Best Practice on Setting up Your Preferences

Setting up preferences in Firefish is key to managing candidates, finding the right talent, and optimising processes. By configuring preferences effectively, you can streamline searches and deliver targeted, successful recruitment campaigns.

Why Preferences Are Important?

Preferences are the backbone of your recruitment database. They help organise candidate information into meaningful categories, making searches more accurate and results more relevant. Here’s why getting them right matters:

  1. Improved Candidate Matching: Preferences streamline the process of aligning candidates with job opportunities by narrowing down the pool to the most relevant options.
  2. Efficient Search Results: Instead of wading through hundreds of profiles, recruiters can pinpoint exactly what they need.
  3. Enhanced Talent Pooling: Dynamic talent pools are easier to build and manage when preferences are structured thoughtfully.
  4. Increased Reach: Well-organised preferences ensure you reach the right candidates through job alerts, targeted campaigns, and speculative CV submissions.

By setting up preferences strategically, you save time, reduce effort, and increase the chances of finding the perfect candidate.

Preference Settings are found in - Settings > System Configuration > Drop Downs > Preferences

 

In This Article

Disciplines

Disciplines are broad categories that define the types of roles your organisation recruits for. They serve as the foundation for organising and searching for candidates.

What Are Disciplines?

Disciplines categorise the roles you recruit for into overarching groups, such as:

  • Education
  • IT
  • Accountancy & Finance
  • HR

This broad categorisation ensures you capture all relevant candidates within a given field.

Roles Within Disciplines

Within each discipline, roles represent generic job titles. For example, within the IT discipline, roles could include Software Developer, IT Support, and Systems Analyst.

 

Best Practices for Disciplines and Roles

  1. Structure Thoughtfully: Review job boards and dropdown lists to ensure your disciplines and roles align with industry standards.
  2. Avoid Over-Specification: Keep categories broad enough to avoid narrowing search results too much but specific enough to be meaningful.
  3. Use for Talent Pooling: Disciplines and roles help create targeted talent pools for proactive candidate outreach 

A good example could be:

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If you are unsure on how to structure these, take a look at Job Boards and the dropdown lists used to search on Job Boards to help you structure how these should be laid out

Locations

What Are Locations?

Locations define the geographic areas where you recruit. Setting these up correctly helps you manage regional searches and avoid irrelevant results.

Best Practices for Locations

  1. Recruitment-Focused Areas: Include only the regions you actively recruit within. Avoid listing the entire country if it’s not relevant to your business.
  2. Balance Granularity: Create broad regions (e.g., North West, South East) and, if necessary, add sub-locations (e.g., Manchester within North West).
  3. Consistency with Job Boards: Refer to job board dropdowns to structure your locations in a logical and user-friendly way.

Example Location setup

    Untitled design (76)

    This structure ensures broad coverage while allowing for finer targeting when necessary.

    If you are unsure on how to structure these, take a look at Job Boards and the dropdown lists used to search on Job Boards to help you structure how these should be laid out

    Specialisms

    What Are Specialisms?

    Specialisms indicate the specific industries or sectors that candidates specialise in. This preference helps define the economic area or niche they operate within.

    Why Specialisms Matter

    • Targeted Campaigns: By knowing a candidate’s specialism, you can focus your outreach on relevant opportunities.
    • Streamlined Searches: Searching by specialism narrows down candidates to those with specific industry expertise.

    Best Practices for Specialisms

    1. Reference Industry Standards: Look at job board dropdowns to guide your specialism setup.
    2. Avoid Overlaps: Ensure each specialism is distinct to maintain clarity in searches.
    3. Combine with Other Preferences: Use specialisms alongside disciplines and locations for the most targeted results.

     

    Examples of Specialisations would look like this:

    Untitled design (77)

    If you are unsure on how to structure these, take a look at Job Boards and the dropdown lists used to search on Job Boards to help you structure how these should be laid out