Pool holds a record of everyone your company has connected with, assembled from records you already have. This article explains where those records come from, how they combine, how audiences behave, and who is eligible to receive a campaign.

Pool opens on its Dashboard, which shows how your outreach is performing and which campaigns are running. See The Pool Dashboard.

Pool uses a small set of terms precisely, and several are easy to confuse with each other.

Talent reaches Pool by four routes. Knowing which route a person took explains why they are present, why they are missing, and how current their information is.

The 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.

A Talent Profile is not a record you create. Pool assembles it by matching records on email address, which explains both why one person can appear twice and why two people can appear as one.

Email is the only merge key. Pool combines the applicant, worker, and prospect records that share an email address into a single Talent Profile. Name, phone number, and address are not used to merge records.

A person who applied with a personal address and was hired under a work address produces two Talent Profiles. Pool has no basis for connecting them. Review profiles before outreach and resolve duplicates through your internal process.

Addresses differing only by dots resolve to separate records by design. Some mail providers treat firstname.lastname@ and firstnamelastname@ as the same inbox. Pool treats them as different contacts, because the assumption does not hold across every provider and merging on it would combine unrelated people.

A shared inbox, such as a family address, an agency recruiter's address, or a shared account at a previous employer, produces one Talent Profile carrying two people's histories. If a profile's application and employment history do not look like one person, this is usually why.

When a contact has the same attribute on more than one source record, Pool uses the most recently updated value. This applies to both audience filtering and campaign personalization, so a dynamic field resolves to the freshest value rather than to a preferred source.

An audience is a saved set of filter conditions, not a saved list of people. Membership is recalculated as your talent changes, which is why the same audience returns different people on different days.

Membership is computed, not stored. When you save or edit an audience, Pool works out who matches afterwards rather than instantly. While it does, the audience shows a banner reading "Members are still updating. The list and the member count are partial until this finishes." Wait for it to clear before reading the count.

After that, membership updates continuously: someone who starts matching enters, someone who stops matching exits. An applicant who moves out of a targeted city is removed without anyone doing anything.

Click an audience name to open it. The Entrance & Exit flow panel charts how many contacts have entered and exited over a period you choose. The Members tab lists who is in it currently, and the Campaigns tab lists the campaigns targeting it with their status and recipient counts.

A contact's own view of the same history is on their Talent Profile under the Audience tab: each membership event with its date and reason. Reasons include Audience criteria changed, Matched audience criteria, Talent profile changed, and Talent eligibility changed. A contact can enter and exit the same audience more than once.

This distinction causes more confusion than any other in Pool. An audience is always live. Dynamic and static describe how a campaign treats that audience, and you choose between them when you create the campaign.

One audience per campaign. A campaign targets exactly one audience. To reach two groups, either build one audience whose conditions cover both, or run two campaigns.

Match Score ranks how well a person fits a job. Competencies are one of the categories it combines, alongside availability, proximity, and job interest. Both are generated rather than recorded. For the full reference, see How Match Score Works.

What Match Score reads. Pool's talent matching engine reads the content on a talent record, including application answers, AI Recruiter conversations, work history, and uploaded documents, and builds a list of competencies for that person. It runs the same extraction on the job's or Opening's title and description to infer the competencies the role requires, then scores the fit across competencies, availability, proximity, and job interest.

Under Pool > Settings > Match Score, Match Score Weights sets how much each category counts toward the score. Unlock a category to change its weight. The weights must total 100% before you can click Save.

On a Talent Profile's Opening Matches, the work availability category is labelled Availability.

The Competencies tab on a Talent Profile shows standardised competencies inferred from a contact's application history, employment background, and profile data, matched against the O*NET database. Each entry shows the competency, its type (task, tool, technology, skill, or work context), a confidence level, and an Evidence field quoting the line on the record it came from. Jobs and Openings carry competencies too, inferred from their title and description.

A profile with no application or employment detail produces no competencies. Volume alone does not populate the tab. A contact who applied through a short form with no work history has little for the inference to read.

It does not know whether someone wants the job, whether they are available to start, whether they would accept the pay, or anything about them that is not in their Fountain records. It estimates fit from history.

Where a record carries too little to assess, Match Score shows "not enough signal" instead of a number. Where the engine has not finished reading a record, it shows "still processing". Neither state is a low score. See How Match Score Works.

Pool attributes come from three sources, and an attribute has to reach Pool before you can filter or personalise with it.

Custom attributes appear in the audience filter builder under the ATTRIBUTES group, below Match Score, Proximity, Profile, Location, Engagement, Application history, and Employment history.

Attributes are listed by their underlying data key rather than a friendly label, so an eligibility question recorded as 18_or_older appears under that name. Compliance requirements follow a different convention, appearing in title case with a colon, such as Compliance Requirement Vehicle Registration: Status. Because the list is long and alphabetical, use the search box at the top of the picker rather than scrolling.

The Attributes tab shows every custom attribute for a contact in one view, with the attribute name, its dynamic field syntax for campaign messages, the current value, and a source tag showing whether the value came from an applicant, worker, or prospect record. Controls at the top of the tab let you search, filter by source, and sort alphabetically.

Being in an audience and being able to receive a message are two different things. Pool calls the excluded state Ineligible, and every ineligible contact carries an exclusion reason naming the rule that removed them.

Ineligible contacts remain in your pool and in any audience whose filters they match. They are simply not counted as recipients, which is why an audience can show 4,000 members while a campaign reports 3,200 recipients.

All of these live under Pool > Settings > Talent Eligibility.

Opting out is something the contact does rather than something you configure. A contact who clicks unsubscribe in an email, or replies STOP to an SMS, is opted out of your company's marketing messaging across both channels, not just the campaign they were reading. A contact can opt back in later, for example by applying to a job again and agreeing to receive messaging. You cannot reverse it on their behalf.

To stop messaging an individual without changing any account rule, open the Actions menu on their row on the Talent page and choose Mark as do not contact. The same action is available in bulk after selecting multiple rows.

Pool confirms with "Talent marked as do not contact", and three things change on the record:

The reasons section is plural because a contact can be flagged for more than one reason at once, so it is the quickest place to see everything currently blocking messages to that person.

Start on their Talent Profile. The Do not contact reason(s) section, if present, names what is blocking messages. The Audience tab lists membership events with their reasons, one of which is Talent eligibility changed. For the account-level view, the Ineligible Talent table in Pool Settings is searchable and shows the exclusion reason for every excluded contact.