Sourcing: How to Find the Right IT Specialists

Companies approach sourcing differently depending on risk tolerance, cost objectives, and strategic priorities.

Single Sourcing

Relying on a single supplier for a given need. Simpler to manage but creates dependency — a risk if the supplier cannot deliver.

Dual Sourcing

Maintaining two suppliers for the same need. Provides redundancy and pricing leverage without the complexity of managing many vendors.

Multiple Sourcing

Distributing procurement across several suppliers. Reduces dependency and enables continuous comparison but requires more management overhead.

Global vs. Local Sourcing / Onshoring

Global sourcing accesses lower-cost markets but introduces complexity around logistics, compliance, and communication. Local sourcing (also called onshoring) prioritises proximity and speed, often at a higher unit cost.

Nearshoring

A middle ground — sourcing from geographically close regions with similar time zones and cultural alignment, balancing cost with collaboration quality.

Captive Nearshoring

A variant of nearshoring in which sourcing takes place between different parts of the same company — for example, a parent company drawing on a subsidiary in a neighbouring country.

Direct sourcing is the practice of engaging candidates or contractors directly — without an intermediary agency acting as the legal employer. In talent contexts, it typically refers to a company building its own talent pool and engaging candidates directly rather than through staffing agencies.

The typical direct sourcing process starts with a search on a business network such as LinkedIn or Xing to identify suitable candidates. The second step is outreach: either the recruiter contacts the candidate directly, or establishes contact via a mutual connection in the network.

For IT companies using freelancers, direct sourcing through a platform like ElevateX combines the speed and quality benefits of a curated network with the simplicity of a direct engagement. The freelancer is contracted directly with the client company, providing full transparency on rates and terms.

Direct sourcing is increasingly common as companies seek more control over their contractor relationships and aim to reduce intermediary margins.

IT sourcing refers to the active outsourcing of IT tasks to freelancers or external IT companies, who perform these tasks in return for payment. This can range from straightforward support tasks to complex programming or engineering work.

For IT sourcing to succeed, companies should start by clearly defining which tasks arise internally, then decide which must be handled in-house and which can be outsourced. The final step is selecting suitable service providers to take on those tasks.

Outsourcing is particularly valuable in the IT sector because the field moves fast — keeping permanent staff continuously up to date with the latest technologies is expensive, and hiring new specialists for every technology is rarely practical. Outsourcing in IT consistently delivers higher quality work because companies engage motivated specialists with deep, focused expertise in a given area.

ElevateX specialises in exactly this: matching companies with pre-vetted IT and engineering freelancers across areas such as software development, design, project management, product management, scrum mastery, and data science — with placements possible within 48 hours.