The 60-Second Window: Why Your Best Candidates Accept Other Offers While You're Still Formatting Their CV

I ran the numbers for a 6-desk IT recruitment agency in Sydney last year. They were working 23 active job orders across three specialisations. Their recruiters were good — experienced, well-networked, strong closers. Their placement rate was tracking at industry average: about 15% of interviews converting to placements.

But their speed metrics told a different story. Average time from candidate application to first recruiter contact: 4.7 hours. Average time from interview completion to client feedback delivery: 2.3 days. Average time from verbal offer to formal confirmation: 1.8 days.

In those gaps — those hours and days of silence — they were losing candidates. Not because the candidates weren’t interested. Not because the roles weren’t right. Because someone else got there first.

We tracked every lost candidate for a quarter. Of the 34 candidates who dropped out of active processes, 22 cited the same reason in their exit feedback: they’d accepted another offer. Not a better offer. Just a faster one.

The Maths That Should Keep You Up at Night

Here’s the arithmetic for a typical contingency recruitment agency. Assume you’re placing candidates at an average fee of $15,000 per placement (roughly 20% of a $75,000 salary). Your recruiters manage 15-20 active candidates per job order, across 4-5 concurrent orders.

If slow follow-up causes you to lose just one placement per recruiter per quarter — and based on the data I’ve seen, that’s conservative — that’s $15,000 in lost revenue per recruiter per quarter. For a 6-desk agency, that’s $360,000 per year in placements that went to someone faster.

Not lost because you didn’t find the candidate. Not lost because the candidate wasn’t qualified. Lost because between finding them and placing them, you let the silence stretch too long.

Where the Gaps Actually Are

Every recruitment agency I’ve worked with has the same blind spots in their candidate communication. They fall into three categories:

The Application Black Hole. A candidate applies or responds to an outreach. Their details enter the ATS. And then… nothing. Not because nobody cares, but because the recruiter is on the phone, in a client meeting, or working a different requisition. The candidate sits in limbo — sometimes for hours, sometimes until the next morning — wondering if anyone received their application.

The Status Vacuum. The candidate had a great screening call. The recruiter submitted them to the client. And then the candidate hears nothing for three days while the client reviews the shortlist. During those three days, the candidate has two other agencies chasing them. Your silence isn’t professional restraint — it’s an invitation for competitors to close.

The Offer Drift. The client wants to hire the candidate. The recruiter calls with the verbal offer. The candidate says yes. And then the formal paperwork takes two days to arrive because someone needs to draft the confirmation, get it approved, and remember to send it. In those two days, the candidate’s current employer makes a counteroffer.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The system I help agencies build isn’t complicated. It doesn’t require AI-powered candidate matching or predictive analytics. It’s operational plumbing: making sure the right message reaches the right person at the right time, without relying on a busy recruiter to remember.

Stage 1: Immediate Acknowledgment. When a candidate applies, responds to outreach, or is added to the ATS, they receive a personalised email within 60 seconds. Not a generic auto-reply — a message that references the specific role, the recruiter’s name, and clear next steps. If it’s an active role, those next steps include a link to schedule a screening call.

Stage 2: Process Milestones. At each transition — shortlisted, submitted to client, interview scheduled, interview completed, feedback received — the candidate gets a brief update. Most of these are two or three sentences. They take a recruiter 30 seconds to write but 30 minutes to remember to send. Automation eliminates the remembering.

Stage 3: Silence Detection. If a candidate hasn’t responded to a message within 48 hours, a gentle follow-up fires automatically. If a client hasn’t provided feedback within 24 hours of an interview, the recruiter gets a reminder. If a candidate’s process has stalled for more than 3 business days, both the recruiter and the candidate are notified.

The Counter-Intuitive Truth About Automation in Recruitment

Here’s what I hear from recruiters who resist automating their candidate communication: “My candidates want a personal relationship, not automated emails.”

They’re right about the first part. Candidates absolutely want a personal relationship with their recruiter. But they define “personal” differently than recruiters think. To a candidate, “personal” doesn’t mean every email is hand-typed. “Personal” means: you remember my name, you know what role I’m in process for, you tell me what’s happening without me having to chase, and you actually respond when I have questions.

Automation handles the first three. That frees the recruiter to be exceptional at the fourth.

The agencies I’ve seen implement follow-up automation don’t become less personal. They become more personal — because their recruiters have the bandwidth to actually prepare for screening calls, remember candidate preferences, and provide genuine career guidance. They stop being message-sending machines and start being the trusted advisors they wanted to be when they entered the profession.

Building This Without Replacing Your ATS

A common objection I hear: “We’ve already invested in Bullhorn (or JobAdder, or Vincere). Why do we need another system?”

You don’t need another system. You need your existing systems to talk to each other. Your ATS tracks candidate stages. Your email sends messages. Your calendar manages availability. What’s missing is the connective tissue — the logic that says “when this candidate moves to this stage, send this message, and if nothing happens within this timeframe, do this next thing.”

That’s what Neudash provides. It doesn’t replace your ATS. It watches what happens in your ATS and triggers the right actions in your email, calendar, and communication tools. Your recruiters keep using the tools they already know. They just stop falling through the gaps between them.

The agency I mentioned at the start — the 6-desk IT shop in Sydney — implemented a system like this in February. By May, their average first-response time had dropped from 4.7 hours to 3 minutes. Their candidate drop-off rate fell by 38%. And they made 7 additional placements that quarter — placements they would have lost to silence.

At $15,000 per placement, that’s $105,000 in revenue they were leaving on the table every quarter. Not because their recruiters weren’t good enough. Because their processes weren’t fast enough.