Sourcing in a market that stopped replying
Response rates fell everywhere. Some of that is volume, some of it is you. A look at what still works.
Ask any sourcer in Toronto, Berlin or Austin what their reply rate was in 2021 and what it is now. The number roughly halved. The market did not get smaller. The inbox did.
Some of that is out of your hands. Automated sequences made every engineer with a public profile a target, and people adapted the way anyone adapts to noise: they stopped reading.
The part you control is narrower than the tooling vendors suggest, but it is real.
Volume is now a tax, not a lever
The old maths said send more. The new maths says every message you send makes the next one from anyone slightly less likely to be read.
Teams that recovered their reply rates almost always did it by sending fewer, better messages to a shorter list. Not because quality is virtuous, but because the shortlist forces you to know something about each person, and knowing something is the only thing that reads as human.
What a reply actually rewards
Three things, in rough order of impact.
Specificity about them. Not "your background is impressive". Something that could only be true of this person, and that you clearly did not get from a title field.
Specificity about the job. Salary band, team size, what the first project is. Vagueness reads as a fishing trip, and people are right to think so.
A small ask. "Worth fifteen minutes?" outperforms "let's set up a call to discuss the opportunity" every time, because the second one implies a process and the first one implies a conversation.
Channel matters more than it used to
LinkedIn InMail is the most crowded channel and the one where your message competes with fifty others. Email to a personal address, a well placed message in a community where the person already participates, or a referral introduction all perform better, in that rough order.
None of that scales the way a sequencing tool scales. That is the point.
The things that stopped working
Templated personalisation. The first line that mentions a repository or a conference talk, followed by four paragraphs of boilerplate. Candidates learned that shape and now discard on sight.
Urgency language. "We are moving quickly on this" from a stranger is not urgency, it is pressure, and pressure from someone with no relationship gets ignored.
Follow up chains of five. Two is fine. Three is the ceiling. Beyond that you are training people to filter your domain.
What good looks like now
A sourcer working a list of forty people a week, with real notes on each, sending short messages that name the salary and the first project, following up once. Reply rates in the twenty to thirty percent range are still achievable that way in most markets on both continents.
It is slower work than the dashboard wants. It is also the only version that still produces offers.