There is a figure that should change how a small agency thinks about its own records. Bullhorn analysed 7.8 million placements made on its platform and found that 66.4% of externally sourced candidates were already in the agency's own database.
Read that again from the recruiter's side. Two out of three people those agencies went out to find, paid a job board or a sourcing tool to reach, and wrote to as strangers, had already been in their records. A resume in an inbox, notes in a sheet. Nobody could find them, so they were found again from the outside.
Why spreadsheets make this worse
A sheet can hold a name and an email, and it can filter a column. It cannot search a resume, remember that a candidate was screened for a similar role last year, or tell you that the person who just applied is the same person you rejected in March under a different email address.
So the database grows, and it gets less useful as it grows, because the only way in is a name you already know.
What changes on a board
In rinkats every resume is parsed into a profile with skills and months of experience, so a search for "Kafka, five years, Bengaluru" returns people, not files. Every card carries its history, so the screen from last year is one click away. When your team adds or edits a candidate, identity is a name and a contact match, so two relatives sharing a phone do not become one person.
And when the AI is on, the first pass over the whole database against a new requirement is done before you open it.
The caveat
This is vendor data about that vendor's customers, who are by definition agencies large enough to run a platform. Your ratio may be lower.
Source: Bullhorn, "Applicant tracking systems for small companies", 2026. Read it at the source.