Cold sourcing: hire someone you don't know.

The three biggest sources of candidates are referrals from your existing team, inbound applicants who apply on your jobs page, and sourced candidates that you proactively bring into your funnel.

Small companies tend to rely on referrals, and large companies tend to rely on sourcing candidates, using dedicated recruiting sourcers for whom this is their full time job (often the first rung on a recruiter career ladder), and medium sized companies are somewhere on the continuum between those extremes. (Slack in particular has done some interesting work to encourage inbound applicants, and while they’re now getting to the size where most companies depend more heavily on sourced and direct applicants, I suspect inbound applicants are not their largest source of candidates.)

Hiring and recruiting teams tend to prefer referrals because they often have higher pass and accept rates, and most early stage companies, especially those without dedicated recruiting functions end up being primarily composed of referrals. (An interesting caveat: lately I’m seeing more of a second category of referral candidate, who are running their own extremely systematic interviewing process, with the aim of getting offers from three or more companies, and consequently tend to have much lower acceptance rates.)

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