What is active sourcing? A complete guide for 2026

The problem with passive sourcing

Active sourcing has exploded in popularity because passive methods for finding qualified candidates just aren’t effective.

Traditionally, recruiters and hiring managers would post a job online and simply hope that the right person with the right qualifications would find their ad and apply. Often, you’d end up with hundreds or even thousands of applications, but no guarantee that any of the candidates were high quality or their skills aligned with the needs of your role. And even if you did attract a great candidate, it was all too easy to lose them in the haystack of applications.

If you took it upon yourself to actively seek out candidates on LinkedIn and invite them to apply for your role, the process was excruciatingly time-consuming. You’d have to search for job-related keywords, manually review each candidate’s profile, and then reach out to them individually. Worse, since keywords and job titles don’t correspond well to actual capabilities, a lot of these painstakingly sourced candidates would drop out of your hiring process later because of a skills mismatch.

The answer is active sourcing

It helps you find top talent quickly

Enter active sourcing: a new approach to talent discovery that enables you to quickly find candidates who have the right qualifications for your role and get them into your hiring funnel.

Active sourcing uses a series of screens, filters, and skills assessments to help you identify top talent for a specific role and proactively build relationships with candidates. It doesn’t rely on keywords or manual processes, so you can screen thousands or even millions of candidates and focus solely on the ones that have the skills your business needs. You can then reach out to top candidates to invite them to apply for your role.

This approach dramatically cuts down the time required to fill roles by quickly bringing highly qualified candidates into your hiring pipeline. It also reduces the number of unsuitable applications you need to review, shortening your time-to-hire. 

Even better, active sourcing means you don’t need to wait for candidates to find your job posting. It empowers you to start building relationships with candidates who have the skills your company might need in the future. When a position opens, you’re ready to reach out immediately and get your hiring process off to a quick start, without teams having to scramble.

It gives you a competitive advantage

Another reason active sourcing is so important is that it gives you access to a massive pool of candidates who may not be looking for a new role – candidates that passive methods miss entirely. These are often high achievers who are focused on excelling in their current role – but could be enticed to join your company if you reach out with an invitation. 

These candidates also aren’t applying to other roles, giving your company a competitive advantage in the hiring process. That’s a big deal in talent-limited industries where there aren’t enough qualified candidates to go around.

It improves hiring outcomes

While speed is mainly why many recruiters and hiring managers now use active candidate sourcing, it’s only one of the reasons this hiring approach is so critical. Another key benefit of active sourcing is that it improves hiring outcomes and reduces costly mishires.

When you practice active sourcing, you have a list of highly engaged candidates you can invite to apply for a role as soon as it opens. Instead of hoping that the right people see your job posting, you can handpick your applicant pool based on who’s pre-qualified in terms of skills and motivated to work for your company. The result is a higher-quality talent pool tailored to the role’s specific needs.

And because these candidates have an existing relationship with your company – perhaps cultivated through conversations in industry forums or ongoing engagement with their professional milestones – they’re more likely to respond to your invitation to apply and far less likely to fall out of your hiring pipeline.

Furthermore, the benefits of active sourcing extend beyond hiring itself. Research has found that actively sourced candidates have a 21% higher retention rate than candidates hired through traditional methods. This may be because these candidates are already productive and successful in their current jobs, allowing them to consider their fit and motivation for new opportunities more carefully.

To top it all off, active sourcing saves your company money. Faster hiring, better retention, and reduced reliance on external recruiters or paid job ads combine to deliver a potentially significant return on investment. 

A practical guide to active sourcing

Let’s take a closer look at how active sourcing works in practice and walk through the steps involved.

Step 1: Creating a pre-screened talent pool

The first and most critical step in active sourcing is creating a database of candidates you can source from. This is a master list of high-quality candidates that you can use to identify individuals who are a good fit for your company’s open roles.

There are several different ways to create talent pools, each with their own benefits and drawbacks, as we explain below.

Use a pre-built talent pool

The easiest way to get started with active sourcing is to use a pre-made talent pool. Many sourcing platforms have their own talent pools that draw from different databases, including LinkedIn, GitHub, and private sources. They provide instant access to millions of candidate profiles, making them a scalable solution for hiring for any type of role. 

However, the quality of pre-built talent pools can vary widely, so it’s important to use a platform you trust. For example, some talent pools have out-of-date contact information, making it difficult to get in touch when you find a candidate you’re keen on. Others rely heavily on resumes, which often contain inflated information and can introduce bias into the sourcing process.

TestGorilla Sourcing avoids these issues by offering a pre-screened database of more than two million global candidates. Crucially, all candidates in this talent pool have taken one or more TestGorilla skills tests, so you can view detailed information about each candidate’s proven skills instead of comparing candidates based on resumes.

Build your own external talent pool

You can also build your own talent pool by finding potential candidates you might be interested in. As before, you can find candidates from databases like LinkedIn (using LinkedIn Recruiter), GitHub, StackOverflow, or Behance, and add their details to your database. You can also find candidates via social media. 

You don’t need to be overly selective when adding candidates to your talent pool, but it’s important to capture as much information as possible about candidates’ skills and work experience for the next steps in the sourcing process. 

The drawback to building your own talent pool is that it’s very labor-intensive. It can also be challenging to verify candidate details, especially if you’re sourcing from social media. Be very mindful of privacy regulations, especially if you collect any candidate data from non-public sources.

Build your own internal talent pool

An internal talent pool focuses on candidates who already have a relationship with your company – usually current and alumni employees and past job applicants. These talent pools tend to be smaller than pre-made or external talent pools and aren’t easily scaled, but they can be very high quality. Candidates are likely to engage at a high rate, and you may already have detailed information about their skills and experience.

Don’t forget that you can use multiple talent pools in combination. For example, you can actively source candidates from both a pre-made talent pool and your own internal talent pool.

Step 2: Defining your role and creating filters

Once you have a talent pool, the next step in active sourcing is to define your job role. Start with your job description to identify the essential skills a candidate should have, along with criteria like the location, required seniority, and salary range for your role. Then apply these criteria as filters within your talent pool to get a list of candidates for review.

Step 3: Reviewing and shortlisting candidates

Now you can review candidate profiles to find and shortlist the most talented prospects. How you review candidates depends on your sourcing platform and candidate database. In TestGorilla Sourcing, each candidate’s profile shows their performance on skills tests relevant to your role, their work experience, and details like their desired salary and work location.

Step 4: Reaching out to candidates

Once you’re sure that the candidates on your shortlist have the skills needed for your role, it’s time to move from sourcing to recruiting. You can reach out by email to start a conversation with each candidate about their skills or work experience, or directly invite them to apply for your role.

With TestGorilla, you can also send candidates an invitation to take a talent assessment, a powerful first step in the application process that helps them show what they’ll bring to your role. TestGorilla can suggest appropriate skills tests based on the job title, making it easy to craft the perfect assessment.

Supercharging active sourcing with AI

Active sourcing’s big leap forward has been thanks in part to AI, which can dramatically speed up the process of identifying talented candidates.

First, many sourcing platforms use AI to help you filter your talent pool. You enter your job description, and AI uses the information to create filters for required and nice-to-have skills, desired work experience, and more. You can then customize the filters or jump right into reviewing candidates.

AI also helps you identify the most qualified candidates within your filtered talent pool. Its prediction algorithms identify candidates who are most likely to excel in your role and surface them for review. Many platforms offer AI-powered candidate scores or rankings, making it easy to sort based on the qualifications that matter most for your position.

AI can even help you reach out to candidates by drafting personalized emails that reflect your company’s voice. That saves you valuable time you can instead spend on nurturing relationships with candidates currently in your hiring pipeline or further expanding your talent pool.

Insights for effective active sourcing

It’s fairly easy to get started with active sourcing – all you need is a platform like TestGorilla that offers a built-in talent pool and tools to help you filter and invite candidates. But effective sourcing requires more than just following a set of prescribed steps. You need to undertake a full-scale transformation in how you discover, evaluate, and engage with talent.

Here are several insights from our experience and discussions with active sourcing experts to help you consistently find strong candidates and make your hiring process fairer and more strategic.

Focus on proven skills, not resumes

Skills are at the heart of active sourcing. The candidates you build relationships with and invite to apply for your roles must have the skills your company needs to thrive. Focusing on impressive-sounding job titles at the expense of skills is a frequent cause of mis-hires and can significantly extend your hiring process.

“Titles don’t always reflect skills, impact, or potential,” says Kim Henry, director of talent acquisition at Stop, Engage, Employ! “They reflect how one company chose to label a role.”

The best way to address this issue is to verify candidates’ skills with science-backed tests or proven deliverables (e.g., GitHub codebases). For example, you can ask candidates to complete a talent assessment as the first step in your application process. 

Even if candidates have verified they have the role-specific skills you need, this assessment step enables you to compare candidates’ performance directly and makes the hiring process more fair. Many candidates inflate their resumes with skills they don’t have or aren’t proficient at, so treat resumes with a healthy amount of skepticism. 

Rahul Vishwakarma, founder of Blogger Voice, says that his process is to “evaluate candidates based on their documented skills rather than job titles or employer brand names.” This skills data enables teams to “validate candidate qualifications during the early stages of the sourcing process and eliminate candidates who are unlikely to meet the qualifications of the open role.”

This approach helps Vishwakarma save valuable time and allows the recruiters to focus more attention on the most qualified applicants.

Keep bias out of your sourcing process

Active sourcing can be an effective way to diversify your workforce since it gives you access to a wider range of candidates than traditional job boards, including some who might not be actively looking for new roles. However, it’s important to be aware of bias during sourcing, just as you would during hiring.

One of the best ways to prevent bias from creeping in is to eliminate names, photos, and resumes when reviewing candidates. TestGorilla does this automatically, ensuring that you’re fairly comparing candidates based on proven skills and work experience alone. You get access to candidates’ personal data only after shortlisting them.

Other ways to address potential sources of bias include:

• Creating standardized evaluation criteria so that personal judgments and biases don’t influence which applicants advance.

• Reviewing your databases for talent sourcing to ensure candidates are not drawn disproportionately from a narrow set of schools, companies, or networks. 

• Monitoring sourcing and hiring outcomes, including tracking candidate diversity at each stage of your hiring process, so you can spot patterns of bias and adjust accordingly.

Cultivate multiple talent pools

If you’re recruiting for a large company with multiple departments or highly varied roles, it’s often helpful to create multiple talent pools. These may be derived from the same overarching database of candidates, but they’re pre-filtered to include candidates with different skills and experiences. 

For example, you could have one talent pool for programming roles and another for sales and marketing roles. You can also have pools for past job applicants and employee alumni.

Creating distinct talent pools allows you to tailor mass communications, such as monthly newsletters or new job announcements, to candidates who are likely to find value in that information. It also helps you focus your relationship-building efforts on different types of candidates, making that effort more effective. Finally, when you’re ready to hire for a new role, you’ll already have a pre-screened talent pool to source from.

Track your active sourcing success

It’s important to measure whether active sourcing is effective at helping you identify more qualified candidates and reducing your time to hire. The most popular sourcing metrics to monitor include:

• Response rate: What percentage of candidates respond to your outreach

• Conversion rate: What percentage of candidates you’ve reached out to apply for your role

• Candidate success rate: How far actively sourced candidates make it in your hiring process

• Retention rate: What percentage of candidates fall out of your hiring process

• Time to hire: How long it takes to fill positions after applications open

Tracking this data can help you identify inefficiencies in your active sourcing strategy and improve your overall hiring process. “When sourcing is working effectively,” says Vishwakarma, “our recruiting teams are conducting less screening, and our hiring managers are seeing better-qualified candidates sooner.”

In other words, active sourcing, when done properly, can help you build a skills-focused hiring culture that positions your company for long-term success.

Streamline your hiring process with active sourcing today

Active sourcing is an essential strategy for modern hiring, especially in competitive industries where there’s high demand for skilled talent. It can help you find strong candidates more quickly, enhance the candidate experience throughout your hiring process, and dramatically improve your hiring success.

TestGorilla Sourcing is the best solution for active sourcing because it offers a talent pool of more than two million candidates with proven role-specific skills. It’s easy to hire for any role quickly using our AI-powered platform. Try TestGorilla Sourcing for free today or contact us for a live demo to learn more.

Contributors

• Kim Henry, Stop, Engage, Employ!, Director of Talent Acquisition

• Rahul Vishwakarma, Blogger Voice, Founder