Every talent platform quotes a candidate count. Almost none of them tell you what fraction of that count will answer an email this month.
This report separates the two, because the difference is what determines whether a hiring plan is realistic.
Live from our candidate database
Counted at render time and refreshed every six hours. This is a supply-side view of one platform, not a national labour-market statistic.
Registered is not the same as available
A registered candidate base accumulates. People who found a job two years ago do not delete their accounts, so any platform's headline number includes a substantial tail of candidates who are no longer in the market.
The honest metric is recent activity. We publish both the total and the ninety-day active figure on this page precisely so the gap between them is visible rather than hidden inside a marketing number.
Availability bands and what they mean operationally
Candidates active in the last fortnight will typically respond to outreach within days. Candidates active within forty-five days respond, but more slowly and at a lower rate. Beyond that, response rates fall sharply and a shortlist built on them will disappoint.
This is why our shortlists weight towards recent activity rather than simply towards match score. A perfect skills match who has not logged in for six months is not a candidate, it is a record.
The resume gate
The proportion of a pool with an uploaded resume is a useful second filter, because uploading one is a small act of intent. It also has a practical consequence: a shortlist of candidates without resumes takes materially longer for your team to process.
We publish this figure alongside every pool count for that reason. If the resume-attached number is much smaller than the headline, plan for a longer screening cycle.
How to build a realistic plan
Work backwards from the active figure, not the total. Apply your own historical response rate to it, then your screening pass rate, then your offer-acceptance rate. The number you get is what the pool will actually yield.
Teams that plan from headline counts consistently under-resource the top of the funnel and then conclude the market is tight. Usually the market was fine and the arithmetic was optimistic.
Key takeaways
- Headline registered counts include a long tail of candidates no longer in the market.
- Ninety-day activity is the honest availability metric; we publish it next to the total.
- Resume-attached share is a useful intent filter and predicts your screening cycle length.
- Plan from the active figure and your own funnel rates, not from the headline count.
Questions
Why publish the total at all if activity is the better metric?+
Because hiding it would be its own kind of dishonesty. Publishing both, side by side, lets you judge the gap yourself rather than taking our word for which number matters.
How is "active" defined?+
A recorded platform activity, or account creation, within the window. It is a conservative definition — it does not count passive email opens.
Can we filter a shortlist to actively-looking candidates only?+
Yes. Say so in your requirement and the shortlist is restricted to the top availability band, at the cost of a smaller pool.