Martel Howard is building the talent machine over at Coalfire.
He’s one of those people on the internet who consistently puts out great content, cares about the community, and is passionate about the craft of sourcing.
I sat down with Martel Howard to talk about sourcing the way it actually shows up in the work and some of the latest tooling. Martel is a technical sourcing specialist who thinks about profiles in the sense of character arcs which is pretty cool interpretation of keyword search.
We got into:
Why curiosity is still the most valuable skill in sourcing
Why it is not enough to read text on a resume
How some of the best hires come from reading the gray.
He shared how:
Building candidate personas creates institutional memory so teams are not starting from zero on every req
How sourcing done well can dramatically improve pass through rates at the top of funnel.
We also spent time on Boolean, AI tools, and what changes as sourcing becomes more about talent intelligence.
Martel and I agree that AI is helpful, but only if you understand the foundations first. We talked about A/B testing search strategies, pulling silver medalists from the ATS, writing outreach that actually gets replies, and why sourcing is shifting toward a more strategic advisory role. The through line was simple. Data is easy to share, insight is harder to apply, and the real value of a sourcer is knowing how to use that insight to evolve the search.
And since “sourcer” remains undefined by spellcheck, here’s a reminder to sign the petition to get it added to the dictionary.
Timestamps
2:00 Martel’s background and why he gravitated toward technical sourcing
4:00 Rejection, resilience, and why recruiting is supposed to be hard
5:00 Building candidate personas and institutional sourcing memory
7:00 How Martel defines the sourcer ↔ recruiter handoff
9:00 What roles are getting the most traction right now
9:45 Why Boolean is still the foundation of great sourcing
12:00 Why Martel prefers outbound sourcing vs full-cycle recruiting
13:50 Curiosity as the most valuable sourcing skill
14:30 Reading resumes as character arcs and finding signal in the gray
17:00 A-B testing tools, Booleans, and search strategies
18:00 Martel’s hardest search and how an old JD changed everything
23:00 The future of sourcing as talent intelligence and strategic advisory
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