ℹ️ After you have kicked off a role, you can make adjustments to your Search Criteria directly in the Dover App. Learn more in our Help Center article.
Candidate Pool FAQ
❓ What is a Candidate Pool?
A candidate pool is the number of candidates with experience in a given position that meet the criteria for your search.
❓ How does Dover know how many candidates fit my search?
When you select the type of position you’re hiring for, Dover identifies the total number of people with recent experience in that position.
Once you have calibrated Dover with your search criteria, Dover defines your candidate pool as the number of people that meet the criteria for your specific search.
❓ How does my criteria impact the size of my candidate pool?
As you set the criteria for your search, the narrower your search parameters are, the fewer matching candidates you will have.
The criteria that typically increase or decrease candidate pool size most significantly are location and years of experience — flexibility here can help increase the number of matching candidates.
The more must-have requirements in your criteria, the fewer matching candidates there will be. Focus on distinguishing your must-haves vs. your nice-to-haves.
❓How can I see how my criteria impacts the size of my candidate pool?
You can see the approximate number of candidates left to source by clicking 🔍 Searches and looking at the remaining candidates in your Active Searches.
🟢 If the candidate pool is large enough to source the target number of weekly candidates, you will see the of remaining candidates in green
🔴 If your remaining candidate pool is small, the search criteria is very restrictive. The number of weekly candidates sourced will be very limited. Click on the search to adjust your criteria and expand your candidate pool or toggle on Enabled for Auto Adjustments and Dover will expand the search when it runs out of candidates.
🔄 When you make adjustments to your search Filters, the number of estimated matches should update.
When you are finished making changes, click Save Search to lock in your changes.
❓ Why is the size of the candidate pool in Dover different than LinkedIn?
Dover identifies candidates across publicly available sources (LinkedIn, personal websites, etc.) and applies sophisticated search techniques to determine which candidates match the search criteria for your job.
Similar tools like LinkedIn provide more general capabilities that yield a different number of matching candidates. The search parameters are less precise, so the count tends to be higher.
Some candidates have little to no specific information listed, so Dover may filter these candidates out depending on how precise your search criteria are.
Dover also applies intelligence in prioritizing candidates who have a higher probability of interest in the role.
❓ Why can't Dover source all matching candidates?
Dover will exclude candidates you’ve recently contacted so they don’t get contacted multiple times.
Dover utilizes various tools to locate contact information in order to send emails to candidates. Sometimes Dover is unable to find email addresses to contact certain candidates.
❓ How does Dover determine how many candidates to contact each week?
If you're on the Growth of Concierge Plans...
You can adjust the amount of sourcing you want our Managed Outbound product to do for you based on your needs. The 3 options are: Passive, Standard, and Boosted.
These options are based on the target number of new candidates we expect per week.
Dover determines a weekly amount of candidates to contact based on the target number of new candidates and candidate interest rates. This ensures you have a consistent flow of new candidates to feed into your funnel.
For more info, please read our Sourcing Overview article here
If you're on the Base Plan and have Sourcing Autopilot enabled,
Dover will reach out to ~50 candidates per week.
❓ How many people contacted by Dover will become candidates for my search?
The number of candidates that enter your interview funnel is determined by the size of your candidate pool and your conversion rate.
Conversion rate is the percentage of candidates contacted who respond as interested to outreach.
❓ How does the size of my candidate pool impact the time to hire?
Your time to hire is the amount of time expected between the first candidate being contacted and a candidate signing an offer letter to join.
Small candidate pool size and low conversion rate increase your expected time to hire.