Follow Talent
TOOLS · EXPERTINI ATS

Follow Talent

The people your team has followed from Talent Search, kept in one shared list — and honest with you when someone later chooses not to be listed.

4 min read · Updated July 2026 · Expertini Editorial

Finding the right person and then losing them in a browser tab is the oldest failure in sourcing. Follow Talent is the shortlist that survives the search: one click while you are looking at a profile in Talent Search, and that person is on a list your whole organisation can see.

It belongs to the organisation, not to the recruiter who clicked. A colleague who joins next month opens the same list; a recruiter who leaves does not take it with them. That is the difference between a shortlist and a bookmark.

01What it does

Follow anyone you can see in Talent Search. The list is shared across your organisation, and following the same person twice is impossible rather than merely discouraged — each follow is keyed to your organisation and that candidate, so a second click is the same record, not a duplicate row. Unfollowing is one click from the same list.

02It tells you when someone is no longer listed

A followed profile is not a copy you own. If a job seeker later switches their profile off, the entry stays on your list but is shown as no longer listed, and their details stop being served — you cannot open the profile or the CV. This is the deliberate choice: quietly dropping the row would leave you wondering whether you had imagined the candidate, and quietly continuing to show their details would ignore a decision they made.

A snapshot of what you saw at the time is kept only while the person is still listed, so the list stays readable at a glance without becoming a private cache of profiles somebody has since withdrawn.

03Who it's for

Recruiters building a shortlist across several sessions, teams where one person sources and another screens, and agencies who want an internal longlist before anything is shown to a client. For candidates who have actually applied to you, the talent pipeline and its saved pools remain the right home — this list is specifically for people you found on the network.

It is also the natural staging post between finding somebody and doing anything about them. Sourcing rarely happens in one sitting: you search on a Tuesday, someone else screens on a Thursday, and the role opens the following month. A shared list means the person you found is still there when the work resumes, and that nobody re-runs the same search to rediscover somebody a colleague already looked at.

04What a follow does not do

Following is not access. It does not copy the person's details into your account, it does not give you their CV without spending a view from your allowance, and it does not survive their decision to stop being listed. What it saves is the fact that you were interested — the details are still read live, under the same checks as the original search, every time you open the entry.

It also carries no signal to the candidate and no ranking on the network. Following someone does not move them up anyone's results, and it is not visible to them, to other organisations, or on the job site. It is your team's private note that this person is worth coming back to.

05How it fits with alerts

Follow Talent is the manual half of network sourcing and Candidate Alerts is the automatic half: you follow the people you found today, and an alert tells you about the ones who join tomorrow. Both draw on the same opt-in, single-country population, and neither meters anything until a CV is opened.

06Plans and what's included

Included from the Growth plan upward, and unlocked in full during the 14-day free trial. There is no cap on how many people you follow — the metered resource is CV views, not shortlist size. See pricing for what each plan includes.

07Support

The Help Center documents what a follow does and does not give you access to; support@expertini.com is there for anything more specific.

Engineering notes

Platform architecture & operations

A1Architecture: where it sits in the platform

Follow Talent is a first-class module of the Sourcing & Job Ads suite inside the authenticated Expertini ATS workspace. The platform is deliberately server-rendered: every view is prepared by the application server and shipped as complete HTML, with no client-side framework, no third-party CDN scripts, and no build pipeline between the data and the page. What renders is what the server computed — the property that makes the interface auditable.

All persistence runs on a single search-native document store; every query carries the organisation's identifier as a mandatory filter at the lowest query layer. Tenant isolation is therefore structural — a property of how every request is composed — rather than a policy that relies on application code remembering to check.

Availability is governed by the platform's tool registry: this tool is registered from the Growth plan, and access is enforced server-side by the registry gate on every request — never by hiding a button. Plans also carry a monthly distinct-tool quota (3 / 5 / 15 / 30 / 45 across Trial→Business, unlimited on Enterprise), counted at the same chokepoint. The pricing page states both honestly: what is available, and how much of it the month includes.

A2Data model and dependency map

In production the tool reads and writes ats_candidate_follows. Documents are plain, explicitly-mapped fields — mappings are provisioned ahead of first write, so term filters and aggregations behave deterministically instead of depending on inferred types.

Every distinct open is journalled to the tool-activity store — and that journal, not a parallel analytics system, is what the Reports section aggregates. The usage numbers you see are the numbers the platform actually recorded.

Anything that leaves the request path — notification fan-out, webhook delivery, activity journalling, mail — runs in fire-and-forget background threads. A slow external endpoint can never make the interface hang, and a failed side effect is logged rather than silently retried into inconsistency.

A3Operational considerations

Organisation-level settings, destructive actions, and connections are gated to owner and admin roles; recruiters operate the tool on the records they can see. Role changes apply on the next request — enforcement is at the route, not in the menu.

Failures are surfaced, not swallowed: server-side validation returns the exact field and reason, vendor errors are quoted verbatim where integrations are involved, and every write either confirms or reports. Exports regenerate on request rather than being cached — a report you download reflects the store at the moment you asked, not last night's snapshot.

Everything written is yours to take: CSV exports and the Data Export app cover the same stores the product itself reads. The exit is as open as the entrance — by design, not concession.

A4Interaction contract

The interface follows the platform's search-and-select convention: any field that names a real record — a candidate, client, or job — is a type-to-search picker over live data, never a free-typed string, which is what keeps activity trails and deduplication trustworthy. Static choices are filter-as-you-type combos rather than native dropdowns, and state transitions give explicit feedback: server confirmations surface as toasts, validation errors name the exact field, and nothing is shown as done that the server has not confirmed.

The wireframe and flow below document the structural contract of the surface — what panels exist, what order the states occur in, and what happens at every edge — rather than pixels. The layout is composed with native CSS grid and flexbox and adapts from wide desktop to a single column without separate mobile views.

Dependency map

Reads / writesats_candidate_follows
Access gateGrowth plan and above — enforced server-side by the tool registry
Monthly quotadistinct tools per month: Trial 3 / Starter 5 / Growth 15 … unlimited on Enterprise
Usage journalats_tool_activity (per open)
Tenancyevery query filtered by organisation id at the query layer
Side effectsbackground threads — never on the request path

Interface blueprint

Structural schematic of the surface — panels, hierarchy, and interaction affordances. A contract, not a screenshot.
Input panel
type-to-search record picker
run — server-side
Result panel
copyexportjournalled
Fig. 1 — Follow Talent: structural interface schematic. Panels and states are the contract; data shown is placeholder.

Interaction flow — states, validations, feedback

Every state below is enforced server-side; the interface reports it, it doesn't decide it.
Open toolregistry gate: plan + monthly quota
Pick recordstype-to-search over live org data
Server computeorg-scoped reads; deterministic logic
Resultrendered server-side; export on demand
Journalactivity store → Reports
Plan below minimum → lock page shows the exact tier ladder, never a dead endMonthly quota reached → upgrade prompt with the count that triggered itValidation failure → the specific field and reason, inlineEmpty search → honest empty state; no fabricated matches
Fig. 2 — interaction flow: navy = states, gold = server-enforced gates, green = confirmed outcomes; tags list the edge cases and their feedback.

Frequently asked questions

Is my followed list private to me?
It belongs to your organisation, so colleagues on your account see the same list. It is never visible to the candidate, to other organisations, or on the job site.
Does the candidate know I followed them?
No. Following is not a message and produces no notification — use Talent Pool Messaging if you want to reach someone.
What happens if someone hides their profile after I follow them?
The entry stays on your list marked as no longer listed, and their profile and CV stop opening. You are told, rather than left with a row that silently stops working.
Is there a limit on how many people I can follow?
No. Following is unlimited on every plan that includes the tool; the monthly allowance applies to CV views only.
Do follows count against my CV-view allowance?
No. Only opening a CV counts. Searching, viewing a profile and following are all unmetered.

At a glance

  • One-click follow from any Talent Search result
  • Shared across your organisation, not tied to one recruiter
  • Duplicate-proof — following twice is the same record, never a second row
  • Tells you when a candidate is no longer listed instead of failing quietly
  • Unlimited follows on every plan that includes the tool
  • Included from Growth upward, and unlocked during the 14-day trial

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Hi! I'm Expertini's AI Product Expert. Ask me anything about our solutions, get guidance on any of our Hiring Tools, or just tell me what you're trying to do — I'll point you in the right direction. For account-specific issues, email support@expertini.com.