Here's a habit that separates fast sourcers from thorough ones — and the thorough ones aren't slower, they just know a trick: the same search words, run three ways, return three different sets of people.
Why one search only shows you one pool
When you type keywords into Google or Bing, the engine matches them anywhere on the page — a job title in the headline counts the same as the same phrase buried in a recommendation someone wrote. That "anywhere" pool is broad but noisy, and its top results are just one slice of who's actually out there.
Search engines also let you demand the match in specific places:
intitle:— the words must appear in the page's title. On a profile or resume page, the title is usually the person's name and current headline, so this pool is people who are the thing you typed, not people near it.inurl:— the words must appear in the page's address. Resumes and portfolios often carry the role right in the filename or path (think/jane-doe-staff-accountant-resume.pdf), so this pool skews toward people who named their own document after the role.
The three-pass routine
- Run your search as a normal anywhere match. Work the first pages.
- Re-run it with the role in intitle:. Different faces rise — often stronger direct matches.
- Re-run with inurl:. A third set surfaces, heavy on actual resume documents.
Each pass takes about a minute. The overlap between pools is smaller than you'd expect, because you're not asking a different question — you're asking the same question of a different part of the page, and the engine ranks each pool by different signals.
The part everyone forgets
Your browser is quietly keeping score for you: links you've already visited turn purple. On passes two and three, ignore the purple — only the new faces are blue. That's the whole triage system, built into every browser since the 1990s, and it makes the second and third passes faster than the first.
The honest caveat
Not every role plays equally. inurl: shines for professions that write resumes and portfolios (accountants, engineers, designers) and does less for people whose only web presence is a profile page. When a pass comes up thin, that's information too — it tells you where that pool of candidates does and doesn't live online.
Sourcer's Desk builds all three variants with its match buttons — cycle anywhere → title → url on the same plain words and it rewrites the operators for you. But the technique is yours either way: same words, three questions, three pools. Most of your competitors stop at one.