Cross platform sourcing: what is it and why use it

Cross platform sourcing is searching for candidates across several professional and social media platforms.

This involves a lot more platforms than LinkedIn. Think about platforms like GitHub, AngelList, Medium, Kaggle and MeetUp. Just to name a few.

Sourcing on alternative platforms is still not embraced at scale by recruiters.

Our latest poll indicates that 57% of recruiters lose their job or their business if they would be banned for life on LinkedIn.

Looking at the increased restrictions on LinkedIn and the price increases, it can be good idea to include other platforms in your recruitment strategy.

The benefits of cross platform sourcing

Using several other platforms to source talent on provides big opportunities compared to sourcing on LinkedIn only:

• Less competition: The competition on other platforms for candidates is less, a lot less.
• Richer information: Candidate information that you can find on other platforms is in many cases richer in terms of professional activity and orientation.
• Niche players: The users on the alternative platforms are niche players who show very strong interest in a specific domain.

The challenge of cross platform sourcing is that it is hard to find the right platform to source on.

Most of these alternative platforms are not designed for sourcing talent so you have to know how to navigate these platforms.

Every platform has its own formats and rules.

But there are plenty of ways to do this successfully.

Our goal is to help you start today with cross platform sourcing.

Just a reminder: follow the rules of the platforms you’re sourcing on, don’t act like someone else than you actually are and for outreach, only use publicly available information and clearly communicate your intentions.

Alternative platforms for finding talent

There are literally hundreds of platforms out there that provide relevant candidate information.

Because we want to keep things simple and because we focus on tech companies, we picked a selection of platforms so you can begin venturing in cross platform sourcing.

In our blogs on cross platform sourcing you'll find the full explanations per platform with examples of profile information and how to search these platforms.

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