Skill Zone

This guide covers the talent pool used to hold on to good candidates who aren't the right fit right now.

Purpose

Not every strong candidate gets hired for the role they applied to — sometimes the timing, the specific position, or the vacancy count just isn't right. Skill Zone answers: "Where do we keep track of good people for next time, instead of losing them?"

How It Works

• A Skill Zone is a named talent pool — for example, grouped by skill, department, or however the organization chooses to categorize talent.
• A candidate can be added to one or more zones directly from their record, along with a short reason for adding them (why they're worth keeping on file).
• A candidate can belong to multiple zones at once, and adding them again to a zone they're already in is simply skipped rather than duplicated.
• Zones are shown even when empty, so recruiters can see the full set of talent pools the company maintains, not just the ones currently in use.

Managing Skill Zone Candidates

• Archiving a candidate within a zone hides them without deleting their entry — useful once someone's no longer relevant to that pool (for example, they've since been hired elsewhere), while keeping the history. Archiving can be undone at any time.
• Deleting removes the entry outright, and is blocked if that entry is still referenced elsewhere in the system.

What Each User Sees

Action	Employee	Recruitment Manager / Stage Manager	HR Administrator / Recruiter
Add a candidate to a skill zone	—	✅	✅
View skill zones and their candidates	—	✅	✅
Create, edit, or delete skill zones themselves	—	✅	✅
Archive / delete a candidate's entry in a zone	—	✅	✅

How Visibility Is Decided

1. Permissions. Broad permissions grant the ability to manage skill zones and their candidates across the company.
2. Being a manager. Managing at least one job opening or pipeline stage — anywhere in the system — is enough to create, edit, and manage skill zones, the same broad pattern used for Interviews. Adding a candidate to a zone specifically only requires the ability to edit candidates, so it's available to most people already working with candidates day to day.
3. Company. Skill zones and their candidates belong to the company they were created under.

Good to Know

• Adding someone to Skill Zone doesn't change their status on the opening they applied to — it's a separate, additional record, not a replacement for rejecting or hiring them.
• Because access to add a candidate is fairly open (anyone who can edit candidates), Skill Zone is meant to be used liberally — recruiters shouldn't hesitate to add a promising candidate "just in case."
• Archiving instead of deleting is the safer default: it keeps the reasoning on file in case the same candidate resurfaces for a future opening.

Good talent, never lost.