Two applicants with the same phone number: what it means

Sort an applicant export by phone number and you will sometimes find the same number on two, five or twenty applications under different names. The same happens with email addresses, though less often, because addresses are free and numbers are not. Either way you are almost certainly looking at one person, or one operation, applying as many.

Why it happens

Someone running several identities has to give each a phone number. Numbers cost money or effort, so they get reused: one number across a batch of applications, or across several postings at the same company. The names, résumés and email addresses differ; the number is the thing that was too much trouble to vary.

The Gmail trick

Gmail ignores dots in the local part and anything after a plus sign. So j.smith@gmail.com, jsmith@gmail.com and jsmith+acme@gmail.com all land in one inbox. An export shows three distinct addresses; the applicant has one. Before comparing addresses, strip dots and plus suffixes on Gmail and Googlemail domains. ApplySift does this automatically and reports email-shared on the normalised mailbox.

How to find them in a spreadsheet

1. Normalise the phone column: strip everything but digits, drop a leading 1.
2. Add a column with =COUNTIF(phone_range, this_phone) and filter for values above 1.
3. Do the same for a normalised email column.
4. Look at the matched rows together: different names on one number is the pattern; the same person applying twice to the same posting is the innocent case and is obvious from the names.

What to do with them

Treat the whole cluster as one applicant and look at the strongest résumé in it, if any. Do not interview more than one. If the number is also in a VOIP wholesaler block, the cluster is very unlikely to be a real candidate at all.

ApplySift does all of this on upload: shared numbers and mailboxes are linked row to row, and the scored file carries a shared_with column listing the other rows in each cluster.