Every recruiter has a req like this one. It has been open eleven weeks. The applicant flow is technically alive, forty applications, sixty, a hundred, but none of them are close. The skill is niche, or the local market is thin, or the title is one nobody thinks to search for. Screening harder does not help. There is nothing in the pile to find.

This is the case that screening tools quietly do not handle. We built SquarePeg to tell you which applicants are worth your time and to show you exactly why. That is genuinely useful right up until the moment the answer is "none of them," and then it is just an expensive way to confirm what you already suspected.

So what happens next? Usually one of three things. You call an agency and pay twenty percent. You buy a separate sourcing tool with its own login, its own credit balance, and its own idea of what a good candidate looks like. Or you open LinkedIn and start scrolling.

All three have the same problem, and it is not cost. It is that the moment you leave, you lose the model.

The part that gets thrown away

Setting up a req properly is real work. You decide which requirements are non-negotiable and which are nice to have. You write eligibility rules: location, work authorization, the reasons you rejected people last time. You tune the criteria, look at the scores, adjust, look again. By the time the shortlist is trustworthy, you have encoded a fair amount of judgment about what this role actually needs.

Then you go outbound and none of it comes with you.

The agency gets a job description and a phone call. The sourcing tool gets a boolean string, which is a lossy translation of a criteria model at best. LinkedIn gets whatever you can hold in your head. Candidates come back from those channels unscored, unranked, and unchecked against the eligibility rules you spent an afternoon writing and if one of them progresses, someone re-enters them by hand.

You end up running two standards for one role. Applicants get judged by a model you built and can inspect. Sourced candidates get judged by vibes, or by whatever the vendor's black box decided, which you cannot inspect at all.

That is the gap we went after.

Sourcing inside the job

Outbound sourcing in SquarePeg searches an external talent database using the job's own criteria and returns candidates into the same candidate list you already work from. The candidate view becomes a dropdown: Applicants, Rediscovered, Sourced, each with its own count.

Three things about how it works matter more than the fact that it exists.

The criteria carry over intact. Required and preferred criteria go to the search provider as must-haves. Bonus criteria go as nice-to-haves. The distinction you drew when you set the job up is the distinction the search respects. You are not rewriting your requirements as a query and hoping the translation holds.

Eligibility rules are enforced on the way in. If a candidate fails a knockout rule, they do not appear in the Sourced tab. The rules you wrote to keep your applicant shortlist clean keep your sourced shortlist clean too, without you checking each profile by hand.

Sourced candidates are scored by the same model as applicants and rediscovered candidates. Not a separate outbound score, not a vendor's proprietary match percentage. The same scoring model, with the same explanation behind it. You can ask why a sourced candidate scored where they did and get the same kind of answer you would get for someone who applied.

Sourced candidates are marked so you always know what you are looking at: a chip on the card, a blue marker behind the score, and a banner on the profile explaining where they came from. You can filter them by location, criteria, whether they meet required, authenticity, score, invited status, and more, exactly as you filter applicants.

Why bother saying all that

A glass-box screening model and a black-box sourcing engine bolted together is just a black box with extra steps. If sourced candidates arrive with a number you cannot interrogate, the number is worthless and you will go check the profiles by hand, which is what you were trying to avoid.

The value is not that outbound candidates appear. Plenty of tools make candidates appear. It is that they appear ranked by criteria you wrote, filtered by rules you set, with an explanation you can read and argue with, in the list where you were already working.

If your pipeline has nobody in it and you want this turned on for your account, email support@squarepeg.ai and we will switch it on.