This article will cover the required administrative setup steps for Fountain Pool and settings that can be customized to make Pool efficient for your company’s needs.

Once Pool is enabled, Talent Profiles will be generated for every worker record currently in your Fountain account.

To start the flow of applicant records into Pool, click Pool in the left side panel and then Settings, then complete the one-time setup step at the top of the page that connects Fountain Hire to Pool. This ensures your applicants’ data from Fountain Hire continually flows into Pool so you have an accurate pipeline of talent.

You’ll be brought to the Automation Center, and a rule will be automatically created for you. No updating is required. You can navigate away from this screen.

The Hire to Pool sync is near-real-time and event-driven. Pool records update as applicants are created and updated in Hire, with a delay of a few minutes up to an hour depending on volume. There is no fixed polling interval, so there is no set time at which records appear.

Expect a few minutes in normal conditions and up to an hour during a high-volume intake. Because the sync reacts to events rather than running on a timer, a record with no recent activity in Hire does not resync on its own. A record that has not appeared after an hour is worth investigating rather than waiting on.

Attributes collected during the Hire application become available as Pool filter options only after they are synced. Use Sync from Hire in Settings > Worker Attributes.

To access Pool settings, click Pool in the left side panel, and then Settings. The page presents six tiles, each with an Edit button and a summary of its current configuration:

Each tile is covered below in the same order. Below the tiles on the settings page, the Ineligible Talent section shows how your eligibility rules impact your talent pool.

Control which competencies are shown when viewing a job profile. Minimum Importance sets a threshold: only competencies whose importance score for the job is at or above this value are shown. Raising the threshold returns fewer but more relevant competencies.

If a job profile looks sparse, check this threshold before concluding the underlying data is missing.

To configure talent-job matching, click Edit in the Match Score tile of the Pool Settings page. The page has two panels.

Only show matches with a score at or above this value. For example, you may want to view jobs for which a given talent profile has a 75% match or higher. This threshold also supplies the default percentage offered in the audience filter.

Set the relative importance of each matching criterion. There are three:

Each weight has its own lock control, so you can hold one steady while adjusting the others.

Configure the filters used to match talent to openings in Fountain Hire. Changes may take up to 1 hour to take effect. Three settings are available:

Messaging Rules prevent inbox spam and recipient fatigue by limiting how often a campaign can message the same person. The tile on the Pool Settings page shows the rule currently in effect.

The limit applies per campaign rather than across campaigns, so a contact who is in three campaigns can receive a message from each of them on the same day. Check for audience overlap before running campaigns concurrently.

To make updates to which talent can be included in your pool, click Edit within the Talent Eligibility tile. Rules are grouped into four sections, and every rule shows how many contacts it currently excludes.

Opt-outs — Pool automatically excludes any talent who have opted out of messaging. This setting cannot be changed.

Exclude applicants by stage — Type to search and select the stages you want to exclude. A common choice is rejected applicants. Click Save when finished.

Exclude applicants by rejection reason — Exclude talent who were rejected as applicants for specific reasons. These reasons carry over from your Fountain Hire application settings. Learn more about rejection reasons in this article. Use Force sync if a recently changed reason has not appeared yet.

Exclude applicants by custom conditions — Build exclusion rules on your own data keys. Those keys have to be mapped to Fountain's concepts before they can be used here, so talk to your account team first and use the Map your data keys link to start that process. Click Add custom condition to create one.

Exclude workers by segment — Use Worker Segments to define which workers to exclude from Pool audiences and messaging. A common segment to exclude is workers whose status is active, meaning they currently work at your company. Create the segment first — learn how to set up segments in this article — then type in the box to select the segments to exclude and click Save.

GDPR Eligibility Window — Talent with no activity within this period are automatically marked ineligible and removed from outreach. A new application, worker record update, prospect upload, or campaign engagement will reset the window and restore their eligibility. Set the number and the unit, then click Save.

This window is why a Talent Profile shows an Expires on date. That date moves forward whenever the contact does something.

On the main Pool Settings page, you’ll see the values for Eligible and Ineligible talent change based on your new settings.

New Prospect Profile is a public form anyone can submit to add themselves to your talent pool as a prospect. You share it as a link or a QR code, and each submission creates a Talent Profile ready for audiences and campaigns.

Setting it up covers four things: turning on the master switch, writing the landing page a prospect sees, choosing which fields are collected and which are required, and sharing the link or QR code. For the full walkthrough, see Capture Prospects with a Public Form and QR Code in Manually Add Prospects to Pool. The same article covers importing prospects in bulk from a CSV file, which is done from the Talent page rather than here.

Based on the rules configured in the Talent Eligibility tile, you can review how your ineligible talent impacts your pool.

You’ll see tiles with the total number of Talent Profiles (applicants, workers, and prospects), how many of those individuals are eligible, and how many are ineligible, each with its percentage.

Below the tiles, a table lists every excluded contact with their city, state, zipcode, type, and an Exclusion reason naming the rule that removed them. Use Search ineligible talent to find a specific person, and Columns to change what the table shows.

The Jobs page is accessed by clicking Pool in the left side panel and then Jobs. Here you’ll see a list of jobs available for matching your talent against, with the name and the date each was last updated. These jobs will automatically flow over from Fountain Hire if your company is using Hire.

To find a specific job, use Search jobs at the top of the page, and Columns to change what the table shows.