Learn how to set up how a vacancy will be scored, including the weighting between skills, behaviours and qualifications, and how to adjust the requirements Tali picks up from your advert.

Evidence Based Scoring works from the requirements set against an individual vacancy, so each vacancy is set up on its own. Everything in this guide happens on the 'Score' tab for your vacancy on the new Applicant Screen, before you start reviewing candidates.

If you want to understand what the score itself is and how it is worked out, start with our Evidence Based Scoring Explained article [link: Evidence Based Scoring Explained].

Your System Administrator manages this against your role, and you can read more about how in our Managing Roles and Permissions article. You will need access to the 'Can Manage Vacancy Settings' permission in order to open and configure a vacancy's Score tab.

Not everyone who needs to see a vacancy's requirements needs to be able to change them. On the same Applicant Screen, the 'Vacancy Manager' dropdown is how you reach a vacancy's settings, and inside it is an 'Evidence Based Scoring' option. If you hold the 'Score - Viewer' permission, that option gives you a read-only version of the requirements already set up on that vacancy, so you can see exactly what Tali is looking for without being able to edit anything.

This is aimed at hiring managers who want visibility into how a role is being assessed without needing, or wanting, configuration access. Changing a vacancy's requirements still needs the 'Can Manage Vacancy Settings' permission, and happens on the Score tab described in the rest of this guide.

Once a vacancy is posted, Tali reads the job advert and pulls out the skills, behaviours and qualifications it describes, then pre-fills this tab with them already sorted into sections. The tab isn't a blank form. It's a starting point built from your own advert, waiting for you to check it.

That also means opening the tab is optional. If you never open it, or open it and save nothing, Tali's own grouping is used exactly as it stands. Nothing is lost by leaving it alone, and your candidates will still be scored.

The best time to check this tab over is straight after you post the vacancy and before applications start landing, so every candidate from the start is scored against the same, considered setup.

Scoring is set up from the new Applicant Screen. Open the vacancy you want to configure there, then use the 'Vacancy Manager' dropdown to reach its settings, where the 'Score' tab is what holds everything covered in this guide.

At the top of the tab is a toggle controlling whether Evidence Based Scoring runs on this particular vacancy. It's on by default, so a vacancy is scored unless you decide otherwise.

Switching it off hides the rest of the configuration on the tab, since there is nothing to configure for a vacancy that isn't being scored. If you switch it back on, everything you had already set up is still there, so nothing is lost while it is switched off.

Most vacancies are best left on, and switching off is the exception rather than the rule. The cases where it earns its keep are a vacancy where you don't plan to act on scores at all, such as a placeholder or a talent pool advert, or one where the application asks too little for scoring to say anything useful.

The weighting section controls how much of the score comes from each part of the assessment. Expand it and you'll find three sliders:

The three must add up to 100% between them. A badge shows the running total as you move the sliders, and switches to a confirmed state with a checkmark once you reach exactly 100%. If you want to start again, 'Reset to default' puts the split back to its default position.

The default split is 85% Skills, 10% Behaviours and 5% Preferred Qualifications, which suits most vacancies as it stands.

The Skills slider sets the weighting for your required skills. Preferred skills aren't part of this 100% split. They're scored separately, at a relative 20% of wherever you set the Skills slider, so a preferred skill always contributes something to the score while counting for proportionally less than a required one.

There is more on how the split behaves, and on when it's worth moving away from the default, in our Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices article [link: Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices].

Use this to lean a vacancy towards what the role actually depends on. A role that lives or dies on technical skill and a role that depends mainly on how someone works with a team don't need the same weighting.

Eligibility requirements aren't part of this split. They're checked as a pass or fail rather than scored, so there's no weighting to set for them.

Below the weighting, you'll find the requirements themselves, grouped into four sections:

Those are four of the five requirement types Evidence Based Scoring uses. The fifth, Eligibility, isn't a section of its own. Instead you mark an individual item as an eligibility requirement, which is covered further down.

Work through each section and check that what Tali has proposed sits where you want it. The type an item sits in changes how it's treated when candidates are scored, so this is the part worth spending a minute on.

Most vacancies read well with somewhere around three to six required skills. Piling on far more than that spreads the weighting thin across each one and makes it harder for any single requirement to move the needle.

Name skills as specifically as the role needs. 'Excel pivot tables' scores more precisely than 'Microsoft Office', and 'Salesforce' more precisely than 'CRM experience', since a vague name is harder for Tali to match evidence against cleanly.

Every item has a drag handle. Pick an item up by its handle and drop it into another section to change its type, for example moving something out of Preferred Skills and into Required Skills because the role genuinely depends on it.

A rough test is whether you'd rule a candidate out for not having it. If yes, it belongs in Required. If it would just be a bonus, it belongs in Preferred. Be sparing with Required Skills: putting too many things in there dilutes how much each one is worth, so a strong candidate missing one gets pulled down more than you'd want.

There is more information on where each requirement belongs in our Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices article [link: Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices].

Hover over an item and a three dot menu appears with the options for that item. Selecting 'Set as eligibility requirement' turns it into a pass or fail requirement rather than a scored one, and the item is then shown with a badge, so you can see at a glance which of your requirements are must haves.

[Screenshot to add: an item marked with the eligibility requirement badge via the three dot menu]

Once an item is an eligibility requirement, and only then, you can optionally add a minimum years of experience to it. This is set inline against the item and defaults to any experience, meaning the skill simply needs to be present rather than held for a set length of time.

Minimum experience applies to skills only, so you won't see the option on behaviours or qualifications.

Keep this for things a candidate either holds or doesn't, and that you'd rule them out over entirely. Putting a real capability in here is expensive, because it stops being scored at all, so someone with ten years of it gets no more credit than someone with six months. Our Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices article [link: Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices] has the full guidance on this, including the minimum-years trap it covers there.

Some of the items Tali pulls out of your advert may arrive with a bias alert against them. When Tali reads the advert it looks for requirements that exclude a group of people, and flags the ones where nothing about the role itself appears to explain the exclusion. Hover over the alert and a tooltip explains why that item was picked up.

The test is whether there's a genuine reason tied to the nature of the role. An advert for a retail assistant asking for men only would be flagged, because nothing about that job explains excluding women. A role at a women's care setting that requires a woman, or a role at a religious organisation that requires that faith, wouldn't be flagged, because in those cases the requirement is tied to what the role actually is.

If you're satisfied the requirement is justified for this role, 'Remove bias alert' in the three dot menu clears the alert. Clearing it removes the flag from the item and doesn't change the requirement itself, and an alert that's never cleared stays visible on the item as a reminder to review it.

Only items Tali extracted from the advert are checked this way. Anything you add yourself isn't scanned, so it's worth applying the same test yourself to anything you add by hand.

'Rename' lets you edit an item's name in place, with the option to confirm or cancel your change. This is useful where the advert's own phrasing is longer or vaguer than the skill you actually mean.

The name is what candidates are matched against, so a vague or generic name matches vaguely. 'Experience with relevant systems' gives Tali very little to look for, where 'SAP payroll' gives it something it can find real evidence of.

'Remove' deletes an item from the vacancy's requirements. A brief confirmation appears straight afterwards with an undo option, so an accidental removal can be reversed, though only for a few seconds.

Removal is the right call for boilerplate advert language that isn't a genuine requirement, and for a pure must have that has also turned up as a separate scored item elsewhere, since leaving both in means the same thing counts twice. Our Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices article [link: Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices] covers that duplication pattern in more detail.

Where a skill matters for the role but the advert didn't describe it clearly enough for Tali to pick it up, you can add it. Select 'Add Skill' and a window opens where you name the skill, choose which section it belongs in, and, where the item is being added as an eligibility requirement, set a minimum experience.

Items added by hand carry a tooltip showing who added them and when, so it's clear later which requirements came from the advert and which a person added.

Select the save button at the bottom of the tab to apply your configuration.

If you try to navigate away with changes you haven't saved, you'll be warned first, so nothing is lost by accident.

Towards the bottom of the tab is a short feedback section asking how accurate Tali's analysis of this job was, where you can leave a positive or negative response. It's entirely optional, and it doesn't change the vacancy's configuration or its scores.

It's easier to see the whole tab working when it's applied to a single role, so here's one way a Sales Executive vacancy might be set up. The role is relationship and target driven, needs enough tool literacy to keep a pipeline in order, and includes field visits to customer sites. The choices below are an illustration rather than a standard to copy, but the reasoning behind each one holds for most vacancies.

The one eligibility requirement is a full UK driving licence. Field visits are part of the job, so a candidate without one genuinely can't do the role, and it's a straightforward yes or no rather than something that gets better with practice. That's the test for eligibility, and one clean item is usually all a role like this needs. No minimum years figure is set against it, because holding the licence is what matters, not how long it has been held.

Required Skills holds three items: new business development, objection handling and negotiation, and Salesforce. Three sits comfortably inside the three to six range, so each one still carries real weight, and each is named as specifically as the role allows. 'Salesforce' gives Tali a concrete thing to find evidence of in an application, where 'CRM experience' would match almost anything loosely. If your team runs on a different system, name that one instead.

Preferred Skills holds experience selling into the manufacturing sector. It lifts a candidate who has it, since they arrive already knowing the buyers and the buying cycle, but you wouldn't turn away a strong salesperson without it. That's the difference between Preferred and Required, so it belongs here rather than a section up.

Behaviours holds resilience and relationship building. Both are about how someone works rather than what they know, which is exactly what this section is for. Sales involves a lot of rejection followed by long-running customer relationships, so these two do real work in telling candidates apart.

Preferred Qualifications is kept light, with a recognised sales qualification such as an Institute of Sales Professionals certificate. It isn't something the role depends on, and it's only worth having here because it can separate two otherwise similar candidates. If nothing like that applies to your vacancy, there's no need to force one in.

For the weighting, the default split leans further towards technical skill than a sales role deserves. This is a people facing role, so a reasonable starting point is Skills 55%, Behaviours 40% and Preferred Qualifications 5%, which matches the people facing example in our Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices article [link: Evidence Based Scoring Best Practices]. Treat it as a starting point rather than a rule, and adjust once you can see how your candidates are separating out.

What happens to candidates who already applied?

Changing a vacancy's requirements only affects candidates who apply from that point onward. Anyone who already applied before the change keeps their existing score against the previous requirements; it isn't automatically recalculated.

There's currently no way to bring every candidate on a vacancy up to date in one go.

If you want a specific candidate rescored against the new requirements, each affected candidate shows a banner once you've saved the change, telling you their score is out of date, with the option to rescore that candidate individually from there.