Successful sourcing can be developed by adopting the best practices of successful e-recruiters.

1. Organize your research – in the form of organized bookmarks, favorites or a notebook. Maintain research folders for associations, company profiles, financial profiles, industry resource folders, news resources and other links.
2. Use Advanced Search Options Wherever Available - Prepare Boolean search strings ready for each type of advanced search in a search engine. Prepare lists of industry-specific search strings, including x-raying and flip searching every URL of each industry competitor.
3. Research the URL well - Peel back each sub folder to find all that the site holds. Frequently, a resume is a page in a directory of other similar resumes.
4. Research Contact Information - Find out more about that “hard to locate” candidate by using meta-search engines or worldwide yellow pages.
5. Explore the Internet for your executive searches as well – Often high-level executives can be located easily through the Internet. Explore such sites as Edgar-Online or Redherring.com that host lists of executives, replete with their job titles and pay packages. With a ready list of names, meta-search their contact information.
6. Explore multiple Search Engines – Every search engine indexes the web differently, searches the web differently and thus has very different results.
7. Apply relevant tools – Analyze requisitions and use only those techniques that are best suited.