--- id: M-025 type: mechanism title: "Bid-Conditional Talent Pool" lang: en registry: 2026.08.2 canonical: https://hoba.work/mechanisms/M-025 json: https://hoba.work/api/v1/mechanisms/M-025.json --- # Bid-Conditional Talent Pool Recruiters run a real search for a real role whose funding depends on a contract that is not yet signed; if the bid is lost, the pool is closed without the role ever having existed. > **On the canonical path** — [Published with its terms on the page](https://hoba.work/process#WF-003-published) > > The posting states the compensation band, the location rules, the stages the process has and roughly how long each takes. It comes down when the search ends. > > This entry is one of the ways that commitment stops being kept. ## At a glance - Actor: recruiter - Nature: incentive - Visibility: opaque - Agency zone: none - Evidence: hypothesis ## What it looks like Composite excerpts, written to be typical rather than copied. No particular message, company or person is quoted here. **Outreach against a bid** — *reconstruction* ``` Recruiter We are growing the team on a large fintech engagement and your profile is a strong match. Could we talk this week? day 2 Candidate Happy to. Is this for an open role I can read somewhere? > Recruiter The details are under wraps for now — I can share more on the call. day 19 Candidate Following up on our call — is there any update? ``` *What to notice* Everything said is true. The engagement is real, the match may be real, and the role does not exist yet: it exists if a contract signs. The one fact that would let the candidate price the wait is the one fact the conversation is structured not to state. ## From each side The same entry from inside each position that meets it: what reaches them, what it means from there, and what happens next given what they control. ### Candidate - **What reaches them:** A concrete-sounding approach about a role that cannot be found posted anywhere, then a call that goes well, then a silence with no stated end. - **What it means from there:** Nothing distinguishes this from an approach against a funded seat. The difference is a record — a signed contract — that no message references and no search of the postings can reveal. - **What happens next:** Asks what the conversation is attached to: an approved requisition, or a pipeline for something expected. The answer, or its absence, is the only observable this structure leaks. ### Recruiter - **What reaches them:** A staffing plan owed against a proposal, with named profiles required in it, and a deadline set by the client's procurement, not by any funnel. - **What it means from there:** The bid cannot be won without the CVs, and the people behind the CVs cannot be promised anything until it is won. Both halves are true at once, and the brief usually forbids stating the second. - **What happens next:** Builds the pool the proposal needs, keeps the conversations warm for as long as the decision takes, and closes them without a verdict when the decision goes the other way — because there is no verdict to send about a role that never came to exist. ### Client - **What reaches them:** A vendor's proposal with named, available profiles in it — evidence the vendor can actually staff what it is bidding to deliver. - **What it means from there:** The profiles are part of the bid's credibility. Whether the people behind them know what stage the engagement is at is the vendor's affair, and nothing in procurement asks. - **What happens next:** Evaluates the bid on rate, profiles and risk, on procurement's calendar — unaware that the calendar is experienced, somewhere, as an unexplained silence. ## What this observation does NOT establish - Does not mean the role was fake: it was real and conditional, which is a different structure from a posting nobody intends to fill. - Does not establish that the recruiter was free to disclose the bid's existence. ## Related entries - operates at — [B-014](https://hoba.work/barriers/B-014) — Outbound Sourcing & Talent Pool Contact - emits — [A-001](https://hoba.work/artifacts/A-001) — Complete silence after submission - emits — [A-012](https://hoba.work/artifacts/A-012) — Unsolicited recruiter outreach followed by ghosting --- hoba — a public, versioned atlas of hiring obstacles. Content CC BY-SA 4.0. This document is generated from the registry; the canonical page is linked above.