Candidate Pool
Keep a list of people you might recruit, approve volunteers who signed up to review, and invite the rest to your committee.
Purpose
The Candidate Pool sub-tab of Committee lists people you are considering for your program's committee. It holds candidates you added yourself or imported from a CSV. It also holds volunteers who signed up to review from the conference Portal, and you can Approve those volunteers straight onto your reviewer list.
When you use it
- To review and approve people who volunteered to review for your program.
- To keep a shortlist of potential reviewers or area chairs before inviting them.
- To import a list of candidates, then invite them one at a time.
Walkthrough
- 1
Open the Program Chair Console, select your program, go to Committee, and click the Candidate Pool sub-tab. Its button shows how many candidates the pool holds, like the count on Committee Members.
- 2
Click the Signed Up filter chip to see only volunteers waiting for your decision. Their Source reads Signed up, and any note they left appears under their name. The Signed Up column shows the date and time each person signed up (for rows you added, when you added them), and the table lists the newest first. Volunteers can only sign up once their reviewer profile is complete (organization, education, title, country, research interests and an expertise area; a scholarly record and conflicts are optional), so you always have something to judge them by.
- 3
Under the name, a candidate who signed up (from the Reviewer page or by committing to review as an author) is marked Signed Up User, and one you added who already has an account is marked System User. Each of them shows Profile ready or Profile incomplete; hover the amber badge to see what is missing. Sign ups made before 2026-10-10 and committed authors can still have an incomplete profile. Click the Profile incomplete filter chip to list only them.
- 4
To ask someone to finish their profile, click the amber envelope (Email a profile reminder) on their row. The message window opens with the Reviewer Profile Completion (Sign Up) template filled in: the list of required items and a link straight to the Reviewer Profile in their profile editor. Review it and click Send. To remind several people at once, turn on the Profile incomplete filter, select their rows and click Group Email; the same template is filled in. Every template closes with the program's name, for example "On behalf of the AIMG 2026 committee", never with your own name.
- 5
Click View Profile (the person icon) on a row to read that person's User Profile: organization, country, bio, research interests, the Reviewer Profile (expertise areas, expertise statement, publication and relation counts, scholar links, and whether it is complete), career, education and links. It appears for candidates who have an account (marked Signed Up User or System User). Click Open full profile in that window to see their whole User Profile page in a new tab, read only, including their Reviewer Profile, reviewer history, roles and publications.
- 6
Authors who check I commit to reviewing papers when they submit a paper to this program also land here, with the status Committed and the source Author commitment; the note under their name names the paper. Click the Committed filter chip to see only them. They are not added to the committee until you approve them. The submitting author must complete their own reviewer profile while submitting. A committed co-author whose profile is incomplete gets a notification, an email and a Complete reviewer profile task asking them to complete it.
Reviewers nominated by a paper's authors (every single author paper names one) also show as Committed, with the source Nominated by an author. They are not authors of that paper, their profile was complete when the paper was submitted, and they are never assigned to review the paper that nominated them. Approve or decline them like a committed author. If you decline a nominee and no author of the paper committed, the paper's Submission Details show Reviewer commitment missing.
- 7
Click Approve on a volunteer's row. They are added as an active Reviewer and appear straight away on the Reviewers sub-tab. Their row changes to Accepted, and they are notified. An author of this program keeps their authorship and gets the Reviewer role as well. If the volunteer already holds a committee role here, such as Area Chair, that role is left as it is. The sign-up is still marked accepted, and a message tells you which role they already had. If the person's profile is incomplete, you are asked to confirm first and told what is missing.
- 8
To turn a volunteer or a committed author down, click Decline. Their row stays, marked Declined, so they can't sign up again for this program, and they get a notification. Delete removes the row without telling them.
- 9
Approve and Decline send only a short notice inside AirBalloon, not an email. To write to the person formally, click Send Email on their row: for an Accepted or Declined volunteer or committed author, the message opens with the Reviewer Sign Up: Approved or Reviewer Sign Up: Not Approved template filled in, ready to edit and send. Both templates are also in the Template list of any new message.
- 10
For candidates you added yourself, click Send Invitation. They get an email and are added to the committee once they accept. Use Add Candidate or Import CSV to add more people.
Tips
Volunteers have already asked to review, so Approve adds them immediately, with no invitation to accept. Candidates you found yourself haven't agreed to anything yet, so they get Send Invitation instead.
Before you approve someone, click View Profile on their row, or Send Email to contact them. Approved reviewers are matched to papers by their expertise, so an empty profile will match poorly.