Every candidate,
every stage,
always visible

The Five-Stage Candidate Pipeline

VendorDesk uses a single, unified pipeline for every requirement. All candidates — whether submitted by your team, by a sub-vendor, or imported from Excel — flow through the same five stages. This gives every team member the same shared view of where every candidate stands.

Moving a Candidate Between Stages

Open any candidate profile within a requirement and click the stage selector at the top. Choose the new stage, add an optional note ("Cleared technical, good on Spring Boot — scheduling L2 for next week"), and save. The change is logged with a timestamp, and the relevant people are notified automatically.

You can move candidates forward or backward through stages at any time. If a candidate drops out after L2, move them to a rejected state with a reason note — this data feeds your pipeline conversion analytics.

Automatic Notifications at Every Stage

When a candidate's stage changes, VendorDesk notifies everyone who needs to know — automatically, without any manual emails:

Pipeline Analytics & Conversion Rates

For every requirement, VendorDesk tracks the conversion rate between each stage. You can see exactly where candidates are dropping out — whether it's a weak pool at submission or a bottleneck at L2 — and fix the issue before the deadline.

Go to Analytics → Pipeline Conversion to see these funnel metrics across all requirements, filtered by client, role type, date range, or vendor source. It's the data you need to have honest performance conversations with your team and your vendor partners.

From Selected to Placed — Closing the Loop

When a candidate reaches Selected ✓, VendorDesk prompts you to create a Placement record. This links the candidate to the client, captures the offer details, and starts the timesheet and billing cycle — making the pipeline a complete end-to-end workflow from first submission to invoiced placement.