Skills are fundamental to any talent pooling you wish to do from a vacancy, as they allow you to identify the key criteria that you are looking for and compare this with your applicants and talent pool. These comparisons then automatically populate skill match percentages and skill counts, to help you intelligently find those most suitable.

To add skills and enhance your vacancies, access the Vacancy Record and click into the Skills tab.

From here, you can click through any of the skill groups to identify the skills you wish to add, then clicking each skill to assign to the job. This will move the skill into the bottom section, where you can see all of the skills assigned to the role currently.

Alternatively, you can use the Quick Select, which allows you to type the name of the skill you are interested in then select to assign to the role. This is great for when you know which skills you need to add, making the whole process quicker and easier.

At the bottom of the page, you have the option to populate skills, which can help to automatically assign skills to your vacancy. This tool works by scanning your job descriptions (About the Role, About You, About the Company) and identifies any skills you have included, before assigning them to the job.

If you normally create vacancies from templates, either in the core system or via the hiring manager portal, you can save a lot of time and admin by adding the appropriate skills to your vacancy templates. By doing this, each of the jobs raised form the templates will automatically have the skills assigned, saving you a job for each individual vacancy.

When a candidate is added to the system, either manually, via the candidate portal or through the CV import tools, the CV that they provide will be parsed to populate the candidate record. This means that they don't need to manually type in their name, address or employment history etc. Another major benefit of the parsing tool however is the ability to automatically identify and assign skills to the candidate, based on their CV.

Once the candidate has been added, you may want to add additional skills to the candidate record, either manually or from a second CV.

If a candidate has provided a CV, or you were unable to successfully parse the data the first time, you can choose to extract the data, including skills, from a CV. To do this, navigate to the candidate record and click in to the CV tab. Highlight the file you wish to extract from then click Extract Data.

This will open a pop-up window, where you can choose how much data is parsed from the CV.

Identify the information you want to extract and ensure that the Skills option is ticked, which it should be by default, then click Extract Data:

After clicking Extract Data, you will be returned to the candidate record where you can review the details, including any parsed skills from the CV.

You can also choose to manually add skills to the record, without the need to extract any data. This can be done from the Skills tab of the candidate record. Use the skills groups, or quick select, to find the skills you want to assign, then click on the skill name to assign it to the Candidate.

Whilst Skills are normally used for talent pooling between candidates and vacancies, they can also be a powerful tool for finding the right candidates to work in specific organisations or departments. You can then go a step further and use them to find candidates with the skill sets that would suit specific hiring managers or contacts, based on your knowledge of them looking for that skill set.

To do this, assign the skills directly to the organisation or contact record, as described above. You can then use the groups to find the right skill before clicking to add. Alternatively, the quick select will allow you to type search the name of the skill before adding to the record.