Recruiting moves fast, sometimes too fast.

Drea Codispoti, CPC/CERS

Between juggling client calls, candidate interviews, and everything else that pops up during a busy week, it’s easy to overlook one crucial habit: keeping your pipeline updated with the candidates you’re actively working with.

But here’s the truth: maintaining an accurate, up-to-date pipeline isn’t just a housekeeping task. It’s one of the simplest and most powerful ways to increase your placements, strengthen relationships, and make your life easier in the long run.

And in this article, I’m going to tell you all the reasons why this is the case.

Why Updating Your Pipeline Matters

Your pipeline is the heartbeat of your recruiting business. It’s where your progress lives, your priorities take shape, and your next placement is probably hiding. When it’s current and complete, it gives you clarity. You can instantly see where every candidate stands, which clients need attention, and which searches are heating up.

When it’s not up to date? You’re flying blind.

• You risk losing track of promising candidates.

• You miss follow-up opportunities that could lead to placements.

• You make it harder for trading partners to help you.

An outdated pipeline doesn’t just slow you down; it creates blind spots in your entire process. And in a network like Top Echelon, where collaboration can mean the difference between a missed opportunity and a successful placement, those blind spots matter.

The Ripple Effect of an Updated Pipeline

When your candidate and job pipelines are consistently refreshed, it has a ripple effect throughout your workflow:

1. Better Collaboration with Trading Partners

Accurate pipelines make it easier for other recruiters in the Network to know who you’re representing and where they can help. If your candidates are visible and tagged properly, your partners can quickly match them to their open jobs, saving everyone time and creating more split placements.

2. Improved Candidate Relationships

When you track communication accurately, you never lose momentum with candidates. You’ll know exactly when you last reached out, what roles they’re interested in, and how far along they are in the process. That level of organization translates into better candidate care — and a stronger reputation for professionalism.

3. Stronger Client Confidence

Clients want to know that you have a firm handle on the search process. A well-maintained pipeline lets you provide clear updates, timelines, and candidate insights at any moment. It demonstrates that you’re proactive, detail-oriented, and fully invested in delivering results.

4. Data-Driven Decisions

Your pipeline data can reveal valuable trends, like where bottlenecks happen or which sources deliver the best candidates. When you update consistently, that data becomes a goldmine for improving your strategy, forecasting workloads, and spotting new opportunities.

A Few Simple Habits to Stay Consistent

Keeping your pipeline current doesn’t require hours of admin work; it just requires consistency. Here are a few quick habits to make it part of your daily or weekly rhythm:

• Add new candidates immediately. Don’t wait until “later” (we all know later rarely comes).

• Update statuses right after key interactions. Phone screens, submissions, interviews . . . log them while they’re fresh.

• Archive or close out stale entries. A clean pipeline is an accurate one.

• Review weekly. Spend ten minutes each Friday scanning for gaps or outdated info.

These small actions compound over time. The more accurate your pipeline becomes, the more confident you’ll be in your numbers, your follow-ups, and your future placements.

Your Pipeline is Your Playbook

Think of your pipeline not as a database, but as your recruiting playbook. It tells you where you are, where you’ve been, and what’s next. Keeping it updated means you’re always playing with a full field view with no blind spots, no guesswork, just clear, actionable insight.

So before you dive into another week of calls and candidate searches, take a moment to check your pipeline. Add the candidates you’re working with, update your notes, and clear out the clutter. Your future self (and your next placement) will thank you.

Matthew Deutsch

At Top Echelon, we’re committed to helping recruiters and agencies work smarter, faster, and more strategically. This week’s Integration Spotlight highlights SourceWhale, the industry-leading headhunting and business development platform that’s redefining how recruiters engage with candidates and clients.

Through its seamless integration with TE Recruit®, SourceWhale empowers recruiting teams to automate outreach, streamline data management, and deliver hyper-personalized engagement across multiple channels — all from one place. The result is a more connected, efficient, and revenue-driven recruiting operation.

Why SourceWhale Matters in Today’s Recruiting Landscape

Recruiters today juggle dozens of tools and hundreds of contacts across phone, email, LinkedIn, and more — all while trying to maintain personalization and consistency. Without the right automation, follow-ups fall through the cracks, data becomes fragmented, and opportunities are missed.

SourceWhale changes that. By centralizing outreach and automating repetitive tasks, it ensures that every prospect and candidate receives timely, relevant communication. Recruiters can now focus less on manual tracking and more on meaningful conversations that drive placements and growth.

Key Features of the SourceWhale + TE Recruit Integration

Together, SourceWhale and TE Recruit deliver a powerful, unified workflow built for modern headhunting and business development.

Multitouch Automation – Over 70% of conversations start after the third touchpoint. SourceWhale ensures you never miss a follow-up by automating outreach sequences across your entire contact base with candidates, clients, and prospects alike.

Multichannel Engagement – Build customized, multi-step campaigns that blend email, phone calls, SMS, and LinkedIn to reach more people, increase response rates, and secure more meetings.

AI-Enhanced Quality – With tools like WhaleGPT and Content Coach, recruiters can craft tailored, high-quality outreach in seconds. The Chrome Extension enables on-the-fly personalization—complete with images, GIFs, and video—while dashboards track engagement metrics and sentiment in real time.

Scalable Efficiency – SourceWhale eliminates manual data entry, activity logging, and follow-up scheduling. By automating the backend, recruiters can focus on refining strategies, deepening relationships, and scaling success.

Integration at the Core – Sitting at the center of your tech stack, SourceWhale connects with over 100 sourcing sites and systems. With TE Recruit, it synchronizes activity data automatically, providing complete visibility without switching tabs or losing context.

How the Integration Works in Practice

Imagine you’re launching a business development campaign targeting a niche industry segment. With SourceWhale integrated into TE Recruit, you can build a multichannel outreach sequence and blend email, LinkedIn messages, and SMS follow-ups in just a few clicks.

Each interaction is tracked, synchronized, and recorded in TE Recruit automatically. WhaleGPT helps you craft personalized messages, while real-time analytics reveal which content performs best. When a prospect replies or a meeting is booked, TE Recruit reflects the update instantly — giving your team the full picture of engagement and outcomes.

The integration streamlines every step, from first contact to closed placement, ensuring recruiters stay productive and informed.

Benefits for Agencies and Recruiting Teams

Increased Engagement – Reach more prospects with consistent, personalized communication across multiple channels.

Improved Efficiency – Automate repetitive tasks to free up time for strategic, relationship-driven work.

Enhanced Data Accuracy – Keep your TE Recruit system up to date automatically, reducing errors and manual entry.

Actionable Insights – Use analytics and sentiment tracking to understand what works and optimize future outreach.

Stronger Collaboration – Centralized data and unified dashboards help teams share best practices and scale success together.

Strategic Impact on Recruiting Operations

The SourceWhale integration turns outreach into intelligence. Every touchpoint becomes structured data that can be analyzed to identify trends, measure ROI, and refine strategy.

Managers can review which campaigns drive the best engagement, recruiters can adapt their messaging with AI-powered insights, and agencies can make data-backed decisions that accelerate revenue growth. It’s not just automation; it’s smart automation designed for modern recruitment.

To learn more about SourceWhale, request a demo and see how this integration can help maximize your recruiting process.

We’re moving right along in our series of blog posts that contain a networking tip for members of our recruiting network. Our next tip also deals with how recruiters should interact with one another.

Specifically, it deals with how quickly they should react in a potential split placement situation.

As you might imagine, speed counts when it comes to reacting to other members. The more quickly you react, the more quickly you can make things happen—and make split placements, too.

However, there’s more to it than just that. The rest of Networking Tip #3 is as follows . . .

Respond to other recruiters’ job orders quickly and accurately!

The database of candidates that you’ve accumulated during your years in the business can be a tremendous resource if you use it! Conducting a search against your candidate database and quickly responding to trading partners’ job orders with potential matches could generate a tremendous amount of additional split placement revenue for you.

Remember, your split recruiting partners have shared their job orders because they need help with those search assignments. By responding to their job orders with good, quality candidates, you’re providing them with the help they need.

Even if the candidates you supply are not an exact match, those recruiters will remember the efforts you put forth. They’ll be more inclined to help you in the future.

In other words, if you scratch their backs, they will scratch yours!

Below are immediate steps you can take in terms of responding to job orders in Top Echelon Network:

#1—Search for job orders.

To get the most current information available, login to Top Echelon and search the Network Jobs tool for any job orders.

You’re looking for job orders similar to the types of candidates in your database. This can easily be done by searching on the date entered.

#2—Create Job Order Alerts.

Do this so that the system can automatically notify you of any new job orders added that match the criteria you requested. By creating Job Order Alerts, you can leverage the power and reach of the Network and allow it to work for you.

In the meantime, you can focus your time on other recruiting tasks that generate revenue. Win-win!

#3—Send results immediately.

Send the results to your trading partners right away! Make sure to include the following items:

• A completed Resume Data Sheet (RDS) for each resume you send
• A clean copy of the resume for your candidate
• A copy of their original job order so they know why they are receiving resumes from you

#4—Avoid common mistakes.

Learn from the mistakes of others. What does that mean? It means not doing the following things:

• Do not send a trading partner a candidate who is not qualified or does not meet the requirements that were provided in the job order. Responding with “junk” will destroy your credibility.
• Do not constantly call members for a status update on the candidates you’ve sent to them. Instead, take the posture that if there’s any further interest in your candidate, they will call you! Don’t waste their time with non-productive phone calls.
• Do not forget to always send a completed RDS with each resume you send! The more information they have to make a decision, the better.

If you have any questions, please contact me by calling 330.595.1742 or by sending an email to drea@topechelon.com.

Believe it or not, the Thanksgiving holiday is already here!

Mark Demaree

As always, it seems as though Thanksgiving kind of “snuck up” on us this year. (Wasn’t it just Labor Day? Wasn’t Halloween last week?)

And along with this holiday, of course, come our Top Echelon holiday hours.

The Top Echelon offices will be closed on Thursday, November 27, and Friday, November 28. These hours apply to:

• Top Echelon’s split network (TE Network)
• Top Echelon’s recruiting software (TE Recruit)

The Top Echelon offices will re-open as usual at 8 a.m. on Monday, December 1.

I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: we at Top Echelon are thankful for ALL of you as customers.

We enjoy working and talking with you on a daily basis, and we’re glad that we can contribute to the health and well being of your recruiting agencies.

So please travel safely this week and make sure you eat too much turkey and stuffing . . . and of course, pumpkin pie.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Top Echelon Training and Support Manager Todd Bossler recently conducted a special TE Recruit Training Tuesday webinar titled, “Email Made Easy in TE Recruit: From Setup to Success.”

Matthew Deutsch

You may have attended this free webinar on Tuesday, November 4. On the other hand, you may not have been in attendance.

Regardless, we have the recorded version of the webinar, which I am presenting to you now. (The recording is also located in the Top Echelon Help Center.)

If you are not a user of our recruiting software, TE Recruit, then check out the video, anyway, to see how the software could benefit your recruiting desk and agency.

We at Top Echelon are continually working to make the resources that we provide to our customers better, and this is yet more proof!

Below is the official description of this training video:

— — —

Todd Bossler

• How to get started with email in TE Recruit
• Creating reusable templates and signature files that save hours
• Best practices for mass emailing without sacrificing personalization
• The new setting for default font and text size to keep your branding consistent
• Using Merge Fields to quickly tailor messages for each recipient
• Fast, effective ways to deliver information to candidates and clients
• And much more!

Watch this TE Recruit training video!

— — —

Remember to check The Pinnacle Newsletter Blog every week for more updates regarding Top Echelon software improvements and upgrades.

If you have any questions about how you can maximize your TE Network membership, please contact Director of Network Operations Drea Codispoti, CPC/CERS.

You can do so by calling 330.595.1742 or by sending an email to drea@topechelon.com.