Talent
Match candidates and employees to a vacancy
Score the applicants of a vacancy, and your own employees, against its required skills, see the matched and missing skills, and understand how each score is calculated.
3 min readLast updated
In this article
The talent matcher tells you who fits a vacancy before you spend time on interviews. It scores the people who applied (external) and your current employees (internal) against the vacancy's required skills, from 0 to 100. Running the internal match first shows whether you can fill the role by promotion or transfer.
Before you start
The vacancy must be an approved or published job posting. Only those appear here.
The posting needs required skills. Without them there is nothing to match on.
Candidates need skills on their candidate record, and employees need skills in the skills matrix.
Run a match
Open People › Talent › AI Talent Matcher & Succession. The Talent Matcher lists each open posting with its Job Title, Job Code, Department and number of Skill Requirements.
To check or change what the vacancy requires, open the row's actions and select Skill requirements. Add each skill with its minimum level and tick Mandatory where needed, then select Save.
Select View matches on the posting.
In Candidate Matches, choose External for the applicants or Internal for your employees.
Read each person's score, recommendation, and the skills they match and lack.
The system recalculates the scores every time you open the matches, so changes to skills show immediately.
How the scores are calculated
Each score ends in one of four recommendations:
Score | Recommendation |
|---|---|
80 and above | Strong Match |
60 to 79.99 | Good Match |
40 to 59.99 | Partial Match |
Below 40 | No Match |
External candidates. The matcher looks at every candidate who applied to this posting. It compares skill names only, without levels. The base score is the share of required skills the candidate has. Each missing mandatory skill then costs half of one skill's share. Example: a posting requires four skills, one of them mandatory. A candidate has three of them but not the mandatory one. The base is 75, the penalty is 12.5, so the score is 62.5, a Good Match.
Internal employees. The matcher looks at the active employees of the posting's department, or at all active employees when the posting has no department. A mandatory skill weighs 2 and an optional skill weighs 1. An employee at or above the required level earns the full weight. An employee below it earns part of it: their level divided by the required level, times the weight, times one half. The score is the earned weight divided by the total weight. Each mandatory skill the employee does not have at all costs another half of one weight unit's share. Example: Excel is mandatory at level 4 and English is optional at level 3, so the total weight is 3. An employee with Excel at level 2 and English at level 3 earns 0.5 plus 1, which is 1.5 of 3, a score of 50 and a Partial Match.
Common questions
Why does a posting show no matches? Either it has no required skills, or nobody has applied yet (external), or the department has no active employees with skills recorded (internal).
Why do two applicants with similar experience score differently? The external match counts only the skills recorded on the candidate. Add the missing skills to the candidate record and open the matches again.