Most of the money on your candidate side is sitting in a message your desk has never sent. Not the first one. The second one.

In this episode: what silence from a senior candidate actually means, and why a desk that only ever sends one message is filtering out the exact candidates it was hired to find. The keen tenth answer. The unhappy and the already-being-shown-around answer. What is left in the silence is the group your client is paying you to reach, and a one-message desk never gets to them.

Also: what the second message has to carry that the first did not, why it has to ask for less rather than more, how many touches is enough before a name moves from a campaign into a rhythm, and the reason the same second message sent to a technical lead and a finance director tells both of them your firm cannot tell their markets apart.

Michael secured £36k in guaranteed retained business within four months. Laura: "My first year I doubled the bottom line. I am fully retained and my fees are a lot bigger than when I started."

Step 5 of the nine in The Desk Build is Attract. Its own words for the problem are blunt: you have no candidates in a new niche. Not too few. None.

One thing to do before the week is out: go back through every candidate your desk approached this year and pull out only the ones who never replied. Not the ones who said no. The silent ones. Count them. That count is the size of the market your firm reached and then let go of.

For owners of recruitment and executive search firms, UK and USA, perm and contract.

Comment VAULT on this episode or on any of Andy's LinkedIn posts for The MPC Reply Fix: nine blanks to fill in about one candidate before you write a word, the email to finish by filling in the brackets, which fact belongs in which line, two worked examples, and a follow-up for when nobody replies.

Send Andy the word BUILD on LinkedIn and he will send you the details: what we build, what it costs, and who it is for. theapexrecruiter.com/details