What if the candidate you forgot to follow up with was the perfect hire?
Last month, a startup founder reached out to us in a panic…
They'd been interviewing engineers for three months and suddenly realized they couldn't remember three things:
- Which candidates they'd already spoken to.
- What feedback their team had given.
- Who was still waiting for a response.
One of the candidates had emailed twice asking for an update and the founder had no idea what stage they were supposed to be in.
The embarrassment was bad enough, but the real problem was that they'd lost track of someone their CTO had loved after the technical interview.
By the time they found the notes buried in an email thread, that engineer had accepted an offer elsewhere.
This isn't unusual. I see it constantly with early-stage startups trying to hire their first few engineers.
They start with good intentions, but within weeks, the system falls apart under the weight of dozens of applications, multiple interviewers, and the daily chaos of running a startup.
Their system is most often…
- Google Sheets to track applications.
- Shared email folders for candidate communications.
- Maybe some notes in a Google Document.
I was recently talking to Hugo, one of our tech recruiters, about how many startups come to us after botching their first few hiring attempts.
The technical talent exists and the compensation is competitive, but candidates disappear into organizational black holes because nobody knows who's responsible for what or where anyone is in the process.
I want to show you how we keep track of candidates for our clients using Homerun, and why the traditional methods startups rely on inevitably fail once you're managing more than a handful of applications.
Why Sheets Stop Working After The First Few Candidates
I’ve found that pretty much all startups begin their first technical hiring process with a Google Sheet, and it usually looks something like this…
As you can see, it has the potential to work well for a while.
However, as applications start coming in faster than anyone expected and the spreadsheet grows to 30 rows, then 50, then 80… things fall apart!
Nobody remembers to update it consistently because everyone's focused on their actual job responsibilities.
There is no…
- Single source of truth for feedback on candidates.
- Accountability for next steps.
- Candidate communication history.
You can't see the entire conversation with a candidate in a spreadsheet. What if someone already asked them about their salary expectations?
Every status change requires someone to remember to open the spreadsheet and update it.
When I speak with founders who've tried the spreadsheet approach, they describe a growing sense of dread every time they open it because they know how much information is missing or outdated.
The Email Folder Approach Isn't Much Better
Some startups skip spreadsheets entirely and try to manage everything through email.
I don’t want you to take this approach either. Here’s why…
- Email threads branch and split as different people reply to different messages.
- Finding a candidate's information means searching through emails (and remembering names!)
- Multiple email threads with each candidate can create confusion around what’s already been said.
Sure, email folders work slightly better than spreadsheets for very small teams, but they collapse just as quickly once volume increases or more people get involved in the hiring process.
I think people often forget that email was designed for asynchronous communication between individuals, not for managing complex multi-person workflows with dozens of moving pieces.
Here’s What Actually Works For Tracking Candidates At Scale
I don’t want you to build your own system. There are some really good solutions on the market.
After placing over 250 developers and managing thousands of candidate interactions, I know what actually works for keeping track of candidates as a startup scales from zero to dozens of applications per role.
I can speak with authority on this because I’ve tested nearly every applicant tracking system on the market. You name it, I’ve already tried it!
My team is using Homerun for every placement we make. I’ll explain why…
Homerun’s Pipeline Shows Everything At A Glance
As you’ll see, Homerun's interface shows candidates as cards that move through stages visually. You can see at a glance that you have new applications, people scheduled for phone screens, and others in technical interviews.
This visual representation makes it immediately obvious where candidates are and where bottlenecks exist in your process. If you have 8 people stuck in "Phone Screen" for more than a week, you know you need to schedule more calls.
When candidates are moving quickly through early stages but stalling at the final interview, you know where to focus your attention.
The pipeline view becomes the single source of truth that everyone on the hiring team can check without asking for status updates or digging through messages.
Every Candidate Has A Complete History
Click on any candidate in Homerun and you see everything...
- Full application and resume
- Every email exchange
- All feedback from interviewers
- When they were moved between stages
- Who made decisions and why
This complete history means you never have to ask:
- Did someone already talk to this person about salary?
- What did the CTO think after the technical interview?
The information is right there, organized chronologically, and accessible to everyone who needs it.
I've always found that this stops you from feeling like you're missing important context when making hiring decisions. You can see the full picture instead of fragmentary pieces scattered across different tools!
Automated Communication Keeps Candidates Engaged
Homerun deals with the mechanical parts of candidate communication automatically once you set up templates. When you move someone to "Phone Screen," they automatically receive an invitation with scheduling details.
If you move them over to "Rejected," they automatically receive a respectful rejection message thanking them for their time.
What this means is that every candidate gets timely communication, no matter how busy your team is.
You don’t have candidates slipping through the cracks and waiting weeks, wondering what's happening, which protects your reputation and prevents awkward situations where candidates have to chase you.
Scorecards Create Structured Feedback
After each interview, interviewers fill out scorecards in Homerun, rating candidates on predefined criteria.
This structured feedback gets attached to the candidate's profile automatically, and everyone can see what each interviewer thought about specific aspects of the candidate's skills and fit.
This is way better than asking interviewers to "send me your thoughts" via email or Slack, where feedback often amounts to "they seemed good" or "I'm not sure about them" without any specifics or consistency across different candidates.
It's interesting to see how scorecards surface patterns that informal feedback misses.
You might notice that candidates who score well on technical skills consistently score low on communication ability, which tells you something about your sourcing channels or the way you're describing the role.
Can You Really Afford Not To Track Candidates Properly?
If poor tracking causes you to lose one great engineering hire every six months, and that engineer would have generated value worth their $120,000 annual salary, you're losing $240,000 in missed value yearly.
Add in the cost of your founder's time spent on administrative tracking work instead of product development... maybe 10 hours per week at a $200 per hour opportunity cost.
That's another $100,000 per year in wasted time!
Then factor in the reputational damage that makes future hiring harder because your interview process has a bad reputation in local technical communities. That's harder to quantify but very real.
All of this can be avoided by implementing a proper candidate tracking system that costs less than $200 per month and requires minimal time to maintain once it's set up correctly.
The return on investment isn't even close! Proper tracking pays for itself within the first hire by making sure that you don't lose the right candidate due to disorganization.
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