Source candidates
Find people who never applied — from public profiles and public licence registries — ranked against the role, with the evidence behind every rank.
Most good tradespeople and clinicians are not reading job boards. The Source tab looks for people who match a role, ranks them against it, shows you why, and hands the good ones into your pipeline as prospects.
Open a position and choose the Source tab. If you do not see it, sourcing is not switched on for your organization — it is included in the Hire plan.
The tab has four sections: Sourced (the people found), Brief (what you are looking for), Sequences & inbox (outreach to them) and Voice screens.
Across the top is the funnel for this role: Sourced, Engaged, Screened, In pipeline, Hired.
Write the brief first
The brief shapes every search, every licence lookup and every ranking explanation. Fifteen minutes here is worth more than any amount of re-running searches.
- Open the Brief section.
- Fill in Must-haves — one per line. Someone without these is not worth a call.
- Fill in Nice-to-haves. These tip the ranking but never exclude anyone.
- Fill in Non-negotiables — deal-breakers worth stating up front in outreach, such as an on-call rotation.
- List Required licences, one per line, with the state if it matters, for example "Journeyman electrician (TX)". These are checked against public state registries where one exists.
- Set the Pay range and whether it is per hour or per year.
- Set the Search radius in miles from the job location.
- Add anything else under Notes for the search — shift, travel, tools, team size.
- Choose Save brief.
Every field is optional, but a brief with nothing in it produces a search with nothing to aim at.
Run a search
- Open the Sourced section.
- Choose Find people — or Search again if you have run one before.
- The search runs in the background. Come back in a few minutes.
- Expand What it searched for to see the exact queries that were used. If they are aimed at the wrong thing, fix the brief rather than re-running the same search.
Results are filtered with All and Saved, and each run tells you where the people came from: how many from the web, how many from the federal provider registry, how many from a state registry.
What is actually searched
Public web profiles. InsightHire turns the role and your brief into a handful of plain-language searches and runs them against an index of public profile pages, keeping the passage of the page that matched as evidence.
The federal NPI registry. For licensed healthcare roles, InsightHire queries the official CMS NPPES provider registry nationwide. This confirms identity and specialty; it is not a state licence check.
State licensing registries, where the state publishes one as open data or a documented bulk file.
Which states are actually covered
Be honest with your hiring managers about this. Trade licensing is not uniform, and most states publish nothing that can be searched automatically.
| State | What is searched |
|---|---|
| Texas | TDLR — electrician, HVAC, appliance installer, elevator, well driller. Plumbing is lookup-only. |
| Florida | DBPR — electrician, HVAC, plumber, contractor, roofer, pool |
| California | CSLB — electrician, HVAC, plumber, contractor, roofer, welder, pool |
| Washington | L&I — the trades above plus sheet metal, elevator and well driller. Contractor registrations, not individual journey cards. |
| Oregon | BCD and CCB — electrician, plumber, contractor, elevator |
| Minnesota | DLI — electrician, plumber, elevator, contractor |
| Virginia | DPOR — electrician, plumber, HVAC |
| New Jersey | Division of Consumer Affairs — electrician, HVAC, plumber, contractor, nurse |
| Connecticut | eLicense — electrician, plumber, nurse |
| Delaware | DPR — electrician, HVAC, plumber, nurse |
| Colorado | DORA — nurse |
| Illinois | IDFPR — nurse |
| Pennsylvania | Philadelphia L&I only — electrician, plumber, contractor, HVAC |
| New York | New York City DOB only — electrician, plumber, welder |
Everywhere else, no automated registry search runs. Web search still runs, and for some states InsightHire shows a link to the official lookup page so you can check by hand. The Source tab tells you which registries apply to the role's state, or says plainly that no free automated roster exists for that licence type.
Two registries people often expect are not available and are not faked: California's DCA/BreEZe boards and Michigan's LARA publish no reusable dataset, and the national nursing database has no free interface that permits automated use. For nurses, the NPI registry is used instead.
How the ranking works
Each person carries a n% match — how closely their evidence matches the role description and your brief.
Where your organization has ranking turned on, they also carry a Coach score, which blends five things: how well they match the role, whether a trade licence was confirmed, whether contact details are on file, their verification score, and your team's thumbs.
Choose Why this rank? on anyone to see it broken out:
- Matches the role description
- Trade licence verified
- Contact details on file
- Verification score
- Your team's thumbs
Underneath, Against your brief ticks off each must-have and licence it could find evidence for, and What would move them up tells you what is missing — usually "run Verify" or "give a thumbs up or down".
The ranking uses none of the role's protected characteristics as inputs. It weighs similarity, licence status, contact completeness, verification and recruiter feedback, and nothing else.
Teach it with thumbs
Use the thumbs on each person: Good fit — rank people like this higher or Not a fit — rank people like this lower. Click again to undo.
Thumbs are stored per role and applied overnight, not instantly — expect a re-ranked list the next morning, not the next click. Until a role has about 20 thumbs, including at least one of each, the ranking uses its standard weights; after that it learns the weights from your team's own decisions on that role.
Hand people off
- Choose Add to pipeline on someone worth pursuing.
- Confirm.
They become a candidate on this role with the kind Prospect and the source Sourcing, and the card changes to Open candidate.
Two checkboxes next to the search button decide what happens at hand-off:
- Invite to journey on hand-off — on by default. Sends the role's screening journey invitation as soon as they are handed off.
- Add to sequence on hand-off — puts each person you hand off into a sequence you choose, so the follow-up runs itself. See Sequences.
Hand-off is not outreach. Nobody hears from you until a journey invitation, a sequence or a message you write goes out.
Keep looking every day
Tick Keep looking every day in the brief and InsightHire runs a fresh search each morning for as long as the role is open, then emails the new people to the hiring manager and the person who created the role.
The digest is subject-lined "n new people found for role" and lists up to five of the best new profiles with their match score and a link to the Source tab. If your organization connected Slack, it posts there too.
To stop it, untick Keep looking every day and save the brief.
What InsightHire never does
- It does not scrape LinkedIn or Google.
- It does not read anything behind a login, a paywall or a terms-of-use prohibition on automated access.
- It does not invent contact details. An email address or phone number on a sourced profile came from the public page that was indexed, or from the public registry record itself.
- It does not read pages that a state publishes only as a lookup form. Only datasets a state publishes for reuse are read.
If a registry has no open dataset, the honest answer is that the state is not covered, and that is what the tab shows you.
Related
- Verify a candidate — confirm contact details and licence status before you call.
- Sequences — the follow-up that turns a sourced name into a conversation.