RecruitSourcing-Only Recruiting: What It Costs and When It Is Enough
What a sourcing-only engagement covers, how Recruitmint's Sourcing Sprint is structured, and how to tell whether sourcing alone is enough or a full search is the better call.
What a sourcing-only engagement covers, how Recruitmint's Sourcing Sprint is structured, and how to tell whether sourcing alone is enough or a full search is the better call.
Sourcing-only recruiting means a firm identifies, engages and qualifies candidates and hands over a shortlist, while the client runs interviews, assessment, offer and close internally. Our version is the Sourcing Sprint, a flat fee quoted per search. It fits a client who already knows what the role needs and simply needs a pipeline to run against.
A Sourcing Sprint is scoped narrowly, on purpose. The engagement covers identifying candidates, reaching out to them, and qualifying whether they are worth the client's time. What comes out the other end is a calibrated shortlist, not a hired candidate.
Everything after the shortlist stays with the client. That means:
The firm's scope stops at the handoff. If a client already has an interview process that works, and just needs more of the right people in front of it, this is the cheapest way to get there. If that process does not exist yet, or the client has never run it for this kind of role, sourcing alone leaves the hardest part of the hire unaddressed.
The fee is priced per search, not per candidate and not per hire, because the deliverable is a shortlist, not a placement. There is no success fee attached to a Sourcing Sprint, because there is no placement event this model is responsible for. The client owns the outcome from the interview stage forward, including whatever it costs internally in recruiter or hiring-manager hours to run that stage well.
The quote itself moves with the work. A search for a well-defined mid-level role in a familiar market sits toward the lighter end. A search that requires reaching into a market the team has less visibility into, or qualifying candidates against a more technical bar, costs more to source properly, and the quote moves accordingly. Pricing is available on request rather than published as a fixed figure.
The Hiring Scorecard is a 2-3 minute, nine-question assessment that scores four things: Role Clarity, Hiring Readiness, Talent Market Fit and Recruitment Capacity. One of the nine questions asks directly what kind of support a client wants: sourcing only, end-to-end, ongoing, or not sure.
The routing logic is direct. If a client asks for sourcing-only support and has one role open, the scorecard recommends Sourcing Sprint. If the client asks for ongoing support, or has four or more roles open, it recommends Embedded Partner instead. Almost everything else, including a single hard-to-fill role with end-to-end support requested, routes to Full Search.
That logic reflects something practical: sourcing-only makes sense when the constraint is candidate flow, not process. A client who already knows how to run a structured interview loop does not need a firm to run it for them. A client who is unsure how to assess candidates for a role they have never hired before is asking the scorecard to solve a different problem, and it answers accordingly.
Sourcing-only tends to work when three things are true at once:
A founder who has hired several engineers before and just needs more qualified resumes in the pipeline for one more opening fits this pattern well. So does a hiring manager backfilling a role the team has filled successfully before, where the interview loop is already built and just needs candidates to run through it.
Sourcing-only tends to fall short in three situations:
In any of those cases, a Full Search is the better fit. It combines a launch fee with a success fee on placement, and it covers the search end to end, from calibration through candidate assessment, interviews, offer and close. The Sourcing Sprint vs Full Search comparison walks through that decision in more detail, including how the scorecard's own logic separates the two.
| Approach | What it covers | What the client owns | Typical cost basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-house sourcing | Whatever the internal team can source themselves | Everything, including sourcing | Internal time only |
| Contingency recruiter | Sourcing and candidate presentation, paid only on placement | Interviews, assessment, offer, close | Success fee only, no upfront cost |
| Sourcing Sprint | Identify, engage, qualify, hand over a shortlist | Interviews, assessment, offer, close | Flat fee per search, quoted on request |
| Full Search | Calibration through assessment, interviews, offer and close | Final decision and offer approval | Launch fee plus a success fee, quoted on request |
The distinction that matters most is between Sourcing Sprint and contingency: both leave interviews and close with the client, but Sourcing Sprint is a paid engagement owed regardless of outcome, while contingency is typically structured around payment only at placement. For a fuller comparison of how contingency and retained models differ from this scope entirely, what a success fee actually covers is worth reading alongside this one, as is the broader breakdown in recruiter fees and engagement models explained.
Suppose a growth-stage ecommerce brand needs one Head of Ecommerce hire, has run a structured interview loop for leadership hires before, and just wants a stronger candidate pool than its own outreach is producing.
If that same brand instead had no established interview process for ecommerce leadership roles, or was hiring the role for the first time, the calculation changes. A Full Search combining a launch fee with a success fee on placement would cover the parts the client cannot yet run internally, and the success fee itself varies with seniority, complexity and volume rather than being fixed. For a Head of Ecommerce hire specifically, the process differences between the two models are covered in how we run a Head of Ecommerce search.
A Sourcing Sprint is the right call when the role is well-defined, the market is familiar, and the client already has a working interview and assessment process, just not enough candidates flowing into it. It is the wrong call when the client lacks the internal capacity to run that process, or is hiring into unfamiliar territory, in which case a Full Search, combining a launch fee with a success fee, covers the parts a shortlist alone cannot. Pricing for both models is available on request.
No. The Sourcing Sprint is a flat fee per search, with no success fee attached, because the deliverable is a calibrated shortlist rather than a completed placement. Success fees are a Full Search or Embedded Partner feature, tied to the placement itself.
The scorecard and site describe three distinct models rather than a tiered upgrade path, so the honest framing is that a client who realizes mid-search that they need help with interviews, assessment or close should scope a Full Search for that work rather than assume automatic conversion. The Hiring Scorecard is built to route a client to the right model up front based on what kind of support is actually needed.
The scorecard's logic routes four or more open roles, or a request for ongoing support, toward Embedded Partner rather than Sourcing Sprint, since that model is built for dedicated capacity across multiple active searches. A single role with sourcing-only support requested is the specific case Sourcing Sprint is scoped for.
The upfront fee is a single flat amount rather than a launch fee plus a success fee, but a Sourcing Sprint shifts interview, assessment, offer and close costs onto the client's own team. Whether that is cheaper overall depends on how much internal time those stages consume and how much risk the client is comfortable owning on a role that matters; both models are quoted on request.
How Recruitmint's Embedded Partner model is structured, what it includes, and the volume threshold at which the Hiring Scorecard recommends it over a single search.
Embedded recruiting and RPO both provide ongoing recruiting capacity, but differ in scope and how pricing is structured. Here is an honest comparison, using Recruitmint's Embedded Partner model and the RPO Association's own published pricing categories.
The market convention for retained executive search fees, what that means in dollar terms at different compensation levels, and how Recruitmint's Full Search model compares in structure.