Identifying available candidates

Identifying available candidates

I was wondering if anyone would be good enough to share how they identify if a candidate is available so that when searching for potential candidates it could be filtered to include only those that are available.  The only option I have come up with so far is to include a date field for "date candidate will be available" and then I also have put an additional date field in to record the date the previous field was last updated.  Unfortunately this doesn't allow me to filter on available candidates though.

Ideas anyone?