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.
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.
On this page
- What it does
- It tells you when someone is no longer listed
- Who it's for
- What a follow does not do
- How it fits with alerts
- Plans and what's included
- Support
- Architecture: where it sits in the platform
- Data model and dependency map
- Operational considerations
- Interaction contract
- Interface blueprint & interaction flow
- Frequently asked questions
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is still listed, so the list stays readable at a glance without becoming a private cache of profiles somebody has since withdrawn.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.
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
Interface blueprint
Interaction flow — states, validations, feedback
Neighbouring tools — Sourcing & Job Ads
Frequently asked questions
Is my followed list private to me?⌄
Does the candidate know I followed them?⌄
What happens if someone hides their profile after I follow them?⌄
Is there a limit on how many people I can follow?⌄
Do follows count against my CV-view allowance?⌄
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
See follow talent on your own hiring.
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