What this article covers
Similar Contacts is Beamery's matching engine for finding candidates who look like the ones you already have. You can run it two ways: from inside a Pool, where it compares suggestions against everyone already added to that Pool, or from a single candidate profile, where it finds contacts who look like just that one person.
This article covers both. It's for any recruiter, sourcer, or talent acquisition team member sourcing candidates through Pools or working from an individual profile in Beamery.
Why it matters
Sourcing takes time. Similar Contacts removes the manual search step by scanning your CRM for candidates who share the traits of the people you already know are a fit, so you spend your time reviewing strong matches and reaching out, not building search queries from scratch.
The more you use it, whether that's adding and dismissing suggestions in a Pool or running it from a well-filled-out profile, the more accurate your suggestions become. It's built to improve with use, not just on the first try.
Who can access this
Find Similar Contacts (from a profile): All Beamery users can access this, except those with restricted permission levels.
Similar Contacts in Pools: Your Pool needs at least one contact already added before suggestions will generate, and the feature works only on Pools with fewer than 2,000 contacts.
How to use Similar Contacts
How the matching engine works
Both versions of Similar Contacts run on the same underlying logic, whether they're comparing against a whole Pool or a single profile. Beamery analyzes five areas of a profile: location, job titles, languages, skills, and keywords found in profile attachments.
Each matching candidate in your CRM gets a Match Score based on how closely they align across those five areas, and the top 20 matches are presented to you, ranked from strongest to weakest. You won't see a numeric score on a candidate's profile. Instead, Beamery shows the ranking as a bar: a full green bar means a strong match, and a partially filled yellow bar means a weaker one.
Similar Contacts does not use AI or machine learning. It follows a rules-based process: Beamery looks at the traits common to your starting point (a Pool or a profile) and surfaces other CRM contacts who share those traits. That keeps the matching logic consistent and transparent rather than predictive.
Profiles with a Do not contact engagement status, or that have been archived, anonymized, or deleted, are excluded from suggestions in both versions of the feature.
Similar Contacts in Pools
Use this when you're building out a Pool and want Beamery to suggest more candidates like the ones you've already added.
Here's what happens when you run it. Beamery looks at the contacts already in your Pool and finds what they have in common across location, job titles, languages, skills, and attachment keywords. It also reviews any contacts you've previously dismissed from that Pool, to understand what does not fit.
From that analysis, Beamery builds a hypothetical ideal candidate for your Pool. You never see this profile directly. It exists only to power your suggestions behind the scenes. Beamery then scores every contact in your CRM against it and surfaces the top 20 as your suggestions.
Once you're reviewing suggestions, you have two actions for each contact: Add them straight to your Pool, or Dismiss them with a reason (Lacks Desired Skills, Not in Desired Location, Lacks Desired Experience, Overqualified, or Other). Dismissed contacts will not be suggested again for that Pool.
Click into a contact's Mini-Profile from the results list for a closer look before you decide.
To get better suggestions faster: start by adding 5 to 10 contacts who already match the type of candidate you're sourcing for. This gives Beamery a stronger base to build the ideal persona from. Then keep adding and dismissing as you go. Every action refines your suggestions further.
A few starting points tend to produce strong Pools to seed from:
- Silver medalist candidates who made it far in a process but were edged out at the final stages
- Contacts you and a hiring manager have already agreed are a strong fit for future roles
- Candidates you found through filters or Boolean search who match your requisition criteria
Find Similar Contacts (from a profile)
Use this when you have one strong candidate profile in front of you and want to find more people who look like them, without building or adding to a Pool first.
To launch it, open any profile in Beamery, click the vertical ellipsis in the top right corner, and select Find Similar Contacts.
Beamery analyzes that one profile's location, job titles, languages, skills, and attachment keywords, the same five areas used in Pools, and searches your CRM for the 20 closest matches. Results are ranked by Match Score, strongest first.
The results grid highlights exactly which terms two profiles have in common. Matching job titles, languages, and skills are shown in green directly on the list, so you can see at a glance why a contact was suggested.
From the results, click a contact's name to open their full profile, or take action directly, like adding them to a Pool, Vacancy, or Campaign.
To get better suggestions: make sure the profile you're starting from has strong data. A clear job title, a location, and at least one attachment go a long way. The overall data quality of your CRM matters too. As stronger matches are added to your CRM, they'll start showing up in your results.
Next steps
Similar Contacts is one part of a broader sourcing toolkit in Beamery. A few places to go next:
- How to Create and Manage Pools
- How to Add Candidates to Pools
- Leveraging Boolean Search and Filters to Find Similar Contacts
- Capitalizing on Previous Work to Generate Similar Contacts
- Using Employee Profiles to Generate Similar Contacts for New Roles
- Using Unavailable Candidates to Generate Similar Contacts