Overview

Communities is a talent pool management module within Eightfold Talent Acquisition built to curate and nurture talent to build a pipeline for the requisitions. They allow you to resurface prior applicants from your database to nurture relationships with them until you find a right position for them. You can create communities tied with specific talent or broader ones for specific geographies and demographics.

Communities support calibration to build skill-based talent pools, confidential workflow to support executive hiring and stages to progress prospect relationships.

Key benefits

For recruiters

• Reduced time to find qualified and interested leads: AI-calibrated pools resurface the right past applicants instantly, so sourcers spend less time hunting and more time engaging.
• Increased workflow efficiency: Stage-based progression, bulk actions, and workflow automation remove repetitive manual work.
• Track and view top-of-funnel activities in one place: Every prospect touchpoint and stage move is captured in a single community view.

For candidates

• Better experience: Prospects receive timely, relevant, branded communication tied to their interests and skills, instead of generic spam or radio silence between applications.

For your organization

• Faster hiring: Pre-warm pipelines reduce time-to-fill on recurring and evergreen roles.
• Better quality: Calibration and AI matching ensure every pool stays aligned with the standard of talent you want.
• Compliance ready: Confidentiality controls, ownership tracking, and audit trails support regulated and sensitive hiring.

Core concepts

• Community Types:: workflow structures that define prospect progression. Out of the box, you get Nurture community type. You can create custom types for custom engagement and nurture journeys.

• Calibration: this is how you tell Eightfold what an ideal prospect looks like for this community. It captures the criteria (titles, skills, experience, education, location, ideal prospects) that the AI uses to find, rank, and recommend talent for the pool.

• Community Teams: recruiters, sourcers, and hiring managers you invite to collaborate on a community, each with a role that controls what they can view and manage. New team members can be auto-provisioned with the right permissions when added.

• Community Campaigns: enable targeted communication to engage prospects with relevant branded content.

• Community Stages: used to track prospect progression, starting from their addition to a community until they are moved into a pipeline.

• In Pipeline View: Shows community prospects who have applied, been saved, offered, or hired for a position, so you can track how the community is converting into real hiring outcomes.

• Confidential Communities: allow organisations to do executive hiring or replacement hiring which are highly sensitive.

• Community Workflow Automation: lets you set up rules that act on prospects automatically as they move through a community, such as advancing stages, or inviting to apply, so engagement and progression happen without manual effort.

How it works

Build Talent Pool

Community setup:

1. Create a community
2. Select community type and add community description
3. Add custom field values

Calibrate a Community:

1. Enter the community details (job titles and locations) that define who belongs in this pool.
2. Add ideal prospects so the AI learns what good looks like.
3. Refine your requirements with skills, experience, education, and advanced preferences.
4. (Optional) Use the Calibration Assistant to copy from a similar position or community, and add notes for context.
5. Review the matched prospects preview, then click Confirm Calibration.

Add prospects to a community:

The recruiters can add prospects to a communities through following approaches:

1. Move candidates with high match score from leads to community using stage advance action. [Link to community workflow documentation]
2. Import or Add prospect through import resume functionality
3. Use Linkedin CRM Connect to export prospect to a community. [Linkedin CRM connect article]

Nurture and Engage Prospects

Use community campaigns to cast a wider net:

1. Create a community campaign
2. Track prospect engagement in campaigns [Documentation link to campaigns]
3. Set up community workflow automations to advance stages, enroll prospects into campaigns, or assign owners automatically based on triggers like new adds, engagement, or stage changes.

Use pipeline actions to screen and engage prospects:

1. Use pipeline filters to find the prospects with specific attributes
2. Select/Bulk select to contact candidate using SMS, emails or Whatsapp [check if your system is integrated with Twillio to support SMS and Whatsapp]
3. Use scheduling feature and feedback feature to do initial screening of the prospects.

Track Prospect Conversion

Use community stages and tabs to track prospects in engagement funnel:

1. Select/Bulk select prospects and use Advance Stage action to move prospects to engagement funnel stages.
2. Use Invite to apply action to invite interested and qualified prospects to open requisitions or move the prospect to relevant requisition manually using Add to ATS action.
3. Use In Pipeline view to track candidate progression in a requisition.

When to use Communities

Best practices

• Tie every community to a hiring outcome: Create communities for a specific role family, program, or event, not as a generic catch-all, so engagement and reporting stay meaningful.
• Invest in calibration upfront: Spend time getting titles, skills, and ideal prospects right at the start, because the quality of every match, recommendation, and campaign downstream depends on it.
• *Nurture continuously, not just when you have a req open: *Run ongoing campaigns and check-ins so prospects stay engaged with your brand between opportunities, not just when you need them.
• Keep the pool clean: Periodically review and remove disengaged or no-longer-relevant prospects so match scores, campaign metrics, and reporting reflect real opportunity.
• *Convert engaged prospects into the ATS fast: *Use Invite to Apply or Add to ATS as soon as a prospect shows intent, so warm interest doesn't go cold while sitting in the community.

Required permissions