Must-haves & Dealbreakers

How Mira turns your requirements into an Ideal Candidate Profile. What goes in Must-Have, Nice-to-Have, and Avoid, and how each one shapes the search and the ranking.

Before it searches, Mira turns your brief into an Ideal Candidate Profile: a structured summary you review and confirm. It's three lists, and each one steers the search differently. Getting your requirements into the right list is how you control the results.

The three lists

List	What goes here	How it shapes the search
Must-Have Requirements	The non-negotiables a candidate has to meet	The hard bar. Mira uses these to filter and match, so a candidate who misses one won't make the cut.
Nice-to-Have	Preferences that make someone stronger, but won't rule them out	Broadens the search and lifts matching candidates up. It never excludes anyone.
Avoid	Dealbreakers: a competitor to steer clear of, an agency or consulting-only background	Not used to search. Mira applies it after retrieving candidates, to filter out or downrank anyone who matches.

The lists are independent, and the same criterion shouldn't sit in two of them. Any list can be empty, as long as one isn't.

Keep protected characteristics out of your criteria. Age, gender, race, religion, nationality, disability, and similar traits aren't valid requirements: Mira is designed not to filter or rank on them, and in most markets using them in hiring criteria is unlawful.

Hard filters vs reasoned criteria

You don't have to sort your requirements into "filters" and "fuzzy" yourself. Inside Must-Have Requirements, Mira reads each row and decides how to use it:

Literal filters for things that map to a field: a title, a seniority, a location, a company.
Reasoned criteria for the rest, the implicit ones like "took a product from 0 to 1" or "high-growth background", which Mira interprets rather than keyword-matches (see How Mira Searches).

So you just state the requirement in plain language. Mira handles whether it's a hard filter or something to reason about.

Review, edit, and confirm

Mira proposes the Ideal Candidate Profile on a card before it searches. You're in charge of it:

Edit any list: add a Must-Have, move something into Nice-to-Have, or add a competitor to Avoid.
When it looks right, click Search. Whether you took it as-is or edited it first, the search runs against the profile on the card.

Mira starts searching only after you confirm, so the search runs against exactly the bar you set. Want to change direction later? Adjust the profile and Mira re-runs against the new version.

Tips

Put non-negotiables in Must-Have, not Nice-to-Have. A requirement in Nice-to-Have won't gate anyone out; it only boosts.
Use Avoid for what rules a candidate out, like a specific competitor or an off-target industry, rather than burying it in the description.
Keep each row to one atomic criterion, so Mira can weigh them cleanly.

What's next

How Mira Searches: how the confirmed profile drives a multi-source search.
Inside a Candidate Profile: how to read the candidates that come back.
How Mira Matches Candidates: how MRE reasons about your criteria.