In the ever-evolving landscape of recruitment, finding top talent has become a complex and competitive task. LinkedIn has long been the go-to platform for sourcing candidates, but today, the world of talent acquisition demands a broader and more diversified approach. Let's explore the exciting possibilities of sourcing talent outside of LinkedIn and how this shift can bring remarkable benefits to your recruitment efforts.

What lies beyond LinkedIn?

Even though LinkedIn is focused on showcasing career and professional skills and serves as a reference point for professionals in nearly all possible industries and career levels, this platform is not the only one where a sourcer can find candidates.

On the contrary, there are several professionals in specific niches who hang out on their preferred platforms where recruiting aspects are often not considered, or at least are less pronounced compared to a 'professional social network' like LinkedIn.

Good recruiters know how important it is to find the right place to discover talents, even if these places are designed for different purposes. In some cases, there are actual directories containing talents from various disciplines.

Let’s pick some niche site examples

On these sites, recruiters can connect with talents in specific disciplines. It's just a matter of learning how to navigate that specific environment, the search might be simple or sometimes a little complicated. However, the learning curve is usually not too steep.

Examples of niche sites are plentiful

A site like Kaggle, for example, contains tips, models, data, and code about Machine Learning and AI, making it a typical place to find Data Scientists and ML/AI data engineers.

Places where developers hang out also include GitHub, StackOverflow, DEV, Toptal, HackerRank, and many others, each with their particularities and of interest for technical recruiters and sourcers.

As for the Healthcare sector, sites like Doximity, NPI, HealthGrades, HealthProfs, and ZocDoc are of interest for any branch of medicine and full of medical specialists.

Another interesting mention is for sites like GoogleScholar, Academia, and ResearchGate, which are valuable resources to find experts for academic and research roles.

Ingenious recruiters also utilize these sites to fill junior positions because it is very common for senior professors and people in academia to have direct contact with several students in their discipline. This provides a direct link to easily reach the most skilled and promising students or young graduates.
Worth adding to this category, are also other sites and directories that list patents and the related documentation, since they share similar points to the ones made above.

Another niche is the one of designers and creative individuals. And, of course, we are able to find plenty of specific internet sites focused on these topic. The sectors are vast and includes many tipologies of image design, internet creativity, animations and video editing. When it comes to recruiting a designer and creatives, the places to search are sites like Behance, Dribbble, or Fiverr, just to mention the largest ones, however the list here can be quite long.

… and some more generalist sites?

Even more generalist sites with different objectives can be gold mines for sourcers. The important part is identifying a specific topic of interest that will meet the recruiting needs required for a successful hire. This requires sourcers to narrow their search to find the right topic and therefore the right candidates.

For example, sites filled with questions and answers, identify 'experts' and people with interests in that topics. Sites in this category could be Quora, Medium or Reddit.

A similar situation occurs with sites focused on organizing meetings and events between people with a common interest. An example of this category could be Meetup, Eventbrite or DownToMeet which offer opportunities for recruiters to find people with specific interests and specialists in more diverse disciplines, sometimes professionals, sometimes amateurs.

The list of generalist sites that can be of interest to sourcers and recruiters is aslo very long, but some additional sites worth mentioning are Polywork, 10times.com, and potentially many more. For example, there are recruiters able to go the extra mile and source from sites like, Slideshare or Vimeo, where they find authors of presentations or videos about a specific field of expertise or also places like TickTok, Clubhouse or even Pinterest.

Each of these platforms requires some specific knowledge to be an effective source of talent. Obviously, there is a high dependence on the specific niche where the recruiting is needed.

You can find a discussion about recruiting niche, here:

Are we forgetting something?

Of course!
We should not forget the top ones such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter/X, as well as Instagram and TikTok. They are so extensive and cover such a wide range of topics that there are no additional comments to add.

We put them at the end of this list because they are so obvious making it potentially superfluous to mention them 😀.

OK - great, but how do we easily access that information?

All this information and the great amount of people's profiles participating in these specific sites is good for sourcers and recruiters but how do we properly capitalize on it, and how do we access this info without spending hours and hours on the browser?

Navigation of these sites could be really dispersive and difficult to organize.

We can streamline such searching and sourcing processes with dedicated tools/systems.

One of them is to simplify the search criteria and let automation and the search engines' advanced operators do the heavy lifting. In other words, you define your search criteria and keywords and let your software give you pages with resulting people profiles and links.

Here we could mention the system applied by Jobin.cloud where you have your search criteria in place and with just the selection of your target platform (see image below) it will use Google and Bing X-Ray search techniques and present you the final results. No need to know any operators, boolean strings or any technicality.

You will then be brought to a list of results matching your search, ready for you to screen and eventually import into your pipelines and database for further analysis.

This is quite practical and you can always further tweak or add extra filters to the system anytime.

The point here is to be efficient and fast at accessing new talents from unconventional internet sources. Jobin.cloud helps you achieve that.

Jobin.cloud's built-in X-ray interface - with pre-categorized and selectable websites.

There is more:
The need for a spotless, well-managed database.

It is crucial to highlight the importance of keeping data pristine and free from any duplicates. Following an approach of collecting imports from different sources could in fact lead to a dataset with duplications, inconsistency and information gaps.

Obviously, this is a downside of the approach of ‘sourcing outside LinkedIn’ we are discussing here because a clean and well-organized database is essential for streamlining recruitment procedures.

Fortunately, this is no longer an issue when you utilize automation tools like Jobin.cloud to handle the heavy lifting. For instance, Jobin.cloud, or other similar platforms can provide the capability to effortlessly maintain data integrity by consolidating and eliminating redundant information within the database, while also aggregating available data. In Jobin.cloud, information from various sources can be automatically aggregated, merged, and enriched (click to read more about this) to keep your candidates' profiles updated with their current LinkedIn pages.

And the best part is that all these features are included in the Free Forever Plan of Jobin.cloud.

For some more details, you can read this.

Profile Update and enrichment

A problem that arises when reaching candidates on platforms that are not job and career-oriented is that this information is never complete from a recruiting point of view.

For recruiting purposes, a complete bio, a list of skills, and career history information are very important for pre-screening and selection.

Of course, the obvious solution is to start obtaining email or other contact information to reach out to each candidate and ask for a full resume or CV, which can sometimes be a bit annoying for both recruiters and candidates.

A better option to solve this problem is when there is identifiable information from the internet page, or even better, when the URL of the LinkedIn profile of your prospective candidates is present.

If this is the case, there is a great shortcut offered by the Jobin.cloud Chrome extension that with just one click can automatically extract any LinkedIn URL found on the page and perform a full profile import into your Jobin repository of all (or a bulk selection) of the people found.

It's easy to agree that this is a really efficient and fast way of sourcing and pre-screening candidates 😀

In addition to that, this will unlock the possibility to have these profiles constantly updated also in the future which is even better than collecting a resume or CV in pdf that will become outdated in a few months.

What would it mean for you if you could effortlessly update these profiles with just a single click? Whether you're importing data from a .csv file or scraping from social platforms.

Read more about this feature here

Last but not least (when money is not a concern … )
Purchase Candidate data

Tools that can help automate manual tasks help save tons of time, but you still need to put in some manual effort.

Platforms that directly sell the end result (lists of contact data) are also an option, but are always very expensive
They're mainly made for marketers and sales persons but some, such as HireEZ and SeekOut do a better job for recruiting purposes. They come at a price of about $6000 a year (with no monthly option).

Conclusion

Tkhe recruitment landscape has evolved, requiring a more diversified approach to sourcing talents beyond the confines of LinkedIn. Hard-to-find talents and the best passive candidates are often found on platforms focused on their niches of expertise and on a wide variety of social networks and informational social platforms.

For Recruiters, being able to access these, means exploring new horizons in talent acquisition and opening up exciting possibilities and remarkable benefits for their recruiting efforts. However, in such a heterogeneous environment, there are problems related to accessibility, the lack of information regarding past careers and other information can easily become dispersed, duplicated and incomplete/insufficient for a recruiter's needs.

Fortunately, technology can help in all this, this can range from either purchased lists of contacts with prices around $6k - $12k per year or Free sourcing automation tools such as Jobin.cloud which instead facilitate and streamline accessing the multitude of free resources on the Internet, available at no cost within Jobin.cloud's Free Forever Plan
(Note that Jobin.cloud is an all-in-one platform where other optional commercial features exist. These features include a built-in multichannel messaging, ChatGPT integration, other advanced LinkedIn automations, pipeline management, and more.)