Candidate Status & Communication Nudges

The problem this kills

Candidates remember silence. A great applicant fills out your form, has a promising screen, and then... nothing. Days pass, then weeks. They assume the worst, tell their friends, and your employer brand takes the hit - over a reply that nobody meant to skip. It just fell through the cracks while you were buried in the next req.

The truth is that no recruiter ghosts people on purpose. It happens because the pipeline lives in an ATS tab, a spreadsheet, and your memory, and nothing is watching the clock. Who's been "still reviewing" for eight days? Who got interviewed last week and is waiting to hear? Who needs a kind decline so they can move on? You can't keep all of that in your head, and you shouldn't have to.

This tool watches the clock for you. It scans the pipeline every day, finds everyone who has waited longer than your service-level rule, drafts the right message for each one - and then hands it to you to approve. Nothing sends without a human saying yes.

What you'll build

A private web app, locked behind a login, where:

• Your candidate pipeline (each person, their stage, and when they last heard from you) lives in one place - imported from your ATS export, a Google Sheet, or a CSV.
• A daily scan flags everyone who has sat too long in a stage based on your SLA rule (for example, "no candidate waits more than 5 business days").
• For each flagged candidate, the tool drafts the right templated message - still reviewing, invite to interview, or a gentle decline - personalized with their name, the role, and the recruiter.
• A recruiter reviews, edits, and approves every draft before it sends. Nothing goes out on its own.
• Bulk rejections require an explicit confirm step with a preview of exactly who will receive what.
• Approved messages send via Resend, get logged, and the candidate is suppressed from getting the same nudge twice.
• Candidates who asked not to be contacted are always respected and never surface.
• You can pull a CSV export of communication history any time.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your current pipeline and ATS, your real stage names, the fields and ID formats in your data, your typical and peak candidate volumes, your SLA rules, your message templates per stage and outcome, and the messy edge cases (candidates who reapply, on-hold reqs, do-not-contact requests). It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before building anything. You get a tool shaped to how your team actually hires, not a generic template.

From there it's a step-by-step build, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt for your AI coding agent: the database and pipeline model, the login and per-organization isolation, the daily staleness scan, the template engine with personalization tokens, the review-and-approve queue, the bulk-rejection confirm-and-preview gate, the Resend send-and-log, the duplicate and do-not-contact suppression, the audit trail, and the CSV export. It closes with a "how to know it works" checklist and a no-API CSV fallback so you can run it today even with no ATS integration.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your recruiting team can get in.
• Row-level security so users only ever see their own organization's candidates.
• A complete audit trail - who drafted, who approved, who sent, and when - for every message.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts; a recruiter reviews and approves; only then does anything send. Bulk rejections need an extra explicit confirm with a recipient preview.
• Duplicate guards keyed on candidate ID plus message type, so the same nudge can never fire twice - and do-not-contact candidates are suppressed entirely.

This keeps the candidate experience human and your employer brand intact - while making sure a person, not a script, owns every word that goes out.

Who it's for

Recruiters and recruiting coordinators who lose track of who's waiting on a reply, who juggle several open reqs at once, and who never want a good candidate to walk away because of silence.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.