Sourcing Without Tools — In Praise of Frugality

Originally published on Sourceurs ? Non Peut-être ! by Nicolas Darcis.

Once upon a time, there was travel…

I love travelling — and more than anything, the open-road wandering it brings. I discovered it at 13, on a traverse of France by back roads: south-south-east, through the Jura, Switzerland, the Alps, Italy, Menton, and finally Provence. Eight days drifting from town to village, visiting church steeples, parks, curiosities. Thirty years later, that wandering still haunts me: the intoxication of freedom, crates of fruit bought by the roadside, colourful markets, improvised bivouacs, the adventure of reinventing daily life. Since then, the wandering has taken many forms — on a scooter, on foot, by bike, running, by car. The means don’t matter. What counts is the escape.

Every year it’s roughly the same: first comes the ritual of choosing a destination, then the preparation — logistics, gear. I love this part. Hours spent listing, studying, comparing: sleeping bags, tents, the caloric value of freeze-dried meals… pure bliss. Everyone has their quirks.

I also find it a perfect outlet for my sourcer instincts: sourcing the right kit, finding the right blog — a journey before the journey.

The gear race

What I’ve learned from these adventures? You always pack too much — at least at first. You over-equip.

My first backpack weighed 30 kg for a six-day trek. A few years later, at the Marathon des Sables, my pack weighed 9 — food included — for the same duration.

What does this have to do with sourcing? I’m getting there.

Connected to dozens of Slacks, Discords, and Facebook groups, I watch the same question appear every day:

“I’m struggling to source Sales/Data/Developer profiles… does anyone have a tool or platform to recommend?”

Ah, the ultimate tool! The magic, saving platform!

Is there anyone with a hammer that drives nails straight into angled right-angle corners?

Fortunately, there are lists circulated under the counter — or not so under the counter — cataloguing the “must-haves” of every good sourcer. Some people have even made it their trademark.

Dean Da Costa, The Search Authority, posts a video about a new tool almost every week. His list is staggering. For a long time, this was my guilty pleasure: I love novelty, the wow effect — install, test, what a treat.

Yet, just like in trekking, these plugins have a cost. Over time, this endless parade of plugins slows my machine to a halt — turning it into a hairdryer or a helicopter. Some plugins, poorly debugged, create incompatibilities between tools or with certain websites. I can no longer use Chrome to access my online banking — I have to open a separate, “clean” browser.

Each plugin has its use, they say — like carabiners, pitons, sleeping bags… there are many. For every situation, there’s a tool, just as there are dozens of trowels in masonry or knives in a kitchen. Faced with a given situation, I can indeed ask myself which tool to use.

But what if the situation is new? Now I’m off on a quest for the perfect ad-hoc tool to solve my problem. Without it, I’m lost.

That’s the fast-shoe syndrome.

It wasn’t his Pumas that made Usain Bolt a great champion. Just as it’s not LinkedIn that makes a great sourcer. Tools bring comfort and help — nothing more.

It’s not the tool that makes the craftsman.

Coming back to equipment: I see several limits to an abundance of tools — machine performance, which I’ve already mentioned; and a second, more insidious one: the loss of my own performance, caused by the sheer profusion of tools. Like a child in a candy shop, I don’t know which one to pick.

Who wants to go far must spare the horse

If I want to spare my horse — and my back — I’ll need to travel light and make choices. Give up the gadgets and focus on what matters.

Sourcing is like travel: rather than obsessing over the superfluous, focus on the essential — the goal: recruiting, or at least building a pipeline for it.

Over the years, we taught our sons to pack only the essentials. What’s essential varies by destination. But what never varies: each child gets a 20-litre daypack. There are five of us, and we distribute the rest across two 90-litre bags, supplemented by lightweight bivouac gear and some electronics. The bags top out at 14 kg each — light enough to carry. The trade-off: every item is carefully chosen and considered.

The same applies to sourcing. Before thinking about tools, think about what you want to achieve. Think about the tasks at hand, then build a problem-solving method around them.

Time is money

I’m sometimes alarmed by the budgets spent on tools versus the budget invested in teams — not in salaries, but in the means we give ourselves to do the work: time.

• Time for methodical reflection and the design of efficient strategies
• Time for learning and developing beyond tool use

When I launched Anara, I imposed a discipline on myself: for every sourcing operation I ran regularly, I identified two or three different ways to do it, with a different tool set. The goal: avoid dependency on a single tool or method, and approach an action from multiple angles. This also lets me design processes I can reprogram at will, depending on my needs.

Less is more

After this approach, my daily “goto” — my sourcing stack — becomes quite frugal: a scraper, a bulk-opener, and a spreadsheet.

But I know my tools intimately. I know their strengths and their limits. Yet once again, mastering the tool is necessary but not sufficient for sourcing or recruiting. What enables me to source is a broader process of understanding the challenge and deploying a methodical approach to meet it.

Mastering the latest trendy growth tool will not make you more effective if you haven’t carefully defined your objectives.

Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul

Rabelais wrote this to say that without humanist awareness, science leads mankind to ruin — but it also speaks to the necessary ownership of knowledge as a lever for progress. In other words: I grow when I internalise concepts; I stagnate when I apply them mechanically.

Tools augment us. By multiplying our strengths, they also multiply our mistakes.

My approach is primarily task-driven. I think about what I want to accomplish first, then consider which tools are useful to get there. I break each task into multiple steps, then think about how to execute each one.

A concrete example: sourcing developers with a taste for innovation

Say I’m looking for senior developers with an appetite for innovation in a given technology (Ruby, NodeJS, or Laravel — the technology doesn’t matter). I could dive straight into LinkedIn. I’d find people who list the technology — no doubt.

But what about the appetite for innovation?

I could look for those who claim to be conference speakers — an interesting signal, but results would be thin. Another option: look directly at conferences and speakers, or at Meetup, or even Twitter.

For each of these, I’d adopt a different strategy.

Conferences & speakers: retrieve speaker names, then enrich — LinkedIn can then be very helpful.

Meetup: I could pull the entire group. But for NodeJS, that’s over 5,000 people — enrichment would be long and tedious. And the ease of joining a group makes it a weak signal by itself.

I’d focus instead on those who attend meetups — people who make the effort to show up. That’s a far stronger signal of commitment. I’d look at attendance frequency: the more often someone comes, the more embedded they are in the community.

Twitter: I isolate opinion leaders on a given technology, then pull their followers. I ran this recently for Java — 40 opinion leaders, pulled their followers, filtered by geography and bio, enriched via GitHub to find emails, then LinkedIn profiles. Why bother ending up on LinkedIn? Because it guarantees that my prospects are actively engaged in their field — and therefore receptive to innovation.

The Meetup process in detail

Once the logic is set, here’s how I break down the steps:

1. Retrieve attendees from each event
2. Clean the data, keeping only people with first and last names
3. Count occurrences
4. Filter for those appearing more than once and set a minimum attendance threshold
5. Enrich via LinkedIn search (first name + last name)

Tool by tool:

• Scraper: InstantDataScraper works well; Webscraper or OutwitHub allow full automation but require more learning time
• Cleaning: import into a spreadsheet, a few simple filters
• Occurrence count: pivot table
• LinkedIn enrichment: concatenate https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords= with first and last name — or PhantomBuster (I prefer the former)
• Verification: bulk opener, 20 URLs at a time

This process is repeatable for every platform.

In the end

The tool is a small thing. It augments us and frees us from tedious, low-value tasks. No more, no less.

Don’t expect to find a tool that will source on your behalf — it simply doesn’t exist. Sourcing is persuasion. And for now, no machine, AI, or gadget can do that for you.

Struggling with your sourcing? Question your pitch before you question your tools.