Active Candidates

The distinction has a practical consequence. If a role is hard to fill because few people in that skill group are looking, more job advertisements will not help and a search approach will. If it is hard to fill because applications are arriving and nobody is screening them, sourcing is not the problem at all. Both situations get described as a lack of candidates.

A pipeline count is only useful if the definition excludes people who are not really in it. Set the rule and let the system apply it.

• An application with no recruiter action within a stated number of days lapses rather than remaining active.
• A candidate who has not responded to two contacts across a stated period lapses.
• A candidate on hold for a role that has been frozen is not active for that role, and the freeze should be recorded rather than left as a silent pause.
• A candidate rejected for one role is not automatically active for another. Moving them requires their agreement, not an internal transfer.
• Report active pipeline by stage and by age within stage, since ten candidates all sitting at first screen for three weeks is a different situation from ten spread across the process.

Enforcing lapse rules feels like deleting pipeline. It is admitting the pipeline was already gone. The value is that the shortfall becomes visible while there is still time to source, rather than at the point the hiring manager asks why nobody has been interviewed.

Someone actively looking in the Indian market is usually running three or four processes at once, and their availability is a decaying asset.

• Time to first response is the number that changes most and costs least. A candidate contacted the same day is in a process; one contacted in ten days is in someone else's.
• Compress the stages rather than shortening the interviews. Two panels in one day converts better than four separate rounds over three weeks and gives you the same information.
• Ask early what else they are running and what their timeline is, and then respect it. The answer decides whether your process is even viable for them.
• Make the offer complete when you make it. A verbal number followed by a written offer two weeks later is where candidates disengage.
• Account for notice. An active candidate serving one to three months is not a fast hire, and planning that assumes otherwise produces a gap that gets filled badly.

Every organisation with a few years of applications believes it has a talent pool. Usually it has an archive.

• Contact details and current employment go stale within months, so a rediscovery search returns people whose circumstances you know nothing about.
• Someone rejected eighteen months ago remembers the rejection. An approach that does not acknowledge it reads as automated, because it is.
• Re-contacting for a new purpose is a fresh use of the person's data. If the notice they were given covered an application for one role, using the record to market other roles later needs its own basis and, generally, a fresh notice.
• Retention rules apply to the archive. A database kept indefinitely because it might be useful is exactly the position the data protection regime is aimed at.
• Where reactivation is worth doing, do it narrowly: people who reached a late stage, for roles genuinely similar, with a message that says when and for what they applied.

Verify the notice and retention obligations under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the rules made under it before building a reactivation campaign on historic applications. Note the timing before building anything around it: those duties are not yet in force. Sections 3 to 17 of that Act, which carry the grounds for processing, notice, consent, the obligations of a data fiduciary and the data principal rights, take effect on 13 May 2027 under the commencement notification of 13 November 2025. The definitions, the Data Protection Board and the penalty machinery commenced in November 2025.