Sourcers are highly specialized, experienced, and on-demand professionals — yet compensation doesn’t seem to follow along.

Here’s something I don’t get: take a look at the average sourcer job description, and what do you see? The average sourcer is expected to have:

• 3 to 5 years of prior experience in recruiting and/or sourcing
• Specialized knowledge of a specific Industry (software, healthcare, financial, etc), combined with the knowledge of how resources of those industries are located across different geographies.
• Deep and continuously updated knowledge of searching techniques (online and offline)
• Innate ability to develop strategic approaches to develop candidate pipelines
• Working knowledge of Applicant Tracking systems and collaboration tools in use by other areas of HR and business at large
• Wonderful written and verbal communication skills
• An uncanny ability to apply all of this at lightning speed, as it is typical that sourcing is a timing game and the first to find and submit a candidate is the one that wins.
• Costly certifications that give an official stamp of approval to all of the above.

And the demand the profession is commanding: it is not about two or three openings out there. A quick search across aggregators throws back 300+ openings for sourcers across the nation (at least as of mid-January 2012).

So, as the subtitle of this article clearly states:

Sourcers are highly specialized, experienced, and on-demand professionals…

If that is the case, can someone explain to me why would it be justified to expect to pay a professional of this caliber who is in such a high demand $20-30 dollars an hour? Or even worse, $6.25 an hour with offshore resources in countries with much different labor conditions than ours?