Every recruiting team I talk to has some version of the same problem: a role reopens, sourcing starts from zero, and everyone acts like the applicant pool for this job is the only pool that exists.

It isn't. If you've been hiring for more than a year, your ATS already contains people who were good enough to get through your process before. Somebody who applied for a similar role eighteen months ago, scored well, and didn't get the job only because someone else got there first, or the req closed, or the timing was wrong. That person is still in your database. Almost nobody goes back to look.

This isn't a hypothetical. Every job you've scored in SquarePeg already has a set of candidates attached to it, each with a real score and a real breakdown of why they landed there. That data doesn't expire when the job closes. It just stops being useful the moment nobody thinks to check it against the next req.

Candidate rediscovery is the part of SquarePeg built for exactly that: searching your entire ATS, not just a job's applicant list, for people who already match what you're hiring for now.

It searches on the job you're working now, not the job they originally applied to.

Rediscovery takes the scoring criteria you've set for your open job (the same required, preferred, and bonus criteria you'd use to evaluate a new applicant) and runs them against your full historical candidate pool. It isn't matching old job titles to new job titles. It's asking the same question of everyone in your ATS that you're asking of today's applicants: does this person fit what I actually wrote down.

The results reflect who someone is now, not who they were when they applied.

Every candidate in your ATS is enriched with their most recent work experience, so a rediscovery search doesn't hand you a stale snapshot. Someone who applied as a mid-level engineer two years ago and has since been promoted twice shows up as who they are today, not as the resume you happen to have on file.

Rediscovered candidates are scored exactly like applicants, because they're evaluated by the same model against the same criteria.

There's no separate "rediscovery score" and no softer bar for people found this way. A rediscovered candidate costs one scoring credit, the same as scoring an applicant, and shows up in your results with the same score breakdown, the same explanation behind each criterion, and the same weighting between required, preferred, and bonus. If you trust the score on your applicants, there's no reason to trust this one less.

Your eligibility rules travel with it.

If you've set eligibility rules for a job (location, a prior rejection reason, a specific screening question answer, or a particular ATS source) those rules apply to rediscovery results the same way they apply to applicants. A candidate who'd fail an eligibility rule doesn't get surfaced through rediscovery either. You don't end up running the eligibility check twice, once for applicants and again by hand for anyone rediscovery turns up.

Turning it on, and letting it keep working

Rediscovery is a platform add-on. Reach out to support@squarepeg.ai and we'll get it turned on for your account. Once it's on, you'll find two toggles in Settings, both off by default.

Automatic rediscovery runs a search as soon as a job is scored, so you don't have to remember to go looking for candidates yourself every time you open a req.

Continuous rediscovery keeps the pool topped up over time. Once you've marked 100 or more rediscovered candidates as invited or removed, it runs again and finds more, up to the same 200-candidate cap, so the well doesn't run dry halfway through a search.

Each rediscovery search returns up to 200 candidates. From there, the actions are the same ones you'd use anywhere else in SquarePeg. Invite to Apply opens the candidate's record in your ATS in a new tab and marks them as invited, so you know who your team has already reached out to. Remove hides someone from the current search and marks them as removed. Both actions can be undone if you change your mind.

None of this happens on its own. A rediscovered candidate doesn't move forward and doesn't get contacted until a recruiter decides to act on them. Rediscovery just makes sure the people worth that decision aren't sitting forgotten in a database nobody thought to search.

For a hard-to-fill role, a fresh post can take weeks to produce a single serious applicant. Checking a pool of candidates your team has already vetted takes minutes, and it doesn't require a single new person to apply.

If your team is re-running the same search from scratch every time a role opens, there's a good chance part of the answer is already sitting in your ATS. Reach out to support@squarepeg.ai and we'll get rediscovery turned on for your account.