Incentivized network dynamics in digital job recruitment

Abstract Recruiting passive candidates, i.e. individuals not actively seeking jobs but open to compelling opportunities, remains one of the hardest challenges in digital recruitment. Motivated by a real collaboration with an industry partner, we introduce the Independent Halting Cascade (IHC) model: a simple but rich agent-based framework that couples network diffusion with the possibility of halting through job applications. Agents can either recommend vacancies to peers or apply themselves, and incentives increase the likelihood of recommendation, mobilizing otherwise passive candidates. The IHC bridges research on social network diffusion, coordinated task completion, and labor economics by modeling heterogeneous skills, job specificities, and network structures, including homophily. We derive analytical boundaries that characterize diffusion and failure regimes, and we show through simulations that the IHC reproduces the empirical chain-length distributions of Travers and Milgram and Dodds with only coarse calibration. Across synthetic (ER, BA, homophilic) and real networks (SMS, e-mail, Twitter), the IHC achieves comparable or higher success rates than direct-recommendation baselines, while requiring fewer applicants. Our findings suggest that the IHC captures core mechanisms of coordinated task completion, offering both a theoretical contribution and a practical foundation for recruitment systems designed to reach and engage passive candidates.