Candidate

Why does the candidate record outlive the requisition?

A role closes; a person does not. The strongest argument for treating the person as the durable object and the pursuit as the temporary one is that useful history accrues on the person: what they can do, where they are, what they were paid, why a panel rated them highly, and whether they can be approached again. A record shaped entirely around one opening becomes unsearchable the moment that opening closes, which is why re-engagement programmes fail in databases that were designed as a filing cabinet for finished vacancies.

What makes a candidate database searchable years later?

Structure and discipline, not volume. Skills, seniority, location, work authorisation and compensation expectation belong in fields that can be queried, while the reasoning behind a decision belongs in notes attached to the pursuit it came from. A database where everything valuable sits in free text is a pile, not an asset. Currency matters as much as structure: contact details and salary expectations decay quietly, so any re-engagement should verify the basics rather than assume that a record written three years ago still describes the person accurately.

How do duplicate records damage candidate management?

When one person exists twice, their history splits. Two recruiters can hold contradictory views of the same individual, an interview already run can be scheduled again, a note recording a firm not-now can sit invisibly on the record nobody opened, and the same person can receive two different messages in a day. The reporting damage follows: totals count people twice and conversion looks worse than it is. Prevention at the point of intake costs far less than periodic clean-up campaigns after the damage is embedded.

Which routes create a candidate record?

A candidate record can be created several different ways, and the route is worth storing on the record itself. Someone can be sourced by a recruiter, referred by an employee, submitted by an agency, revived from a pipeline built for an earlier role, met at an event, or arrive through a direct application. Each route delivers a different amount of verified information and a different provenance, and later decisions depend on knowing which one applied.

The practical consequence is that no two records arrive on equal footing. An agency submission carries a commercial claim, a referral carries a colleague's reputation, and a sourced profile carries no application at all and often no permission to be contacted about anything beyond the role discussed. Treating every arrival identically is how fee disputes, unwelcome outreach and unusable reporting all begin, usually several months later.

At what point does a prospect become a candidate?

Most teams draw the line at engagement against a live role. A name sitting on a sourcing list is a prospect; once that person has been approached about a specific opening and has answered with interest, they are being evaluated and the organisation is accumulating notes, impressions and eventually assessments about a real individual. Write the rule down, because when each recruiter decides privately, headcount reporting and pipeline reviews stop agreeing with each other.

Some organisations set the threshold at the first two-way exchange, others at the first completed screen. Either convention works provided it is applied uniformly and the system enforces it. What matters more than the exact placement is that crossing the line is a visible event with a date attached, since obligations around notes, communications and eventually deletion all start from that moment rather than from an application.

How do status, stage and disposition differ?

These three are routinely collapsed into one field and the loss is severe. Stage describes where a person sits inside the pipeline for one particular role. Status describes the person overall: live, dormant, unreachable, do not contact. Disposition is the coded outcome recorded when someone leaves a particular pipeline, capturing why they stopped progressing. They answer different questions and belong in different places, and software that offers a single convenient dropdown quietly encourages the merge.

The distinction has teeth because a person can be dispositioned on one role while progressing on another, and a single shared field forces a false choice between those two truths. Keep stage and disposition attached to each individual pursuit, and reserve the person-level status for facts that are true regardless of which role is open. Reporting that mixes the two produces totals nobody can reconcile.

Who owns a candidate when two recruiters are working the same person?

Ownership rules exist so one individual does not receive two unrelated pitches from the same employer in the same week. The common conventions are first-contact ownership with an expiry window, ownership tied to the requisition rather than the person, or ownership held by a team covering an account or a market. Any of them work; none of them work without a visible owner field and a date on which the claim lapses.

Agency involvement adds a commercial layer on top of the etiquette. Supplier agreements frequently grant a submitting firm a claim period over a named individual, so the ownership entry can carry a fee. Record the submission date, the role it was made against and the agreement it sits under, then resolve disputes against that log rather than against anyone's recollection of who spoke to whom first.

What obligations come with holding candidate records?

Holding personal data about people you did not hire is a duty rather than a filing convenience. In many jurisdictions an employer must be able to state what it holds, why it holds it, on what lawful footing and for how long, and must respond to access or erasure requests inside a defined window. The specific duties and deadlines differ by country and sometimes by regulator, so check local employment and data protection law rather than assuming one global standard.

Operationally this translates into retention periods that actually execute, a defensible reason for every category of record kept after a rejection, and a route to honour an erasure request without destroying material the business is separately obliged to preserve. These decisions are cheap while the database is small and painful once it holds several years of history, so settle them early and put an owner's name against them.