Silver Medalists: 6-Month Re-Engagement Runbook

Scenario: It is Monday 9:10 AM. A critical role reopens after an offer fallout. The hiring manager wants interviews scheduled by Wednesday to hit a customer delivery date. Recruiting pulls "silver medalists" from six months ago, but the notes are scattered and inconsistent. One interviewer used a rubric in the ATS, another wrote paragraphs in a doc, and a third left only a calendar invite. Your operational risks stack up fast: - SLA breach: your time-to-first-interview blows up because recruiters have to reconstruct context before they can even send a credible outreach. - Legal exposure: if legal asked you to prove why Candidate A was re-contacted and Candidate B was not, you cannot retrieve a consistent, timestamped rationale. If it is not logged, it is not defensible. - Cost of churned cycle time: every hour spent rebuilding prior context is pure waste. Worse, a rushed re-engagement can create a mis-hire that you will pay to replace. Replacement cost estimates are often cited in the 50-200% of annual salary range, depending on role and level. - Fraud risk: re-engagement is a high-trust path. Candidates know they are "almost in," which is exactly when proxy help and identity substitution become attractive. One report found 1 in 6 applicants to remote roles showed signs of fraud in one real-world pipeline.

The market mostly treats re-engagement as CRM email automation or as an ATS search problem. Neither is sufficient because the bottleneck is not outreach. It is evidence integrity. Common failure modes: - Sequential checks slow everything down. Teams re-check references, re-run screens, and re-administer assessments in a waterfall because systems cannot trigger parallelized checks based on events. - No immutable event log. Outreach happens in email, decisions happen in Slack, and the ATS becomes a partial record. Shadow workflows are integrity liabilities. - No unified evidence packs. Structured notes, scorecards, and assessments live in different places, so reviewers cannot see a complete record without manual stitching. - No standardized rubric storage. Six months ago, the interview loop may have used different questions, different scoring anchors, or no rubric at all. You cannot compare candidates consistently across cycles. - No SLAs or audit trails on review steps. The re-engagement queue becomes whoever has time, and escalations are informal. Time delays cluster at moments where identity is unverified and ownership is unclear.

Before you automate anything, assign ownership explicitly. This is where most programs fail: automation runs, but no one is accountable for eligibility, exceptions, or audit retrieval. Ownership model (recommended): - Recruiting Ops owns workflow: eligibility rules, routing, SLAs, templates, reconciliation, and ATS write-backs. - Security owns access control and audit policy: identity gating thresholds, step-up verification triggers, evidence retention, and who can view biometric outcomes. - Hiring Manager owns scoring discipline: rubric versioning, re-interview rules, and final decision attestations. - Analytics owns dashboards: time-to-event instrumentation, funnel segmentation, and failure mode reporting (missing notes, stale rubrics, SLA breaches). Sources of truth: - ATS is the system of record for candidate state, requisition mapping, decisions, and timestamps. - Interview notes platform is a supporting system only if it writes structured fields back into the ATS. - Verification service is authoritative for identity events, but outcomes must be written back into the ATS-anchored audit trail.

A defensible re-engagement program behaves like an instrumented workflow with controls, not a campaign. Model components: - Identity gate before access: do not issue live interview links, assessment links, or offer steps until identity is verified for this cycle. Treat it like privileged access management. - Event-based triggers: re-engagement should be driven by ATS events (req opened, stage changed, shortlist approved), not by manual exports. - Automated evidence capture: every outreach, response, scheduling event, and reviewer decision is logged with timestamps and actor identity. - Standardized rubrics: store the rubric version and scoring anchors used six months ago. If the rubric changed, require a delta review or a lightweight re-interview. - Segmented risk dashboards: track silver-medalist conversion by role family, time since last interview, missing evidence rate, and identity step-up rate. Key metric discipline: measure time-to-event (time from req open to shortlist creation, shortlist to scheduled screen, verification initiated to verification completed), not just time-to-fill.

IntegrityLens is used here as the ATS-anchored control plane that turns re-engagement into a logged recertification workflow. Operationally, it enables: - An identity gate before access: biometric identity verification with liveness detection, document authentication, and face matching, completed before any new interview or assessment access is granted. - Parallelized checks instead of waterfall workflows by triggering verification, interview scheduling, and rubric retrieval as event-based tasks with retries and idempotency. - Immutable evidence packs that bundle timestamps, reviewer notes, verification outcomes, and rubric versions into an audit-ready record tied to the candidate and requisition. - Zero-retention biometrics architecture to reduce data handling scope while still producing verifiable outcomes in the audit trail. - ATS write-backs so recruiting does not maintain shadow spreadsheets to track who was contacted, who responded, and why someone was excluded.

• Sending assessment or interview links to silver medalists before step-up verification, then trying to "clean up identity" later. That contaminates your evidence pack. - Allowing recruiters to re-engage from personal email or external sequences without ATS write-back. You lose the immutable event log and create undiscoverable decision paths. - Auto-rejecting re-engagement candidates based on stale six-month-old scores without a rubric equivalency check and documented reviewer attestation. Automation without review creates legal exposure.