Building a Talent Pipeline That Doesn't Depend on LinkedIn
What happens to your sourcing if LinkedIn changes its pricing tomorrow? Or limits InMail volume. Or restricts filters to Enterprise-only.
If your answer is "we'd be in serious trouble", you have a single point of failure in your most critical business function.
I've worked for many startups. At most of them, the recruiting team's sourcing strategy was "we have LinkedIn Recruiter licenses". That's not a strategy. That's a vendor dependency.
The LinkedIn Problem
Everyone is fishing in the same pond. That senior backend engineer in Austin? She's getting 30 InMails a month from companies using the same LinkedIn Recruiter filters you are.
The profiles are self-reported and often stale. That engineer who "works at Google" might have left 8 months ago.
Passive candidates are invisible. The best engineers often have minimal LinkedIn presence. If your only channel requires active LinkedIn presence, you're missing a huge chunk of the talent pool.
Pricing only goes up. ~$10K-$12K per seat per year in 2026.
Diversifying Your Sourcing Channels
GitHub and Open Source. 100M+ developers. Activity tells you things LinkedIn never will. A GitHub profile shows 47 contributions to a Rust project over 18 months. A LinkedIn profile says "Proficient in Rust."
Tech Communities. Stack Overflow (high reputation in specific tags), Discord servers, Reddit (r/ExperiencedDevs), Hacker News hiring threads.
Conference and Meetup Speakers. Self-identifying as knowledgeable, good communicators, and open to public engagement. Watch recorded talks to evaluate communication skills before reaching out.
Referrals (Actually Good Ones). Pay $5K-$10K per hire. Ask specific questions: "Who's the best infrastructure engineer you've worked with?" Follow up quarterly. Make the process frictionless.
Niche Job Boards. Key Values, AngelList/Wellfound, language-specific boards, underrepresented group communities (Lesbians Who Tech, /dev/color, Techqueria).
Your Own Content. Engineering blog posts and open source tools attract engineers interested in the same problems. Compounding awareness over time.
The Diversified Pipeline
| Channel | % of Pipeline | Signal Quality |
|---|---|---|
| 25-30% | Medium | |
| GitHub + Candyfloss | 20-25% | High |
| Referrals | 20-25% | Very High |
| Communities + Conferences | 10-15% | High |
| Inbound (blog, brand) | 10-15% | High |
| Niche job boards | 5-10% | Medium-High |
The goal isn't to eliminate LinkedIn. It's to make sure that if it disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have a functioning pipeline.
Where Candyfloss Fits
We index millions of profiles from multiple sources. Career history, skills, salary data, GitHub activity, job change signals. An independent dataset that doesn't depend on any single platform.
Your talent pipeline should be yours, not rented from someone who can change the terms at any time.