Cause 1: Not on AIRA Plan
AIRA Search is only available on the AIRA Plan. If your account is on a different plan tier, the bar will not appear. Contact your Account Manager to discuss upgrading.

Cause 2: Feature disabled by Admin
An Admin may have turned off AIRA Search from the Admin Panel. Ask your workspace Admin to re-enable it under Admin Panel → AIRA Search toggle.

Cause 3: Viewing a non-Candidates page
AIRA Search currently only appears on the Candidates page. It is not available on Contacts or Companies pages.

You see: "We couldn't interpret this query. Try rephrasing to get better results."

Fix: Rephrase your query using plain recruitment language. Avoid non-recruitment terms, random strings, or very short queries with no context (e.g. "good" or "asdf"). A fallback link to the standard Advanced Search filters appears below the error message — use it if you need to search immediately.

See How to write a good AIRA Search query for guidance on structuring effective queries.

Scenario 1: Zero quantitative matches
Your filters were too narrow for your database. AIRA automatically falls back to semantic ranking across your full candidate database and returns up to 200 best matches — with a notice: "No exact filter matches found. Showing best AIRA matches across all candidates." If you still see no results, broaden your query.

Scenario 2: All qualitative scores below threshold
You see: "No candidates scored highly enough for your qualitative criteria. Try broadening your search or adjusting the AIRA Intelligence filters."
This means your qualitative criteria are too specific for the AIRA Talent Graphs in your database. Try rewording the qualitative signal to be broader, or remove one qualitative chip to lower the bar.

Scenario 3: No candidates in your database
You see: "No candidates in your database yet. Import candidates to start searching."
AIRA Search requires an existing candidate database. Import candidates first.

AIRA extracts filters from your query based on its best interpretation. If a chip doesn't reflect your intent, click Edit on the chip and correct it. Alternatively, rephrase your original query to be more explicit — see Understanding how AIRA interprets your query for guidance on how different phrases map to filter types.

If more than a couple of chips are wrong, it's usually faster to rephrase the full query than to edit chips individually.

Cause 1: Access permissions
You may not have permission to view that candidate. NLS results respect your account-level candidate access rules. Ask your Admin to check your permissions.

Cause 2: No AIRA Talent Graph (qualitative query)
If your query included qualitative ranking criteria and the candidate has no AIRA Talent Graph (no notes, transcripts, or resume on file), they are excluded from qualitative ranking. They may appear below ranked results with a "Limited profile data" indicator — but only if there are fewer than 100 ranked candidates. Add data to their profile to improve their visibility in future searches.

Cause 3: Qualitative score below 70
Candidates scoring below 70 on qualitative criteria are excluded from results entirely. They may genuinely not match your stated criteria closely enough. Try broadening the qualitative phrase or removing a ranking signal.

Cause 4: Result cap
When quantitative filters return more than 1,000 candidates, only the top 1,000 ranked results are returned. If the candidate falls outside the top 1,000, they won't appear. Narrow your filters to reduce the result set size.

AIRA Search targets a P95 response time under 15 seconds. A progress indicator in the side sheet shows what AIRA is doing in real time. If results haven't loaded after 20–25 seconds:

If AIRA ranking is temporarily limited due to a service issue, you'll see: "AIRA ranking is temporarily limited. Showing filter-based results." — quantitative filter results will still appear.

This means those candidates don't have enough data in their AIRA Talent Graph to generate evidence. Common causes:

To improve result quality over time, ensure Notetaker is active on calls, resumes are uploaded, and notes are being added to candidate profiles. The richer the candidate data, the better AIRA can rank and explain results.