Paraform Search is a candidate sourcing tool built into Paraform. Describe the role you’re working in plain language and Search finds candidates who match—people who aren’t in your network or applying to your roles yet. From there you save the good ones to your CRM, group them into projects, and reach out with a sequence, all without leaving Paraform.

You’ll find Search in the left sidebar. The whole flow is three steps: Search for candidates, Save the ones worth pursuing, and Sequence your outreach.

Searching for candidates

There are three ways to start a search, and you can mix them freely.

Describe the role in plain language

The search bar sits at the center of the page when you open Search. Type the kind of person you’re looking for the way you’d brief it to someone—for example, “senior backend engineers in NYC who worked at a Series B fintech”—and press the arrow to run it. Search reads your description and turns it into structured filters for you, so you don’t have to translate the role into fields by hand. It understands things like seniority, years of experience, location, skills, past vs. current employers, education, company funding stage, investors, and exclusions (“no agency recruiters”).

Start from one of your roles

Below the search bar you’ll see chips for your primary roles. Click one and Search builds the query from that role’s intake, so you get a first set of results without typing anything.

Set filters by hand

Click Manual to open the filter panel and build the search field by field. This is the most precise option and is covered in the next section.

If you’re new to Search, the search box also shows a few example queries when you click into it—a quick way to see the kinds of things you can ask for.

Refining with filters

Whether you started from plain language or a role, you can open the filter panel at any time to tighten the results. Active filters show up as pills above the results so you can always see what’s being applied, and adjust or clear them.

The filters are grouped as follows:

• Work experience. Filter by job titles and companies, and set the scope to Any, Current, or Past—so you can find someone who works at a company now, or who used to. Companies are picked from Search’s list (each shown with its logo); free-text company names aren’t supported. You can add multiple work-experience clauses to express things like “a current engineer at Stripe who was previously at Google.”
• Company attributes. Within a work-experience clause, narrow by the kind of company the person worked at: keywords (e.g. fintech, developer tools, climate), headcount, funding stage (with a toggle for the stage the company is at now vs. while they worked there), investors, total funding raised, and talent density tier (S / A / B / Other).
• Education. Filter by degree, schools, fields of study, and graduation year. As with work experience, you can add multiple education clauses.
• Skills. Add skills as a scoring signal (candidates with them rank higher) or make them a strict requirement. You can also exclude skills.
• Location and years of experience, plus a candidate-wide minimum degree.

Most filters support exclusions, so you can say what you don’t want as well as what you do.

AI assist inside filters

Search has AI built directly into the filters, so you can widen or sharpen a search without having to brainstorm every variant by hand. Both tools are marked with a sparkle icon.

Generate Similar expands a field from what you’ve already added. Add a few companies—say Stripe and Ramp—and Search suggests more in the same vein: other companies of similar space, stage, and caliber. It works the same way on schools, job titles, and fields of study—give it a starting set and it fills in the ones you’d otherwise have to think up yourself. This is the fastest way to improve recall when a search is returning too few people. If there’s nothing genuinely new to add, Search tells you rather than padding the list.

Search with AI resolves a term you type into the right underlying entity for company and school fields. Instead of matching on the raw text, it maps what you typed to the actual company or school—helpful when a name is abbreviated, ambiguous, or has several variants—so the filter targets the entity you actually meant.

Taken together with the plain-language search bar—which is itself AI translating your description into structured filters—these tools let you go from a rough idea to a well-shaped candidate list without manually enumerating every title, company, or school.

Presets

If you find yourself building the same filter values repeatedly—a list of target companies, a set of schools—you can save them as a preset and drop them into a filter with one click. Look for the Select Preset option on supported filter fields.

Reviewing results

Results appear in a table. Click any candidate to open their full profile, which pulls together their experience, education, skills, certifications, honors, languages, and contact details, along with an activity view—so you can vet someone properly before saving them.

Saving candidates

When you find someone worth pursuing, click the bookmark on their result to save them to your Candidates CRM. The bookmark fills in once they’re saved.

Next to the bookmark is a chevron that opens the save menu. From there you can:

• Add the candidate to your CRM.
• Add them to an existing project.
• Create a project to group this role’s candidates together.

Projects group candidates per role, so instead of working one profile at a time you can move a whole batch through outreach together.

Saving in bulk

Select multiple candidates with the checkboxes and a toolbar appears with the same save and sequence actions, applied to your whole selection at once.

A note on client conflicts: if a candidate currently works at another Paraform client, saving them will prompt a confirmation first. This protects you from sourcing out of a company that’s off-limits.

Reaching out with sequences

Once candidates are saved, select them and use Add to sequence to enroll them in an email campaign—a series of emails that sends on a schedule and stops automatically as soon as someone replies. You can write the emails yourself or have Parabot draft them for you. Nothing goes out until you start the sequence, so you can review the schedule first. Sequences tracks replies per candidate, so you can tell a quiet role apart from a broken one.

For the details of building and sending campaigns, see the Sequences article.