Broadening Your Candidate Pool

Broadening Your Candidate Pool

Building a source list on Paraform is one of the highest-leverage moves a recruiter can make. With 500+ active roles across top startups and growing at a rate of 30% MoM, the platform is designed to route standout talent to the right opportunities. That means every great candidate you invest in sourcing has multiple shots at getting hired—making it well worth the time to go deep and find exceptional profiles.

However, we do see the same issue come up over and over again: all our clients want candidates from the same top startups! We empathize with you too.

In outreach guidelines, we talked about how to sharpen your outreach and increase conversion. In this blog post, let’s talk about how to broaden the pool of candidates we’re hitting up so we’re just emailing the same engineers from Open AI 5 times.

Finding Early Stage Talent

Ah yes–the elusive former founder/founding engineer archetype. Go to LinkedIn and search up “founding engineer” and you’ll also get a ton of noise.

For identifying proper founder/founding engineer talent, we find it most useful to look at accelerators and VC portfolios and hit up their teams. They also are not as passive as you might think. If they’ve graduated the accelerator >1 year and have no fundraising/public news, it might be signal to reach out.

The best lists to use:

• Accelerators, especially high volume ones such as:
  • https://www.ycombinator.com/companies
  • https://www.techstars.com/portfolio
  • https://www.alchemistaccelerator.com/
  • https://500.co/
  • https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/
  • https://f.inc/
  • University accelerators for new grad talent
• High volume VCs, such as:
  • https://a16z.com/portfolio/
  • https://pear.vc/companies/?query_filter_id=3&filter_slug=featured-companies
  • https://somacap.com/
  • https://neo.com/startups?tab=Neo%20portfolio
  • https://www.gradient.com/portfolio/
  • https://www.generalcatalyst.com/portfolio
  • https://www.southparkcommons.com/companies
• General list: https://topstartups.io/

A good chatGPT base prompt: “Get me a list of high volume, low success rate accelerators” and build off of that. Candidates here know the grind and have the hunger, but may not be going through with their current initiative - perfect time to introduce them to clients.

Finding Early Stage Talent

Next, let’s talk through how to build a client-specific source list. ChatGPT can create a very simple source list quickly. Make sure to improve/ask ChatGPT to expand from these!

Starting from the company description:

Base Prompt: I am a sourcer for a recruiter building out a list of companies to source from. My client is [x]. Generate me a list of [number of] reputable tech companies that have deeply challenged known for a high engineering bar.

Expanding on ideal companies list:

Base Prompt: I am a sourcer for a recruiter building out a list of companies to source from. My client is [x]. This is the list of companies they currently want to source from and want to avoid. Generate me 10 more example companies I can pull candidates from.

Example Results for Brilliant:

I am a sourcer for a recruiter building out a list of companies to source from. My client is Brilliant. This is the list of companies they currently want to source from and want to avoid. To source: Calm Grindr Stripe Hinge Bumble Inc. Discord Peak New York Times Digital Chess.com. Avoid companies: Duolingo Udemy Coursera. Generate me 10 more example companies I can pull candidates from.

You should then refine the list further depending on further criteria such as size of company, location (if applicable), etc.

Monitoring the Industry

Lastly, monitoring the industry is critical for effective recruitment—especially when sourcing for startups. Some signals you may want to consider:

• Slow growth – Companies that aren’t growing (e.g., funded in 2021–2023 with no follow-on rounds) may be facing stalled momentum or investor hesitation.
• Bridge rounds / debt – Raising bridge rounds or taking on venture debt might signal runway concerns or a lack of confidence in future growth.
• Bad news – Culture issues, high employee churn, or controversy in the press.
• Executive or founder departures – Sudden exits by key leaders (especially founders, CTOs, or VPs) often hint at internal misalignment or instability.
• Glassdoor or Blind sentiment drops – A spike in negative reviews or employee complaints can be an early warning sign of morale or culture breakdowns.

By tracking these signals, you can stay ahead of the curve and surface top-tier candidates who are quietly looking to make a move.