How to find candidates for an open role

There are four routes: publish a job ad, use your network, pay an agency, or approach suitable people directly. For roles where qualified people are already employed and not applying anywhere, direct sourcing is the only route that reliably produces candidates — the other three depend on the right person happening to be looking.

Below: what each route really costs, when to use it, and how to run direct sourcing yourself without a recruiting team. Published 2026-09-15 by tamo.ai.

1. Job ads — cheap to start, only reaches active job seekers

A job ad reaches people who are currently looking. In DACH that is a minority of qualified professionals in most specialist and senior roles, which is why an ad can run for weeks and produce nothing usable.

Works well for high-volume, entry-level and generalist roles with a large active pool.
Weak for senior, specialist, sales and engineering roles where good people are employed.
The real cost is rarely the posting fee — it is the weeks of waiting before you conclude it failed.

2. Referrals — the highest hit rate, the smallest reach

Referrals convert better than any other channel because trust is transferred with the introduction, but they are limited by the size of your team's network and tend to reproduce the network you already have.

Ask specifically. “Do you know anyone?” produces nothing; “who was the best account executive you worked with at your last company?” produces names.

3. Recruitment agencies — no upfront cost, a large fee per hire

A contingency agency is paid only if you hire, typically a percentage of the first-year salary. You buy speed and someone else's effort; you do not keep the search work, the market map or the candidate relationships.

Rates vary by country, seniority and the agreement you negotiate, so no honest page can quote you a single percentage. Use your own agreed rate in the agency cost calculator to see the fee per hire and the annual spend it implies.

4. Direct sourcing — you reach the people who are not applying

Direct sourcing means identifying suitable people in the market, checking them against the role and writing to them personally. It reaches passive candidates, and everything it produces stays with you.

The reason most teams do not do it is time. Done manually, one role means building a market map, reading hundreds of profiles, writing individual messages and chasing follow-ups — commonly 10–30 hours per role.

Define the role as evidence you could verify on a profile, not as a wish list.
Map the market first: which companies employ this profile, in which cities, at which level.
Write to a person, not to a segment — reference something specific from their background.
Plan follow-ups. Most replies to cold outreach come after the first message, not to it.
Track who answered and why, so the next search for a similar role starts better.

Can AI do the sourcing for you?

It can do the search, the evaluation, the ranking and the drafting, and it can run the follow-ups. It cannot decide who is worth contacting or who to hire — and it should not.

That is how tamo.ai works. You describe the role once. tamo searches public professional profiles and company data, evaluates every relevant profile against your requirements and returns a ranked shortlist with the evidence per criterion, typically in minutes. You approve the people worth approaching; only then does outreach go out, from your own LinkedIn account, followed by follow-ups and replies in one inbox.

Run your first search See what a role costs