When a single search is not enough
Most sourcing is one search, run well. That is the right tool for most roles. This play is for the ones where it is not: the retained search, the role that has been open for four months, the client who wants to see the market before they believe your shortlist.
The five angles are deliberately chosen to fail differently. Structured search is precise and blind to anyone who words their profile unusually. Semantic search reads meaning and drifts. Competitor mapping is high signal and narrow. Lookalike expansion finds the shape you did not think to describe. Open-to-work finds intent and nothing else. Run one and you get a slice. Run all five and the gaps stop overlapping.
What you get back
Two artefacts. The map: pool size, the distribution across employers, the tiers, the benches worth raiding, and where in the geography the skills actually sit. And the shortlist: the qualified subset with contact details, ranked, with the reasoning kept.
Reading the map
Concentration matters more than the total. A market of nine hundred people spread evenly is a different job from nine hundred people where a hundred and twenty sit at four employers. The second one tells you where to spend your week.
The angle column is the interesting one. People who show up in three of the five passes are the obvious market and everyone is calling them. People who only surfaced semantically are the ones your competitors' Boolean strings did not reach.
A thin pool is a finding, not a failure. If the map comes back small, the honest answer to the client is that the brief is not addressable as written. That conversation is worth more than a padded list, and you now have the numbers to have it.
Where this goes wrong
Running the paid angles before qualifying. The qualification step is free and the per-person steps are not, so anything that spends on the pool before cutting it is money set on fire. The play orders it correctly, but if you rewrite the prompt, keep that order.
Treating an empty result as a zero. A provider that is unavailable returns nothing, which looks identical to a market with nobody in it. The play distinguishes the two rather than folding an outage into your market size.
Confusing coverage with reachability. Mapping a thousand people does not mean a thousand people can be contacted. Coverage falls off at every stage and always will. The map is the market; the shortlist is what you can actually work this week.