What is Sourcing?
Sourcing helps you proactively discover candidates whose Marketplace profiles match an open role.
When you publish a role, Alva’s matching engine evaluates Marketplace profiles against your role criteria in the background. When there’s a match, you can review the candidate’s profile and decide whether to invite them to apply.
Why use Sourcing?
Sourcing is useful when you want to:
Increase top-of-funnel quality by starting with candidates who match your role criteria
Reduce manual search effort - relevant candidates are surfaced automatically
Keep candidate experience respectful - candidates choose whether they want to be discoverable
It’s also currently free and included automatically every time you publish a job to Marketplace, with no separate plan or add-on to purchase. Pricing may change in the future - and we’ll always let you know before anything does.
How Sourcing works
When you publish a role to Marketplace, Sourcing starts running automatically in the background - there’s nothing extra to switch on.
You publish a role to Marketplace (in job setup, step 4)
Matching runs in the background - Marketplace profiles are evaluated against your role criteria (this can take ~5–10 minutes)
You review matched profiles - sourced candidates appear in a dedicated column in your job pipeline
You decide whether to proceed - for each profile, mark Relevant or Not relevant
Relevant candidates get an invitation - when you mark someone as relevant, they receive an email invitation with the role and company details
The candidate chooses what happens next - they can apply or ignore the invitation
The invitation email is currently a default template and includes the candidate name, company name, and role name. Customisation will be available in the future.
💡Good to know: Candidates don’t need to do anything unless they want to apply - they can always choose to ignore invitations.
If you’re seeing few or no matches, your role criteria may be too strict. Revisit the criteria (and role description) to make sure they reflect what you actually need - overly narrow requirements reduce the pool of matched candidates.
If candidates aren’t responding, invitations are optional so some candidates will ignore them. It can help to double-check that the role information is clear and attractive (title, location, level, and key requirements).
What information can I see?
When a candidate’s profile is matched to your role, you can see their:
Name
Working location
Languages
Experience
Education
Skills
💡Why isn’t there a match score? This is intentional. Sourcing is designed to keep the focus on the candidate’s profile context, without over-reliance on a single number.
What happens on the candidate side?
Candidates can choose whether they want to be discoverable via Sourcing.
If a candidate opts out:
Their profile will no longer be matched against open roles
Recruiters will no longer be able to discover them through Sourcing
Their Marketplace account and saved test results remain intact
They can re-enable Sourcing at any time from their account settings.
For the full candidate experience (what candidates see, and how they can control visibility), see: How recruiters find you in Alva Marketplace.
Help us improve Sourcing
Sourcing is evolving, and your input helps improve match quality over time. When reviewing sourced candidates, use the Give feedback option to:
rate how well the candidates fit the role, and
share what could be improved.
The best feedback is specific. For example:
which requirement was a mismatch (seniority, location, language, skills, industry, etc.)
whether the profile looked strong but the role context didn’t match (or the other way around)
if there was something missing that would have helped you decide faster
Even a short note helps us improve the matching for future roles.
Any Questions?
Use the chat in the bottom right corner to connect with a member of our support team.
