I've been a recruiter for over 20 years — and I love it

I didn't choose this profession; it chose me.

I started in IT, building and hosting websites with a friend back in the early days of the internet, when getting a site online was still a kind of voodoo. From there I moved into network integration — supporting infrastructure for companies big enough to need help but too small to hire someone full-time.

After five or six years I wanted a change, so I called a staffing firm to see what else was out there. They met with me and decided they'd found a perfect fit: working for them, as a recruiter. Apparently the mix of technical knowledge and actually liking people is rarer than you'd think. I figured I'd give it a shot.

Nine years on a commission desk

It was one of the big national firms — a name every recruiter knows, and a reputation every recruiter understands. There's a short ramp where they pay you a salary, then the training wheels come off and you eat what you kill: find and place candidates, or you're gone. If you don't know what you're doing, that takes about three months. Anyone who's worked in staffing just nodded.

I lasted nine years. In that world, nine years is a lifetime.

I was good at it. My job was to find the best candidates, fast, for clients who needed someone starting tomorrow. And I wasn't only competing with other firms — I was competing with my own teammates for the same open roles.

Every Friday, the whole firm got a scorecard. Every recruiter, ranked, with what each of us had billed that week. Everyone could see exactly how you were doing, and do the math on what you were earning.

That's where I learned to source. Not from a course — because finding candidates nobody else could find was the difference between a good week and a bad one.

Then I moved in-house

After nine years I moved to internal recruiting by choice. Placing hundreds of people across dozens of firms was satisfying, but I wanted to build something — whole teams, inside one company, and see what those hires turned into.

It's been rewarding in a different way. Watching a hire change what a team can do is a good feeling. Building out teams with skill sets that barely exist in the market is hard, and genuinely fun.

The sourcing never stopped, though. Job boards, LinkedIn, blogs, GitHub, personal sites, conference talks — anywhere a good candidate leaves a footprint.

What twenty years of sourcing actually teaches you

Mostly that the candidates worth finding aren't where everyone else is looking. Anyone can run a keyword search on a job board and reach the same forty people every other recruiter reached this week. The work is in the rest of the internet.

So the craft comes down to a handful of things done well. Writing a boolean search string that says what you actually mean, instead of one that quietly returns everything. X-ray searching — using Google or Bing to search inside LinkedIn, GitHub, Behance or a university's own pages, without ever logging in. Finding resumes and CVs sitting on the open web, where people put them hoping to be found. Reading a company's published email format instead of guessing an address and hoping it doesn't bounce. Knowing that a location search on a resume works better with local phone area codes than with the city name, because that's what's actually printed on the page.

None of that is difficult. It's just specific, and almost nobody teaches it — you pick it up over years, usually because something is riding on it. That's the gap this site exists to close, whether you're a technical recruiter, an agency sourcer, a talent acquisition partner, or someone who just inherited hiring on top of another job.

Which is why this site exists

Everything here comes out of that: two decades of finding people, first because my income depended on it, then because a team was waiting on me.

• Agency recruiters — if you've got a number to hit and a client who needed someone yesterday, I spent nine years in those trenches. I know what it's like to be measured every Friday.
• Corporate recruiters — if you've got hiring managers asking where the candidates are, I know that seat too. Eleven years of it, and counting.

My specialty is boolean and x-ray searching — finding people across the open web, not just where everyone else is looking. So I built the thing I wanted: a free extension that writes those searches for you. Type plain words, get the search a 20-year sourcer would have built by hand.

Take it, use it, and tell me what's missing — support@sourcerdesk.com. I read everything.

If you'd rather learn the craft than lean on a tool, the Guide teaches it, the blog works through one technique at a time, and the resources page lists what I actually use.