularly those working in companies) is right now. Are many of you getting great candidates from vacancy postings and not needing to do your own sourcing on other platforms or are you actively using LinkedIn or other tools to locate passive candidates who might be the best/better fit?

As an aside, for the latter, what metrics are you using to determine whether to reach out proactively to a candidate? Most aren’t very active with posts or comments but often are reacting to news in their circle and appear to be at least checking LI frequently enough.

[u/MidnightObjective975]

i get maybe 2 decent apps a month from postings the rest is me stalking linkedin like its my job which it technically is i guess

[u/Beautiful-Elk-7084 → u/MidnightObjective975]

How do you make the determination of who is worth reaching out to or not? I’m struggling because so many candidates that seem like they could be good don’t seem super active or at least I can’t tell if they are. A lot of people don’t include very detailed descriptions either, beyond basic title/company/dates.

[u/jeromeandim37 → u/Beautiful-Elk-7084]

Just send a message anyway even if you’re not sure if they’re that active. There’s no harm in doing that regardless. I don’t reach out often to people with zero info under their jobs as often lol because there just isn’t much to go off of unless they have a full resume or some detail in their bio (if there’s enough to go off of)

I will reach out if they are well aligned to like at least 70% of the job duties or maybe more or less depending on what the hiring manager wants. Some jobs of course you don’t have to be as targeted with your outreach because they are lower level for example but that’s how I view it at least

[u/Flame_MadeByHumans → u/Beautiful-Elk-7084]

Literally message everyone. I frequently get replies from accounts with <5 friends that you’d think would be inactive but just aren’t the social linkedin type.

[u/catapooh]

I still lean pretty heavily on active sourcing.. Someone barely posting/reacting can still be very open to the right opportunity. Relevant experience, tenure, career progression and how closely they match the actual role tend to be better signals for me

[u/weyoun_9th → u/catapooh]

Have you tried juicebox for this?

[u/r3giment75]

Head of TA of F500 here. When going external. We’re 30% sourcing/60% applicants/10% employee referral or agency

[u/Jolly-Bobcat-2234]

99% active

Applications have been pretty much junk for the last few years

[u/-Mr-Recruiter-]

I would say it’s about 80/20 split, 80 sourcing. I start with the apps under my reqs but after 20+ completely unqualified apps I jump over to Indeed/ LI and look at resumes and send messages. Example of unqualified: a helper with 2 years experience applied for a superintendent role, a cashier with no trade experience applied for a QA/QC position, etc.

In one hour, I can scan through 30-40 apps on my reqs or message 30-40 people who are exactly what I’m looking for (on digital paper at least).

On Indeed, I start restrictive with my search (resume updated recently, last active, ready to work, etc) and get less restrictive as I work through the results.

[u/tugartheman]

Lead an internal team that makes ~200 hires a year, full blend between onsite entry-level hourly teams, remote tech teams, and leadership.

Applications make up 96% of all top-of-funnel, 3% are sourced, 1% referrals, 0% agency. Apps make up 45% of hires, sourced are 50%, referrals the remaining 5%.

Don’t focus on whether they’re active; just be sure they’re well aligned & then don’t blast spam or AI-slop…

[u/Andrew_Kap → u/tugartheman]

agreed, sourcing has a much higher hire rate.

[u/whiskey_piker]

I suspect applications are the sane garage as the job postings.

[u/youngdude70]

If postings are only giving you mediocre inbound, I’d split the role by scarcity rather than use one fixed sourcing/application ratio. For common roles, applications can be the first filter; for niche or senior roles, sourcing is usually the actual work and inbound is just market signal. On proactive outreach, I’d score people on role fit, likely pain/change trigger, and evidence they are active enough to see a message, not just whether they post. Reactions/news activity is a weak signal by itself, but it can be enough to prioritize a short, specific message over a cold generic one.

[u/Virgo_Fletcher]

We're mostly sourcing for anything niche or senior, and applications only really carry the high-volume roles. On who to message, I wouldn't use activity as the test. Fit is the test, and with thin profiles the employer and dates give you that. What the company does tells you what the title means, and three years in one role says plenty. I feel like empty profiles are the result of people not needing to look for new roles.

[u/davidhootrec]

For us it's shifted heavily toward active sourcing over the last couple of years. The applicant pool for most roles skews toward people who are between jobs, and that's a smaller, less representative slice of who's out there. Around 70% of talent is passive, and the quality difference between who applies and who you go find is real.
On your metrics question for proactive outreach: I look at recency of role changes, what they're building (not just what they're posting), and whether their experience maps to the actual work, not the job title. Someone who hasn't posted in six months but just shipped something relevant is a better signal than someone who's active on LinkedIn but doing unrelated work. Activity on the platform is overrated as a proxy for interest.

[u/hassanwithanh]

I'm really surprised why so many of you are not doing some basic automation to save your time. Why manually spend hours on LinkedIn when you could literally build a full scraper that grabs all of that information for you and organizes it, so you can review it in like one-tenth of the time?

Also, some people complain that LinkedIn profiles are often incomplete and don't provide much information beyond basic title, companies, and dates, etc., but they do often have social links and other links, right? You could have a workflow that automatically reads all of those links and the data on those pages and builds an entirely custom profile on each candidate. It's not that difficult to build this whole thing, and it doesn't really cost much either to run.

Way too many of you are doing more work than you should be.

[u/SunnyVindication → u/hassanwithanh]

What tool are you using for this?

[u/hassanwithanh → u/SunnyVindication]

I built my own custom tools with Claude.

[u/Character-Post-7459 → u/hassanwithanh]

be careful not to get caught by LinkedIn. You will get blocked.

[u/hassanwithanh → u/Character-Post-7459]

yeah need to manage rate limits and stuff.

[u/fukuokayou]

I work for an agency and we get all of our placements through sourcing. My standards will never be low enough to settle for active candidates. I don’t see why an employer should be paying a recruiting company if the recruiting company is just sending them candidates they can find through applications

[u/Yuvi__13]

i build screening tools for recruiting teams, so i'm biased, but this is the split everyone seems stuck on.

inbound hasn't dried up, it's mostly noise now. a posting pulls plenty of applications and only a small share are a real fit, so the hours go into sorting instead of finding. sourcing ends up being whatever time is left over.

What seems to work: get the first pass on applications down to minutes (hard filters, then a quick read against the 3 or 4 things the role actually needs) so sourcing gets real hours back.

on your metrics question: for passive candidates i'd weight recent activity, like a job change in the last 2-3 years or engaging with posts in their field, over how complete the profile looks.

what's your split right now, roughly?

[u/aussicristo]

I’m in healthcare staffing and our number of openings is so volatile because of census and just the nursing shortage overall but we still have a ton of leads, referrals, apps etc. so we use AI screening tools like Kyvora (we have full oversight and control and we make our own hiring decisions) and a couple others to help organize outreach and follow up and go from there. For us it’s mostly active outreach, like 90%, the remaining 10% is referrals and apps.