Candidate sourcing strategies for a desk with too many roles

Most articles on candidate sourcing strategies assume the problem is not knowing where to look. On a working agency desk the problem is almost never that. It is having eleven live roles, time to do justice to about four, and no system for deciding which four.

So this is about triage first and technique second, because a brilliant sourcing method applied to a role you were never going to fill is worse than no method at all. It costs you the roles you could have filled.

Score the roles before you source anyone

Every role on your desk has a probability of being filled by you, and those probabilities differ far more than most desks admit. Four questions separate them, and they take about two minutes per role.

Is the brief real? A client who can describe the person, has the salary signed off, and has interview slots in mind has a real role. A client who says "see what is out there" has an idea. Ideas do not close, and they consume exactly as much sourcing time as real briefs.

Does the supply exist at the price? Not whether the person exists. Whether they exist at what the client will pay, in the location, with the certifications. If the honest answer is no, the useful work is a conversation with the client about the package, not three days of searching.

How many agencies are on it? A contingency role with five agencies is a lottery with a twenty percent payout in the best case, and worse in practice because the others may have started first.

Can you reach the decision maker? Roles briefed through a procurement portal with no access to the hiring manager are slower, vaguer and more likely to die quietly.

Score each role out of four. Work the threes and fours properly. Give the twos a time-boxed hour. Have the conversation that either fixes a one or declines it.

Declining is the part that feels wrong and is usually right. A one you keep on the board is not free: it takes status updates, candidate conversations and attention from a three.

Match the method to the scarcity

Once you know which roles to work, the method follows from one question: how scarce is this skill?

Deep supply, common skill. Office support, general labour, entry-level roles in most disciplines. Advertise, work your existing pool, and be fast. Speed is the differentiator because several agencies can fill it; the one who submits first usually wins. Do not spend passive sourcing time here.

Moderate supply, specific skill. Most mid-level professional and trade roles. A combination: your pool first, then a targeted search, then approaches to people currently employed. This is where most agency desks live and where method genuinely matters.

Scarce supply, named individuals. Senior and highly specialised roles where the realistic pool is thirty people in the state and you could list most of them. Advertising is close to pointless. This is relationship work: who you already know, who they know, and patient passive approaches.

The mistake that costs most is applying the third method to the first kind of role, which is slow and loses on speed, or the first to the third, which produces an empty advert and a client who stops calling.

Work the roles together, not one at a time

A desk with eleven roles has overlaps, and sequential working throws them away.

If three roles need civil engineers at different levels, that is one search with three destinations, not three searches. The person who is too senior for one is the shortlist for another. Working them in parallel also means a candidate conversation can cover more than one option, which raises your odds of placing that person somewhere.

The practical version: group live roles by discipline before you start, not by client or by urgency. Then search by group. It feels less responsive and it fills more roles.

Where the hours actually go

Worth being specific about this, with the assumptions labelled, because it is a model rather than measured data from anyone's desk.

On a role in the middle category, the time divides roughly into: understanding the brief properly, maybe thirty minutes if you ask good questions; searching, perhaps an hour across whichever methods fit; reading profiles to decide who is plausible, which is usually two to four hours and is the largest single block; then calls, submissions and client management, which is the rest.

The reading is the surprise for most people. Looking at forty profiles properly, checking each against what the client actually needs rather than scanning for keywords, is genuinely several hours, and it is the part that gets compressed when the desk is busy. Compressing it is what produces shortlists where two of the four were never going to pass, which costs you credibility with the client and a round of interviews.

That block is also the most mechanical part of the job. Checking whether someone meets five stated requirements, with the evidence, is work that has a right answer. Deciding whether they would suit this client, what would move them, and whether to ring them today does not.

Rectask Sourcing takes the first half: you write the brief the way you would brief a colleague, and the profiles come back read and ranked against each must-have with the evidence attached. A search costs 15 credits and only charges when candidates are found. The judgement stays where it belongs.

Fix the brief before you fix the search

The last one, and the most common cause of a search that never converges: the brief is wrong and nobody has said so.

Signs you have one: the must-haves do not fit a single person, the salary does not match the seniority, or the client rejects the first shortlist for reasons that were not in the brief. More searching does not fix any of those, and the second shortlist usually gets rejected too.

The fix is a short conversation with specifics in hand. Take three real profiles that meet the written brief, show them to the client, and ask what is wrong with each. The answers surface the unstated requirements faster than any amount of questioning in the abstract, because people recognise what they want more reliably than they can describe it.

Common questions

What are the main candidate sourcing strategies?

Advertising, working an existing talent pool, targeted searching, direct approaches to employed people, and referrals. Which one to use is decided by how scarce the skill is, not by preference: deep-supply roles are won on speed, scarce-supply roles on relationships.

How do you prioritise multiple open roles?

Score each on whether the brief is real, whether the supply exists at the client's price, how many agencies are competing, and whether you can reach the decision maker. Work the top ones properly and have a conversation about the bottom ones rather than quietly carrying them.

How long should sourcing one role take?

It varies by scarcity, but the largest block on most roles is reading profiles to judge fit, not searching. When a desk is busy this is the step that gets compressed, which is what produces shortlists the client rejects.

What do you do when the client rejects the whole shortlist?

Treat it as a brief problem rather than a search problem. Show them three profiles that match the written brief and ask what is wrong with each; the unstated requirements come out faster that way than by asking the client to describe the role again.