Have you ever sent out a recruiting letter to a candidate and found out that he already rejected an offer a year earlier? Maybe that hasn’t happened to you, but it did happen to Google.

In Google Hiring Funniness, Robert Scoble writes about a highly-regarded candidate that Google was chasing:

Jeff Barr is an evangelist at Amazon on its Web Services team. He’s getting some funky recruiting email, says that the recruiters don’t have a good database of who has interviewed there before. Doesn’t make one confident that they have their act together when it comes to hiring “Googly” people.

It’s interesting, and this is newsworthy because this story involves Google, the people who own the search business. If they’re not doing it right, what does that say about other companies? I’m sure there are lots of contact tracking software companies out there just drooling. But software doesn’t fix bent or broken processes. How do you make sure that you chase who you want to chase and know that you’ve chased them before?