Sourcing as a service for hard-to-fill tech roles
Qualified, interested candidates for the roles nobody applies to. We find and screen them; you run the interviews and make the offer.
Sourcing as a service is outsourced candidate sourcing: we map the market, identify the people who match your role, contact and screen them, and hand you a shortlist of candidates who are genuinely interested. You keep the interviews, the offers, and the candidate relationship — and you pay for the sourcing work rather than a percentage of a salary.
When is sourcing as a service the right choice?
When the bottleneck is candidates, not process. Your team can interview well and close well, but the top of the funnel is empty: the job has been open for weeks, inbound applications are unqualified, and the people you actually want are employed elsewhere and not reading job boards.
It is also the right first step when you have one or two genuinely hard roles rather than a full hiring plan — the situation where a full embedded engagement would be more than you need.
What does the work involve?
- Market mapping. Who exists, where they work, what they are paid, and how many of them are realistically reachable for your role at your budget.
- Outbound sourcing. Boolean and X-ray search, AI-assisted shortlisting, and human verification — because tooling finds profiles, not fit.
- Personalised outreach. Written per candidate and agreed with you first, under your brand or ours.
- Screening. A real conversation about motivation, notice period, compensation expectations, and relocation or work authorisation, so your first interview is not a fact-finding call.
- Shortlist delivery. Interested, qualified candidates with written context, delivered into your ATS.
What you get that a CV drop does not include
The market map is often worth as much as the shortlist. If senior engineers with your stack in Amsterdam are earning fifteen percent above your band, you need that in week one — not after a quarter of rejected offers. Sourcing tells you whether the role is fillable as written, and what to change if it is not.
Who is this for — and who is it not for?
A good fit
- Teams with interview capacity but an empty pipeline
- One to three genuinely hard technical roles
- Niche stacks and scarce skill sets — Web3, fintech, infrastructure
- Companies hiring across borders in Europe, the Gulf, or Egypt
- In-house talent teams that need extra sourcing capacity
Not a good fit
- Teams that also need someone to run interviews and offers — that is embedded
- Companies with a broken interview process; sourcing will just feed a leaky funnel
- Contingency, pay-per-placement expectations
- High-volume, low-complexity hiring
What does sourcing as a service cost?
Sourcing is priced by the work — the number of roles, how scarce the profile is, and how many markets we need to cover — not as a percentage of the salary you end up paying. That means the cost does not jump because you hired someone senior, and you are not paying a placement fee on a candidate your own team interviewed and closed. You get a firm number in writing after the discovery call.
Frequently asked questions
What is sourcing as a service?
Sourcing as a service is outsourced candidate sourcing: an external sourcer researches the market, identifies and contacts qualified candidates, screens their interest, and hands you a shortlist of people who want to talk. You keep the interviews, the offers, and the relationship. It is used for roles where inbound applications do not produce qualified candidates.
How is sourcing as a service different from a recruitment agency?
An agency charges a placement fee, usually a percentage of first-year salary, and only earns when you hire. Sourcing as a service is paid for the sourcing work itself, so you get the pipeline and the market intelligence regardless of whether a particular role closes — and you are not paying a five-figure fee on top of a salary you already negotiated.
What do we actually receive?
A shortlist of screened, interested candidates with profiles and written context on why each one fits, plus the market map behind it: where these people work, what they earn, and what it would take to move them. If the market says the role as written is unfillable at that budget, you get told that early rather than after three months.
Do you write the outreach in our name?
Yes, when you want it that way. Outreach can go out under your brand or ours, and we agree the messaging with you before anything is sent — your employer brand is not something to experiment with.
Can this turn into a full embedded engagement?
Often it does. Teams start with sourcing on one hard role, then move to embedded recruitment once they are filling several at once. There is no penalty for switching models mid-way.
Related
Last updated 27 July 2026
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