The rise of sourcing as a profession all its own within the HR and recruitment communities was highlighted on Tuesday at the first day of SourceCon 2010, a conference for sourcing professionals being held this week in Washington, DC.

Practitioners of art, science and information retrieval sourcers must be able to “see people where other people see code”, as speaker Glen Cathey, vice president of recruiting at US professional staffing and solutions company Kforce, told the 120 attendees.

Cathey compared sourcing to playing golf, saying: “Your goal as sourcers is to make as many holes in one as you can. Why take 20 swings when you can take one?” To make those ‘hole in one’ placements, sourcers must learn different levels of talent mining and sharpen their use of electronic candidate sourcing techniques, he said.

Among others, the speaker line-up on Tuesday also included event chairman Eric Jaquith, lead recruiter, Jaquith & Company, and Shally Steckerl, chief cybersleuth and executive vice president of recruitment marketing technology, media, training and workforce development and consulting services firm Arbita.

Jaquith said in his opening address that he now found sourcing “more rewarding” than other elements of recruitment.

“We enjoy the hunt, the journalism gene of searching for a deeper truth,” he told the audience.

With a nod to the conference’s setting at the International Spy Museum, Steckerl compared the practice of providing “competitive recruitment intelligence” to spying as he took the audience through a myriad of techniques and websites that could help sourcers find potentially off-the-radar talent. He acknowledged that of the searches he was commissioned to undertake, “80% are pretty mainstream… but 15% of the jobs are where you have to go real deep, so you have to try all of these different things”.

The conference continues today in Washington and is being held by ERE.net.