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Candidate Sourcing Guide

For recruiters who source by hand

Open-source candidate sourcing that checks the pipeline first

The open-source CompanyOS

Candidate sourcing is finding people who never applied, then checking they are not already in your pipeline. Kortix is the open-source CompanyOS: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own, with the agents working on real cloud computers.

Try KortixSee a run

Self-host is freeSources and drafts only, the recruiter sendsOne new session per open role, every morning

Daily candidate-sourcing sweep · 07:00
The candidate-sourcing run as it appears in a Kortix session: the run's title line, the prompt it ran, and its summary in the review inbox.

The published run on Kortix's candidate-sourcing page.

Illustrative example. Your counts depend on the role and the sourcing profile.

Source: kortix.com/use-cases/candidate-sourcing

Open source. Read it, fork it, audit it.

The job breaks at the second step

Finding people is the part a recruiter can already do. Reading the pipeline and writing a first touch that survives a reply is the part that gets skipped when the role is already three weeks late.

  1. greenhouse-check.csvWhat comes back
    RefStageAction
    1Applied in MarchDropped
    2Contacted in AprilDropped
    3New matchDrafted
    Illustrative example. Your counts depend on the role and the sourcing profile.

    Pipeline check

    Drops the people you already know.

    The run reads the role's Greenhouse pipeline before it drafts anything, so someone who applied in March or was passed on in April is not contacted again. The run's output reads: "Reviewed 31 LinkedIn profiles and dropped 13 that were already in the pipeline. Drafted 18 personalized emails, each with the candidate's current role and the reason they matched. All 18 are in the review inbox, and nothing was sent."

  2. drafts/batch-0917.csvWhat comes back
    RefCurrent roleLine used in the draft
    1Staff data engineerThe warehouse migration you ran is the setup we work in
    2Payments product managerYou shipped the checkout rewrite your team wrote about
    One batch, one opening per candidate

    First draft

    Each email uses the candidate's own work.

    The draft is built from one or two real details in the profile, and the skill file says to rewrite any line that reads the same without them. The AI candidate sourcing page applies that test to a ranked list.

  3. review-inbox.mdWhat comes back
    • Drafts in the inbox18
    • Sent by the agent0
    • Greenhouse writes0
    Illustrative example. Your counts depend on the role and the sourcing profile.

    Review inbox

    Sending stays with the recruiter.

    Every draft lands in the review inbox. The agent has no send action and no write access to Greenhouse, so the recruiter edits, sends and updates the ATS. The open-source sourcing guide covers where that boundary is written down.

What each sourcing tool sells you

Each price is the vendor's published figure, checked November 2026 on the Juicebox, hireEZ and Pin pricing pages. The tools page goes further into what each price includes.

What it is

Kortix

An open-source CompanyOS where sourcing is an agent in your repo

Juicebox, PeopleGPT

AI search over a candidate database, with outreach templates and ATS integrations

hireEZ

Sourcing, CRM, outreach and screening on top of your ATS

Pin

AI sourcing over 850M+ profiles, with sequences and interview booking

Published price

Kortix

Free to start on your own keys; credits from $50 a month

Juicebox, PeopleGPT

Free tier; Starter $99 per seat a month on yearly billing

hireEZ

Solo recruiters start at $494/mo with a 7-day free trial

Pin

Free; Solo $100 per user a month, billed yearly

Open source

Kortix

Yes

Juicebox, PeopleGPT

No

hireEZ

No

Pin

No

Self-host

Kortix

Yes, free

Juicebox, PeopleGPT

No, SaaS only

hireEZ

No, SaaS only

Pin

No, SaaS only

ATS integration

Kortix

Greenhouse connects as a connector, read-only on the pipeline

Juicebox, PeopleGPT

Integrates with Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workday and others

hireEZ

40+ native ATS integrations

Pin

120+ ATS integrations including Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and iCIMS

Rival prices are each vendor's published figure; check the vendor page before you buy.

The rules are files you can read

Open source changes what a recruiter can check before trusting a run. The dedupe rule, the draft limit and the send boundary are text in the repo, and anything that touches them arrives as a change request.

The agent

One file holds the prompt. agents/candidate-sourcing.md carries the job the agent does, and kortix.yaml carries the triggers: block that runs it every morning.

The rules

A skill file holds the checks. skills/outbound-sourcing/SKILL.md says read the pipeline first, drop every match already in it, and draft at most 20 candidates per run.

The boundary

Never send, never write to the ATS. The same file ends with two refusals, and Kortix publishes the run that holds them, from trigger to review inbox.

Hosting

Run it where the data has to stay. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free.

Candidate sourcing questions, answered

What does candidate sourcing mean?

Candidate sourcing is the work of finding people who fit a role before they apply: searching for profiles, checking who is already known, and writing the first message. It ends where the interview process begins, and the step-by-step guide puts the pipeline check in its right place.

Is sourcing the same as recruiting?

No. Sourcing is the front of recruiting, where people are found and contacted; recruiting also covers screening, interviews, offers and the hire. Many small teams run both from one desk, which is why the two words get used for each other.

What are the best tools for candidate sourcing?

It depends on whether you want to rent seats or own the job. Juicebox, hireEZ and Pin sell searches and sequences by the seat; Kortix is the open-source CompanyOS, where the sourcing agent and its rules are files in your repo. The tools comparison sets the prices side by side.

What is the difference between sourcing and recruiting?

Sourcing ends with people who will take a first call. Recruiting carries those people through screening, interviews and an offer, and a sourcing tool buys only the first part, which is why its price rarely covers the second. The longer comparison follows one role through both halves.

Start with the pipeline check.

The setup prompt writes the agent, the skill and the daily trigger into one change request, so you can read the whole job before it runs.

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