Mandatory Skills, Preferred Skills, and Keywords are three frequently used filters when an AI Sourcing task is conducted in hireEZ. While they all pull information from the candidate’s profile, they focus on various parts of the profile and affect the searching results in different ways. 

Mandatory Skills are must-have skills that a candidate needs for the job. These skills are weighted more heavily and will affect the size of your talent pool, which is indicated on the upper right corner of the Sourcing page.

When searching for Mandatory Skills, hireEZ would look at the skill section of the candidate’s profile.

During the sourcing process, hireEZ’s goal is to find candidates with all mandatory skills. For example, if you have input 3 skills here, hireEZ will look for candidates with all three skills. But if there are not enough candidates in the pool, hireEZ will relax the criteria a bit to find candidates with 2 out of the three and then 1 out of the three. The candidates will be listed in the order of best fits.

hireEZ also uses natural language processing and contextual search to recognize 'umbrella skills'. This means that if you include a broad or more general skill in one of the filters, the system can recognize subsets of skills under this. For example, if I am sourcing candidates that require 'Excel' as a skill, hireEZ can recognize that candidate's with 'Microsoft Office' as a skill will likely be a good fit and vice versa.

Mandatory Skills are applied when defining the most demanded qualifications of the candidates and eliminates candidates who don’t have these skills. Therefore, the number of skills you input significantly impacts the talent pool quality and quantity.

Under these circumstances, we recommend adding between 1-5 skills here to keep the sourcing results more focused on those most important skills that are required for the role.

Preferred Skills are “nice to have” ones that you would prefer the candidate to have, but are not required. The skills listed here will NOT affect the number of candidates in your talent pool.

Similar to Mandatory Skills, Preferred Skills would focus on the Skills section of the candidates’ profiles and go through natural language processing and contextual search to look for umbrella skills.

However, unlike Mandatory Skills, Preferred Skills are not used for outlining the pool. Rather, it helps you to improve the matching and ranking accuracy of the listed candidates. hireEZ would try to source for candidates with all Preferred Skills and display the candidates’ profiles in order of who best fits the search criteria. As indicated on the screenshot above, candidates with the Preferred Skill “Customer Service” are listed on top of the Sample Candidates page.

Since Preferred Skills do not impact the number of candidates in the talent pool, the number of skills you input here is not as critical. You can use the filter to help guide the AI Engine in finding a more focused pool of candidates.

Keywords are words or phrases that can be found anywhere on a candidate’s profile.

As shown in the screenshot, when “Economics” is added to the Keywords filter, hireEZ finds candidates with the word in their Education Experience, Summary, and Title.

In terms of weight, Keywords filter is similar to Mandatory Skills: the modification of words and phrases here will affect the size of your talent pool, as hireEZ will exclude candidates who do not have the information in their profiles.

While at the same time the Keywords filter is more flexible in compared to the Skill sections. You can choose to Exclude Keywords using the additional filter below the text bar.

You may type in any industries or specific words that you don’t want from the candidates’ titles and experiences. For example, you can insert “healthcare” if it is not the industry that you are sourcing at the moment.

You can also add a Boolean String in the Keywords filter. There is no specific limitation of the length of the string, so you can add from a simple “IT OR Economics” to a complicated line with 50 words. Just keep in mind that the longer the Boolean string you input here, the longer time it needs to return the results, so you might want to limit the string to a reasonable length.

The number of candidates in the pool is shown on top of the report. You may use the Skills sections to check if there are any other skills that you want to include in the candidates’ profiles.