Where the preferred name comes from
Guide uses the first of these that applies:
A preferred name entered in Guide. Set in
Edit candidate settingson the candidate. If a preferred name is entered in Guide, this will always be the name Guide uses.The preferred name held in your ATS. For Greenhouse accounts reading candidates from the Harvest v3 API, Guide reads the candidate's native preferred name. If your organization has a Greenhouse custom field mapped to preferred name, that field is used when Greenhouse has no native value.
The candidate's legal first name, when there is no preferred name anywhere.
Preferred names from your ATS stay in sync. If someone updates a candidate's preferred name in Greenhouse, Guide picks up the change on the next candidate sync. If they remove it, Guide goes back to the legal first name.
Setting or changing a preferred name in Guide
Open the candidate.
Choose
Edit candidate settings.Enter a name in Candidate preferred name and save.
A name entered here takes precedence over whatever your ATS holds, and a later sync will not overwrite it.
Using the legal first name instead
Leaving Candidate preferred name empty tells Guide to address the candidate by their legal first name, even when your ATS has a preferred name for them. This is a lasting instruction — subsequent syncs will not reintroduce the ATS value.
If your ATS has no preferred name for that candidate, clearing the field simply leaves Guide with no preference, and a preferred name added to your ATS later will be used.
Limitations
Greenhouse only. Preferred names are read from Greenhouse. Guide does not read them from other ATSs.
Recently active candidates. When preferred names are first enabled for your organization, Guide picks them up for candidates whose records were updated in Greenhouse in the previous six months. Candidates outside that window get theirs the next time their Greenhouse record changes.
Guide does not update your ATS. A preferred name entered in Guide changes how Guide addresses the candidate. It is not written back to Greenhouse.
Candidates cannot set their own preferred name. There is no candidate-facing field for this.
No separate message token. The existing candidate name token resolves the preferred name automatically; there is nothing new to add to your templates.