5 Tips for Recruitment Sourcing in Apollo

Recruiting is all about finding and hiring the right people.

Failing to do proper recruitment sourcing results in loads of wasted time, money, training opportunities, and negatively affects company culture.

But recruiting top-tier talent is easier said than done. Consider the data from recent studies:

• 72.8% of recruiters struggle to find quality candidates.
• 45% of surveyed hiring managers said they could not fill much-needed positions due to the lack of qualified talent.
• 95% of SMBs say talent acquisition is a current challenge.

By honing in on your sourcing strategy and hiring the right talent the first time around, your company will start moving in the right direction from day one. More importantly, you will be able to focus on critical aspects of your recruiting job instead of getting caught up in the weeds. But how can you jumpstart the ever-important talent search?

With the right data and engagement tools of course!

Scale your activity and perfect your talent sourcing strategy, from hunting to meetings and everything in between with Apollo's all-in-one workflow solution. It combines powerful features like an expansive B2B database, Sequences, email templates, AI tools, and more, in one easy-to-use platform.

In this post, we’ll highlight how Apollo supports our users beyond sales; we help you find the right talent, too. Read on to learn the 5 tips for recruitment sourcing with Apollo.

Sourcing vs recruiting: what’s the difference?

Think of sourcing and recruiting as two critical legs of the same race. Sourcing is the first leg; it's focused on identifying, assessing, and engaging potential candidates to build a talent pipeline. Recruiting takes the baton from there, managing the interview process, extending offers, and ultimately hiring the candidate. A sourcer finds the talent, and a recruiter brings them across the finish line. While their functions are distinct, the best talent acquisition teams see them as deeply collaborative.

Why recruitment sourcing matters for your hiring strategy

In a competitive job market, the best candidates are rarely unemployed. Strategic sourcing gives you a direct line to top-tier talent that you'd otherwise miss. It allows you to build a pipeline of qualified candidates before you even have an open role, dramatically reducing your time-to-hire. By proactively engaging talent, you gain a competitive edge, build your employer brand, and ensure you're always ready to fill critical positions with the best people, not just the most available ones.

Types of recruitment sourcing methods

Sourcing isn’t a one-size-fits-all game. Different roles and industries call for different approaches. Common methods include searching professional networks like LinkedIn, tapping into online talent databases, leveraging employee referrals, and engaging with online communities or forums. Advanced strategies might involve analyzing competitor employee lists or using data-driven tools to identify candidates based on specific skills, technologies they use, or recent job changes. The key is to use a multi-channel approach to maximize your reach.

Build targeted company lists with Apollo list building

For ambitious recruiters, efficiency is key. The best way to speed up your recruitment sourcing efforts is to build strong candidate and company lists from the get-go.

When you use Apollo, list building is simple. We provide advanced filters which highly granular data points like names and titles, company revenue, location, technologies used, job postings, keywords, and so much more!

If you 're starting a search for new candidates that fit similar criteria of past lists, take advantage of the lists you have already built by using the Saved Search feature in Apollo.

This allows you two time-saving benefits:

1. You can quickly launch a search using specific filters, give that list a name you can easily reference, and then save it for future use to continuously work from.
2. You can apply specific filters to every search you initiate in Apollo by default by saving the search criteria and clicking a "Set as default" check box.

Create hyper-personalized outreach sequences that target top candidates

It's important that recruiters use the right sourcing strategies to make candidate outreach as effective as possible. With the right recruiting tool, it’s possible to build sequences of unique touchpoints that automate outreach processes and allow recruiters to connect with candidates at speed and scale.

In Apollo, Sequences does just that…

Sequences are customized outreach campaigns with any number of sequential contact points and tasks that you can customize to personally engage your target audiences at scale. They help recruiters deliver communications to candidates and complete the right tasks at the right time to speed candidates through your pipeline and turn them into best-fit employees.

When you build out your sequences, you have eight steps to choose from and arrange:

• Automatic Email: Use any of your Apollo email templates or create new ones to craft personalized and targeted messaging that is delivered based on the parameters you set.
• Manual Email: Use to schedule and deliver follow-up emails that you can fully customize.
• Phone Call: Add notes, tips, scripts, and any other helpful information with a reminder to call a candidate.
• Action Item: A blank canvas to schedule any number of necessary internal communications or processes along the way.
• LinkedIn: View Profile: Access a contact 's LinkedIn profile from within Apollo and document key information that can help you build rapport when engaging with prospective candidates.
• LinkedIn: Interact With Post: Review a contact 's activities, engage with their recent posts, and give yourself direction with reminders and relevant notes.
• LinkedIn: Send a Connection Request: Create connection request templates to make a great first impression.
• LinkedIn: Send Message: Send personalized InMail messages

The timing between these steps is all determined by you. Schedule a specific time and date for steps to automatically happen or tell Apollo how long to wait between each sequencing step.

Here 's an example of a recruiting sequence we 've had a lot of success with at Apollo (and check out that killer open rate of 70.5%!):

Fully equipped with automatic emails, LinkedIn messages, personalized snippets, and value-based messaging, this is a beautiful example of a strategic sourcing effort at work!

Keep talent pipelines' contact details up-to-date with Apollo CSV enrichment

As a recruiter, you often deal with large lists of contacts and it is crucial that you keep them up-to-date for effective segmentation and targeted engagement.

Apollo's CSV Enrichment feature allows you to import CSV files of prospective candidates directly into Apollo for one-click enrichment with our verified data. This is a great way to leverage the vast amount of verified data available in Apollo within other systems that you use every day, but have not directly integrated with Apollo.

CSV Enrichment works for both people and companies; so that you can rest assured that your candidate data sets (whether they live in Excel, Sheets, Google Drive, etc.) are accurate and ready to be put to use.

Our own recruiters at Apollo leverage this feature, nearly every day. "CSV upload is a phenomenal way to import potentially large datasets in a quick and efficient way for enrichment and other uses," says one of our Apollo recruiting managers.

The enrichment opportunities in Apollo don't stop there! We also offer CRM Enrichment, API Enrichment, and job change alerts. Click on these links to learn more about how Apollo supports you in keeping your candidate data squeaky clean.

Gain recruiting insights from everywhere with the Apollo Chrome Extension

Meet your new favorite sourcing tool: the Apollo Chrome Extension!

It unlocks Apollo functionality in tools that recruiters use every day, including LinkedIn, Gmail, and Google Calendar, as well as many of the major brand websites across the internet.

When you use LinkedIn, the Apollo Chrome Extension allows you to find new candidates with verified data that includes direct mobile numbers and email addresses. You can directly add these contacts to lists and sequences that you've already built in Apollo with just one click.

How simple is that?!

Beyond LinkedIn, recruiters can use the Extension to track emails and schedule follow-up reminders in Gmail, access insights and intelligence directly from Google Calendar, grab entire web pages and convert them into lists with Apollo Everywhere, and more.

Note: To enable Apollo Everywhere, launch the Apollo Chrome Extension and click the toggle for 'Apollo Everywhere'.

The Apollo Chrome Extension is a functional data and engagement tool that is perfect for recruiters looking to find and add the right candidates into their pipeline with ease.

Try it out yourself! Download the Apollo Chrome Extension here.

Optimize your talent acquisition process with analytics

To be a results-driven recruiter, you need to consistently track performance and make data-based adjustments to your recruitment sourcing process.

Use Apollo Analytics to track the performance of your emails and gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your sourcing strategies.

In Analytics, you can track scheduled, delivered, open, replied, and interest rates, as well as call performances and high and low-performing sequencing reports. And from your personalized Apollo dashboard, you can access all of this valuable recruiting data in one place!

The more you evaluate what works and what doesn't, the more you can test and improve your Sequences to increase candidate engagement.

Scale your recruitment sourcing with Apollo

You may know Apollo as a sales engagement platform, but Apollo's all-in-one functionality and infinitely adaptable in-app tools make it a perfect tool for talent sourcing, too! With the right data and engagement tools, you can stop waiting for candidates to come to you and start building a world-class talent pipeline today. Get started for free.

Frequently asked questions about recruitment sourcing

What is sourcing in recruitment?

Sourcing is the process of proactively identifying, contacting, and engaging qualified candidates for a job opening, rather than waiting for them to apply. It focuses on building a pipeline of both active and passive talent.

What does a recruitment sourcing specialist do?

A sourcing specialist focuses on the 'top of the funnel' activities. Their duties involve researching and identifying potential candidates, making initial contact, and vetting them to ensure they are a good fit before passing them along to a recruiter for the formal interview process.

What's the difference between a recruiter and a sourcing recruiter?

A sourcing recruiter (or sourcer) specializes in finding and attracting potential talent. A full-cycle recruiter handles that plus the subsequent stages, including screening, interviewing, and hiring candidates.

When should you use sourcing vs traditional recruiting?

Sourcing is most critical for hard-to-fill roles, executive positions, or when you need to find candidates with highly specialized skills. It's also essential for building a long-term talent pipeline, whereas traditional recruiting is often used for high-volume roles with a steady stream of applicants.

How do you measure recruitment sourcing success?

Key metrics include the number of qualified candidates added to the pipeline, the conversion rate from sourced candidate to hire, time-to-fill for sourced roles, and the quality of hire. Tracking the performance of different sourcing channels is also crucial for optimization.