Chapter 4: Redeployment: Your Most Profitable Placement Is One You Already Made
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The Pressure
Staffing firm leaders generally agree that redeployment matters. Few have built the operational infrastructure that makes it systematic.
When an assignment ends, the recruiter who managed it moves on to the next open role, and the candidate relationship goes cold. Weeks later, when a new matching role opens, sourcing starts over from the beginning. That cycle costs firms revenue they'd already earned the right to keep.
The Key Insight
A redeployment costs a fraction of a new placement since the work's already happened once. The economics practically write themselves.
Execution is the real challenge, because most staffing technology was built to manage sourcing rather than to maintain talent relationships across the full lifecycle of an assignment. A TRM system built to keep those relationships alive between assignments turns redeployment from an occasional win into a repeatable source of revenue.
A redeployment costs a fraction of a new placement.
Our Recommendation
Build a redeployment pipeline before opening sourcing on any new role.
Use your TRM data to identify which placed candidates have assignments ending in the next 30, 60, and 90 days, and match those candidates against open roles before sourcing externally. A firm that cannot do this consistently today has a system gap, and closing it means building the habit of tracking assignments and matching before sourcing, supported by a TRM system that keeps every placement visible long after an assignment record would otherwise close.
Calculate Your Redeployment Rate
Run the calculation most firms skip. Here's how.
- Placements made in the last 12 months: [Input]
- Of those, how many were redeployed into a new role without external sourcing: [Input]
- Your redeployment rate: [X]%
That number matters most once it has a dollar sign attached. Take the number you just entered above, the redeployment rate, not the rate, and multiply it by what a from-scratch placement costs your firm (your true cost per placement from Chapter 1). That's the margin redeployment already protected this year. Track it quarterly, and it stops being a bonus and starts being a number finance can plan around.
Why ATS Platforms Struggle With Redeployment
ATS platforms are typically built around the requisition first, treating the candidate relationship as secondary once a placement is made. The record gets archived, the recruiter moves to the next open role, and any signal about when that candidate's assignment ends sits buried in a status field that isn't actively monitored. Redeployment depends on catching that signal early, and a system designed to close the loop at placement has no mechanism built in to reopen it.
The Math of Redeployment: Revenue Retained vs. Revenue Rebuilt
A new placement requires sourcing, screening, and vetting a candidate the firm has never worked with, and each step adds cost and the risk of a bad fit. A redeployment skips all of it. The candidate is already known, cleared, and compliant with whatever documentation the client requires.
The cost difference shows up in time to fill and in margin, since a redeployment consumes a fraction of the recruiter hours a from-scratch placement demands. A firm that tracks this distinction can measure exactly how much revenue redeployment protects every quarter, instead of treating it as a bonus that shows up occasionally.
What a Systematic Redeployment Pipeline Looks Like in Practice
A systematic pipeline starts the moment a placement is made, with the expected end date logged and tracked against a rolling 30, 60, and 90-day window. When a new role opens, the first step is checking that window for a match, ahead of activating any external sources. When a match exists, the recruiter reaches out to a candidate who already knows the firm and trusts the process, turning what used to be a cold restart into a warm reintroduction.
Do you know how many of your currently placed candidates have assignments ending in the next 90 days, and whether any of them match a role you have open right now?