Candidate sourcing: how to find and contact the right people

Candidate sourcing means finding and contacting people who have not applied for your role. Use it when the applicant pool is too thin or misses essential skills, then work through an agreed brief, search, profile review and outreach.

Below, we’ll follow an illustrative mid-level payroll specialist role: hybrid, based in Leeds. The role requirements and messages are examples to adapt, not a live vacancy or claims about the local market.

When candidate sourcing belongs in your hiring plan

I’d consider sourcing when:

• Applicants lack an essential skill or type of experience.
• A senior or confidential appointment needs a deliberate search.
• After the first week, the applicant pool still looks weak against the brief.
• You repeatedly hire for the same role and want to build relevant relationships.

Before searching, agree the salary range, office expectations and responsibilities. Give yourself something concrete to discuss when someone replies.

Step 1: write a candidate sourcing brief

Write the outcome first. Then choose three to five must-haves expressed as evidence you could find in a profile. Replace “excellent payroll professional” with “describes owning payroll processing and resolving reconciliation discrepancies.”

Copy this brief:

Role and hiring owner:
Outcome the hire must deliver:
Must-haves, expressed as visible evidence:
Nice-to-haves:
Title variants to test:
Target employers or sectors:
Location radius or agreed search area:
Office attendance requirement:
Approved salary range:
Do not contact:
Who approves the contact list:

For the illustrative Leeds role:

Role: Mid-level payroll specialist
Hiring owner: Payroll manager
Outcome: Own payroll processing, resolve discrepancies and
provide a clear reconciliation for review.

Must-have evidence:
- Ownership of payroll processing, beyond data entry alone.
- Payroll reconciliation and discrepancy investigation.
- Handling employee changes, including starters and leavers.
- Resolving employee payroll questions.

Nice-to-haves: Improving payroll processes; working with finance.
Title variants: Payroll specialist, payroll administrator,
payroll officer.
Target sectors: In-house payroll teams and payroll service firms.
Search area: Leeds initially; widen after agreeing which
surrounding areas suit the office attendance requirement.
Office pattern and salary: Confirm with the hiring owner
before contacting anyone.
Do not contact: Current staff, clients, previous opt-outs,
people contacted recently or already in an active process.
Contact-list approval: Hiring recruiter.

Treat titles and sectors as search hypotheses. Keep the evidence requirements consistent when you change where you look. For agency work, agree the client’s contact restrictions before building the list.

Step 2: start with past applicants and referrals

Search your applicant tracking system (ATS) before opening an external search.

1. Look for past applicants using the title variants and evidence terms from the brief.
2. Review previous finalists and the notes explaining why they were not hired.
3. Check contact history, exclusions and the relevance of the earlier process before approaching anyone.
4. Ask colleagues for introductions using the same evidence requirements.

For the payroll example, search for reconciliation experience as well as payroll titles. Read the earlier assessment before assuming that someone who missed a different role would miss this one.

Include referrals alongside an open search. The fairness implications of relying on referrals alone are covered below.

Step 3: build a Boolean search in recruitment

Use these LinkedIn Boolean rules:

• Write AND, OR and NOT in uppercase. Use quotes for phrases and parentheses to group alternatives.
• Use only parentheses for grouping. Wildcards, braces, square brackets and angle brackets are unsupported; use AND and NOT instead of + and -. These are LinkedIn’s syntax restrictions.
• The order of precedence is quotes, parentheses, NOT, AND, then OR. Quoted searches ignore stop words such as “by,” “in” and “with.”

Start the payroll search with:

("payroll specialist" OR "payroll administrator" OR "payroll officer")
AND (reconciliation OR reconciliations)

This combines a title alternative with a reconciliation term. Keep the Leeds search area separate from the experience string. Review the other must-haves manually instead of requiring every responsibility to appear as an exact keyword.

Adjust the search deliberately:

1. Too few relevant profiles: remove the reconciliation group temporarily. Review payroll titles for equivalent descriptions of the work.
2. Still too few: add title variants found during review, then discuss widening the search area or acceptable experience with the hiring owner.
3. Too many irrelevant profiles: test an additional evidence group, such as AND (starters OR leavers).
4. Repeated irrelevant results: consider a specific NOT exclusion, then inspect what it removes before keeping it.

Save each string with a note about the change. Don’t change the location, titles and evidence terms together if you want to understand which change helped.

Step 4: rank profiles and choose who to contact first

Use the brief as a review sheet. For each must-have, record evidence found, unclear or evidence of a mismatch. Keep “not mentioned” separate from “cannot do it.”

1. Check exclusions and previous contact history.
2. Read the profile against each must-have.
3. Prioritize people with the clearest relevant evidence.
4. Keep a short reason for inclusion and an unresolved question.

An illustrative note:

Why included: Profile describes payroll processing, employee
changes and reconciliation work.
Unclear: Whether they owned discrepancy resolution themselves.
Location: Confirm whether the Leeds office pattern works.
Next action: Recruiter reviews and approves outreach.

Contact the strongest matches in small batches that you can personally review and respond to. Don’t turn a profile judgment into a hiring decision. Carry unresolved questions into your candidate screening rules, and use the same interview scorecard for sourced people and applicants.

Step 5: write candidate outreach people can answer easily

Give the person a specific reason for your approach, the role, a concrete detail and an easy question. I’d ask for interest before asking for a resume or a meeting.

Replace every placeholder below. Include your actual candidate privacy notice as plain text where indicated, keeping the first message free of links. Name the real source of the person’s details, including separate sources for profile information and contact details where relevant.

FIRST MESSAGE
Subject: Payroll specialist role in Leeds

Hi [First name],

Your profile describes [specific payroll evidence], which caught
my attention for a hybrid payroll specialist role with [employer]
in Leeds. The role includes ownership of payroll reconciliations.

Salary: [approved range]. Office pattern: [agreed arrangement].

Would you be open to hearing more?

[Recruiter name and recruiting organization]

Privacy: [Organization] obtained your [profile/contact details]
from [actual source; specify if publicly accessible] to contact
you about this role. Our candidate privacy notice follows below.
Reply "no thanks" to stop recruitment outreach from us.

[Insert the full candidate privacy notice here as plain text.]

FOLLOW-UP, A FEW DAYS LATER

Hi [First name],

Following up on the Leeds payroll specialist role. One detail
that may help: [approved detail about responsibility, support
or working arrangements].

Would you like me to send the role details here?

[Recruiter name]
Reply "no thanks" to stop recruitment outreach from us.

LAST SHORT NOTE, LATER IF THERE IS STILL NO REPLY

Hi [First name],

I'll close out my messages about the Leeds payroll role after
this note. Would you like the details before I do?

[Recruiter name]
Reply "no thanks" to stop recruitment outreach from us.

The first message explains why you chose this person. The follow-up adds useful information. The last note ends the sequence without pressure.

Use only evidence you actually found. Replace “impressive background” with the responsibility that matches your brief. Stop the sequence when someone replies, read their answer and respond to it. Record opt-outs before preparing another batch.

Step 6: track five numbers and fix the stage that breaks

Count unique people for the same role and outreach batch. Don’t count follow-up messages as new contacts, or automatic replies as candidate responses.

Treat these as diagnostic prompts, not proof of a cause. Read the replies before deciding that the message or offer is the problem.

For the payroll example, repeated objections to office attendance should trigger a discussion about the working arrangement. Rewriting the subject line would leave that objection unanswered.

Record the source and a brief decline reason alongside each person. Measure changes against your own earlier batches; you do not need an invented industry benchmark.

Candidate sourcing strategies compared

Choose a starting channel based on the evidence you need and the records you already have. I’d use this comparison to allocate effort:

For this illustrative role, I’d review past applicants, then test the payroll Boolean string. Add channels when you can explain what the current search is missing.

Data protection and fair candidate sourcing

For UK sourcing, Article 14 of the UK GDPR requires privacy information when you obtain someone’s personal data elsewhere. Provide it within a reasonable period, no later than one month after collection, and by your first communication if you contact them sooner. Waiting to send outreach does not remove the collection deadline.

The information must identify where the data came from, including whether the source was publicly accessible. The source line in the template is only part of that information: include the full notice, rather than offering to supply it after a reply.

Keep the source, collection date, notice delivery and contact preference with the record. Make checking opt-outs part of every contact-list review.

For UK positive action, section 158 of the Equality Act permits proportionate encouragement of participation where an employer reasonably believes a protected group’s participation is disproportionately low.

Keep selection based on job evidence. Section 159 permits favorable treatment because of a protected characteristic only within its conditions, including candidates being equally qualified and no blanket policy favoring that group. It is not general permission to prefer less-qualified applicants.

In the US, the EEOC’s recruitment guidance warns that discriminatory recruiting is unlawful. Its example concerns an employer with a predominantly Hispanic workforce whose reliance on employee word of mouth produces almost exclusively Hispanic hires. That reliance may violate the law.

Use that example to question who hears about your vacancy. Keep referrals alongside other routes, and assess everyone against the same role requirements.

AI candidate sourcing: what changes and what you still check

I’d give AI the search preparation, proposed ranking and outreach draft, while keeping these responsibilities with the recruiter:

• Approve the brief and distinguish essentials from preferences.
• Check the evidence behind each proposed contact.
• Review exclusions, source information and message wording.
• Read every reply and resolve unanswered questions.

In Alfa AI, Lisa builds a search from the job’s title, skills, requirements and search area, and can include matching past candidates from a connected ATS. She ranks profiles against the requirements and drafts outreach for recruiter review. Her ranking helps prioritize contact; it is not a pass mark. Sourced people are contacted only when the recruiter chooses, unless an admin enables automatic outreach for strong matches under company settings.

Use a pilot scorecard for AI recruitment tools to assess the proposed profiles and messages against your brief. Before sending a batch, be able to explain why each person belongs on the list and what you still need to learn.