Glossary
Candidate collision
Candidate collision is when two or more recruiters at the same company contact the same candidate without knowing about each other.
Why it matters
Candidates do not see your org chart. To them, two messages from one company are one company being disorganised. Collisions waste recruiter time, can leave the candidate unsure who to reply to, and weaken the employer brand you are trying to build with outreach in the first place.
How it happens
- Two recruiters search for overlapping roles and find the same profile.
- Outreach happens in different places (LinkedIn, LinkedIn Recruiter, Sales Navigator, email) and nothing connects them.
- Contact is logged late or not at all in the ATS or shared sheet.
- A new team member does not know the history of a talent pool.
How to avoid it
- Make the contact history visible where recruiters work, on the profile, before they write.
- Agree who owns a candidate for each role and how long a contact "counts" before someone else may reach out again.
- Log contact at the moment of sending, or use a tool that does it for you.
Options, with their trade-offs, are covered in how to stop your recruiting team from messaging the same LinkedIn candidate twice and in the comparison of spreadsheets, ATS notes, LinkedIn Recruiter and YellowSync.
Related terms
- Double outreach
- Everyday phrase for the same event: a candidate is approached twice by the same organisation.
- Duplicate outreach
- Another name for the same outcome, often used when the two messages are almost identical.
- Contact history
- The record of who in a team contacted a candidate, through which channel and when. Collisions happen when it is missing or hard to see.
- Cooldown or expiry period
- The agreed time after which a past contact stops blocking new outreach. YellowSync marks expire after 180 days by default and the organisation can change this.
Where YellowSync fits
YellowSync is a Chrome extension that marks, in yellow, the LinkedIn profiles your team has already contacted, with the author and date on hover. It only marks profiles: it never sends messages, connects, visits profiles, scrapes or exports data.