Why Advanced Search is not Displaying Expected Results
Certain elements could have an impact on advanced search results.
Data segmentation: If your organization has activated data segmentation, this might exclude a lot of candidates from your search results. For this reason, it is important to verify if your organization has implemented such restrictions and, if this is the case, ask how they affect which candidates you are entitled to view. There are two dimensions to data segmentation: a user type permission whereby the candidates displayed to a user are determined by the person's staffing type; and the Organization, Location and Job Field (OLF) associated with groups that the user is a member of. While it might be easy to manage only a few groups around specific organizations, the effect of segmentation can be difficult to clearly understand if users are associated with multiple groups incorporating various OLF. Ask your system administrator if the Activate Segmentation in Search setting was activated.
Incomplete submissions: Many candidates never complete their submissions for various reasons. An incomplete general profile will not be retrieved during a search if your organization has configured the system that way. In average, 33% of candidates might not have completed a job specific submission or a general profile. An interesting alternative to not displaying such candidates is to display them and add an Incomplete Submission column.
Remember that the "incomplete submission" flag refers to the online submission process, not to the completeness of the candidate file overall. If your organization does not display incomplete submissions, incomplete submissions that might contain a lot of information are obviously not displayed. On the other hand, you might have partial submissions, that were captured or imported, and those partial submissions have the "complete" flag, even if only few fields were captured. Thus, incomplete submission refers to online submissions or online profiles that have not passed the submission page, regardless of whether all the content has been provided or not. Ask your system administrator if the Display Incomplete Application Protected setting was activated.
Identification missing: "Identification missing" candidate files are missing a candidate's first and last name and do not have the official "anonymous" flag. Ask your system administrator if the Display Identification Missing Candidates setting was activated.
Excluding candidates in selection process: Candidates who are in a selection process associated with an open requisition can be excluded from search results. Ask your system administrator if the Candidate Search Mask Processed setting was activated.
Excluding candidates in selection process who have attained or proceeded beyond a specific status: The Threshold CSW Step - Hide from Search setting indicates the CSW reference model step at which, once reached, candidates will be excluded from search results (unless the user type has overriding permission). Candidates are excluded from search results once they have reached the threshold step or when they are at a step that comes after the threshold step in the reference model sequence. Ask your system administrator if that setting and user permission were activated.
Matching the place of residence: By default, when a user searches for candidates associated with a specific place of residence, the system retrieves candidates associated with a "higher" location in addition to the specific location (place of residence). It is recommended that you include "higher" levels (country and state/province) because even if in theory candidates do have all levels (down to region), some might not. Exceptions are:
If the place of residence field is not mandatory (usually only optional in capture candidate or through import).
If it is a new country. Place of residence locations, which are centrally managed, increase in number as customers request that specific new countries be included. Oracle had numerous countries without states or regions in the past and started to add into the database such countries' regions on a customer-by-customer basis. Some candidates never had the opportunity to select a 2nd or 3rd level so it is important that they are not excluded by default when a search is performed.
The number of exceptions should be less than the number of candidates with an exact match and Oracle feels it is fair to retrieve those candidates who never had the opportunity to indicate their structured place of residence. Some Oracle customers might want to change this setting however.