A vacancy can outlast the involvement of the person who first briefed the recruiter. A hiring manager may change role, go on leave or hand responsibility to a colleague. If the recruitment team simply replaces a contact name, the new owner can inherit messages without the decisions and unresolved questions needed to understand them.
A hiring-contact handover preserves the current vacancy position while making responsibility for future instructions explicit.
Confirm the new authorised contact
Record who now owns the relevant hiring communication and the source of that change. Do not redirect vacancy decisions solely because a new person has appeared in an email thread.
Where the client organisation has a defined approval structure, keep the recruitment record aligned with it.
Summarise the current vacancy baseline
Give the incoming contact a concise view of the role requirements, current stage and material instructions already confirmed. Reference the current vacancy record rather than recreating the entire history in a new document.
The handover should distinguish settled information from matters still under discussion.
Carry forward open decisions
List the hiring questions, feedback or approvals that remain outstanding and identify whether the new contact now owns them. Do not close old actions merely because the person responsible has changed.
This prevents unresolved issues from disappearing during the transfer.
Preserve earlier decision sources
Keep previous hiring instructions traceable to the contact and point at which they were given. The new owner may change them later, but the historical record should not make those earlier decisions appear to have come from somebody else.
This is especially useful when current candidate activity depends on an earlier instruction.
Update active candidate communication routes
Check interview coordination, feedback requests and other live recruitment activity that currently points to the outgoing contact. Redirect future actions through the appropriate process without unnecessarily exposing candidate information.
Stop obsolete reminders or requests that would otherwise continue going to the old owner.
Clarify what the new contact may revisit
If the client wants the incoming hiring contact to review existing requirements or decisions, record those points as active changes or open questions. Do not assume that a contact change automatically resets the vacancy.
Recruitment should continue from the supported current position until a revised instruction is given.
Close the handover with one current owner
Verify that the recruitment team can identify the current hiring contact and the next actions they own. Preserve the outgoing contact's historical involvement without leaving them as the operational default.
A controlled contact handover keeps vacancy decisions, candidate actions and client communication connected when responsibility changes. It prevents an administrative update from becoming a break in the recruitment record.