What recruiters actually look for when searching a talent pool

We spend a lot of time talking about what candidates should do. Not enough time is spent on the other side of the equation: what does a recruiter actually do when they open a talent pool search?

We asked recruiters who use Boba what they look at, in what order, and what makes them click on a profile versus skip it. Here's what we learned.

1. Availability is the first filter, and it's binary

Before anything else, recruiters filter by availability. If you've marked yourself as "unavailable" or haven't updated your status in months, you're invisible. This is the single highest-leverage change most candidates don't make.

2. Role specialization over job title

Generic titles like "Software Engineer" or "Product Manager" mean almost nothing to a recruiter who's trying to fill a specific role. What they're looking for is specificity.

• Not 'Software Engineer', 'Frontend-heavy Software Engineer with React expertise'
• Not 'Data Scientist', 'ML Engineer focused on NLP and LLM fine-tuning'
• Not 'Product Manager', 'Growth PM with B2C experience and strong data background'

The candidates who show up in searches are the ones whose specializations match exactly what the recruiter typed.

3. Salary alignment before the conversation

Wasted conversations are the biggest time sink in recruiting. Talking to a candidate for three rounds only to discover a 40% salary gap is a failure on both sides. That's why recruiters filter by salary range early.

The mistake candidates make is either leaving salary blank (which gets them filtered out entirely), or setting an unrealistically high number (which gets them filtered out by sensible recruiters). Be honest about your range.

4. Work experience descriptions that show impact

Once a recruiter clicks on a profile, the first thing they read is your work experience. Not your headline, not your skills list, the descriptions of what you actually did.

The profiles that get shortlisted have descriptions that do two things: lead with measurable impact, and give enough context to understand the scope of the work.

• Good: 'Redesigned the checkout flow, reducing cart abandonment by 28% and increasing revenue by $2.4M annually'
• Bad: 'Worked on the checkout team and improved various metrics'
• Good: 'Led a team of 6 engineers to migrate 40M user records to a new database architecture, with zero downtime'
• Bad: 'Managed database migration project'

5. Skills that match, not skills that look impressive

Recruiters search by specific skills. If you have experience with a tool or technology, list it. If you don't, don't, keyword stuffing might get you in front of a recruiter, but it'll waste both your time.

The most common mistake is listing broad categories ("Machine Learning") instead of specific tools ("PyTorch, Hugging Face, scikit-learn"). Go specific.

6. A complete profile signals seriousness

Recruiters can tell within seconds if someone filled out a profile carelessly. Blank sections, one-line descriptions, and generic headlines all signal that the candidate isn't serious about the search.

A complete, thoughtful profile signals the opposite: this person is genuinely on the market, they know what they want, and they're worth reaching out to.