The memo guessed. The file already had the answer.
A recruiter was working a data-scientist search when an executive instructed them to contact a candidate. The memo carried one reservation: “hopefully [candidate] didn’t move a lot due to performance concerns”.
They had been trying to recruit her for some time. Before that instruction arrived, the recruiter had already written the answer in the candidate’s file.
The process held a guess and a record at once.
The guess belonged to the person with authority over the search.
The record belonged to the person with none.
Nothing here was hidden or missing.