Underneath
You have met most of your prospects before. Your software has not noticed.
The person who applied for a role two years ago is now a buyer at an account. The contractor you placed is on your own payroll. The referrer is a contact at a client.
In a suite of separate products each of those is three records that happen to share a name. Here it is one human with three roles.
Resolution
Matched on rules that know how email actually works.
Not a lowercase comparison. Dots in an address are not significant at some providers and are at others; a plus-alias is the same person at some and not at others. Profile links carry locale prefixes and tracking parameters that mean nothing.
Each of those is handled as a rule, per provider, because the alternative is a duplicate that nobody can explain.
- CandidateMar 2024Applied · Senior Ops Analystnot progressed
- ContactFeb 2025Smoke & Co Logisticsprimary contact on two deals
- EmployeeJun 2025Operations · Rotterdamactive
- Nothing merges on its own —
Exact matches on an address, a number or a profile link resolve immediately. Anything less confident is queued for a person to decide — stated as a rule in the code, not as a preference.
- A merge is chosen field by field —
Across seventeen fields, and it records exactly which links and which history entries were moved — so an undo can put them back precisely.
- Thirty days to undo, and a refusal afterwards —
Named, rather than a button that silently does nothing.
- A duplicate check that fails never blocks a save —
The record is created and the failure is logged. Nobody is stopped from entering a customer because a background check had a bad moment.
- The same pair cannot queue twice —
However the two records are ordered when they are compared.
Why it holds
The link is not a convention. It is a constraint.
A candidate, a contact and an employee each must point at a person — it is not optional, and the database refuses a record that does not. That constraint was turned on only after verifying there were no gaps, and it would have failed loudly rather than quietly if there had been.
Which is the difference between a unified record and a table somebody populates when they remember. Sixteen different parts of the product resolve through the same path.
- A privacy erasure reaches every role —
Because the subject is the human, not the record you happened to open. And a person under legal hold is skipped, deliberately.
- Warm introductions fall out of it —
Who you already know at a company you are trying to sell to, because the relationship was recorded somewhere else in the business.
›Does this mean hiring can see our sales data?
No. The person record links the roles; it does not merge their permissions. What anybody can see is still decided by the ordinary visibility rules, per record.
›Is merging two contacts the same as merging two people?
No, and the difference matters. Merging two CRM contacts combines those two records. Merging two people combines the humans underneath. Do the person merge when it is genuinely the same human.
›What happens when somebody changes jobs?
Their person record persists and gains the new company. What you knew about them does not restart — which is the entire point of having one.
›Who can see the unified person view?
It is an administrative surface by default rather than something every rep holds. Grant it deliberately.