Every recruiter has sent the message that goes nowhere. A perfect profile, a warm note, and then silence. Most of the time the problem is not the message and not the person. It is the timing. The candidate who ignored you was probably right for the role and simply not ready to move. The useful part is that readiness leaves a trail on a public profile, if you know where to look.
I have run sourcing for product and engineering teams across Bengaluru, Gurgaon and Pune, and the pattern is consistent. A shortlist built on skills alone converts at single digit reply rates. A shortlist built on skills plus timing converts two to three times better, with the same message. Below are the four signals I check before I write a single word of outreach, and how a good tool computes them for you so you are not reading a hundred profiles by hand.
Signal 1: Tenure and the two year itch
The single strongest predictor of an open ear is how long someone has been in their current seat. In Indian tech the itch tends to arrive somewhere between the eighteen month and thirty month mark. Before that, people are still learning the job or waiting on their first appraisal cycle. After three years without a change, many have either gone quiet or gotten comfortable.
So the sweet spot is a candidate who is roughly two years into a role, with a track record of moving every two to three years before that. A person who has stayed at four companies for two years each is telling you something. A person who has been at one company for eight years is telling you something too, and it is usually no. This does not mean the long tenure candidate is worse. It often means the opposite for retention, which is the whole point of our companion piece on how to spot candidates likely to leave within a year. The signal that helps you close and the signal that keeps someone around pull in opposite directions, and both matter.
Signal 2: Promotion recency and title stagnation
A promotion resets the clock. Someone who was promoted three months ago is rarely looking, because the new title feels like recognition and the new scope is fresh. Reach out and you will get a polite decline. The opposite is where the opportunity sits. Look for the person who has held the same title for three or four years while peers who joined around the same time have moved up a level.
Title stagnation is a quiet frustration that people rarely post about but feel every day. A Senior Engineer who watched two batchmates become Staff or EM is primed to hear about a role that comes with a real step up in title and ownership. The trick is to read the trajectory, not the current label. Two people can both be Senior Managers today, but one is climbing and the other has been parked for years, and they will respond to you very differently.
A quick field test
Before you message anyone, ask two questions. When did their current role or title start, and does their pay likely trail the market for that title today. If the answer is roughly two years and probably yes, your reply rate will look very different from a cold blast to a keyword list.
Signal 3: Compensation versus the market band
Money is the reason most people finally pick up the phone, and it is the signal recruiters read worst because you cannot see a salary on a profile. What you can infer is the gap. A candidate at a service company or an older enterprise, in a role that a product company or GCC would pay far more for, is very likely underpaid against their market band. That gap is your opening.
In practice this looks like a strong backend engineer with six years of experience sitting at a company known to pay 18 to 22 LPA for that profile, when the same person would clear 40 LPA at a funded product company. You do not need their exact number. You need to know that the delta is large enough to overcome a counter offer and a notice period. For a deeper look at how these bands actually move, our guide to fair salary benchmarks in Indian tech breaks down the ranges by role and company type.
Signal 4: Context, the thing most sourcers ignore
The first three signals live on the candidate. The fourth lives around them. Context is the state of the company and the market at this exact moment, and it swings the odds more than most recruiters admit.
- A recent layoff or a stalled funding round turns a comfortable employee into an anxious one overnight, even if their own job is safe.
- A company that just raised a large round is hiring hard, which means your target is being counter offered and pursued. Move fast or skip.
- An acquisition or a leadership exit creates a window of a few months where good people quietly start looking before the reorg lands.
- A public open to work flag is the loudest signal of all, but also the most contested, so treat it as a tiebreaker, not the whole case.
Any one of these signals is weak on its own. Stacked together they are strong. A two year tenure, no promotion in three years, a likely comp gap, and a recent funding wobble at the employer is not a maybe. That is a candidate who will read your message twice.
How TalentGPT turns this into a move-likelihood signal
Reading four signals across two hundred profiles by hand is the part nobody has time for, so it never happens and outreach stays cold. This is exactly the work TalentGPT does for you. You describe the person you want in plain English across a pool of more than 300 million profiles, and every candidate comes back with a move-likelihood signal that combines tenure timing, promotion recency, title stagnation and the pay gap against their market band.
The part that matters is the reasoning. The signal is not a mystery number. Each candidate shows you why the score landed where it did, in plain language, citing the tenure, the last promotion date and the likely comp delta. You can agree or disagree, but you are never guessing. That transparency is what separates a real signal from a black box, and we hold ourselves to it across our full set of predictive signals. Sort your shortlist by move likelihood, spend your best outreach on the top of the list, and let Talia, the built in AI recruiter, draft the sequence you approve before anything sends.
Timing is not the only lever. Once you have a warm list, the message still has to earn a reply, which is a craft of its own. If your response rates are low even on well timed lists, our playbook on outreach that actually gets replies pairs naturally with this one, and both feed directly into a shorter time to hire.
Frequently asked questions
Is a candidate with an open to work badge always the best bet?
No. An open to work flag tells you someone is receptive, but it says nothing about fit or whether they are already deep in another process. Treat it as one input among four. A quietly frustrated candidate with a two year tenure and a real comp gap often converts better than someone broadcasting availability to every recruiter in the market.
Does this work for passive candidates who are not job hunting?
That is the whole point. These signals are designed to find people who are not actively applying but are quietly ready to listen. The best hires are usually not on the job boards. They are two years into a role, a little stuck, and waiting for the right reason to move.
How does the move-likelihood signal handle notice periods and counter offers?
The signal estimates receptiveness, not certainty. A long notice period or a likely counter offer does not stop a good candidate from saying yes, but it does mean you should prioritise cases where the pay gap is wide enough to survive both. That is why the reasoning shows the comp delta, so you can judge whether the move will hold.
Can I use this without changing my whole workflow?
Yes. Start by sorting one live search by move likelihood and messaging the top twenty. You will feel the difference in reply rate within a week. From there you can layer in the retention and impact signals for a fuller picture. Start a free search on TalentGPT and see the reasoning on your own roles.