Skills provide for a quick and easy way to ascertain how strong a Candidate is for a given vacancy, based on the keywords that appear within their Records and CVs.
Skills can also be used to create bespoke Talent Pools and can speed up talent searches using the Quick Match tool.
Adding New Skills
As Candidate CVs are extracted into Eploy, a list of potentially useful skills will be created automatically. These can be found within Admin > New Skills.
On this page you'll find a list of the skills and a count of the number of Candidates using that skill.
You have three options:
Ignore the skill
Move the skill into a Skill Group
Merge the skill with an existing skill
Ignore
To ignore a skill, select the skill and click Ignore, located on the toolbar across the bottom of the page.
Move
Moving the skill into a Skill Group makes that skill reportable and means it can now be included as a selectable skill within a Record.
Select the skills to move, then use the Move Skills To drop down to select which Skill Group to add them to.
Click Move within the bottom toolbar.
Merge
Merge allows you to merge the selected skill with an existing one, making this new skill a synonym of the pre-existing one. This can be really useful if there are multiple ways of spelling something (e.g. US vs UK English) but they ultimately mean the same thing.
Start by selecting the skills to merge.
Next use the Merge Skills With drop downs to select a Skill Group and Skill to merge with.
When you're ready, click Merge within the bottom toolbar.
📌 Note if you are only just starting out with Skills, the Skill and Skill Group drop down lists may not contain any items. These will be populated when creating bespoke skills (see below)
Adding Bespoke Skills
The CV Extractor does a great job of highlighting common skills, but there will be times where you'd like to create your own bespoke list. For example, you may wish to include specific qualifications as skills, or use skills to highlight where candidates have worked for specific competitor organisations.
Bespoke Skills and Skill Groups can be created within any Organisation, Contact, Candidate or Vacancy record.
Start by accessing any of the above records and opening the Skills tab.
The Skills interface is broken down into three sections - Skill Groups, Skills and Selected Skills.
Create/Edit a Skill Group
Start by clicking Add New within the Skill Groups section.
Within the popup window, give your skill group a Description (name).
There is also the option to select a Skill Group from the list of existing skill groups. This allows you to create a hierarchy of skill groups.
Click Save
To change the name of a skill group, click the Edit pencil and provide a new Description, saving when done.
Create a new bespoke Skill
To create a new skill, first select which Skill Group you'd like to add the skill to then look to the Skills section and click Add New.
Within the Create Skill window, enter the name of the skill, confirm the skill and select the Populate Skills toggle. Click Save to continue.
With Populate Skills selected, Eploy will search through all Candidates and Vacancies, assigning the new Skill to those records when a matching keyword is identified. Eploy will also now continuously look for this skill whenever a new Candidate or Vacancy is created.
🤓 Tip the skill name is not case-sensitive but is sensitive to punctuation and spacing.
The page will now refresh, telling you how many ,matching records have been found.
You'll also now have the option to merge your new skill with another skill and you'll be able to add Synonyms. When adding synonyms, click Add for each one. When you're done, ensure Populate Skills is selected then click Save.
Manually assign skills to a record
So long as Populate Skills is selected, Eploy will automatically assign skills as needed when a new record is created.
Skills can also be manually added to record e.g. if Populate Skills is not selected.
To do this, open the record in question and open the Skills tab.
There are two ways to add skills to the record:
Click into a Skill Group to display the skills contained within it, then click on the skill name to add it to the record.
Use the Quick Select field to search for skills - type the name of the skill you wish to add. The list of skills will auto-filter as you type. Once you've found the skill, click it to add to the record.
Click Save once done.
🤓 Tip when adding skills to a Vacancy, click Populate Skills in the bottom toolbar. Eploy will search through the Vacancy Title, Job Description and Candidate Specification fields and assign all matching skills.
🤓 Tip Skills can also be added to Vacancy Templates. Any skills assigned to the template will automatically be copied across when a new vacancy is raised using that template.