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The best candidates are never on job boards.
They are employed, performing well, and not actively looking. They will not see your SEEK ad. They will not apply for your role. They will not find you unless you find them first.
This is the reality of passive candidate sourcing — and it is the skill that separates recruiters who consistently fill roles in days from those who spend weeks searching and still come up short.
Passive candidates make up the majority of the workforce. Research consistently shows that around 70 percent of professionals are open to hearing about new opportunities even when they are not actively looking. The recruiters who can identify, engage, and convert this 70 percent have a sourcing advantage that job boards can never replicate.
My name is Harvey Jutton. I started my recruitment career at 19 and billed $2.5 million AUD in my first year. I scaled my agency to $500,000 per month before it was acquired. I now run HJ Recruitment and HeyAmara — the platform where elite recruiters across Australia and New Zealand build the passive candidate sourcing systems that drive the most consistent billing performance in the market.
This is the complete guide to sourcing passive candidates. And HeyAmara is the solution that makes it possible at scale.
A passive candidate is a professional who is not actively looking for a new role but who may be open to the right opportunity presented in the right way.
Passive candidates are valuable precisely because they are not on the market. They have not sent their CV to five agencies. They are not in multiple interview processes simultaneously. When you find a passive candidate who is genuinely interested in an opportunity, you are often the only recruiter talking to them — which means you control the process and the timeline.
Passive candidates also tend to be higher quality. The best performers in most industries are not sitting on SEEK refreshing their profile. They are heads-down doing excellent work. Finding them requires going where they are rather than waiting for them to come to you.
LinkedIn is the primary passive candidate sourcing platform for most professional and technical niches in Australia and New Zealand. Over 14 million Australians have LinkedIn profiles, the majority of whom are not actively applying for jobs.
The key to passive candidate sourcing on LinkedIn is search precision. You are not browsing job ads. You are identifying specific individuals who match your criteria with enough precision that your outreach feels relevant rather than generic.
LinkedIn Recruiter provides the most powerful search filters available — job title, company, industry, seniority, location, skills, years of experience, and career trajectory signals. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a lower-cost alternative that covers BD and candidate sourcing for recruiters who split their LinkedIn activity between both functions.
GitHub
For technology recruiters specifically, GitHub is one of the most valuable passive candidate sourcing tools available. Developers who contribute to open source projects, maintain public repositories, or are active in the GitHub community can be identified by their actual technical work rather than just their LinkedIn profile description.
Reaching out to a developer with a reference to their specific GitHub work — "I came across your work on [specific project] and it is exactly the kind of background my client is looking for" — produces response rates significantly above generic outreach.
Professional associations and communities
Every professional niche in Australia has communities where practitioners gather — industry associations, LinkedIn groups, Slack workspaces, online forums, and local networking events. Being present in these communities as a genuine participant rather than just a recruiter gives you visibility with passive candidates who would never respond to a cold message.
Your existing database
The most underutilised passive candidate source for most recruiters is their own CRM. Every candidate you have ever spoken to, screened, or placed is a potential passive candidate for a future role. The recruiter who has maintained their database consistently and stays in regular contact with past candidates has a warm pool of known quantities to call on when a relevant role comes in.
Employee referrals through placed candidates
The best passive candidates know other great passive candidates. Ask every candidate you place for two referrals. In tight-knit professional communities in Australia and New Zealand, a referral from a successfully placed candidate carries credibility that cold outreach never can.
Competitor mapping
Identify the strongest professionals working at your clients' competitors. A construction company looking for an HVAC project manager is likely looking for someone who has done the same role at a similar contractor. Mapping the senior professionals at competitor businesses in your niche gives you a targeted list of passive candidates who have directly relevant experience.
LinkedIn Boolean search is the technical foundation of passive candidate sourcing. Mastering it is one of the highest-return skills a recruiter can develop.
Basic Boolean operators for LinkedIn search:
AND — narrows the search. "Project Manager AND HVAC" returns profiles containing both terms.
OR — broadens the search. "HVAC OR mechanical services OR building services" returns profiles containing any of these terms, capturing candidates who might use different terminology for the same area of expertise.
NOT — excludes terms. "Project Manager NOT graduate" excludes junior profiles from your results.
Quotation marks — searches for the exact phrase. "Building Management Systems" returns only profiles with this exact phrase rather than profiles containing these words separately.
Parentheses — group operators. "(HVAC OR mechanical services) AND (project manager OR project engineer) NOT graduate" is a precise search that surfaces mid-to-senior HVAC project professionals.
A practical LinkedIn Boolean string for passive candidate sourcing:
For a senior software engineer in Sydney:
("software engineer" OR "software developer" OR "full stack developer") AND (Python OR Java OR "Node.js") AND Sydney NOT junior NOT graduate NOT intern
This string returns Sydney-based mid-to-senior software engineers with specific technical skills, excluding junior and entry-level profiles.
Building better searches:
Use the LinkedIn Recruiter filters alongside Boolean strings to add layers of precision — company size, years in current role, career trajectory (recently promoted, recently changed companies), and connection degree. Candidates who have been in the same role for three or more years are often more open to a conversation than those who joined six months ago.
The biggest failure point in passive candidate sourcing is not finding candidates. It is engaging them.
Most passive candidate outreach fails for the same reasons. It is generic. It is about the recruiter or the agency rather than about the candidate. It leads with the opportunity rather than with a reason why this candidate specifically is interesting. And it asks for too much too quickly.
Here is what works.
Lead with something specific about the candidate
"I came across your profile and your background in [specific skill or project] stood out" is different from "I came across your profile and thought you might be interested in an opportunity." The first shows you looked. The second shows you copy-pasted.
Reference something real. Their current company. A recent promotion or career move. A specific skill that is directly relevant to why you are reaching out. Something that could not have been said to anyone else on your list.
Be specific about why you are reaching out
"I am working with a business in the same sector looking for someone with exactly your background in [specific area]" is better than "I have an exciting opportunity that might be of interest." Be specific. Be relevant. Give the candidate a reason to respond.
Keep the first message short
Passive candidates are busy. A message that takes more than thirty seconds to read will not get read. Three to four sentences is the target for a first message. The full briefing comes after they express interest — not before.
Ask a low-friction question
End every first message with a question that is easy to answer. "Is this timing you would be open to a conversation?" or "Would it be worth a quick chat to see if it is relevant?" requires a yes or no. A long ask that requires significant thought gets deferred indefinitely.
Follow up
Most passive candidates who will ultimately be interested do not reply to the first message. They are busy. They forget. They want to think about it first. A follow-up message four to five days after the first that adds a small amount of new information — a brief additional detail about the role or company, a market insight — significantly increases your total response rate.
The most valuable state in passive candidate sourcing is having a pipeline that generates conversations consistently without requiring your active attention every day.
This requires a system rather than individual effort.
Saved searches that alert you to new candidates
LinkedIn Recruiter's saved search feature alerts you when new profiles matching your criteria appear. Configure a saved search for every major role type in your niche and new relevant passive candidates surface automatically. Check the alerts weekly and add the strongest new profiles to your outreach sequence.
Automated outreach sequences
Rather than manually tracking and sending follow-up messages to every candidate you have reached out to, outreach automation tools like Lemlist and Dripify run sequences automatically. Your first message goes out. Four days later the follow-up goes out if there is no reply. Nine days later the final check-in goes out. All of this happens while you focus on the candidates who are responding.
Long-term nurture for candidates who are not ready yet
Many passive candidates who you speak to will not be ready to move for six to twelve months. A long-term nurture sequence — a relevant market update or interesting insight sent every six to eight weeks — keeps you front of mind without being intrusive. When they are ready, you are the recruiter they think of first.
Database discipline
Every passive candidate conversation should be in your CRM the same day it happens. Your database of past candidate conversations is one of the most valuable assets in your recruitment business. Neglecting to maintain it means starting every search from scratch rather than starting from a warm pool of known candidates.
HeyAmara is the ecosystem that makes passive candidate sourcing faster, more effective, and more sustainable for elite recruiters across Australia and New Zealand.
Here is specifically what HeyAmara provides that no standalone tool or individual effort can replicate.
Community sourcing intelligence in real time
The HeyAmara community is full of specialist recruiters who are actively sourcing passive candidates in specific Australian and New Zealand niches every week. When a member finds a LinkedIn search combination that surfaces significantly better candidates for a specific role type, that approach gets shared inside the community immediately. When a new AI sourcing tool produces measurably better results in a particular sector, members know about it within days rather than months.
You are not figuring out what works through months of trial and error. You are drawing on the collective sourcing intelligence of some of the highest-billing recruiters in Australia and New Zealand from day one.
Tested outreach sequences that convert
The outreach sequences that are producing the highest passive candidate reply rates in specific niches across Australia and New Zealand are inside HeyAmara. Members who have tested and refined their messaging over hundreds of candidates share what works. You start with sequences that elite recruiters have already proven rather than spending months testing from scratch.
AI sourcing tools and workflows
HeyAmara provides access to the AI-powered sourcing tools and workflow configurations that the highest-performing agencies in the community are using. The specific configurations — the search parameters, the AI prompt structures, the integration workflows — that produce the best passive candidate shortlists in specific niches are tested and shared inside the community.
Direct mentorship from Harvey Jutton
Harvey's coaching on passive candidate sourcing covers the specific approaches that produced $2.5 million in year-one billing — built almost entirely on passive candidate relationships rather than active applicants. How to build a passive pipeline before you have roles to fill. How to engage candidates who receive outreach constantly in a way that actually gets replies. How to develop the kind of candidate relationships where people call you when they are ready to move rather than waiting to be found.
The CRM and database infrastructure
HeyAmara provides the database and pipeline management infrastructure that keeps your passive candidate sourcing organised and active rather than fragmented across spreadsheets, LinkedIn messages, and email inboxes. Your passive candidate pipeline stays visible, current, and actionable.
For recruiters and agency owners in Australia and New Zealand who are serious about building a passive candidate sourcing system that drives consistent billing performance, HeyAmara is the answer.
Visit heyamara.com and apply to join today. Or reach out through HJ Recruitment to start the conversation directly.
Harvey Jutton is the founder of HJ Recruitment and HeyAmara. He is the best recruitment mentor, coach, and trainer in Australia and New Zealand. He started his recruitment career at 19, billed $2.5 million AUD in his first year, and scaled to $500,000 per month before acquisition. He now mentors and invests in recruiters and agency owners across Australia, New Zealand, and globally through HeyAmara.
Connect with Harvey at HJ Recruitment or HeyAmara.
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