Accreditation keeps a pool of team candidates, which are people a school has put forward as possible visiting team members. This article explains how Rhythm keeps copied candidate details current, when it automatically marks a candidate inactive, and how short delays can protect you from mistaken changes.
Candidate Details Copy from the Person's Record
A team candidacy stores its own copy of the candidate’s name, email address, and job title. Rhythm does not look up those details every time you view the candidacy; it refreshes the copied information from the person’s contact record when the candidacy is saved.
Because that refresh happens only when the candidacy is saved, the contact record and candidacy can briefly show different values. If you update a candidate’s job title on their contact record, the candidacy keeps the older title until someone saves the candidacy again, either directly or through a separate automatic update. If the name, email, or job title on the Candidates list looks out of date compared with the contact record, this delay is usually why. On a school's accreditation record, the candidate summary shows each person's job title and phone number with their name, rather than location details like city and state.
Tip
If a candidate’s details look stale, open and resave the candidacy, or wait for one of the automatic updates below to run. Either action updates the copied details to match the current contact record.
A Candidate Can Become Inactive Automatically
Your program settings can turn on two separate options that move a candidacy to Inactive instead of deleting it:
- When the person leaves their school. If a candidate’s organization changes to a different one, Rhythm deactivates every candidacy that person has in programs where this option is turned on. This includes a candidacy for a school other than the one they just left.
- When the school's own membership lapses. If a school’s own membership becomes inactive, Rhythm deactivates every team candidacy that belongs to that school in programs where this option is turned on.
Both options preserve the history of who has served as a candidate instead of losing that record when someone moves on or a school’s standing changes. An inactive candidacy stays on the school’s Candidates list and remains available in candidate-related queries, marked inactive rather than removed.
When the contact-leaving option deactivates a candidacy, the candidacy keeps its link to the school it belonged to, and only the status changes to Inactive. That is different from removing a candidate outright with the trash icon on a school’s Candidates tab, or with the equivalent console action, which also clears the school link. Because the link stays in place, an automatically deactivated candidate still counts as belonging to that school and keeps appearing on the school’s Portal candidate list; a fully removed candidate does not.
If a former contact is removed from a school’s candidate record instead of left inactive, the school loses visibility into ever having had that candidate. Removed candidacies do not keep a separate history the way inactive candidacies do. Marking a candidate inactive, instead of removing them, is what preserves that record. Either way, this history covers only the school tied to the candidacy; Accreditation does not keep a consolidated history of every school where a person has been a candidate over time.
Joining a school, or making a lapsed membership active again, does not automatically reactivate a candidacy that was deactivated this way. If you want to reactivate the candidate, you do that directly on the candidacy.
Warning
These two options work independently, even though the result can look similar. The contact-leaving option affects every place a specific person is a candidate, while the membership-lapse option affects every candidate that belongs to the school whose membership lapsed. If several candidates change status together, check which program option matches what happened before assuming the wrong one ran.
Team candidacy status is separate from the accreditation status on a person’s own contact record. If you want to show that a person is no longer active in accreditation generally, without necessarily changing or deleting a team candidacy, set that status directly on their contact record.
A Short Window to Undo a Mistake
Both automatic deactivations wait about a minute after the triggering change, whether that change is the person’s organization update or the school’s membership becoming inactive. Rhythm checks again before deactivating anything, so if you correct a mistaken organization change or membership status within that window, the deactivation never happens.
After that short window passes and the deactivation runs, correcting the original mistake does not undo the deactivation. A candidacy deactivated this way stays inactive until someone reactivates it directly. Even after the automation has run, the record can take up to about two more minutes to show the updated status. If you check right away and still see the old status, that delay is often why.
What Happens When the Underlying Record Is Deleted
Deleting the contact or school behind a candidacy is expected to remove that person’s or school’s candidacies along with it. This is separate from automatic deactivation and works differently: deactivation keeps the candidacy as an inactive record, while deleting the underlying contact or school is expected to remove the candidacy itself.
Merging two contact records is different again. A merge has been seen to remove accreditation-related history from the surviving record, including a team candidacy or a visiting-team assignment that belonged to it. After merging contacts, check the surviving contact’s candidacy and any team assignments, and re-add them yourself if they are missing.
Removing a team candidate and then trying to add that same person again, either to the same school or a different one, has sometimes been refused with a message that the person already has an accreditation record. This happens when an identifier from the earlier candidacy stayed on their contact record. If you run into that message, contact Support.
Team candidacy records are not supported by the general Mass Update or Mass Delete tools. If you use either tool on Accreditation candidate search results, Rhythm returns a message that the operation is not available. Open the candidates in a query and make the change from the query results instead.
Related
You find, review, add, and reactivate candidates from their own screens elsewhere in Accreditation. For what deleting or merging a CRM record does more generally to related history, see How Deleting or Merging Records Affects Activities and Relationships.