Mercury Recruit Quickstart Guide | Up and Running Fast

Mercury Recruit is designed so you can go from sign-up to an active job pipeline in a single session. This quickstart walks you through the five essential steps: creating your account, verifying your email, publishing your first job posting, bringing a colleague on board, and reviewing incoming candidates from your dashboard. Follow the steps in order and you’ll have a fully operational hiring workflow before your first coffee gets cold.

Your 15-day free trial gives you full Professional-plan access with no credit card required. You can explore every feature — AI resume parsing, ATS scoring, assessments, and analytics — before committing to a subscription.

Start your free trial

Navigate to https://mercury360.com/recruit/freetrial and complete the sign-up form:

Field	What to enter
Full Name	Your legal or preferred name — this appears on candidate communications
Work Email	Use your company email address; this becomes your login and the sender address for outgoing emails
Phone	A direct number your team can reach you on (used for account recovery)
Password	Minimum 8 characters; use a mix of uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols

After you submit the form, Mercury Recruit creates your workspace and sends a verification email to the address you provided. You will land on a confirmation screen — keep that browser tab open while you check your inbox.

Use your work email domain (e.g. yourname@company.com) rather than a personal address. Mercury Recruit uses your domain to auto-populate your company profile and to enable trusted-domain team invites later.

Verify your email

Open the verification email from Mercury Recruit (check your spam folder if it doesn’t arrive within two minutes) and click Verify My Email. This confirms your identity and activates your workspace.Once verified, you are redirected to the Mercury Recruit dashboard for the first time. You’ll see a guided setup checklist in the top banner — you can follow it in parallel with this guide or dismiss it and work through these steps manually.

The verification link expires after 24 hours. If it expires, go to the login page and click Resend verification email.

Create your first job posting

From the dashboard, click Jobs in the left navigation, then select + New Job. Mercury Recruit gives you two ways to build your job posting:

AI-Assisted (Recommended)
From a Template

Select AI-Assisted Job Creation from the creation modal.
Enter the Job Title (e.g., Senior Product Designer) and select the Department and Employment Type.
Click Generate. Mercury Recruit’s AI drafts a full job description — including responsibilities, requirements, and a benefits summary — based on the title and industry context.
Review and edit the generated content in the inline editor. Adjust tone, add company-specific details, or remove sections that don’t apply.
Set the Location (on-site, hybrid, or remote), Salary Range (optional but recommended for candidate quality), and Application Deadline.
Click Publish Job to make it live on your career page, or Save as Draft to continue editing later.

The AI-generated description includes suggested ATS screening questions. Review them on the Screening tab before publishing — they directly influence your candidates’ ATS scores.

After publishing, Mercury Recruit generates a unique application link for the job. Share it directly or embed it on your company website — candidates who apply through it are automatically ingested into your pipeline.

Invite a team member

Hiring is a team sport. Add at least one colleague now so they can begin reviewing candidates alongside you.

Click your workspace avatar in the top-right corner and select Workspace Settings.
Open the Team tab and click Invite Member.
Enter your colleague’s work email address and select their role:
- Hiring Manager — can manage jobs and candidates within assigned departments
- Recruiter — can source, review, and move candidates through the pipeline
- Interviewer — can view assigned candidates and submit scorecards
Click Send Invite. Your colleague receives an email invitation with a link to join your workspace.

Team members join your existing workspace and share the same candidate and job data. Each user counts toward your per-user plan seat. See Plans & Billing for details.

Review your first candidates

Once candidates start applying (or after you import resumes manually), head to the Dashboard to begin your review workflow.

Click Jobs in the left navigation and select the job you published in Step 3.
Open the Candidates tab. Each applicant card shows their ATS Score (calculated by Mercury Recruit’s AI based on how closely the resume matches your job requirements), experience summary, and application date.
Click a candidate card to open their full profile: parsed resume, contact details, screening question responses, and timeline.
Use the Stage dropdown to move candidates through your pipeline stages (e.g., Applied → Screening → Interview → Offer), or click Reject to send a polite rejection email automatically.
Leave an Internal Note to share context with your team, or click Schedule Interview to send availability directly from the candidate profile.

Sort the candidate list by ATS Score (High to Low) to surface your strongest applicants first. You can always override the score manually if you spot a strong candidate the AI ranked lower due to non-standard resume formatting.

What’s next?

You’ve completed the core setup loop. From here, customize Mercury Recruit to match your hiring process:

Complete your account setup

Add your company logo, configure your branded career page, and set up notification preferences.

Configure team permissions

Learn how roles control access to jobs, candidates, assessments, and data exports.

​What’s next?

Complete your account setup

Configure team permissions

What’s next?