Two Engineers, Treated Differently

Imagine two software engineers with about the same experience. One is happy enough at her job and isn't looking. The other read your job posting on a Thursday evening, decided it was worth a shot, and applied through your careers page.

At a lot of companies, the first one gets more attention. A recruiter looks her up, reads about what she's worked on, and writes her a message tailored to her. The second one gets an automated confirmation email and then nothing. Three days later she still doesn't know whether anyone has read her application, so she keeps applying elsewhere. Nothing you've done has given her a reason not to.

That's odd when you think about it. The person who has already said she's interested gets less effort than the person who hasn't. The reason is a belief most recruiting teams hold without examining it much: that people who are actively looking are, on average, worse hires. If they were any good, the thinking goes, they wouldn't need to look.

The belief had some basis once. Fifteen years ago, when people stayed in jobs longer and job-hopping was less common, a software engineer who was actively job-hunting often was telling you something, perhaps about instability or performance. Being on the market carried real information.

I don't think it carries much now. Round after round of layoffs, during the pandemic and since, have made involuntary job searches ordinary. Remote work widened the set of jobs people can realistically take, and plenty of employed people now keep one eye open for the right role. One 2025 survey of 4,000 employed professionals found that 62% were actively watching job listings while employed, and 41% had applied to at least one job in the previous quarter. Those are people with jobs. They apply because moving has become easy, and it says little about how they're doing where they are.

So the difference between passive and active candidates has mostly closed, but the premium on passive sourcing hasn't. Teams still put budget and their most senior recruiters' hours into outbound campaigns aimed at people who may or may not be interested, while the people who already raised their hand wait in a queue.

The queue is where you lose them. If the engineer who applied on Thursday hears nothing, a faster employer may well be talking to her within a week and making her an offer a week after that. Your carefully written outbound message could land in someone's inbox at the same moment your own applicant is leaving.

Why do teams let this happen? Mostly because of hours. Suppose a role gets 200 applications in its first week and there are two recruiters. They can't hold 200 real screening conversations, so they triage: most applicants get an automated reply, a few get a person, and the rest wait. With the hours available, it really is the only option.

That limit on hours is what we set out to remove with Asendia. Two recruiters can only hold so many real screening conversations in a day. Software doesn't have that ceiling, so it can call every one of the 200, each within hours of applying and weekends included, and the triage step goes away because nobody has to wait in a queue. Each call is a spoken conversation that adapts to the applicant's answers and to the criteria for the role, covering their background, why they're interested, and whatever the recruiters need in order to rank the shortlist. On Monday morning the team has a ranked list from the weekend's applicants in their ATS, each with a qualification summary and excerpts from the conversation. An interview can be booked that day, and a qualified candidate can be in front of the hiring manager by Wednesday.

What I like most about this is that applicants finally get the kind of urgency you'd normally save for someone you spent real money to reach, and that includes the excellent ones who would otherwise have been lost in a two-week backlog. The post on why offer rejection rates are climbing makes a related argument: that slow processes, more than pay gaps, are behind many of the offers candidates turn down.

None of this means outbound sourcing is useless. For senior and specialized roles it's still the right approach. But for most roles at most companies, favoring passive candidates over applicants has a cost that never shows up on the sourcing dashboard: qualified people who applied, heard nothing, and went to whoever called first. Some of the engineers you are about to send InMails to may already be in your ATS. They applied four days ago.

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