Why talent sourcing is broken (and it’s not just LinkedIn’s fault)

The LinkedIn issue? That’s a symptom of a broader problem

When LinkedIn Recruiter was launched in 2008, it promised to be “the definitive sourcing tool for talent professionals.”

Initially, it delivered on this promise. But more recently, the tide has turned. 

According to Sarah, “[LinkedIn has] slowly changed the search functionality to a point where really even the basic Boolean searches are not functioning the way they should. It’s very difficult these days to run a search on LinkedIn and get less than a thousand results. It’s like it wants to give you everybody who's maybe not quite a fit but close.”

Jim Angleton, CEO of AegisFS, says that part of the quality problem is the presence of unverified and false claims in candidate profiles. “Real due diligence on candidates immediately showed 40% contained falsehoods, puffing of background and education. Reviewing immigration status showed 27% misrepresented their legal status along with professional experience.”

 Kira Byrd, Chief Accountant and Compliance Specialist at Curl Centric, says, “It has become more oriented to sharing content, postings, and interactions instead of being a direct means of searching for professional connections…The new algorithm pays more attention to the visibility of the content.”

These are all very real problems. But the deeper problem isn’t LinkedIn itself – it’s that sourcing has adopted the wrong model altogether. 

The deeper problem? Treating talent sourcing like a sales pipeline

Sarah believes that sourcing’s downfall began when companies started “using a lot and borrowing a lot of the management techniques and the sort of business processes that we saw work in a sales pipeline.” 

Sure, there are similarities between sales and recruitment. Both involve the creation of a pipeline: prospects in sales, potential candidates in sourcing. 

However, a key difference is that the sales pipeline is volume-driven, metrics-focused, and transactional. It emphasizes speed, which often results in humans being treated as interchangeable leads with one goal in mind: to convert them into a buyer. But that’s not all.

“In sales, you don’t really need to investigate the degree to which your client actually needs your product,” Sarah says. In other words: You don’t need to guarantee a good match between the product and client. She explains that if the client doesn’t use the product but remains a subscriber, that doesn’t hurt the business. 

Applying this sales-like approach to sourcing, the emphasis is on the number of potential applicants sourced, rather than match or quality. Success is measured according to rigid, management-focused KPIs that mask the actual, long-term value of sourcing. 

This method misses the mark entirely. Skills-matching, which talent sourcing ultimately is, involves discovery, depth, long-term fit, and an understanding of potential. 

As Sarah says, “In recruitment… it isn’t enough to just generate interest with a candidate and to sell, let’s say, the candidate on joining your organization. They actually have to come with appropriate skills that would then benefit the organization.”

While in sales, more leads equal better odds, in sourcing, more potential applicants equal more noise. The more noise there is, the harder it is for sourcers to target and engage candidates effectively. It fails to consider candidate quality – specifically, whether they have the appropriate skills and whether they’re the best fit for current or future jobs.

Let’s take a closer look at why this is. 

Volume is the objective, rather than effective targeting or candidate quality

“In my world,” Sarah says, “if you're able to  just talk to two candidates that day, but they are standout candidates. Our clients are happy. They're rushing interviews. I don't want you making five or ten useless calls to candidates that don't fit the job. What good is that?” 

But Sarah’s ideal method of sourcing isn’t what’s playing out in companies or agencies using a sales pipeline mindset. 

When sourcers are often left to reach out to hundreds, if not thousands, of poor-match candidates…well, we’ve all seen what this looks like. Ever receive a DM from a sourcer on LinkedIn or Indeed about a job that has nothing to do with your skills – one that feels generic, spammy, or even scammy?

A huge issue is that a higher number of potential applicants doesn’t equal better quality talent pools, as George Fironov, Co-Founder and CEO of Talmatic, puts it bluntly. “High volume of applications tends to mean poor targeting, rather than recruiting success.”

It’s also impossible for sourcers to nurture and build long-term relationships with this many potential applicants and target them effectively. A recent Reddit thread highlights the challenges sourcers face when it comes to engagement.

“I use LinkedIn primarily to search and screen candidates (I recruit for accounting and finance) but have a miserable response rate,“ writes the original poster. Several commenters agreed that personalization was key to success. 

“I have high response rates on LinkedIn (+70%) because I start the personalization process from the moment I'm sourcing (would this person realistically want this opportunity) all the way to the message I'm sending,” says one. 

But this personalized approach simply isn’t possible if we approach sourcing like a sales pipeline.

It’s all about %$ metrics $%

“If you had a sourcer at a company,” says Sarah, “Let's say like Meta or Google, who was able to only find four or five candidates a day… but those candidates were at a 100% rate hired. That wouldn't be considered a positive in those companies. That person wouldn't be celebrated, right? They would be wondering why you're only finding five candidates, you know, and if you can find five great candidates, why don't you try to find 500?”

Sarah’s quote illustrates the problem of treating sourcing as a sales pipeline: It prioritizes metrics above all else. 

“We fall onto lazy management,” Sarah continues. “Which is these metrics that [we] can walk into meetings… with and say, ‘Well, my team is firing off this many calls or they're sending this many LinkedIn reach-outs and see, you know, we're doing something.’”

Of course, some metrics are relevant to sourcing. After all, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. However, when the focus is on volume and pushing candidates through to the hiring process, it’s easy to prioritize the wrong metrics and lose sight of the bigger picture – candidates’ skills.

By approaching talent sourcing as a sales pipeline, metrics like number of candidates added to the pipeline and response rate to outreach quickly become the focus. Things like candidate experience are lost in the shuffle.

Sarah prefers a different approach. “I care about how many placements they get. And I care about the quality of those placements.”

The wrong people are running sourcing

“Corporate recruiting teams, I think they're managed by people often that have never done recruitment,” Sarah says. “They tend to come from a more broad HR background once they're at a senior management level.” She explains that, as a result, they apply management techniques and business processes from the sales pipeline perspective. 

Her quote gets to the heart of another reason for the shift toward sourcing as a sales pipeline: The sourcing process is often run by senior managers rather than experts with strong recruitment experience. 

Sarah points out another issue, too: “We see larger companies silo their recruitment teams,” she says. “Very often, the person that’s sourcing doesn’t actually interview or screen the candidate, they don’t manage the candidate through the process.”

As a consequence, sourcing teams are missing out on opportunities to develop their market knowledge and build their ability to screen talent pools, including an in-depth understanding of the skills requirements for roles. Sarah empathizes with this. “They don’t know what they’re not being allowed to learn.”

This feeds into the quality issue. Unsuitable talent progresses through the sourcing process, wasting sourcers’ and candidates’ time. 

However, it can also work in the opposite direction. Without understanding skills, people involved in sourcing sometimes apply job requirements very literally, ruling out talent with hidden potential. 

Chris Edelen, Client Development Director at Culver Careers, describes the risks associated with this “perfect match” thinking. “Rigid job descriptions with overly specific credentials like exact title match or niche software experience, can inadvertently filter out adaptable, high-potential talent.”

The inevitable (and costly) consequences of treating sourcing like a sales pipeline

Quality candidates are being overlooked 

The focus on volume and speed often means that sourcers end up filtering quickly through large pools of potential applicants, often relying on nothing more than keywords to find matches. Relying on strict keywords and filters, like years of experience, qualifications, or specific job titles automatically rules out talent with transferable skills and adjacent skills and non-linear career paths who are a good fit for potential future roles. 

The problem outlined above – sourcers not being given the opportunity to develop their knowledge – contributes to this. Sarah says that this leads to “sourcing team[s] that [are] essentially stuck in infancy in terms of their market knowledge and their ability to screen the talent pool.” 

For instance, sourcers might not have a strong understanding of transferable skills. Understanding transferable skills, especially soft skills, is a powerful way to uncover hidden talent, including:

• Candidates returning to the workforce after taking time off to raise a family

• Older workers

• Career switchers

• Candidates with adjacent skills, like veterans

• Individuals with minor criminal records

• Current employees with transferable skills

• Applicants who are skilled through alternative routes (STARs)

As a result, this talent might fly under sourcers’ radar. 

Companies are making mis-hires

By emphasizing quantity over quality, there’s a greater chance that initial sourcing efforts lead to mis-hires later in the recruitment process. 

Why’s this? With sourcers chasing volume over fit, resumes are skimmed for keywords, rather than reviewed closely for relevant skills. When KPIs like time-to-hire dominate, there’s a pressure to fill talent pipelines quickly, rather than evaluating initial suitability. And genuine skill matches are often overlooked in favor of more superficial, easily identifiable criteria, such as qualifications or previous job titles. 

As a result, they may wind up chasing “suitable” candidates who aren’t really suitable – like someone who’s claimed a job title on LinkedIn that they’ve never actually held, or who lists a qualification on their resume that they don’t really have.

Also, more unqualified candidates are likely to apply for any future roles, flooding recruiters and hiring managers downstream. 

Dr. Bradford Smart, author of Topgrading, estimates that the cost of a mis-hire ranges from five to 27 times the employee’s salary. This is before we take into account some of the unseen costs, such as lower team morale, damage to client relationships, and an impact on company culture. 

Talent experts are burning out

“How do you stay sane when you’re mass sourcing?” asks one recruiter, pointing to yet another issue: Treating talent as a sales pipeline is also impacting talent experts.

When the emphasis is on quantity, sourcers often rely on mass messaging to do their outreach. This is a lose-lose for both sourcers and candidates. 

Because sourcers are dealing with such high volumes of potential applicants, they don’t always have the time to assess skills and role fit before doing outreach. As a result, candidates receive multiple cold messages about jobs they aren’t suited for (and, in some cases, are being ignored if they respond). 

Often, this isn’t the sourcer’s fault. They’re simply trying to manage outreach at scale, with too many profiles to handle effectively. 

This looks different from sourcer to sourcer. One talent sourcer on Reddit describes the impact of this on them: “I’m completely burned out. Lately, my job has felt more like sales – every day looks the same. The market is super competitive, people rarely respond, and even after putting in hours (sometimes days) of effort, I often end up with nothing. No perfect candidate, no progress – just frustration.” 

Recent research confirms this talent expert isn’t alone. It found that 33% of recruiters feel heavily or very heavily physically and mentally stressed due to workload pressures. A contributing factor? The survey found that the workloads of 51% of recruiters have increased over the past 2–3 years.  

Skills-first sourcing is the solution

I think we have to shift the frame when it comes to sourcing. 

The process shouldn’t be about filtering resumes or LinkedIn profiles for buzzy keywords, pushing candidates through the hiring process, and meaningless KPIs. It should focus on finding skills. 

The best way to do this? Stop treating sourcing like a sales pipeline and take a skills-based approach instead. 

This aligns with a broader shift toward skills-based hiring, with 89% of employers in 2025 now using skills-based hiring, a 4% increase from last year. 

Prioritizing skills is the most effective way to uncover hidden talent and help you find the right talent pool for the next job. 

An added bonus? A skills-first approach also helps reduce bias in the sourcing process. Just ask candidates. According to our 2024 State of Skills-Based Hiring report, 84% of candidates believe that a skills-based approach helps reduce the risk of both conscious and unconscious bias influencing hiring decisions. 

What does skills-first sourcing look like?

Skills-first sourcing involves prioritizing evidence of candidates’ capabilities and potential. There are several ways you can do this, including:

• Searching talent profiles for skills, not keywords

• Using skills evaluations as part of the sourcing process

• Searching for candidates with pre-vetted skill sets to build talent pools

An example of this is Siemens. Speaking to the Financial Times, Jon Turner, Managing Director, says assessments enable the company to create a talent pool based on capability, rather than job titles. “We’ve expanded our pool of talent and that’s a pool of talent outside of the typical industry. We’ve got a very clear set of behaviors that work in our organization and I can now find people with behaviors like that who can complement what we’re trying to do.” 

These examples highlight how skills-based sourcing helps you focus on what really matters – potential applicants’ capabilities and fit for a role. 

Smarter tooling supports skills-based sourcing

Unfortunately, many existing sourcing tools promote the idea of sourcing as a sales pipeline, focusing on quantity over quality. 

Smarter sourcing tools go beyond databases and filters, integrating skills data directly into the process. These tools: 

• Prioritize and filter for candidate skills, enabling sourcers to target talent with the right skills

• Integrate skill evaluation tools, like qualifying questions and skills assessments 

• Uncover high-potential talent that sourcers may otherwise overlook

According to Sarah, the key to choosing the right sourcing tool is taking a collaborative approach. “Sourcing is not going to get better until the people who are making decisions about the tools and processes actually understand what the sourcer actually needs to accomplish.”

Time for a paradigm shift

Treating sourcing like a sales pipeline is bad for hirers and candidates. 

But ditching LinkedIn isn’t the magic solution. Instead, it’s time to reframe how we source candidates. The search for talent is about discovering skills, not chasing leads. 

If you’re ready to try a smarter sourcing tool that helps you do this, read more about TestGorilla Sourcing.