Learn
What is candidate matching?
Candidate matching runs a new role against the candidates already in your database, rather than starting from a fresh advert. It is sometimes called reverse matching, because the search runs the opposite way round to screening: one role against many people, instead of many people against one role.
1.Why the pool is the part agencies waste
An agency that has been running for three years has screened thousands of people. Almost all of them were suitable for something and available at some point, and almost none of them are ever looked at again — because finding them requires knowing they exist.
The candidate placed last March is the clearest case. They were good enough to place, they are known, they are reachable, and by the time a matching role comes up nobody remembers them.
2.How matching differs from a database search
A database search returns the people whose records contain the terms you typed. It depends on your past self having tagged them usefully, which past selves reliably do not.
Matching reads the role and the stored CV the same way screening does, so a candidate surfaces on the strength of what their CV says rather than what somebody labelled them. The candidate whose record says "Java" surfaces for a Kotlin role if the CV supports it.
3.When to run it
Before advertising. That ordering is the value: a role you can fill from the pool is a role you fill in a day instead of a fortnight, and without paying for the advert.
It is also worth running when a role stalls. A pile that has produced nothing after two weeks usually means the advert is reaching the wrong people, and the pool is a different population.
4.The decay problem
Candidate data goes stale in a way job data does not. A CV from eighteen months ago describes a job the person may have left, a salary they have moved past, and a location they may not live in.
Matching cannot fix this — it can only be honest about it. A match on an old record is a reason to make a call, not a reason to submit. Any tool that presents an eighteen-month-old CV as a current candidate is overstating what it knows.
Where this gets it wrong
- A match is a prompt to call, not a submission. The record is as old as the last time you spoke.
- Right-to-work status, notice periods and salary expectations all expire. None of them can be read off an old CV.
- Candidates must have a lawful basis to still be in your database at all. Matching against records you should have deleted is a compliance problem, not a feature.
Common questions
Candidate matching, in short.
Read next
What is AI CV screening?
AI CV screening reads applications against a role's requirements and ranks them, with the evidence for each score. What it is, how it differs from keyword search, and where it fails.
What is an audit trail in hiring?
An audit trail records what was decided, by whom, on what evidence, and when. What UK GDPR requires from a screening process, and what a defensible record looks like.
The offer
See it on a role you are working today.
Twenty minutes, your own job description, your own CVs. You judge it on the shortlist it produces.
- 1Twenty minutesYou bring one live role. We look at it together — no deck, no discovery questionnaire.
- 2Set up on the callYour job description becomes a rubric while you watch, and your own CVs go through it.
- 3Then 7 days aloneYou run it on real work and judge it on the shortlist, not on anything we said.