Public, semi-private or private?

Overview

Visibility answers one question: who can find this opportunity in the first place.

It is not the same as the recruitment workflow, which decides what happens once somebody has found it. Both can stop a person getting through, and when an opportunity is getting no applicants it is almost always one of these two. This article is for administrators.

1. What are the three levels?

Public. Anyone can find it. It appears in your organization page's featured opportunities and in portal searches.
Semi-private. It is featured on your organization page, but only visible to people who match the audience rules you set.
Private. Hidden from your organization page and from portal searches entirely.

2. The direct link works regardless

Whichever level you pick, you can always share the opportunity's direct link with specific people.

This surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly: visibility governs whether somebody can discover the opportunity by browsing or searching. It does not lock the door against a link you sent them yourself.

For a private opportunity the direct link is essentially the only route in, aside from you assigning people directly.

3. Two ways to make an opportunity invisible by accident

Both are common, and neither produces an error.

Semi-private with no audience rules. You picked semi-private and have not set any rules yet, so nobody matches, so nobody sees it. It looks configured and reaches no one.

Private with no link shared. If you pick private and never send the link to anybody, no one will ever find that opportunity. Private is a decision to distribute it yourself, not a decision to publish it quietly.

4. What conditions can semi-private use?

Several, and they can combine:

In the Active list in your database. Archived people are excluded.
Marked finished for a sequence. Any sequence, or specific ones you choose.
Approved for any opportunity. Again, any, or specific ones.
Approved for the same category, meaning they already do this kind of work for you.
Carrying particular profile tags.
Falling inside an age range.

5. Profile tag matching has three modes

Worth knowing, because it is more flexible than most people expect. You can match on:

Any of these tags
All of these tags
None of these tags

That last one is the useful and overlooked option. It lets you exclude rather than include, which is how you build "everyone except the people already on the waiting list" or "anyone who has not yet been flagged as unavailable".

6. The age rule has a third answer you have to give

If you gate by age, you must also decide what happens when the age is unknown, because the age field is not mandatory at signup. Plenty of real profiles have no date of birth.

Three choices:

Hide. No age on file means they do not see it. Safest where the age limit is a legal requirement.
Show. They see it anyway. Reasonable where the age rule is guidance rather than a rule.
Ignore the age rule. The other conditions still apply, age simply does not.

Skipping past this is how an organization ends up hiding an opportunity from a third of its database without meaning to.

7. How does this relate to the recruitment workflow?

They are sequential, and both have to let somebody through.

Visibility decides whether they can see it exists.
The recruitment workflow decides what they have to do once they can.

So a public opportunity whose only workflow rule requires being active in the database is findable by strangers and impassable to them. They see it, they click, and they are stopped by a rule they had no way of satisfying. If you make something public, check that its workflow has a route for somebody arriving cold.

8. Which should I pick?

Public when you want new people, and your workflow can screen them.
Semi-private when the opportunity should only be offered to a subset you can describe with rules. This is the one that lets an approved person discover work they are eligible for but not yet approved to do.
Private when you will hand out the link yourself, or assign people directly.

9. My opportunity is getting nobody. What do I check?

In this order:

Is it semi-private with no rules, or rules narrower than you thought?
Is it private, with a link you never actually sent?
Is it public but the workflow demands something a newcomer cannot provide?
If you gated by age, what did you choose for unknown age?

Summary

Public is discoverable by anyone, semi-private is featured but rule-filtered, private is hidden entirely.
The direct link works at every level. Visibility governs discovery, not access by link.
Semi-private with no rules shows to nobody. Private with no link shared reaches nobody.
Conditions include database status, finished sequences, existing approvals, same category, profile tags and age.
Tag matching supports any, all and none, so you can exclude as well as include.
An age rule forces a decision about unknown ages: hide, show, or ignore.
Visibility and the recruitment workflow are separate gates and both must pass.

Opportunity visibility on Vome: public, semi-private and private