While the primary methods for adding candidates and applications to Mercu are via your career page or through a third-party integration like an ATS, you can also add candidates and applications manually from the UI. This is useful for one-off additions or bulk imports from external systems that aren't integrated with Mercu.

To manually add an application - and the candidate if they don’t already exist - go to the relevant job in Mercu and click "Add Candidates" in the side navigation.

This opens a modal where you can choose to add candidates individually or in bulk.

Bulk upload

Before bulk uploading candidates, prepare your upload file in Excel or Google Sheets with the following columns:

First name
Last name
Phone number
Target job stage

Column names can be arbitrary - you’ll map them to Mercu’s data model during the upload.

Phone number

Must include the country code, with no spaces or special characters.

Example: +61406810297
Not accepted: 04 7930 46734

Use tools like ChatGPT to generate formulas for formatting phone numbers correctly.

Target job stage

Represents the position in your job stage workflow (a running number starting from 1). For example, to upload candidates into the third stage, enter 3 in the Target job stage column.

Running the bulk upload

Once your file is ready, you can either copy the content into the bulk uploader on Mercu or upload the file.

Once uploaded, you'll be prompted to set the header row and map your column names to Mercu's template fields. Mercu will attempt to pre-populate the mapping using basic logic where possible.

Next, you'll be asked to verify the data. Use the filter to display only invalid rows and manually correct them directly in the bulk editor.

Once you've verified the data and fixed all invalid rows, click "Submit". If the bulk upload succeeds, a success message will appear. If it fails, an error message will be shown.

Click "View errors" to see the list of issues and correct them before re-uploading your file.