Migrate from Candidate Management System to Zoho Recruit

Candidate Manager Jobs export with status, department, location, and posting dates. We map Job records 1:1 into Zoho Recruit Job Openings and preserve the internal job ID as a reference field (Job ID or a custom field) for traceability. Zoho Recruit enforces an active-job limit per recruiter license depending on tier (1 for Free, 10 for Standard, 20 for Professional, unlimited for Enterprise), so we verify the customer's tier before migration to avoid hitting a ceiling during the load.

Candidate profiles export with name, contact details, work history, education, and skills. Zoho Recruit requires a Last Name field as mandatory on every Candidate record; Candidate Manager's name fields may store a full name in a single field. We split the full name during the transform phase, assigning the last token to Last Name and everything before it to First Name. We handle multi-record deduplication by email address and flag duplicate candidates for customer review before final insert.

Applications link a Candidate to a Job and carry status, source, and submission timestamp. Zoho Recruit represents the candidate-to-job relationship as a Candidate record associated to one or more Job Openings through the built-in association rather than a separate Application object. We preserve the application status as a Zoho Recruit Candidate Status value, the source as a custom Source field, and the submission timestamp as a custom field or as the Created Date of the association record.

Candidate Manager stores configurable stage names and order per Job or globally. Zoho Recruit uses a Candidate Status picklist tied to the hiring pipeline. We enumerate every active stage in the source, map each to the closest Zoho Recruit Candidate Status value, and flag any stages with no direct equivalent for the customer's admin to add as custom picklist values before the application phase of migration begins.

Each Candidate Manager tenant adds its own custom Candidate and Application properties with no unified schema catalog. We enumerate every custom field during discovery, map them to Zoho Recruit custom fields by name and inferred type, and flag any fields with ambiguous type (e.g., a text field storing numeric scores) as orphaned custom fields for the customer to review. Zoho Recruit custom fields are available from Professional tier; Standard tier customers receive a catch-all custom properties section in the candidate layout for overflow fields.

Ranking scores and pre-profiling data in Candidate Manager live as properties on the Application or Candidate record. Numeric scores migrate directly to Zoho Recruit custom number fields. Textual scoring rubrics migrate to Zoho Recruit Evaluation Forms if the customer is on Professional or Enterprise, where the admin can define structured evaluation criteria with AI-generated assessments; otherwise they migrate as a custom multi-line text field.

Recruiter notes attached to Candidates or Applications export as free-text blobs. We preserve note content and authorship, importing them as Zoho Recruit Note records linked to the Candidate. Non-structured note fields that do not map to typed Zoho Recruit fields are flagged and stored in a custom text area on the candidate record for manual reorganization post-migration.

Resume files, cover letters, and portfolio documents export as binary blobs. We extract text content where parsable for resume parsing, and re-upload original file types to Zoho Recruit's document storage. Zoho Recruit enforces file size limits per import batch; we chunk large attachment sets and re-upload in sequence. Customer-facing documents that were previously attached to Job Openings migrate to the Job Opening's Documents section.

Candidate Manager Users map to Zoho Recruit User records. We match by email address. Hiring Manager users who were assigned as Owners on Jobs or Applications receive a Zoho Recruit Hiring Manager license (Employee license add-on or Staffing Portal access depending on edition). Any Candidate Manager user without a matching Zoho Recruit account is held in a reconciliation queue for the customer's admin to provision before the record migration phase begins.

If Candidate Manager includes client company records from staffing agency portal usage, these map to Zoho Recruit's Clients module (Corporate HR edition uses Accounts or Contacts instead). We identify client records by detecting fields or relationships that represent external companies rather than candidates, and map them to the appropriate Zoho Recruit module based on the edition selected.

Candidate Manager approval chains for job requisitions do not migrate as code. We document every configured approval chain with its stages, approvers, conditions, and escalation rules during discovery, and deliver a written workflow inventory for the customer's admin to rebuild in Zoho Recruit Blueprint (Enterprise tier) or as Workflow Rules (Professional tier). This is not a migration of automation logic; it is a handoff of configuration intent.

Client-facing portal settings from Candidate Manager (portal access permissions, client-visible pipeline stages, branding) do not migrate. We inventory the current portal configuration during discovery and map it to Zoho Recruit's Client Portal and Staffing Portal settings, noting which features require Enterprise tier and which are available at lower tiers. The portal is reconfigured post-migration by the customer's admin.