Sooner or later every recruitment team has to move work from one person to another. A recruiter goes on parental leave, moves to another desk, falls ill for a few weeks or leaves the company. How well that goes depends almost entirely on what is recorded in your Applicant Tracking System. If the open vacancies, the candidates in each stage and the agreements with clients and hiring managers are all on the record, a colleague can take over in an afternoon. If half of it lives in a personal mailbox, a phone and someone’s memory, candidates and clients notice the gap before the team does. This article describes how to hand over a recruiter’s work in the Applicant Tracking System in a way that is quick, complete and visible to everyone.
The stakes differ per segment. For recruitment agencies a handover touches client relationships: a client who hears nothing for two weeks starts briefing a competitor. Staffing desks hand over candidates who are working this week and need shifts next week. Secondment teams hand over consultants on assignment, including end dates and follow-up plans. In executive search the candidate relationship is personal and confidential, so the introduction of the new contact person needs care. In-house recruitment teams hand over vacancies together with the hiring managers who expect regular updates.
Why handovers go wrong
- The handover is a conversation or an email, not a change in the system, so the vacancies still show the old owner
- Promises made by phone, such as “I will call you back on Friday”, were never recorded and are simply not kept
- Candidates and clients are not told who their new contact is and keep writing to an inbox nobody reads
- The new owner has to reconstruct the history of each candidate from scattered notes and starts asking the same questions again
- During temporary cover nobody is sure who decides, so decisions wait until the original recruiter is back
Each of these is a recording problem, not a people problem. The fix is to make the handover itself a set of recorded steps in the Applicant Tracking System.
What has to move with the work
- Per vacancy — the owner, the structured brief, the target fill date and the status of any client submissions that are waiting for an answer
- Per candidate — the current stage, the next-action date, the last contact and anything that was promised, such as feedback after an interview or a decision on an offer
- Per client or hiring manager — the contact persons, recent conversations and agreements, kept in the client and candidate records beside the pipeline rather than in a personal address book
- Per assignment — for staffing and secondment, the running placements with their end dates and the planned follow-up
If an item on this list cannot be found in the Applicant Tracking System, record it there before the handover, not in a separate handover document. A document is out of date the day after it is written; the record keeps being updated.
Planned and unplanned handovers
A planned handover, for leave or a departure, gives you time: the outgoing recruiter walks through their open vacancies and active candidates with the new owner, using the lists in the system, and fills any gaps on the spot. An unplanned handover, after sudden illness for example, gives you none. Then the record is all you have. That makes the unplanned case the real test of your pipeline discipline: if a colleague cannot continue tomorrow morning from what is in the Applicant Tracking System, the gap is in the daily recording, not in the handover.
A handover in six recorded steps
- List everything the recruiter owns — filter open vacancies, active candidates and running assignments by owner, so the scope is complete and not based on memory
- Change the owner in the system — reassign each vacancy and candidate explicitly, so that the change is recorded with who made it and when, just as with every stage change
- Review the open next actions — the new owner checks every next-action date, takes over what is still valid and reschedules what is overdue
- Introduce the new contact person — candidates, clients and hiring managers receive a short message naming their new contact; a template sent from the system saves time, as long as the new owner checks it first
- Close what should stop — a vacancy that will not be filled is closed with a documented reason, rather than handed over as dead weight
- Check after one week — look at whether all transferred records have an owner and a next action that is not overdue
Temporary cover is not the same as a transfer
For a holiday of a week or two, moving every record to someone else and back again creates more confusion than it solves. Agree instead on a named stand-in who follows up on the next actions that fall due and who may take decisions within clear limits, for example scheduling interviews but not rejecting finalists. Record that arrangement on the vacancy, so the team and the client can see who to contact. For longer leave or a departure, transfer the ownership itself. What you should avoid either way is records without anyone responsible: a vacancy or candidate that belongs to a colleague who is not there is effectively ownerless.
Access and candidate data when someone leaves
When a recruiter leaves the company, their access to the Applicant Tracking System is withdrawn on the last working day, after the handover is complete. Candidate data and correspondence should already be in the system rather than in a personal mailbox or phone, so nothing has to be exported or forwarded. The retention date on each candidate record stays as it was; a change of owner is not a reason to keep data longer or to delete it earlier.
See whether handovers work
The Applicant Tracking System can answer this from its own records: how many open vacancies and active candidates are assigned to users who are absent or no longer active, how many transferred candidates have an overdue next action one and two weeks after the handover, and whether candidates in transferred vacancies wait longer in a stage than before. Report these as actual counts from your own data, with the number of records behind each figure and the same filters every time. Avoid general benchmarks you cannot verify.
Where artificial intelligence may help — and where it must not
Artificial intelligence may draft a short summary of each candidate’s history for the new owner, based on the recorded notes and stage changes, or draft the introduction message to a client. The new owner reads and corrects both before relying on them. It stays a helper. Artificial intelligence does not replace recruiters, does not decide who takes over which vacancies and does not make decisions about candidates on behalf of an absent colleague. The relationship with candidates and clients is carried by people; the Applicant Tracking System makes sure they have the full picture.
A practical start
- Build a saved view per recruiter showing their open vacancies, active candidates and running assignments
- Agree as a team who stands in for whom during holidays, and what the stand-in may decide
- Write a short introduction template for candidates and one for clients, in each language you work in
- Do a dry run: pick one recruiter and ask a colleague whether they could continue tomorrow from the record alone, and note what is missing
- Fix those gaps in the daily routine, not in a handover document
The weekly pipeline review is a good place to check that transferred vacancies and candidates are being followed up.
Hand over the record, not a story
A good handover is mostly a matter of changing owners in the system and checking the next actions. When the work is recorded every day, that takes an afternoon instead of a week, and candidates and clients barely notice the change. Explore the product or book a demo — we show how ownership, next actions and handovers work in BoldATS for your segment.