The candidate you already found

There is a person finishing a contract with one of your clients in about three weeks. You sourced them. You screened them. You put them in front of a client who said yes. They have worked out — no escalations, no timesheet drama.

They are the warmest candidate in your business, and in most firms, on the day their contract ends, they quietly stop being a candidate at all.

The economics are not subtle

Compare two ways of filling the same open role.

The first: post it, source it, screen a dozen people, submit three, interview two, place one. Every stage costs recruiter hours, and the failure risk is highest at the point where you know the least — you are betting on a CV and two conversations.

The second: a person you have already placed, whose work your client has already praised, whose rate you already know, whose right to work you have already verified, coming free on a date you can see in advance.

The second one is not slightly cheaper. It skips the entire top of the funnel and it starts with evidence instead of a hypothesis. A redeployed contractor is usually your highest-margin placement of the month, because the sourcing cost was paid a year ago.

Nobody disputes this. Firms miss it anyway, and the reason is boring.

It is a calendar problem, not a strategy problem

Redeployment fails because nobody is looking on the right day.

Contract end dates live in placement records that nobody opens unless something is wrong. The recruiter who made the placement has moved on to this quarter’s targets. The person who would benefit — whoever is working the open role that fits — has no idea that a suitable contractor is coming free, because that fact lives in a different part of the business.

By the time it surfaces, the contractor has taken something else. Not because you were outbid, but because someone called them and you did not.

Three weeks of notice is plenty. Three weeks of notice that nobody sees is worth nothing.

What actually fixes it

Put the two lists on one screen: people coming free, and roles you have open. That is most of the work. It sounds trivially obvious and almost nobody does it, because the two lists live in different modules owned by different teams.

Then apply eligibility as a hard filter, not a warning. If someone cannot legally take a role, they should not appear against it at all. A soft warning is a decision you have handed to a recruiter in a hurry, and it is the wrong decision to hand to anyone.

Rank what is left, and be honest with yourself about what the ranking is worth. Skills overlap and rate fit will get a reasonable list in front of a human quickly. It will not know that this contractor found the client’s site manager difficult, or that the client asked for someone more senior next time. That is your recruiter’s job, and a ranking that pretends otherwise is worse than no ranking, because people stop reading the list and start trusting the order.

The habit worth building

Once a week, look at everyone whose contract ends in the next thirty days. Ask one question per person: what are we putting them forward for?

If the answer is “nothing yet”, that is not a scheduling detail. That is a placement you already earned and are about to give back to the market.