Recruitment shortlist coverage and deadline monitor
Problem
The active shortlist lives in a spreadsheet tab that the chief scout maintains between other jobs. A player watched in October has no assessment since, and nobody notices until a rival mentions signing him. Academy prospects have an age-eligibility cutoff for a given group; a scholarship offer has a deadline; a registration window closes on a fixed date. These dates sit in the same spreadsheet, in a column nobody scans daily, next to forty other rows. The tab does not tell anyone that a decision window is closing in a week with no recent report attached. By the time someone opens the file to check, the window has usually passed or the player has already signed elsewhere.
Product idea
A live board of every prospect on the active shortlist, showing who is assigned, when they were last watched, and what deadline applies: age-group cutoff, scholarship offer date, registration window close. Each row carries a status of green, amber or red based on days since the last report and days left to the deadline. When a row turns red, an alert goes to the head of recruitment and the assigned scout, not into a shared inbox where it can sit unread. The board does not write scouting reports, score players or replace the recruitment database; it only tracks whether the required work against each deadline has actually happened.
Who it is for
Head of recruitment, chief scout and recruitment analysts running an active shortlist across an age group or transfer window, with the head of recruitment as the natural sponsor and escalation point.
Possible first version
A dashboard fed by a weekly CSV upload of shortlist rows: player, assigned scout, last assessment date, deadline type and date, category. The tool computes status per row against configurable thresholds and shows the board grouped by category, with a daily email digest of anything amber or red. Deadline types and their warning windows are configured by the head of recruitment. There is no live connection to the scouting database or third-party data providers in version one; the CSV upload is the entire integration, and someone still has to export it.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Head of recruitment, Chief scout, Recruitment analyst
- Relevant to
- Professional club, Academy & youth, Collegiate athletics, Women's league
- Systems in play
- Scouting and recruitment databases, Spreadsheets and shared documents, Messaging apps
- Product framing
- Monitor
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have ready before this is worth trying?
A shortlist export with five columns: player, assigned scout, last assessment date, deadline type and deadline date. If that does not exist as a clean export today, the first week of the build is really about agreeing what a deadline type is and who owns each one, which is worth doing anyway. Without that groundwork the board just displays the same disorganised list the spreadsheet already shows, with colours added.
Does this replace the scouting database or the spreadsheet we already use?
No. Assessments, ratings and video links stay wherever they live now. This sits above that layer and asks a narrower question: has the required check happened before the deadline. Version one reads a weekly export rather than connecting live, so it will run a few days behind whatever changes in the source system, which is an acceptable lag for a weekly review but not for anything time-critical on the day.
We already have a column for deadlines in the spreadsheet. Why do we need another tool?
Because a column nobody is prompted to look at behaves the same as no column at all. The spreadsheet holds the date; it does not tell anyone that the date is close and the row next to it is stale. The value here is the alert, not the storage. If nobody would act on a red status when it appeared, this will not help, and the honest answer is to fix that first.
Who has to keep this up to date once it exists?
Someone, usually a recruitment analyst, has to export and upload the shortlist weekly and keep deadline types current as categories change, which is a small recurring job rather than a one-off setup. The head of recruitment owns what counts as a threshold breach and who gets escalated to. If nobody takes that configuration job seriously, the board will quietly drift out of step with the real shortlist within a month or two.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
Tell us about itMore in Scouting & recruitment
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