Your Database Has 4,000 Candidates. You Talk to 40 of Them. The Other 3,960 Are Making Money for Someone Else.

I want you to open your ATS right now and look at one number: how many candidate records do you have?

I asked this question at a recruitment agency owners’ roundtable last year. The answers ranged from 2,000 to 18,000. Then I asked the follow-up: how many of those candidates have you contacted in the last 90 days?

The room went quiet. The honest answers were between 1% and 5%.

Every recruitment agency is sitting on a database they paid to build — in sourcing hours, job board credits, LinkedIn InMail spending, and recruiter time. Every candidate record represents an investment. A 15-minute screening call costs the agency roughly $12 in recruiter time. A fully qualified, interviewed, reference-checked candidate might represent $200-$400 in accumulated effort. Multiply that by thousands of records and your database represents tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in invested capital.

And it’s collecting dust.

The Sourcing Treadmill

Here’s the pattern I see in every agency that doesn’t nurture their pipeline: a new job order comes in, and the recruiter starts sourcing from scratch. They run LinkedIn searches, post on job boards, search their ATS with keyword filters. They might find a few candidates they’ve spoken to before — but those candidates haven’t heard from the agency in months, so the recruiter is essentially starting the relationship over.

This is the sourcing treadmill. You’re spending 13 hours per week finding candidates you’ve already found. You’re paying for LinkedIn InMail credits to reach people whose phone numbers are already in your ATS. You’re competing with every other agency on the job boards for candidates who would have taken your call immediately if you’d stayed in touch.

Why Agencies Don’t Nurture (And Why Those Reasons Are Wrong)

I hear three objections every time I suggest pipeline nurturing to an agency owner:

“We don’t have time.” This is the most common and the most backwards. You don’t have time to nurture because you’re spending all your time sourcing. You’re spending all your time sourcing because you don’t nurture. The circular logic is only broken by automation.

“Candidates don’t want to hear from us unless we have a specific role.” Wrong. Candidates want to hear from recruiters who remember them, understand their career goals, and reach out with relevant opportunities — not generic job blasts. The distinction matters. A message that says “Hi Sarah, I noticed you were interested in product management roles when we spoke in August — there’s a new PM opening at a Series B fintech that matches your background” is not spam. It’s the service candidates expect from their recruiter.

“Our ATS can do this.” Your ATS can store candidate records. Some can send bulk emails. Very few can run intelligent nurturing sequences that segment candidates by specialisation, seniority, and engagement level, then deliver personalised content on a cadence that adapts to their responses. And even the ones that can — you haven’t set it up. Because setting it up in your ATS requires hours of configuration that nobody has done.

The Three-Tier Nurturing System

The system I build for agencies segments candidates into three tiers based on recency and engagement:

Tier 1: Warm Pipeline (contacted in last 6 months). These candidates receive monthly touchpoints: a personalised check-in, relevant role alerts matching their profile, and occasional market salary updates for their specialisation. The goal is maintaining the relationship so that when a role matches, you’re their first call.

Tier 2: Cool Pipeline (6-18 months since last contact). Quarterly touchpoints with slightly more content: industry insights, career development resources, and a gentle “are you still open to opportunities?” check-in. These messages re-establish the relationship without being aggressive.

Tier 3: Cold Pipeline (18+ months). A single re-engagement message per quarter that offers value — a salary survey, an industry report, or a genuinely relevant opportunity. If they don’t engage within two quarters, they move to an annual check-in or are archived.

The key principle: every message must provide value to the candidate, not just to the agency. If the candidate wouldn’t forward your email to a colleague and say “this is useful,” it’s not good enough.

What Happens When You Actually Do This

A boutique accounting and finance recruitment agency I worked with had 3,200 candidates in their Vincere database. Two recruiters, running three desks between them. They were spending roughly 60% of their working week on sourcing — LinkedIn searches, job board responses, and cold outreach to people they’d already spoken to but lost touch with.

We built a nurturing system that segmented their database by specialisation (management accounting, financial analysis, CFO-level, bookkeeping) and engagement tier. The system sent monthly role-relevant touchpoints to Tier 1 candidates, quarterly check-ins to Tier 2, and re-engagement sequences to Tier 3.

Within three months, their sourcing time had dropped from 60% to 35% of total working hours. Not because they stopped sourcing — but because 40% of their shortlists were now coming from nurtured pipeline candidates who responded to targeted outreach rather than cold searches.

More importantly: their time-to-fill dropped from an average of 28 days to 18 days. When you already have a warm, pre-qualified candidate who’s been receiving relevant content from you for months, the gap between “new job order” and “first submittal” shrinks from days to hours.

Over the first 12 months, they attributed 11 additional placements directly to pipeline nurturing — candidates who came back into active processes because of a nurturing touchpoint rather than a cold sourcing effort. At their average fee of $14,000 per placement, that’s $154,000 in revenue generated by automation that took two days to set up.

The Reluctant Convert

I’ll be honest — when I first suggested pipeline nurturing to this agency’s founders, they were sceptical. One of them told me: “I’ve been recruiting for 15 years. I don’t need a system to tell me to call my candidates.”

He was right that he didn’t need a system to tell him to call his best candidates — the ones he remembered, the ones he placed last year, the ones who were top of mind. But he was wrong about the other 3,100 candidates in his database. He couldn’t remember them all. He couldn’t call them all. He couldn’t maintain a relationship with all of them manually.

The system didn’t replace his relationship skills. It extended them to candidates he physically couldn’t stay in touch with on his own. And when one of those candidates — a management accountant he’d screened 14 months earlier and then forgotten about — replied to a nurturing email saying “actually, I’m looking to move,” the placement happened in 8 days. He called me that afternoon: “Okay. I get it now.”

The Database Isn’t a Filing Cabinet

The fundamental mindset shift is this: your candidate database isn’t a filing cabinet where you store records of past interactions. It’s a pipeline of future revenue.

Every candidate you’ve ever spoken to represents a potential placement. Not today — maybe not for months. But if you maintain the relationship, if you stay relevant and useful, if you’re the recruiter they think of when they decide to move… that’s a placement that costs you almost nothing to source.

The agencies that understand this don’t think of sourcing as a role-by-role activity. They think of it as an ongoing, continuous process that runs in the background. New candidates enter the pipeline through active sourcing. Placed candidates re-enter the pipeline for their next move. And the entire database — every candidate, every relationship, every conversation — compounds over time into an asset that makes every subsequent placement faster and cheaper.

The ones that don’t? They’ll keep running on the treadmill. Sourcing the same candidates, paying for the same LinkedIn credits, and wondering why the agency across town fills roles in 18 days when it takes them 32.