Sourcing frustration is usually diagnosed as a volume problem. Not enough candidates in the funnel. Not enough searches. Not enough outreach.
Steven Lu thinks it’s the opposite problem.
Steven is the co-founder and CEO of Pin.com and the founder of Interseller, a recruiting outreach platform that helped place over 40,000 candidates before being acquired by Greenhouse in 2021. He launched PIN in December 2024, with the current version of the search engine live since August 2025. He has spent the better part of a decade studying how recruiters find and reach talent. His conclusion: the volume game is running out of road.
“You need to treat every candidate like they were the best candidate for that role. Instead of trying to do hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of candidates, you select 10. And you’re spending all of your time and effort on those 10 candidates. That’s how you’re going to win.”
In this episode, Steven breaks down why most sourcing tools surface the most visible candidates rather than the most qualified ones, and how PIN’s approach changes that. He also shares the outreach sequence that delivers a 30 to 40% response rate, the four most common mistakes recruiters make with candidate emails, and where AI sourcing is heading over the next two years.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [3:49] Steven’s background – from software engineer to building Interseller and selling to Greenhouse
- [7:59] Why Steven started PIN after leaving Greenhouse: AI finally made the idea viable
- [9:34] The talent curve: why 30% of top candidates have almost nothing on their profiles
- [10:15] The shadow resume: how PIN rewrites every candidate’s profile from external data
- [13:36] PIN’s North Star KPI: 7 out of 10 candidates surfaced get accepted by recruiters
- [15:23] How PIN used its own tool to hire three salespeople from a list of 50 in under seven days
- [20:03] The LinkedIn tax – and why every sourcing tool that tried to beat it failed
- [27:32] Autopilot mode: 50 sourced candidates added to your pipeline every weekday
- [37:34] Why only the top 3 to 5% of recruiters were doing outbound in 2016 – and why the same volume tactics will destroy you in 2026
- [44:57] The four outreach mistakes recruiters make that kill response rates
- [49:50] The optimal outreach sequence: 3 emails and 2 LinkedIn touches across 5 steps – order matters less than going omnichannel
- [55:14] How long your outreach emails should actually be (hint: around 140 words, not 80)
- [1:04:12] How the top 1% of billers manage their candidate Rolodex differently
Why LinkedIn’s Best Candidates Never Show Up in Search
Here’s something recruiters notice but rarely diagnose correctly.
You run a search on LinkedIn. You wade through page after page. The candidates who look great on paper are the ones who’ve figured out how to look great on paper. And the ones you actually want – the ones who’ve just been doing excellent work for years without broadcasting it – are nowhere to be found.
Steven has a name for this. The talent curve.
“I would say the 50 to 70% of talent just knows how to keyword game, knows how to describe themselves. And then the remainder, 30%, which I would say is where most top talent lives, don’t describe themselves at all. All you get is a name, a company, their title, and when they worked. There’s no description, there’s nothing.”
PIN’s answer is what Steven calls the shadow resume. For every candidate in the database, PIN ingests external data – colleagues, job descriptions, funding announcements, company context – and rebuilds a more complete picture of that person’s actual experience. The result is a search that can find someone who has migrated MongoDB to Postgres or sold flood insurance for corporations, even if they’ve never used those words in their own profile.
Seven out of 10 candidates that PIN surfaces get accepted by the recruiter on the other end. That’s the metric Steven is building toward.
The implication for your search process: stop refining your Boolean strings and start questioning whether the search engine itself is showing you the right pool.
The Case Against Volume Sourcing
Outbound sourcing used to be a competitive edge.
In 2016, only around 3 to 5% of recruiters were doing it. Response rates were strong because the practice was rare. You were reaching candidates before anyone else thought to.
That’s gone.
“In 2025, volume has skyrocketed and AI can customise and write every single email. What do you do after that? You’ve got 50% of recruiters sending candidates 20, 30, 40, 50 emails on a weekly basis. You’re going to drown.”
The answer isn’t a better template. It’s a smaller, sharper list.
Steven uses the sports agent analogy deliberately. A sports agent doesn’t represent everyone who plays a sport. They represent a select few – and they give each one serious attention. In Steven’s own hiring process at PIN, they sourced around 50 candidates to fill three sales roles. Seven or eight were interested. Three were hired. All three were exceptional fits – and they found them in under seven days using PIN’s own platform.
“If a candidate’s not going to be good for your role, just don’t bother. Make sure you’re targeting the best 25, 50 people rather than tens of thousands of people.”
The volume instinct is also actively damaging your deliverability. Email providers measure engagement signals and quietly route low-response senders to spam. Every wasted send burns capacity that could go to a better-targeted candidate.
Stop adding more candidates. Start removing the wrong ones faster.
The Four Outreach Mistakes That Kill Response Rates
Steven has seen enough recruiter outreach – through Interseller and now PIN – to spot the patterns that consistently hurt deliverability and engagement.
Cap the sequence at five steps. Three emails and two LinkedIn touches. The data is clear: most responses come from the first two emails. “Your most interest is going to be within your first two emails. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 – you’re just wasting your time. You’re actually spending your email capital for no reason.”
Never paste the job description into the body of the email. Link to it instead – a Google Doc works well. “Whatever candidates get deterred by the most is they have to read the garbage that you just sent. You’ve got two seconds.” A short message with a link keeps the email out of spam and keeps the candidate reading.
Don’t push the candidate off the platform before they’ve responded. No Calendly links. No “apply here” CTAs. Cold outreach needs a reply. That reply is a signal that improves your sender reputation with email providers.
Go omnichannel. Using two channels – email and LinkedIn – yields roughly 1.5 times as many responses as a single channel. The order matters less than the combination. Steven recommends email first where possible, with LinkedIn connection requests and InMail alongside, but the key principle is that seeing an outreach across two channels validates it as legitimate rather than spam.
On email length: around 140 words is the working target for a hyper-personalised message. A greeting, two sentences of genuine personalisation, five short bullet points, and a clear action item. Not 80 words – that’s a sales email benchmark, not a recruiting one.
If you’re only changing one thing after this episode, make it the sequence length. Cut it to five steps and redirect that energy to a tighter, better-qualified list.
If your outreach list is getting bigger while your response rates are getting smaller, this one’s for you.
