A planner at a staffing branch gets a call on Thursday afternoon: a client needs four extra people for the evening shift from Monday. The pool holds more than two hundred names, so it should be easy. Two hours and thirty phone calls later, three people are confirmed. Several candidates have started a job elsewhere, a few only work mornings now, one moved to another city and one said months ago that she was available “from September”, which nobody followed up. The pool looked large, but nobody knew who could actually work. This article explains why every staffing pool candidate in your Applicant Tracking System needs confirmed availability: why availability goes stale, what to record, when to reconfirm it, how to use it when you plan and how to check with your own data whether your pool is as large as it looks.
Availability matters most for staffing desks that fill shifts and short assignments from a pool, but it is not only their concern. Secondment firms need to know when consultants between assignments can start again. Recruitment agencies that place contractors and interim professionals work with the same question. Executive search firms that also place interim executives need to know who is free for a mandate of a few months. In-house recruitment teams that run an internal flex or on-call pool, for example for seasonal peaks, face exactly the same planning problem.
Why availability goes stale
- Availability is recorded once, at registration, and never asked again
- It sits in a free-text note such as “flexible, prefers evenings” that cannot be filtered or sorted
- Candidates tell one planner about a change by phone, and the record is not updated
- Someone starts a job through another agency or a direct employer, and the pool still shows them as available
- Each branch keeps its own list in a spreadsheet next to the system, so the same person appears three times with three different answers
None of this is a lack of effort. Availability changes week by week, while most records are built for information that hardly changes, such as a name, a phone number and a work history.
What confirmed availability means, and what it does not
Confirmed availability is a short, structured statement on the candidate record of when and where someone can work, together with the date it was last confirmed and who confirmed it. The word that matters is confirmed: availability without a date is a guess, and a guess from four months ago is worse than no information at all, because it looks reliable.
It is not a promise of work, and it is not a schedule. Recording that someone is available on Tuesday evenings does not mean they will be booked, and it does not commit the candidate to accept every shift offered. It is also not the place for the reasons behind it. You need to know that someone is not available on Wednesdays, not why. Availability is personal data, so record only what you need for planning and handle it under the same privacy rules, such as the GDPR, as the rest of the record. This article is not legal advice; what applies is what your own policy, contracts and working-time agreements say.
What to record
Keep it to a handful of fields that a planner can filter on:
- Status — available, partly available, not available until a date, or no longer in the pool; one value, not a paragraph
- Days and shifts — which days, and which shifts such as early, late, night or weekend, using the same shift names the desk uses with clients
- Hours per week — a minimum and maximum, so you do not offer forty hours to someone who wants sixteen
- Available from and until — for example a student who is free during the holidays, or a consultant whose secondment end date is known
- Travel area — a home region or maximum travel time, and whether the candidate has their own transport
- Confirmed on and confirmed by — the date of the last confirmation and the named colleague, or the candidate if they confirmed it themselves
Combine this with the shared skills and tag list, so a planner can search for people with the right skills who can work late shifts in a given region this month, instead of scrolling through names.
Keep it current: when to reconfirm
Agree a reconfirmation interval that fits the work. For a shift pool, availability older than four to six weeks should count as unconfirmed. For consultants between assignments, a check every two weeks during the bench period is common. For contractors and interim professionals, reconfirm when an assignment is about to end. Use the next action date on the candidate record for the next check, so the reconfirmation shows up in someone’s list instead of depending on memory.
Some events should always trigger a reconfirmation: a placement or booking that ends, a candidate who declines several shifts in a row, a change of address, or a candidate who tells you they started a job elsewhere. In the last case, set the status to not available or no longer in the pool, and record a date to ask again later if the candidate agrees to that.
Using availability when you plan
Once availability is structured, the planner starts from the people who can actually work, instead of from everyone in the pool. A few rules keep that honest:
- Filter on confirmed availability first, and treat anything older than the agreed interval as a reason to call, not as a match
- Check that the candidate is not already booked or proposed to the same client by a colleague for the same period
- Ask the candidate before you propose them, in line with your consent before submission, even if their availability fits perfectly
- Before a first shift, make sure the right-to-work check is recorded; availability does not replace it
- When an assignment ends, update availability on the same day, so the candidate is back in the pool for the next request
The candidate and client relationship view beside the pipeline then shows not just who someone is, but whether they can help this client next week.
Let the system do the reminding
Reconfirming availability is a repeated step that suits automation. The Applicant Tracking System can send a short message when availability is about to expire, with a link the candidate can use to confirm or change days, shifts and hours themselves. An artificial intelligence helper can suggest which pool candidates to contact first for a request, or draft the check-in message. The planner still decides who is offered a shift and talks to the candidate when something is unclear; artificial intelligence does not replace recruiters or planners and does not book anyone.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Availability without a date — a status without a confirmation date cannot be trusted and should not be filtered on
- Free-text only — notes like “mostly evenings” cannot be searched; keep a structured field and use the note only for exceptions
- Recording reasons — illness, care duties or other personal reasons do not belong in the availability field
- A pool that only grows — people who left the pool stay listed as available; give them a clear status and keep the retention date on their record
- Branch lists beside the system — a second list means two truths; let every branch work from the same record, with the right user roles and access rights
Questions teams ask
- Should candidates update their own availability? — Yes, where possible; it is faster and more accurate, as long as the record shows that the candidate made the change and when
- How detailed should shifts be? — As detailed as the clients you serve; use the shift names you actually plan with, and no more
- What about permanent candidates? — For permanent roles, the start date usually depends on the notice period; availability per shift matters most for flexible, temporary and contract work
- What if a candidate keeps declining shifts? — Ask and reconfirm; often availability has changed and the record is out of date
Check it with your own data
Count from your own records: how many candidates in your pool are marked as available, how many of those have a confirmation date within your agreed interval, how many have no confirmation date at all, how many requests last month were filled from candidates with confirmed availability, and how often a proposed candidate turned out not to be available after all. Report the number of candidates and requests behind each figure. Do not compare with industry averages; the gap between the pool you think you have and the pool that has confirmed availability is the number that matters.
A practical start
- Agree the status values, shift names and reconfirmation interval with your planners
- Add structured availability fields to the candidate record, including confirmed on and confirmed by
- Mark every pool candidate without a recent confirmation as unconfirmed, and contact the most active ones first
- Set a next action date for each reconfirmation and switch on a reminder before availability expires
- Review confirmed versus unconfirmed availability per branch in your weekly pipeline review
A pool you can actually plan with
A large pool only helps when you know who can work, when and where. Record availability in a few structured fields, confirm it on a fixed rhythm, update it when assignments end, leave out personal reasons and plan from confirmed availability rather than from every name you have. Explore the product or book a demo — we show how availability, reconfirmation reminders and pool filters are set up in BoldATS for your segment.