Let candidates check their own status

Signed in, a candidate sees the applications they have made, the stage each one sits at in plain language, and any action that is waiting on them. They can update their phone number and email address, change their availability and notice period, and upload a newer resume when their situation changes.

That is the current scope. It is small on purpose. Every field a candidate maintains themselves is a field a recruiter does not have to verify, and the three fields that go stale fastest, contact number, availability and current CV, are exactly the three the portal covers.

A recruiter updating a candidate record is working from a phone call they had three weeks ago. The candidate is working from their own life. When a candidate updates their own notice period, the field is correct in a way a recruiter guessing from an old note cannot match.

The gain compounds across the database. A talent pool of two thousand people whose availability was last confirmed by the person it belongs to is a usable asset. The same pool with recruiter-entered availability from eighteen months ago is a list of phone calls somebody has to make before it means anything.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. A candidate who can see that their record is current is more likely to keep it current, and a candidate who updated their availability in March is a candidate you can ring in April without an opening apology about being out of date. The portal turns the database from something a desk maintains into something the people in it maintain, which is the only version of database hygiene that survives a busy quarter.

The stage names recruiters use internally are not the stage names a candidate should see. Submitted to client, client rejected on salary and awaiting client feedback are operationally useful and, exposed raw, actively unhelpful.

Candidate-facing status labels are mapped separately from the internal stage machine. You choose what a candidate sees at each internal stage, so a rejection is communicated as a decision rather than as a coded disposition, and an internal stage that has no meaning to a candidate can map to no visible change at all. The mapping is configured once and applies across every requisition.

Because the portal is the surface a candidate already uses, it is the natural place to handle consent and data requests. A candidate can see the consent basis recorded against them, withdraw consent for marketing contact, and request an export or an erasure, and those requests arrive as workflows against the record rather than as an email to whoever monitors the inbox.

What the portal is not is a job board. It is not where a candidate discovers roles, and it does not attempt to be a public careers site. A fully white-labelled career portal, carrying your branding as its own destination, is Wave 2 work and is listed as such on the pricing page rather than implied here.

The portal reduces inbound questions; it does not replace outbound communication. A candidate at offer stage still needs a phone call, and a candidate who has been rejected still deserves to be told rather than left to discover it from a status label.

The right way to think about it is that the portal handles the queries that never needed a person, leaving the conversations that do need one. Message cadences, WhatsApp threads and the candidate communication log continue to work exactly as they did; the portal is simply another place the same record is visible.