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We have a large update this time,
with many new features and dozens of behind the scenes changes that
make this the best PCRecruiter ever. Main Sequence Technologies
has developed the PCRecruiter Resume Inhaler to fully automate resume
processing. This software is working for hundreds of users already,
monitoring email and folders for new resumes to process. The Resume
Inhaler even recognizes resume sources (such as Monster, Hot Jobs,
etc.) and logs the source in a auto-created custom field called
"Source".
The PCRecruiter ASP service is also proving to be very popular with
users who need to move to SQL and want to skip the upgrade charges
and server setup, with “virtual firms” who are working
in multiple locations, and for other owners who just enjoy having
Main Sequence handle the technical aspects of PCRecruiter use. Please
note that you can use the web based PCRecruiter on your own IIS
web server, which is included with Windows 2000 Server.
Now for news about the latest Windows release of PCRecruiter!
Here are the details on the software update for PCRecruiter Windows
version 3.90.775 and above:
NEW FEATURES
RESUME ROUTING
You'll find a button on the Position screen to access the new Resume
Routing feature.
The Routing and Template function allows you to present HTML emails
to clients and candidates for resume submissions and at each interview
step. Once saved, each time you send one, PCRecruiter will fill
in all the info and present it in a web-page type wrapper. This
can be really useful to project a classy image and keep everyone
in the loop.
From the interview records for that a position, a list of candidate's
resumes is initially provided to choose from on the route form.
You can then add any other candidate resumes to the list if you
wish. You can select multiple recipients simultaneously from the
selector form (a Hiring Authority Contact rollup list may be used
here if you do a lot of work with a group of people at a company).
Activities will be created for the position, for each recipient
emailed, and for each candidate whose resume is used.
Once the route is built, you can select any TEMPLATE you wish, which
will become the body of the email.
TEMPLATES
You can make a template for each type of interview, submission,
client, etc. Once setup, you can send resumes or interviews in a
template wrapper with one click. When sending a Resume Routing or
Interview Template, there is also a Comment text area for you type
in comments to be pasted directly into the email. This is translated
to the [[SYSTEM.COMMENTS]] merge field on the template when you
are designing it. Also, the template editor allows you to toggle
editing the HTML source code directly if desired, which allows more
flexibility for advanced users to get the exact look desired.
CC: AND BCC: EMAILING
When emailing resumes or interview templates, the email setup form
now includes CC: and BCC: fields. These recipients can be filled
by browsing Names in the database, or you can type in their email
addresses manually. Note that if you manually enter email recipients,
they will receive activity records only if a matching record is
found in the database.
OUTLOOK SYNCHRONIZATION
You can now synchronize your Outlook Schedule with the PCRecruiter
scheduler. This can be found from the Scheduler form, under the
menu FILE->SYNCHRONIZE WITH OUTLOOK. This feature allows schedule
items in PCRecruiter and Outlook to pass back and forth and stay
in sync.
Here are the options available to you on the Synchronization Form:
- User Name
Select which PCRecruiter user will be synchronized with Outlook
(generally, you should just leave this as your own user logon).
- Cutoff Date
This is the Cutoff Date before which Outlook and PCRecruiter entries
will not be checked. If you have thousands of Outlook items from
past years, you don't want all these entries crossing over into
PCRecruiter.
- Allow New PCRecruiter Schedule Items To Appear In Outlook
This allows PCRecruiter to control the creation of scheduled items
over to Outlook
- Allow New PCRecruiter Schedule Deletions to Cascade to Outlook
This allows PCRecruiter to control the deletion of scheduled items
in Outlook that are synchronized between each other.
- Allow New Outlook Schedule Items To Appear In PCRecruiter
This allows Outlook to control the creation of scheduled items over
to PCRecruiter
- Allow New Outlook Schedule Deletions to Cascade to PCRecruiter
This allows Outlook to control the deletion of scheduled items in
PCRecruiter that are synchronized between each other
- Auto Synchronization During Logon If At This Computer
This allows PCRecruiter to automatically sync to your Outlook if
you log into PCRecruiter from the computer specified. The reason
you specify a particular computer is because you may not want to
sync your schedule with someone else’s Outlook if you happen
to be sitting at someone else’s computer.
By default, only PCRecruiter is allowed to add/delete items from
Outlook. If you want full synchronization, you will have to turn
on the other two items, and then Outlook additions and deletions
will be replicated in PCRecruiter. This may turn out to be very
useful for those using Palm Pilots, which can synchronize with Outlook,
and thereby synchronize with PCRecruiter.
TITLE SOURCING
Under Rollup Lists, viewing the Company List portion, there is now
an option to set up an “Organizational Chart” for Sourcing.
You can select a group of titles, in order of importance, and store
those parameters to a particular company rollup list. You can then
view or print out a title sourcing report for companies. This report
pulls all the companies on a rollup list and matches up the names
connected with those companies with the titles you have defined.
The resulting grid will show which name records have a match to
those titles, and which titles you need still need to come up with
to complete a company.
CONTRACTOR SUBSYSTEM
The temp/contractor subsystem in PCRecruiter has been refined substantially.
One change is that you can now forecast candidates to be placed
into temp/contract positions. There are differences between a contract
and a perm placement, and you can select either when making a placement.
Permanent placements have Starting Date/Arranged Date/Placement
Fee/Starting Salary. Contractor/Temp placements have Starting Date/Ending
Date/Bill Rate/Pay Rate.
A couple of things to note on contract placements. The day a candidate
begins a new contract/temp position, their name status will change
to ‘A’ which refers to on assignment. The day after the
candidate finishes the position, their status will change to ‘T’
which is an available contractor/temp. Contracting/temporary candidates
will NOT change companies when placed as they do on normal,
permanent placements. This allows contracting for multiple companies
in the same timeframe. To find out which companies and timeframes
that a contract candidate has set up, go to the name record and hover
the mouse over the “colored company flag” at the top of
the record. A dropdown will appear showing details of all contract
placements for that person.
Finally, the placement reporting subsystem has been enhanced to
show and report information on both temporary and contract/temp
placements. The layout is also set up in a more friendly fashion
now separating report criteria from the report filters.
INTERVIEW/PLACEMENT SEARCH
From the Positions->Interviews tab, there is a new button marked
"FIND". This button works much in the same way as the
Company/Candidate/Position Query Builder forms, and is used to search
and pull up Interviews.
RAPID ENTRY
When doing rapid entry, the auto insertion of the company's address/phone
number has been split so that you may select one or the other from
the menu. You can now also copy the company phone number over to
new candidates without also copying the whole company address.
KEYWORD INSERT
When on the "Search Companies" or "Search Names"
form, pressing the "Keywords" button would bring up a
form to insert a keyword. This form has always had a dropdown to
select which type of keywords you wish to pull from (i.e. SIC, Education,
etc...), but it never had a place to type in the first few characters
to locate a specific keyword. A text entry box has been added to
this form next to the dropdown so you can enter the first few characters
to find a particular keyword in the list.
KEYWORD SORT
When under a Name Record’s keywords, the columns in the SIC,
Skill, User Defined, and Educational tables can now be resorted
ascending/descending by clicking on the column headers. These columns
are now resizable as well.
AUTO COPY COMPANY KEYWORDS TO NEW NAME
RECORDS
If you have the user preference selected to copy industry/keywords
from company automatically, it will now also copy company keywords
and index them.
TAPI OPTIONS
Under SYSTEM->OPTIONS, the TAPI preferences now include a checkbox
labeled "Use Windows Dialing Preferences (Canonical Format)".
This was added because the Windows 2000 dialer will not use Windows
Dialing Preferences unless the phone number is delivered in Canonical
Format.
NAME SELECTOR
When selecting a name, you could always type in part of the last
and first name as a search. Now, you can also select a rollup list
and display all of the names on that list as well.
ADDING NEW NAME RECORDS
PCRecruiter has always brought up an 'add name' dialog box when
you press the ADD button on the NAME tab. However, this creates
an extra step each time you add a new name. By popular demand, this
box now only appears if the current company does not yet have any
names associated with it. The functions that the ADD name dialog
box used to present have been moved to a popup menu directly on
the ADD button. Finally, the "Auto Add New Names" checkmark
will be remembered, even after closing PCRecruiter.
MERGE DUPLICATE ENHANCEMENT
The Merge Duplicate now has a First Name, Last Name, Company Name
filter for locating Name Duplicates.
NO KEYWORDS NEEDED FOR MULTI-DATABASE SEARCH
You can now perform filter tab and advanced tab searches without
being required to also type in keywords. This adds flexibility into
the searches, especially for multi-database searching. Essentially,
you can now do field searching across multiple databases.
COMPANY ADDR
When using the Company ADDR, it normally copies the information
extracted to the main form's Company information. However, this
has caused confusion because you can potentially overwrite the current
company information unless you hit ADD before using the ADDR button.
Now, when you hit ADDR, PCRecruiter will automatically add a new
company record first.
LABELS AND BUTTONS
PCRecruiter has always used miniature buttons as "labels”.
However, this may have caused some confusion because some of those
"labels" could also be used for searching or other functions.
True labels that don't have any functionality beneath them now look
like labels, while buttons continue to look like buttons so you
can easily tell the difference.
CUSTOM FIELDS IN FORM LETTERS AND TEMPLATES
You can now insert custom (detail) fields into form letters and
templates. This includes the Company, Candidate, and Position fields.
This can allow a great range of personalization options for your
correspondence.
ACTIVITY WEIGHT REPORT ENHANCEMENT
The activity weight report now splits out each individual User's
Activities, and then the summary of all the Users combined. You
can also choose to export Pie, Column, and Line Charts in Excel.
This should be very useful to track recruiters and value different
activities and sum them as you desire.
ATTRIBUTES TO NOTES
We have changed the word "Attributes" to "Notes"
because most people we asked prefer it. That means when you do keyword
searches, you will also see "N" instead of "A"
if the hit was in Notes/Keywords.
ACTIVITY DATE SECURITY
There is now an added security setting to allow PCRecruiter users
to be allowed to directly modify activity dates. Previously only
an Administrator could directly change these dates, but now a trusted
user can be delegated as well.
SUBJECTIVE RATING
The Windows version of PCRecruiter will now reflect the subjective
rating if it is modified in the Web version of PCRecruiter.
COMPANY FAX NUMBERS IN ADDR
Company fax numbers will now import in the ADDR. Previously, fax
numbers were not being imported properly.
MSWORD DETECTION SPEED
MSWord will now be detected almost instantly when PCRecruiter first
loads. We had some complaints of the additional load time for Word
in the past.
DETAIL FIELD ORDER
The detail fields will now change their position order to match
the corresponding detail template. That means detail fields can
be inserted in between other detail fields, or reordered, by use
of the numerical order field in the detail templates located in
the SYSTEM tab. This is useful when adding fields later if you use
many detail fields.
MSWORD RESUME HIGHLIGHTING
When searching keywords, and jumping directly to a resume that is
supposed to contain those keywords, if you were viewing the resume
in MSWord, there were some scenarios where the keywords would not
highlight because the highlight color was set to transparent. Now
PCRecruiter sets the highlight color to RED before jumping to the
resume in MSWord.
EMAIL HISTORY
When changing a candidate's email address, it now asks if you want
to keep the old email address in the candidate's history. This is
primarily used for the email manager, as it identifies emails belonging
to a candidate by the actual email address. This is used if your
candidates change their email address and you want to still keep
track of their emails from their old address.
NEW SHORTCUT KEYS
The shortcut keys for the main screen of PCRecruiter have been enhanced
greatly. PageUp / PageDown still moves you by a single record at
a time. CTRL+ PageUp / PageDown now moves by 20 records at a time
(same as the double-arrow button). CTRL + Home / End will now move
you to the first or last record. This change was added by popular
demand so that the Home and End keys could be used for editing text
fields. Also, the F9 - F12 keys will now switch between SEARCH,
COMPANY, NAMES, and SYSTEM tabs respectively.
AUTOLOADING COMPANY WHEN PULLING UP A NAME
In the past, when searching or pulling up candidates on the Name
tab, the first record’s associated company would automatically
load on the Company tab in the background. If you then scrolled
through the rest of the name records, the Name and Company tabs
may have become “disconnected”. You would then click
on any name’s “company flag” at the top of the
record to load that company record on the Company tab. However,
it may be sometimes be desirable to keep this “disconnection”
between the Company and Name tabs. There have been requests to allow
searching or pulling up records on the Name tab while leaving the
currently loaded company alone.
To answer this, there is now a preference checkmark under "SYSTEM
-> Recruiters/Users -> User Preferences" marked "Do
Not Automatically Pull up Associated Company when Pulling up a Candidate".
With this preference checked, you can pull up a candidate without
automatically changing the company tab. As always, you can still
click on the name’s “company flag” to get that
company record loaded onto the Company tab.
RESUME EXPORT UTILITY
PCRecruiter databases store their resumes compressed to save space,
and we have been requested to make a utility to automatically export
resumes out of PCRecruiter in a useful stand-alone form. To accommodate
this, PCRecruiter now has an EXPORT RESUMES button from the SYSTEM->IMPORT/EXPORT
form that will save your candidate resumes into a directory as uncompressed
files.
GLOBAL KEYWORD CHANGES
The tab labeled "Change Name Keywords" under Global Changes
has now been renamed to just "Change Keywords". You can
now select whether you want to modify keywords for Companies or
Names. Previously, you could only run this on Names.
AREA CODE UPDATE FILE
A new area code update file has been included with this release
including changes as of June, 2002. Please see www.pcrecruiter.com/areacode.htm
for more information on updating your area codes.
IMPORTANT NOTE TO MSACCESS DATABASE USERS
MSACCESS DATABASE DESIGN UPDATES
There have been a couple of structural updates with this new release
of PCRecruiter. MS SQL Server databases will automatically update
to reflect these alterations. MSAccess databases will have to be manually
updated by pressing UPDATE DATABASE in the SYSTEM area. MAKE
SURE YOU BACKUP YOUR ACCESS DATABASE BEFORE RUNNING THIS STRUCTURAL
UPDATE. The database updates are to allow the new the two-
way Outlook synchronization. If you don’t intend to synch with
Outlook, you can skip this database update procedure.
BACKING UP YOUR ACCESS DATABASE
The "Backup Database" menu item from the main form has been
renamed to "Copy Current Database" because this function
was not meant to replace a standard backup program. YOU
SHOULD KEEP MULTIPLE COPIES OF YOUR DATABASE(S) IN MULTIPLE LOCATIONS
AT ALL TIMES. Keep in mind that you can cut and paste your
Access database just like any other file, so putting it on another
hard drive on your network is a simple way to “backup your backup”.
During the copy, nobody else can save to the database. If they attempt
to, they will receive a "record locked by another user"
error.
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