Understanding the difference between candidate profiles and opportunities

Follow
Available for Roles Super Admin, Admin, Team Member, Limited Team Member
Permissions • Manage profiles and view associated postings
Packages Lever Basic, LeverTRM, LeverTRM for Enterprise

In Lever, talent relationships are managed based on the idea that each candidate could be considered for more than one job opening. That's why Lever treats candidate profiles and opportunities as distinct entities. This separation also helps with organizing data, and sourcing directly from within your Lever talent pool.


Defining candidate profiles and opportunities

Candidate profiles and opportunities are defined as follows:

A candidate profile consists of information specific to the candidate, regardless of the job(s) they apply for. The candidate profile includes contact-level information such as their name, location, email address(es), telephone number(s), and external profile URLs (e.g. LinkedIn). Candidate profile information is cumulative, meaning it is pulled from all jobs for which the candidate has been considered.

An opportunity represents the consideration of a candidate for a specific job. The opportunity consists of opportunity-specific information such as the posting title, the resume the candidate provided with their application, as well as the opportunity's stage, origin, and source.

 

Every candidate in your Lever environment should only have one candidate profile. That profile can then be associated with multiple opportunities. Check out our help article on merging candidate profiles for information on how to keep your pipeline and archive free of duplicates.

Identifying candidate profile and opportunity information

When you are viewing the pipeline or archive, you are looking at a list of opportunities associated with the candidates in your Lever database. This is why it is possible to see the same candidate's name appear at multiple points in the pipeline. If a candidate has more than one active (i.e. non-archived) opportunity, a suitcase icon will appear on their opportunity in the pipeline view. 

Close-up of Lead section of pipeline with opportunities listed, two of which have the same candidate name.

For example, Casey Kwon is in the 'New Lead' stage for two different roles - Solutions Architect and Senior Project Manager. Clicking into the Senior Project Manager opportunity will open the candidate's profile, with the chosen opportunity selected. Refer to the image below for a breakdown of the contact-level and opportunity-specific information that appears on the profile:

Close-up of candidate profile with contact level and opportunity information fields outlined and labelled.

The candidate history that appears beneath the opportunity details is a record of activity for all opportunities linked to the candidate's profile, including Nurture campaigns, interviews, offers, feedback, and notes. This allows you to have the most holistic view of a candidate's journey without having to switch between opportunities (if they have more than one).

Benefits of the opportunity-oriented structure

Treating candidate profiles and opportunities as distinct entities affords you advantages when it comes to candidate management:

Managing candidates with multiple active applications
If you are hiring for many roles within a single department, having candidates apply to multiple postings will likely be a common occurrence. The opportunity-centric structure allows recruiters and hiring managers to have the degree of visibility they need in order to take a coherent approach in managing each unique opportunity or role consideration. 

Rediscovering archived candidates
Candidates may have multiple archived opportunities, each archived under a different archive reason. This provides a better sense of why you chose not to move forward under each scenario, and allows you to quickly resurface candidate opportunities archived for a reason that is amenable to rediscovery, such as 'Future hire' or 'Better for another role.'

Maintaining good data hygiene
By adopting an opportunity-centric design, Lever removes the need to reactivate profiles for candidates when you would like to consider them for new roles. If you decide to re-engage with a past candidate, you can simply create a new opportunity for them at the top of the funnel. This keeps your data clean by keeping the candidate's history (including all of the information associated with their archived opportunities) intact. For more information, please refer to our help article on adding new opportunities to existing candidate profiles

Was this article helpful?
1 out of 1 found this helpful