What is Candidate Freeze?
Candidate Freeze is a protection mechanism built into Recruitera to prevent your team from doing duplicate work on the same candidate across two different jobs.
This one came directly from a real problem our customers were facing — two recruiters, two open roles, one candidate. Neither recruiter knows the other is working on the same person, and before long, the candidate has been phone screened twice, emailed twice, and interviewed twice.
That's wasted time for your team and a poor experience for the candidate.
Candidate Freeze solves this automatically.
When Does It Happen?
A candidate gets frozen when they are actively being processed in two jobs at the same time and a recruiter moves them forward in one of those jobs.
The moment a recruiter advances the candidate to the next stage in Job A, the candidate's card in Job B gets automatically locked.
What Does a Locked Candidate Look Like?
You'll see a 🔒 Locked badge appear directly on the candidate card in the pipeline. This tells anyone viewing that job that this candidate is currently being actively processed in another role and cannot be moved forward here until the lock is resolved.
📌 The locked state is visible to all recruiters who have access to that job — so there's no confusion about why the candidate isn't moving.
What Can You Do With a Locked Candidate?
You have two options when you encounter a locked candidate:
Leave them as is — if the candidate is already being handled in the other job and you don't need to do anything further here
Switch their primary job — if you want to move the candidate's active process to this job instead
To learn how to switch a candidate's primary job, check out the next article: [How to Switch a Candidate's Primary Job →]