Running your first search

In this lesson

Construct a search using skills, availability, and location together
Understand why starting broad produces a better search than starting narrow

The search screen has three groups of filters - skills, availability, and location - and the instinct on a first search is to fill in everything you know. That instinct produces zero results more often than it produces the right five names.

How the filters combine

Skills, availability, and location are not blended into a single fuzzy guess. Availability and location act as hard filters - someone unavailable in your window or outside your acceptable locations will not appear, regardless of skill fit. Skills then rank who is left, using the to include people who describe their skills in different words than you searched for.

This matters because a narrow location filter can silently remove your best candidate before skills are ever considered, and the results page will not tell you that happened.

Start broad

Enter the two or three skills that matter most for the work, not every skill you can think of. Extra skills narrow the field further than intended.
Leave location open at first, even if you expect the answer to be location-specific. See who the skill match surfaces before you cut people out.
Set availability to the actual window the work needs, not a padded estimate - padding here just removes people who would in fact be free in time.
Run the search and look at how many results come back before adding any further filter.

Reading a thin result

Zero or one result on a first search almost always means a filter is doing more work than intended, not that nobody in the organisation fits. The usual culprits are an over-specific location, an availability window narrower than the work needs, or a skill phrase too literal for the ontology to widen. Loosen one filter at a time and re-run, rather than guessing at several changes at once.

A search is a draft

Treat your first search as a starting point, not a final answer. Run it, look at what comes back, adjust one thing, and run it again. Two or three iterations to reach a workable list of candidates is normal, not a sign you did something wrong the first time. The next lesson covers how to read what comes back once the search is producing a sensible set of results.

Key takeaways

Skills, availability, and location work together as filters, not as one blended score
Starting broad and narrowing beats starting narrow and finding nothing
A search is a draft, not a commitment - expect to run it more than once