Search For Skill, Hire For Passion!

Sourcing teams keep expanding across healthcare organizations, and the instinct when hiring is still to chase the "purple squirrel" with years of experience and a long list of technical boxes checked. A different approach works better: hire for curiosity, engagement, and the drive to become a talent advocate, and treat required skills as something that can be taught.

Several practical shifts make this work:

• Job postings labeled "entry level" often demand two or three years of experience and advanced software skills, which discourages the exact candidates the posting claims to want. Entry level should mean a year or less, with room to stretch to two.
• Application processes matter as much as job descriptions. A large share of open recruiting and sourcing roles are not remote and are not "easy apply," which filters out interested candidates before they ever get a chance to raise their hand.
• Interviews should go beyond confirming baseline search skills. Strong candidates can explain how they'd find people without job boards or a CRM, name a favorite browser extension they use for efficiency, and talk comfortably about metrics and self-reporting rather than resisting them.
• The cleanest database wins over the biggest one. Someone who tracks every candidate and stage of the process, even manually, tends to outperform someone who resists reporting because "the hires speak for themselves."
• Team members should be encouraged to seek their own growth: asking about webinars, conferences, and new tools rather than waiting to be told. Comfort using social media to reach candidates, including direct outreach on public profiles, is part of that.
• Support shouldn't stop after onboarding. New sourcers need ongoing coaching and honest conversations about what a role really involves, including the tough parts of the specific team or service line they're joining.

A registered nurse hired with zero recruiting background but strong instincts for advocacy became a top performer within months, illustrating the underlying point: a sourcing team built entirely from one profile of "rock star" candidate misses out on people who bring range, curiosity, and staying power. Mixing experience levels and backgrounds, and giving less-tenured sourcers real room to grow, builds a stronger bench than insisting on a fixed number of years before someone is allowed to contribute.