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Ask narrower questions
A broad question about the best person gives someone nothing to search their memory for. Narrow it to a need on the team, such as the engineer most collaborative with designers or the one who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone they have seen, and names come to mind much more easily.
Let names repeat
Those narrow questions come straight from the skills and experiences the team stack ranked in advance. Asked of a group of people with high taste in talent, they start to produce the same names. When one person mentions a candidate and a second person mentions the same one, that candidate goes on the target list.
The slow method
The most valuable sourcing method is also the slowest. People whose entire job is to dig into current employees' networks sit down with them every other week for six weeks, ask about the names from the last session, and follow up on the notes that were sent. LinkedIn and AI tools can automate parts of it.
Why do specific questions jog memory better?
In 1973 psychologists Endel Tulving and Donald Thomson proposed the encoding specificity principle: a memory is retrieved best when the cue at recall matches the details present when it was stored. A broad prompt such as the best person you know offers no cue to match. A narrow prompt, such as who works well with designers, points to specific past episodes the mind can search. Cued recall tests in laboratories regularly outperform free recall for this reason.
Why does a repeated name count for more?
Francis Galton visited a livestock fair in 1906 and collected 787 guesses at the weight of an ox. The median guess landed within about one percent of the true weight. Independent judgments each carry some error, and when they come from different people the errors tend to cancel while the shared signal remains. Two separate people naming the same candidate behave like two independent guesses that agree.
Why do personal networks surface hidden talent?
Sociologist Mark Granovetter studied how professionals in a Boston suburb found jobs and published the results in 1973 as The Strength of Weak Ties. Most had learned of their position through people they saw only occasionally or rarely, not through close friends. Those looser contacts move in different circles and carry information the close circle already has. A network mined across several people reaches far more distinct circles than any one person can.
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