Inbound recruiting waits for applications; sourcing goes and finds people. For senior and rare profiles in IT services it is usually the only funnel that works — the engineers you most want are employed, not browsing job boards. In practice, CEE sourcing lives on LinkedIn, Djinni, Work.ua and robota.ua, plus GitHub for engineers whose work is public.
What separates disciplined sourcing from a spreadsheet of profile links:
- Provenance — where each profile came from and the link to it, recorded, so a pipeline decision can be traced back to its source.
- Dedup — the same person sourced twice, or sourced after applying, must converge on one record instead of forking into contradictory ones.
- GDPR Article 14 — a sourced person did not give you their data. The law obliges you to tell them what you collected, from where and why — and being sourced is not consent; consent still has to be asked for separately.
Skipping the third point is not a paperwork risk: European regulators have issued fines for exactly this failure.
In Helia, the sourcing capture API takes a profile the recruiter is actually viewing, dedups it against existing candidates, parses it into the ATS with the source and profile URL kept as provenance, and sends the Article-14 notice automatically — with consent explicitly not presumed.