I. Add a strategy

1. Open or log into your https://chat.xtrf.io/.

2. Go to the Admin workspace panel → Apps card and click the Settings button.

   

3. You will be directed to the Job Prospecting Strategies page. Click the Add Strategy button in the top right corner.

   

   You will be directed to the strategy creator page.

4. Provide a name for the new strategy.

   

5. In the General Settings card: 

   1. Decide whether the strategy should be Active and thus selectable.

   2. Provide the detailed Description that will help you to select the proper strategy later.

   3. In the Vendor Assignment section, decide whether you want to select vendors automatically or manually when job prospecting ends.

   4. Enter the Prospecting Expiry Time to define when the selection process should end if no vendor is selected for the job.

II. Set up the Cascades

Before starting the cascades, XTRF automatically preselects vendors that suit the basic requirements for the job. Those requirements include the following:

• Vendor active status and availability for the job dates

• Corresponding job type, specialization, and language pairs

• Vendor’s acceptance by the client (proposed vendors shouldn’t be excluded by the client).

Only those preselected vendors will be processed in the subsequent prospecting. Therefore, the job type,  specialization, language combinations, or status filters are unavailable in the cascades.

In the Cascade card, you have to decide which vendors should be offered the job first. You should successively set all the cascades you plan to use in this strategy.

For each cascade, perform the following steps:

1. Click on the Cascade bar to expand the cascade settings card.

2. (Optional) Provide a name for the cascade.

   

3. (Optional) In the Vendor Filtering section, decide how the vendors should be filtered:

   1. From the drop-down list, select the filtering criteria.

   2. In the filter fields, select the required settings.
      The Evaluation filter uses a percentage scale, so all the XTRF evaluation scales are recalculated during the prospecting. To ensure you get the expected results from filtering by evaluation, provide the correct percentage. For example, if you want to select vendors evaluated with four stars or higher on a 5-star scale, enter 80 in the second column. 
      The system uses the following vendor evaluation levels from the Home Portal:
      1. Specific evaluation for the selected job type, language combination, and specialization.
      If there is no such evaluation, then:
      2. The evaluation for the selected job type and language combination.
      If there is no such evaluation, then:
      3. The evaluation for the selected job type.
      If there is  no such evaluation, then:
      4. The vendor’s overall evaluation.  If there is no such evaluation, the vendor is excluded from the cascade.

   3. (Optional) To add filtering by custom fields or price profile name, click the Switch to advanced editing link. In the text field that appears in the Vendor Filtering section, use the JQL syntax:

      • For custom fields -  the additionalProperty(“Custom field name”) function,e.g., additionalProperty(“Nice folk”) = true or additionalProperty(“IQ”) > 100

      • For price profile names - the additionalProperty(“Price profile name”)function,  e.g., additionalProperty(“Price profile name”)exactly matches "EUR"
        or  additionalProperty(“Price profile name”)does not start with "EUR".
        💡 To check if the advanced filtering was entered correctly, try saving your changes. If your syntax is incorrect, you will get a message pointing to the error. 
        Only the vendors who fit all set criteria will be processed later. You can select several filters to find the vendor that suits the job perfectly.

4. In the Vendor Sorting section, decide how the vendors should be sorted:

   1. From the drop-down list, select the sorting criteria.

   2. Select the required settings for each criterion.

      

      You can select several sorting criteria to ensure that the most suitable vendors will be on top of the list.

5. In the Maximum Number of Vendors field, define how many vendors this cascade should send job offers to.

   

6. In the Negotiation Strategy section, decide whether you allow the negotiations with vendors selected by this cascade.

7. In the Contract Proposal Ranking Strategy section, select the ranking strategy for comparing vendor contract proposals. For now, two options are available:

   • Select the first proposal with the original or better deadline and fee.

   • Select the proposal with the lowest price and the original or early deadline.

• If you have more than one cascade in the Job Prospecting Strategy, an additional Time Delay Before Starting The Next Cascade section appears. Here you can:

  • set up the time of the cascade duration, after which the next cascade will be launched

  • allow vendors to respond to job offers even after the start of the next cascade.

    

    If vendors are not selected within a cascade (for example, because they didn’t respond on time), they are not participating in the next ones. Checking the Allow… box is the only option for letting them be selected if they respond later

• If you want to include another cascade, you may create it from scratch by clicking the Add Another Cascade button at the bottom of the page. Or you can click the Duplicate button in the top right corner of an existing cascade and change only some details (for example, prolonging the response time while keeping the other criteria).

  

•  To rearrange the cascades, drag and drop the cascade cards to the desired position. 
  💡 Before rearranging, collapse the cascade cards. To pick up the card, click on the icon or the Click to expand/collapse, drag to reorder cascades text.

• To finish the creation of the Job Prospecting Strategy, click the Save button in the top right corner of the page.