Calibrate the role on real profiles before anyone is contacted

Criteria are easier to recognise than to write

Ask someone to describe the person they want to hire and you get a job description. Show them five real profiles and ask which ones are right, and you get the criteria they were actually using. The second answer is the one a search needs, and it usually arrives weeks into the process, one rejected shortlist at a time.

The Company Room is built to get that answer on the first day. When EmployLabs takes on a role with you, you get a Company Room for it: a private room, opened from a link with no login, where you work through the role with Meera, the EmployLabs recruiting agent. Once the room is connected to the live search for your role, calibration happens there, against live profiles rather than a description of them. Marking profiles, previewing samples and re-running the search all need that live connection.

Profiles, grouped by the kind of person

A role rarely has one shape of good candidate, so Meera proposes several personas: distinct kinds of person who could do the job. Each persona carries its own search, and choosing one pulls a small set of real sample profiles for it, sourced live for that role.

That gives the conversation something concrete to point at. The question is no longer whether the brief is right in the abstract, but whether these people are the people. It is the same idea as seeing real profiles before anyone is contacted, put in front of you, the person who decides.

A hiring manager who cannot write the criteria down can almost always point at the right profile. The room is built around pointing.

What you can do in the room

• Mark each profile good or bad. Good means more people like this; bad means not who they meant. A reason can go with the mark, and that reason is where most of the signal lives.
• Change their mind. There is one verdict per profile per persona, and marking it again replaces the earlier one rather than piling up contradictions.
• Pick or drop personas. A persona that is plainly wrong can be dropped, and a promising one picked to pull its profiles.
• Re-run the search with different criteria. The location scope (the base location held strictly, a more flexible location, or remote), the experience range (tighter or wider) and the skills list can each be changed, and the search runs again on the changed version.

Where the marks go

Every verdict, and every reason, is stored against the role EmployLabs runs for you, the persona and the profile. Nothing re-runs the search on its own when a mark lands. The marks are read when our team shapes that role’s personas with Meera: at that stage she sees how many profiles under each persona were judged, how many came out good and bad, and she reads the reasons.

Where the correction goes depends on where the complaint lands. A complaint about who one persona finds is directed to that persona’s own search. The same complaint across several personas is a problem with the brief itself, so it is directed to the role’s base criteria instead.

Marking profiles in the room does not move anyone along the pipeline. A good verdict there is a calibration signal, not a decision to contact the candidate.

The hiring-manager link is a different thing

EmployLabs also has a shortlist link for hiring managers. That link is read-only: it shows the role and its candidates with the reasoning attached, and it takes no marks. Calibration, with verdicts and changed criteria, happens in the Company Room.

How to use it

1. Open the room before the search is set in stone, ideally with everyone who will interview. The profiles are cheap to look at and expensive to discover late.
2. Give a reason with every bad mark. A bare thumbs-down says that something is wrong; a reason says what.
3. Watch for the same complaint across personas. It means the brief needs to move, not the search. There is more on how Meera works a role from brief to search.