"Applicants: the in-play list and how they are surfaced"

What this page covers

Every applicant in Recruiting, whether they just landed from a forwarded resume or they have been in your pipeline for weeks, lives in one place: the Applicants tab. Verinode does not source candidates or decide who to hire. It reads the resumes, cover letters, and status updates that flow into your recruiting inbox (or that you add by hand), scores each applicant against the role's requirements, and lays the whole pool out so you can search, filter, and compare without digging through email threads. You decide who advances.

The same applicants also surface, filtered down to the ones worth your attention right now, on the In Play row of the Recruiting home view. This article covers both: the full list in the Applicants tab, and the home-row summary that points you at it.

Where to find it

Open Recruiting from the sidebar. The route is /recruiting. Recruiting is a switchable section (not one of the four every account starts with), so if it hasn't been turned on yet you will see a "Switch on Recruiting" panel first; see Recruiting: overview and how the section works for that step.

Once the section is active, applicants show up in two places:

• In Play, one of the horizontally scrolling rows on the Recruiting home view, underneath Open Roles.
• Applicants, the third tab in the cards slider (Findings, Open Roles, Applicants, Pipeline, Talent Pool, Hires + Retention, Benchmarks). Click any applicant tile, or the Applicants tab itself, to open it.

Both pull from the same underlying applicant records, so an applicant's score, status, and stance read identically whichever way you got there.

In Play: the home row

What it is. In Play is your active applicant pool, sorted so the ones that need eyes on them land first. Sorting is by severity, most urgent first (an applicant flagged for compliance review or a top-scoring candidate sorts ahead of one that is simply moving through the pipeline normally), then alphabetically by name within the same severity level. The row shows up to 20 applicants.

What each tile shows. Each applicant renders as a standard home tile: the kind label ("Applicant") in the small accent tag, the applicant's name as the headline, their status label underneath with a colored dot (green for on track, amber for something to watch, red for something urgent), and the same kind label repeated as the meta line. Clicking a tile opens the applicant's detail view directly, arriving straight into the Applicants tab rather than making you find them in the list yourself.

Empty state. When you have no applicants yet, the row reads:

"Applicants will appear here as resumes flow into your recruiting inbox or get added manually."

This is the same copy the full Applicants tab shows when it is empty, so wherever you land, the instruction to fix it is the same: forward resumes to your recruiting inbox, or add an applicant by hand.

The Applicants tab: search, filter, compare

The Applicants tab is the working list: every applicant in your pipeline, in one searchable, filterable view. It sits above a row of controls, and below that, the filtered list itself.

Search

A single search box, placeholder text "Search applicants…", filters as you type. It matches against the applicant's name, their subtitle line (score, source channel, and state), and their status label, all case-insensitively. There is no separate field-by-field search, one box covers name, channel, location, and status in a single pass.

Filters

Three dropdowns sit next to the search box:

• Channel, defaulting to "All Channels." The list of channels in the dropdown is built from your own applicants, only channels at least one of your applicants actually came through appear as options (referral, a job board, direct application, and so on). If none of your applicants came in through, say, LinkedIn, LinkedIn will not show up as a filter option, there is nothing dead in the list.
• Status, defaulting to "All Statuses." Same rule: only statuses present in your current pool appear (New, Scored, Advanced, Declined, Withdrawn, Ghosted, Hired, or Talent Pool for one that has moved out of active consideration).
• Score, defaulting to "All Scores," with four fixed bands regardless of your data:

- Top (≥ 85) - Strong (70–84) - Mid (50–69) - Low (< 50)

All three filters combine with the search box and with each other. Narrow by channel and status and score band at once if you want, for example, every Indeed applicant still in New status scoring Strong or better.

Empty state (no applicants at all):

"Applicants will appear here as resumes flow into your recruiting inbox or get added manually."

Empty state (filters too narrow):

"No applicants match the current filters."

There is no separate "clear filters" button for this case, reset each dropdown back to its "All" option (or clear the search box) to widen the list again.

What the applicant tile shows

Each row in the filtered list is a single tile, most of it clickable to open the applicant's detail view. Left to right:

• Name, bold, the applicant's full name.
• Stance pill, a small colored, uppercase tag reading one of six words: Healthy, Progressing, Watching, At Risk, Blocked, or Closed. This is Verinode's read on where this applicant sits relative to how a healthy pipeline normally moves, not a score, and not a hiring recommendation. Green (Healthy) and teal (Progressing) mean the applicant is moving normally; yellow (Watching) means something is worth a look, four common reasons are the applicant scoring low, not having a score yet, going quiet since last contact, or having ghosted outright; red covers both At Risk (most often a top-scoring applicant where speed matters, because a strong candidate rarely stays unclaimed for long) and Blocked (a compliance review, a comp mismatch outside your posted range, or a qualified internal candidate that should be weighed first); gray (Closed) covers applicants who are hired, declined, or withdrew. Click through to the applicant's own detail view for the specific reasoning behind the pill, the subtitle line there spells out exactly why (for example, how many days since last contact, or what triggered a compliance review), rather than leaving you to guess from a one-word tag.
• Legal Review pill, appearing only when a background-check consideration needs a documented, non-discriminatory review path. Verinode does not score that field and instead surfaces the full resume for your review; this is a defense-in-depth flag, not an auto-decline, and it never displays the underlying detail on the list, only the pill.
• Subtitle line, reading "Applicant" (the kind label), then the source channel if one is on record, then the status label, separated by middle dots, for example "Applicant · Referral · Scored."
• Score, right-aligned, showing the overall score out of 100 (for example "82/100") or a dash if the applicant has not been scored.

Two fields are deliberately never rendered on this list, or in the compare view below: free-text notes and the work-history summary. Only structured fields (name, status, score, source channel, and the compliance flag) ever reach the screen here, by design, to keep protected-class information out of a scanning list view.

Comparing applicants

Each row also carries a checkbox. Check up to four applicants and a compare bar appears above the list, showing how many you have selected and a reminder that you can pick up to four. A Clear button resets the selection; a Compare N button (active once you have at least two checked) opens a side-by-side modal.

What the compare modal shows, one column per applicant:

• Score, the overall score out of 100, large and color-coded (green for 85+, teal for 70-84, yellow for 50-69, red under 50).
• A Legal review flag banner when applicable, reading "Legal review flag, scorer skipped criminal history."
• Score Components, five weighted dimensions with their individual value out of 100 and a colored bar: Certs (30% of the overall score), Experience (25%), Peer Profile (20%), Location (15%), and Comp Fit (10%).
• Years Exp, Location, Channel, preferred Comp range, and Status.
• Certs, a row of badges for every certification the applicant holds, when they have any on file.

A footer note spells out the same weighting shown above and closes with the same principle that runs through every part of Recruiting: Verinode does not make hiring decisions, the comparison is there to ground your review, then you decide.

Cadence-stale flagging

An applicant goes cadence-stale when they have moved past the New status, have not been marked declined, withdrawn, ghosted, or hired, have gone more than four days since you last logged contact with them, and have no next action scheduled, or the next action they had scheduled has already come and gone. In plain terms: someone still active in your pipeline who nobody has followed up with in a while and nobody has a next step queued for.

Cadence-stale applicants pull the Watching stance on their tile. The reasoning shows up in full once you open the applicant's own detail view: a subtitle along the lines of "Re-engage [name], last contact N days ago," because four-plus days of silence is where candidates start to go quiet on their own, and a short check-in re-anchors the conversation before that happens.

You will also see the cadence-stale count without opening the list at all: the Applicants tile in the home view's Explore row shows how many of your in-flight applicants are currently cadence-stale (for example "3 cadence stale"), or "all in cadence" when none are. Clicking that tile opens straight into the Applicants tab so you can work the list.

Best-practice example

Say your Explore row shows "2 cadence stale" on the Applicants tile. Open the Applicants tab, filter Status down to the statuses your active pipeline uses (skip New and Closed), and scan for the Watching pills, sorted to the top of In Play already if you came from home. For each one, open the detail view to see the exact reasoning, most often it names how many days since last contact, and send the two-line check-in it is asking for. Separately, if a Top score band filter turns up an applicant still sitting at New after a few days, that is worth moving before a competitor's faster process claims them, an At Risk pill on a high scorer is Verinode's way of saying speed is the lever here, not more diligence.

Related reading

• Recruiting: overview and how the section works
• Recruiting home: the Explore tiles
• Creating a new role
• The decision workspace
• Benchmarks overview
• Reading a benchmark
• Forwarding documents
• Connecting your data