Data Handling for Candidate Leads and Candidates

Summary
Talenture RS provides the Candidate Leads category to manage candidate lead information collected via headhunting, public lead generation activities such as candidate walk-ins, job fair events etc.

This article explains how data is maintained for such lead candidates as opposed to full candidates, the mapping of data when they are converted to full candidates and handling of custom field information.

Details
A Candidate Lead is candidate for whom full details including the resume file are not available. For example in the case of headhunting, you may have just the name, designation, current employer but not contact details. Again in the case of a Walk-in candidate at a Job Fair event you may just have the name and contact details of a candidate and not the full resume.

The Candidate Leads feature enables you to efficiently track headhunting/lead generation activity within the team and ensures that you do not miss out on good prospective candidates.

1.1 How Data is Maintained for Candidate Leads
All candidates that you add as Walk-ins and Headhunting leads are maintained in the Candidate Leads category and are not part of the public database by default. They cannot be used in the recruitment process until they are converted into Full Candidates. 

You can manually convert them into full candidates using the ‘Make Full Candidate’ option.

In contrast, full candidates are stored in the public database and are available to all team members for use in Jobs.

a. User Defined Fields in Candidate Leads
Due to the differences in the way candidate lead information is acquired as compared to Full candidates, recruiters may need to store additional details for Lead candidates. For example this could include:

• Lead Source: Details related to source of candidate
• Mode of contact: How to follow up on the candidate

Such details may not be required in the case of Full candidates.

b. Detail View Designs
Talenture RS uses different screen designs for detail screens of Lead candidates and Full candidates. Hence the field structure and display format for the Lead and Full Candidate screens is different.

1.2 Data Mapping During Conversion of Lead Candidates
When lead candidates are converted to full candidates Talenture RS handles custom information stored in lead candidates as follows: 

• Base fields will get transferred on an “as-is” basis with corresponding fields since these will be common to both Lead and Full candidates. For e.g. First Name, Last Name, Email Address etc.
• User defined field data will be transferred from Lead to Full Candidate in the following cases:
• There is a user defined field with the same name, and same value type in the full candidate object.
• If the user defined field is of “Fixed Set” type (a drop-down type of field), then it should have the same name, and exactly same fixed set members with same display name, and same internal value.
• If a matching field does not exist in the Full Candidate object:
• The value will be converted to text, and the data of all unmapped fields will be converted to a text chunk and added to ‘Comments’ field. These will be added in the following format:
  
  <FieldDisplayName>: <value>
  <FieldDisplayName>: <value> & so on….
  
  Note that for Fixed Set’ fields, the value will be the display string.
  
  

2. Related Resources

• Candidate Leads
• Candidate Leads: How do I?