Add a candidate

What this achieves

A candidate record holds one person’s details, independently of any role they have applied for. Adding one by hand is how someone you met, were referred, or sourced yourself gets into your talent pool.

Required role: Administrator.

Steps

1. Go to Recruiting → Candidates.
2. Select Add candidate.
3. Enter the First name, Last name, and Email.
4. Add the Phone, LinkedIn URL, Current employer, Current title, and Years of experience if you have them.
5. Choose the Source.
6. Add Tags, separated by commas.
7. Write any Notes.
8. Save.

Adding a candidate is not the same as applying

A candidate record is a profile. Applications arrive against a requisition when someone applies through its link, and that is what puts a person on a pipeline board.

So a candidate you add by hand sits in the talent pool until they apply to a role. Send them the requisition’s apply link if you want them considered for a specific vacancy.

Example: Sophie Clarke meets a strong engineer at a London meetup and adds them with the source set to Walk-in and a tag for the skill area. When HC Corp opens an engineering requisition, she sends that person the apply link rather than expecting the record to move on its own.

Recording where someone came from

Option	Description
Careers page	Found the role on your careers page.
Direct link	Came through an apply link you shared.
Referral	Referred by somebody.
LinkedIn	Sourced from LinkedIn.
Job board	Came from a job board.
Agency	Introduced by an agency.
Walk-in	Approached you directly.
Other	Anything else.

Source is the field that tells you later which channels produce hires rather than applications. Set it accurately at the point of adding, because nobody reconstructs it afterwards.

Example: if referrals produce two hires from six candidates at HC Corp and a job board produces none from forty, that is an argument for a referral scheme — but only if the source was recorded honestly on all forty-six.

Tags and notes

Tags are your own vocabulary for finding people again: a skill area, a location, a seniority. Keep the list short and spell them the same way each time, because a tag nobody else uses is a tag nobody else searches.

Notes are free text on the record. Write what you would be comfortable for the person to read, since a candidate record is personal data about someone who does not work for you.

Candidate statuses

Option	Description
New	Recently added, not yet worked.
Active	In play for something.
Hired	Became an employee.
Archived	Kept, but out of active consideration.
Blacklisted	Marked as not to be considered.

Archived and Blacklisted both keep the record. Agree internally what each one means and who may apply them — particularly blacklisting, which is a lasting judgement about a person recorded in a system they cannot see.

Finding people again

The list searches by name or email and filters by status, and shows each person’s current title, source, status, and tags. Use tags for anything the search box cannot answer.

What happens next

The candidate appears in the talent pool and can be found by search, tag, or status. Once they apply to a requisition, the application appears on their record’s Applications tab, and their assessment result — where the role requires one — appears alongside it.

Related

• Work the candidate pipeline
• Review a candidate’s assessment
• Publish a requisition
• Setup Considerations: what you ask candidates for