Recruiters will find it easier to track down hard-to-find technology professionals with the help of a new UK-based ‘people aggregator’. 3Sourcing has been launched by former recruiter Tom Savage and business partner Raz Dinu, and is part of a Silicon Valley accelerator programme for start-ups, which will broaden out to other sectors in the future.

Savage told Recruiter that he was frustrated by the recruitment sector’s use of what he felt were relatively old methods of finding people. “I felt there was a much more intelligent way to go about things, and that the answer may lie in some technological solution,” he said.

Dinu has written an algorithm that brings together all the available unstructured data that makes up a person’s online footprint in one place. The tool was born after the pair tried to solve the disconnect that existed between jobs and candidates on 3Desk, its online marketplace launched for freelancers. “There would always be lots of jobs for hard-to-find candidates and lots of candidates, but no jobs for easy-to-fill roles,” said Savage. “We were tinkering around trying to solve this problem, and that is how 3Sourcing was born. We shared it with some recruiter friends and they couldn’t get enough of it, so we knew we were on to something.”

3Sourcing has kicked off with technology professionals because these staff “have an interesting footprint” on the internet, said Savage and it has indexed relevant sites such as GitHub, Stack Overflow and Dribble. 3Sourcing works just like a search engine and is simple to use: a recruiter keys in a skill, such as the programming language Java, and a location, and it will return suitable individuals with a brief summary and links to their various online profiles and activities. Currently, searches return a healthy crop of results but Savage said they still have more indexing to do. 

Early adopters of 3Sourcing include the agencies Austin Fraser, Square One, and Stott and May. Aaron Neale, director at Stott and May, believes that people aggregators “are the future” of the industry. “It affords a recruiter more of their most valuable asset: their time,” he said.

Because of the accelerator programme, Savage would not be drawn on which sectors or markets 3Sourcing would focus on next, and said the priority was getting feedback from users to find out how the site is being used. He reported that some are running it as a tab in the background so they can quickly locate the latest information on a person that they might find on a candidate database or a job board. “This means they don’t waste time tracing someone who isn’t available any more,” he said. “This is one of the issues we want to address. There’s a huge amount of time spent across the recruitment world tracking people who aren’t available. We want the tool to help people make more qualified calls to people who want to be reached. Availability of candidates is something that comes up a lot.”

Recruiters can run several free trials on 3Sourcing and can then pay a subscription of £99 per month per user.