11 Talent hunters share their favourite sourcing and engagement tools

Ah sourcing – the art of finding the right people and engaging with them effectively are two of the most important skills in modern Talent Acquisition.
Until not so long ago, candidate sourcing is mostly limited to job boards and LinkedIn, and engaging with Talent is done via email – but how times have changed. There are now so many tools available today to help you find and snag that great candidate.
Take a look at some of the favourite tools that your peers are using. Did we miss anything? Use the comment section to share your favourite sourcing tool.

Chloe Field
Talent Acquisition Partner at University of Melbourne School of Engineering

Besides the ATS and LinkedIn Premium, my go-to list of sourcing tools include Hiretual, Recruit’em (free sourcing tool to help write complex Boolean searches), GitHub and Google X-Ray. I also love using Textio for writing my PDs, adverts and InMails to engage female audiences.

Martin Freeman
Senior Talent Sourcing Consultant at Medallia

GitHub is one if not the largest open-source developer communities with 20+ million users listed globally with approx 40k of those referenced in Australia. Full Contact for Gmail/Inbox sits in your email client and is a good alternative to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Hiretual produces results that are very accurate compared to other contact lookup tools on the market and is a must for your toolkit. AmazingHiring is another one you should explore and it essentially is a cross-reference tool that will search for all the social footprint data that is connected with the viewed profile. Find that email allows you to generate 40+ combinations of an email address that you can test inside your email client using Full Contact.

Polly Buerano (left)
Kusha Sharma (right)
Talent Sourcing Specialists at BAE Systems Australia

We are trailing a number of new platforms like Hiretual and Discoverly which help us to create Boolean search strings quickly and effectively and helps us x-ray multiple sites with a click of a button. Recently we tried Stack Overflow (a question and answer website for professional and enthusiastic programmers) and Github. These have proven to be great sources for finding software engineers!

Megan Kwee
Head of Talent Acquisition Strategy at Medibank

Apart from the usual suspects like LinkedIn, Facebook, Indeed Resume and SEEK, our team has started using Slack for candidate sourcing and we like it because it is a much more informal way to connect with potential candidates and get referrals.

Emily Alexander
National Recruitment & Resourcing Manager at DXC Technology

Seek is a great local product, we have had quick successes with it. We have been trailing HiringSolved and its a little early to tell if it is a success for us. I’m looking at trailing Hiretual out of curiosity, as there is so much positive buzz about its awesomeness.

Nathan Anderson
Recruitment Leader at Virgin Australia

Chequed Ref is good at combining reference checking and psyc-testing. ContactOut is ok – it overlaid over LinkedIn and sometimes gave you their contact details which was useful.

Ruby Lee
Founder of The Careers Emporium

For sourcing, I like Vervoe. They are insanely awesome and easy to use, highly recommended.

Stan Rolfe
Principal at Qi Talent Solutions

I use Slack to reach out to candidates in more specialised, tech fields. Hiretual is a great tool for turbo charging my sourcing process as it is able help me identify potential candidates quickly. I also use various Chrome extensions such as ContactOut and RocketReach to find email addresses and contact numbers.

Jon Bowker
Head of Recruitment at Roy Hill

Our focus at the moment is going into our LiveHire Talent community platform and engaging with the 40,000 members we have in there and sourcing our Talent from that pool.

Mark Mansour
Talent Acquisition Lead at Servian

Trove is one of my favourite tools at the moment. It is an email prioritisation app. I receive 200+ emails a day and the app shows the ones that are most important first, then provides stats on the comms with the people I’m replying to, so that I remain in touch with my best Talent.

Want to learn more about sourcing? We will be running a workshop at the upcoming ATC2018. Tickets still available.