Recruiting and Talent Sourcing
Finding candidate profiles, company pages, and public work samples via search APIs.
The problem
Most sourcing tools are built around a single database (a job board, a professional network), but strong candidates for niche roles often show up first outside those databases — a GitHub contribution history, a conference talk, a portfolio site — and a recruiter manually Googling each of those channels doesn't scale past a handful of searches a day.
How the workflow is built
Boolean-style queries combine a role, a skill set, and a location or `site:` filter targeting professional networks, code-hosting platforms, and portfolio sites, run per open requisition or per target company list. A sourcing agent typically issues several variants of the same search (different skill synonyms, different seniority phrasing) since candidates describe themselves inconsistently.
Example queries
"senior rust engineer" site:linkedin.com/in "distributed systems"site:github.com "kubernetes operator" contributor bio -recruiter"speaker" "data engineering conference" 2025 bio
Pitfalls to watch for
- Public profile data goes stale fast — someone's listed employer or title can lag a job change by months, so any outreach should verify current role before assuming a search result reflects the present.
- Sourcing at scale runs directly into privacy and platform-terms-of-service questions (most professional networks restrict automated scraping of profile data), so this is one of the verticals where checking a provider's and platform's data-use terms matters more than usual.
- Boolean query strings that work well on one network's search syntax often don't translate to another's, so query templates need to be maintained per source rather than reused blindly.