Guide's candidate portal helps you provide candidates with a personalized prep content for each stage of the candidate journey, which unlocks when you send a candidate a confirmation email after scheduling their interviews for that stage.
The goal is to improve candidate experience, reduce back-and-forth, and ensure candidates feel confident at each stage.
🧩 Where Does the Prep Content Come From?
Prep content can come from either a global Candidate Portal template or be customized at the individual job level:
1. Global Candidate Portal Prep (Using Your Organization's "Default" Template)
You can set up a global Candidate Portal template in Template → Edit Default template. Within that template, you can define prep content for each interview stage (e.g. Phone Screen, Onsite, etc.).
This content becomes the default for all jobs using that template
It’s ideal when you have shared content across many jobs (e.g. behavioral interview expectations, general company culture notes)
You can create multiple templates if you support different job families or departments
🧠 Tip: If you find yourself reusing the same content across several jobs, set that content in a shared template and link that template to those jobs.
2. Job-Level Candidate Portal (Job-Specific Content)
You can also customize prep content directly within a specific job, which gives you more flexibility for role-specific information.
Here’s how:
While scheduling a candidate, click edit next to interview plan within the Guide Greenhouse extension.
Add prep content for each relevant stage
Click Save to Job Settings
→ This saves the prep content as the new default for that job
The next time you schedule a candidate for that job, Guide will use this content automatically
From the Guide extension in Greenhouse:
Edit stage-based prep content for this job:
This method is great for tailoring prep to a specific hiring loop (e.g. Backend Engineer vs. Product Designer).
Alternatively, you can set up prep content for each job from within your Guide dashboard from Jobs > Select Job > Candidate portal:
Editing content from this path will divert from the template this job pulls from and only update the portal content for new candidates in this job.
Notes about changing candidate portal content for active candidates
Note that by default updating candidate portal content will only apply to new candidates you schedule after the changes are made.
To sync changes to all active candidates as well, you'll need to Sync changes to all active candidate portals:
💡 When to Use a Template vs. Job-Level Edits
Scenario | Best Practice |
You want the same prep across many jobs | ✅ Use a portal template |
Prep content varies per job or role | ✅ Customize at the job level |
You want to reuse custom content across some—but not all—roles | ✅ Create multiple templates and apply selectively |
🧠 Final Tips
Use templates for scale, job-level editing for precision
Always click Save to Job Settings if you edit prep content during scheduling
Candidates only see the prep content relevant to their interview stage(s)