Calling Back the Runners-Up

Every search produces more than one good candidate, and a company only has a use for one of them. What happens to the rest is one of the odder habits in recruiting.

Say you ran a search four months ago. You screened 130 people, shortlisted eight, and hired one. The other seven got far enough to have real conversations with your team. Most of them lost out on timing, or budget, or some small edge the winner had, and not because they couldn't do the job. Then they went back into the ATS, and nobody has called them since.

Now a similar role opens and the search starts from nothing. You pay to find people, and then you pay to screen them, as if the conversations you had four months ago never took place.

It's worth asking what's actually missing here. The records are accurate, the earlier evaluation was real, and some of those seven are probably open to a conversation right now. What's missing is somebody with the time to pick up the phone.

How many of them there are

The size of this is easy to miss, because you only see the cost of the search in front of you. Say each search leaves behind seven people like that. A team running 40 searches a year collects close to 300 of them annually, and the better part of a thousand over three years, every one of them already evaluated once. When a new role opens, somebody should be asking whether the right person is already in the system. For a team hiring steadily into similar roles, my guess is the answer is yes more often than anyone checks.

Calling one of these people is also a different act from cold outreach, even a year later. They already decided your company was worth their time. They know how your process works. There's a little trust there that a message from a stranger can't reproduce, so I'd expect more of them to pick up, and to be further along when they do.

And their circumstances change. The job they took may not have worked out. They may have grown and want a bigger scope, or the company they joined may be struggling. Someone who nearly got hired in October might be ready in April. Your ATS knows who they are. The question is whether anything in your process will ever bring their name up again.

Why nobody makes the calls

Almost everyone agrees in principle that past finalists should be contacted before anyone new. Very few teams do it, and the reason is capacity. A recruiter running three live searches doesn't have room to call through 200 former candidates to see who's interested. The work is fiddly too, since you first have to work out which past candidates match this month's criteria. Say a recruiter can make 10 to 15 of these calls a day. A backlog of 500 would take somewhere between seven and ten weeks of doing nothing else. By then the role has usually been filled, the expensive way.

This is one of the jobs we had in mind when we built Asendia. We make software that phones candidates and interviews them, and for re-engagement the workflow is simple. You export the prior candidates who fit a current opening, Asendia calls them, and within 48 hours you have a ranked shortlist of the ones who are interested and still qualify. The call is straightforward about why it's happening: they interviewed with you before, there's a new role that fits them better, and you wanted them to hear about it first. Being remembered feels different from being pulled out of a database, and candidates can tell which one is happening to them. The ones who say yes go back into the ATS with a qualification summary and notes on their current situation. If you're wondering how you would even measure the value of this, there's a separate post on why recruitment KPIs were built for a pre-AI world.

Whether or not you use software for it, the habit is worth building. Before your next search opens, pull the shortlists from similar roles over the past year and call those people first. The best candidate for the job may be someone your team has already met.

Ready to transform your hiring strategy? Schedule a Demo with our founders today!