It can look confusing when a Canadian Experience Class (CEC) draw has a low CRS cutoff but still invites thousands of candidates — it doesn't mean every eligible person got invited in a single prior draw. Two things keep replenishing the pool between draws:
- New eligibility, not just new profiles. Many candidates only become eligible for a specific draw once they've just crossed a threshold — for example, finishing their required one year of Canadian work experience — so they enter the pool freshly eligible at that exact time, not because they were previously overlooked.
- A large volume of new profile creation happens between draws. After a well-publicized 'mega draw,' it's common for tens of thousands of new candidates to create Express Entry profiles (in this case, 20,000+ profiles were reported created in the weeks following one such draw), which refills the pool considerably.
Historical note: the specific draw sizes and CRS cutoffs referenced here (e.g., a 75-point CEC cutoff, 5,000 invitations) are from a particular 2021 period and don't reflect current draw patterns — but the underlying mechanism (pool replenished by newly-eligible and newly-created profiles) still explains why draw sizes can look larger than expected relative to a given cutoff.