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Tips to improve your search results
Tips to improve your search results

Find great matches from the get-go with these pro tips from our team

Robyn Luyt avatar
Written by Robyn Luyt
Updated over a week ago

When searching for candidates on OfferZen, focus on these four tips to find the candidates that best match your requirements:

  1. Set up your standard search filters well

  2. Fine-tune results with advanced filtering

  3. Use the saved search feature

  4. Log in and review candidates weekly

Let’s look at the details.

Set up your standard search filters well

Making sure your standard filters are set correctly will ensure that you find all the available candidates that are worth reviewing.

  1. Start with roles

    1. Include all the roles you’d consider a good fit

    2. Keep in mind that candidates might use different names for similar jobs

      1. E.g. Product manager and product owner

    3. Candidates will be included in the matches if they have any one of the specified roles on their profile
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  2. Specify must-have skills

    1. Add 1-2 core skills essential for the role

      1. If it’s a dev, select the core language they would be using

      2. Don’t add generic skills like Javascript, HTML, Git, Agile, SQL

    2. Never add more than 3 must-have skills

      1. Candidates will only be regarded as a match if they have all of the must-have skills on their profile. Candidates that have 1/3 must-have skills will be regarded as partial matches. This means that adding more must-have skills reduces the number of matches but increases the number of partial matches.
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  3. Add remote policy and location

    1. For hybrid or in-office roles, select the location closest to the office the candidate will need to work from.
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  4. Define experience level

    1. Specify the minimum level of overall experience based on how junior/senior a candidate you are looking for

    2. Don’t specify an upper bound, unless you would like to explicitly filter out candidates with too much experience. It’s likely that the salary filter will achieve the same result.
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  5. Specify salary range

    1. Specify the maximum salary according to your budget

    2. Don’t specify a lower bound, unless you would like to explicitly filter out candidates that prefer a low salary that you regard as too low. It’s likely that the overall experience filter will achieve the same result.

Fine-tune results with advanced filtering

In some scenarios, companies might have specific requirements that require specific filtering.

  1. Candidate location filter:

    1. For remote roles requiring candidates to be located in specific regions (e.g., South Africa), add a candidate location filter.

      1. Eg. This could be because you’d like to fly everyone in to Cape Town once a year for a function but don’t want to fly people in from Europe.

    2. For hybrid/in-office roles, filter by region if relocation isn’t an option.

    3. Use broad areas (e.g., Gauteng, rather than Johannesburg).

    4. If you want to add South Africa, make sure to type out “South Africa” fully to get the right option to select.
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  2. If you can only hire SA citizens, add a work authorisation filter

    1. All this does is remove candidates from the list that are not SA citizens
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  3. Add a few nice-to-have skills to help rank the list

    1. Nice-to-have skills don’t change the number of matches or partial matches, but it ranks the candidates better, because candidates that also have more of the nice-to-have skills will appear higher in the list.

    2. Don’t add more than 3.
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  4. Add a keyword filter to search for something very specific

    1. The keyword filter is a hard filter, so candidates will be filtered out completely if they don’t have this on their profile

    2. Examples are:

      1. specific industry

      2. specific university

      3. specific company candidates have worked for

      4. specific skill that is not available in the skills filter

      5. specific candidate name

Use the saved search feature

Once you’ve sufficiently tweaked your search to give you the right balance of candidates, save it to use in your next session!

Top tip 👋 Use the new this week filter to focus on fresh candidates.

Log in and review candidates weekly

Consistency is key. Reviewing candidates weekly ensures you:

  • Catch new candidates early.

  • Spend less time filtering through large pools.

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Learn about citizenship and work authorisation as an employer
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