Why Talent Teams Need to Think Like Sales Teams: The Case for Total Addressable Market (TAM) Analysis

In sales, you don’t launch a campaign without knowing your TAM — your Total Addressable Market.

You figure out who’s out there, where they are, and how many of them might actually buy what you’re selling. You map it. Segment it. Prioritise it.

Talent teams? Still flying blind way too often.

If you’re not applying TAM thinking to sourcing, you’re not just behind — you’re wasting time, burning candidate trust, and creating noise instead of results.

What is TAM (in recruiting terms)?

In hiring, your TAM is the total market of people who:

• Have the skills you need
• Are in the location(s) you can hire from
• Fit the level/seniority range
• Are likely to move (or at least open to a conversation)

It’s the candidate universe for a specific role or group of roles. And it’s your secret weapon if you want to build repeatable, effective sourcing campaigns.

1. Sales builds a TAM before outreach. So should recruiters.

Sales teams ask:

• Who are our ICPs?
• Where’s the highest intent?
• What’s our wedge in?

Talent teams should ask:

• How many engineers with Go and AWS are in Leeds?
• What do they earn?
• Where are they coming from?
• How competitive is the market?

You wouldn’t let your sales team cold-call blindly. Don’t let your sourcing team do it either.

2. It kills “spray and pray” hiring

Without TAM analysis, you default to volume — InMails, job posts, referrals, rinse, repeat.

With TAM analysis, you default to strategy. You see:

• The size of the actual qualified pool
• Where the talent clusters are (and where they’re overlooked)
• How to prioritise outreach and personalise messaging

Suddenly, you’re not casting a wide net. You’re spear-fishing.

3. It brings rigour to hiring forecasts

In sales, your pipeline is only as good as your TAM understanding.

Same in hiring.

When you know how many people meet your criteria, you can set expectations with hiring managers and execs. You can say:

• “There are 5,200 candidates who fit this brief.”
• “We’ll need 100 replies to land 5 interviews.”
• “Here’s how long that’ll likely take.”

That’s how you go from “we’ll see what we get” to “we know what we need.”

4. It helps you write outreach that gets replies

Sales teams don’t write one-size-fits-all cold emails. They tailor messaging based on who they’re targeting.

Same deal here.

A good TAM analysis tells you:

• What companies candidates are coming from
• What skills are trending
• What languages and frameworks dominate

You can then craft outreach like:

“Noticed you’ve been scaling product infra at a 200-person healthtech. We're solving similar problems, but with more autonomy and deeper technical ownership.”

That’s relevance. That’s why they’ll reply.

5. It gives you a sourcing engine — not just a search

Sales is a growth engine. Hiring should be too.

TAM-based sourcing gives you:

• Repeatable playbooks
• Targeted segmentation
• Campaign-level learnings
• Scalable systems

No more relying on one hero sourcer who “just knows where to look.” It’s all out in the open, documented, and ready to improve with every hire.

Final Word: Hiring is go-to-market. Treat it like one.

If your GTM team wouldn’t run a campaign without TAM data, why should your recruiters?

This is the shift forward-thinking talent teams are already making:

• From reactive to strategic
• From intuition to insight
• From activity to outcomes

Running TAM analysis isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s how the best teams:

• Align with hiring managers
• Launch smarter sourcing campaigns
• Win top talent in hyper-competitive markets