Video Transcript

We’re back with another Two Minute Tuesday, Main Sequence’s series of short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to help make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

PCR’s flexibility and configurability means being able to accomplish many tasks in multiple ways, and sometimes it can be helpful to see how someone else gets a job done. Today we’re going to walk through one workflow for submitting a potential hire to a manager which you may want to try out for yourself.

Let’s say we’ve just added a new candidate to the database, and we know she’d be perfect for one of our existing openings. We want to put her into the job’s pipeline and email her info to the hiring contact.

We’ll start by typing part of the job title into the Quick Find box. Now that we’ve found our job, we can use the “Add Interview” icon here to begin logging the submittal. Remember that in PCRecruiter, an “Interview Record” is generated for every step in the process of connecting a person with a job, not just the actual person-to-person interviews. A resume submittal or an online inquiry by the candidate is often the first Interview Record in the process.

We’ll search for the candidate by name or any other field, and select them from the list. Now we get the ‘Add Interview’ screen. The “Interview Type/Status” box is already set to my Resume Submittal status because I’ve previously used the configure icon here to make that my default option. We can fill in any other details, and click “Save.” Now, we have an interview record in the pipeline for the job so that the submittal date and time are available for tracking and reporting.

Next, we can click the “Email” option at the bottom of the window to send this candidate’s details to the hiring contact. When the window pops up, our default Pipeline Email template appears. In this database, the pipeline email has been written as a personal letter to the manager. You’ll see all the relevant details have been automatically merged into the letter, which we can then hand-edit however we please before sending it.

Pipeline Emails are a special class of form letter that can be configured from the System area. When we’re creating one, the ‘Insert Fields’ option allows us to merge in practically any details from the name, the company, the job, and the interview record. The letter can be as simple or complex as you wish. The template labeled as “Default” will always come up first, but we can use the ‘Template’ button in the email screen to switch to any other template for other uses, such as emailing the details on an interview to an internal administrator, or emailing them to the candidate.

Using the sidebar, we can see that the candidate’s resume is going to be sent along with the email by default. We can add additional attachments, and even include a meeting request, before sending the email to the manager, the candidate, or even a list of contacts.

For more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, join the LinkedIn PCRecruiter user group, and watch our blog posts on your PCR login screen. If you have any ideas for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.

Video Transcript

We’re back with another Two Minute Tuesday, Main Sequence’s series of short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to help make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

The MyPCR screen is a great place to see quick stats and access hot lists and links when you first log into PCRecruiter. In this episode, we’re going to look at using custom search links on your MyPCR screen. You can use any Name, Company, or Job search query that you build in the Advanced Search screen, or an SQL query entered by hand.

For this example, we’ll choose a simple search. Let’s say our colleague, Raymond, is entering lots of name records into the database. Some of them may be missing the email address, and he’s going to go back and fill them in later. We want to keep tabs on the project and let him know if he’s forgotten to complete them.

To start we’ll go to the Advanced Name Search and create a query. For the first search term, we want Predefined Fields > Email Address > Is Empty. We click ‘Add’ to lock in the term. We can also catch improperly formatted addresses by choosing Predefined Fields > Email Address > Not Like > %@%.%. The percentage sign is a search wildcard, so this will find any emails that aren’t in the usual “something at something dot something” format. We’ll click ‘Add’ again, and we’ll set this the dropdown to “OR” so we find records matching either term. Lastly, we’ll limit this to Raymond’s records by choosing Predefined Fields > User Name > Equal, and selecting his username from the popup. We’ll set this second dropdown to “End Group / And” so that the first “OR” search is grouped together, and the username search is treated as a requirement in addition to that result.

If we expand the ‘Query’ section, we can see the structured query language that we’ve just built. We’re going to highlight and copy it. Now we’ll load the My PCR screen and open the Configure option from the Action menu. We want to configure the ‘Search Links’ item from the sidebar.

To start, we’re going to give this search a descriptive title. Now we paste the query into the Search box. Next, we tell the system whether this is a Name, Company, or Position search.

Let’s stop at this point and save the configuration. We can see our new search in the Custom Stats area with a number indicating how many matching results exist. Clicking on the item will run the search so we can view the names that need to be completed.

Let’s go back into the config screen and add a notification. It’s ok if Raymond’s got a handful of incomplete records at a time, but if there are 10 or more, then we want a notification so that we can give him a reminder. That’s where the Notification Trigger comes in. We’ll set it to “Greater Than 9” and add a Popup Message. Now, if the number of results for this query gets to ten, we’ll get an alert popup whenever we load the MyPCR screen.

For more complex searches check out the list of custom queries in the PCR 9 Learning Center, or contact Main Sequence support to ask about custom queries for your particular needs.
And for more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, join the LinkedIn PCRecruiter user group, and watch our blog posts on your PCR login screen. If you have any suggestions for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.

Video Transcript

We’re back with another Two Minute Tuesday, Main Sequence’s series of short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to help make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

If you’re one of the many who access your database via the PCRecruiter Portal for Microsoft Outlook™, this week’s Two Minute Tuesday is for you. We’re going to show you a customized menu tweak that will save you some clicks.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Portal, it’s our innovative add-on for Microsoft Outlook that allows you to interact with your PCRecruiter data from inside the Outlook application. For those of you who absolutely “live” in Outlook, the Portal can save a lot of switching between windows. Plus, it synchronizes calendars and contacts and gives you quick access to importing resumes from your inbox, and it can reduce the learning curve for new users by embedding PCR into a familiar environment.

When Portal is installed, it creates a new tab in Outlook that contains all of the major PCR menu items. However, this normally means switching back to the built-in “Home” tab for common Outlook email and schedule functions. You don’t have to let that slow you down! There’s actually a way to merge your key Outlook functions into the PCRecruiter Portal tab.

First, we’re going to right-click in the empty space on the PCRecruiter tab and select “Customize the Ribbon”. The “Ribbon” is Microsoft’s name for the toolbar strips in their products. On the left you’ll see the available commands and on the right are the main tabs in the Outlook ribbon.

We’ll start by creating a New Group under the PCRecruiter tab. We can call it “Outlook Features” or anything else you please. You’ll likely want to put this group at either the start or end of the section rather than in the middle. Now we’ll drag our commonly used items from the left column into the right. For example, we might want to pull over ‘New Email” or ‘Send/Receive All Folders.”

Outlook shows you a list of “Popular Commands” to start with, but you can change the dropdown to see “All Commands” instead to bring over things like Reply, Reply All, Forward, and so on. You’ll see some items multiple times – for example, there are two seemingly identical “Delete” options. If you hover your mouse over one of them, you’ll see what it does. In this case, one “Delete” is for calendar items, and one “Delete” is the email one from the Home tab. That’s the one we want. You can also move any of Outlook’s pre-grouped options – for example, from the “Main Tabs” selections, I can choose Calendar > New, which brings sub-items along with it.

When we click “OK”, we can now see the new options reflected here in the PCRecruiter tab. Now the PCR Portal saves time switching between the email and the browser, and our freshly customized ribbon saves switching between the tabs in Outlook!

For more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, or watch your PCR login screen. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.

Video Transcript

Welcome to another Two Minute Tuesday, Main Sequence’s series of short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to help make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

We’re going to revisit the topic of screen customization this week, and check out how you can adjust your main search form and search results. Every user in the database can have their own personalized customizations, or the system admin can copy one user’s settings to others for consistency.

The simple name, company, and position search forms all include three fields that can be combined, plus a keyword search box. By default, all three dropdowns contain all of the possible fields for the record type you’re working with. You can quickly get to any field you want by typing the field name into the dropdown, but you can speed up your process by cutting out any fields you would never expect to search.

To do this, we go into the Customize screen in the action menu. In the ‘Searching’ section, we’ll see a column containing all of the available fields on the left, and a column for our selected fields on the right. Since we’ve never configured this screen before, the right side is empty. We can drag the fields from one column to another, or use the plus and minus icons, and drag them up and down into any order we want. After we click save, the three dropdowns will contain only those fields that we placed in the right column. Our pared-down set of fields applies to the dropdowns on the Advanced Search as well.

If you want to set a default group of search options, just select the fields you want, check the “Save as Default” box, and then click “Search” to save your choices. You can also use this method to pre-fill any of the three values. For example, if I usually want to search only my Available jobs, I can set “Status (Dropdown)” as a search field and set it to “Available/Open”. Now I’ve saved not only the field, but the search term as part of my default.

The same Customize popup allows you to control which columns you’ll see in your search results. Clicking the ‘Results Page’ sidebar item brings up this list, in which we can change the order of the fields, click on them to delete them from our results screens, or click the menu icon at the right to set a default width for the column.

At the right are the default options for a primary and secondary sort order for the results. Most of the time you’ll just sort by one field – such as descending order by Last Activity, or alphabetically ascending by Last Name, but you may want to have a secondary sort if you wanted to group results by state, and then by zip codes within each state.

We can also change the default number of rows per page, and hide any items in the ‘Action’ pulldown on our results that we don’t want to see. Keep in mind that adding more columns and more rows can cause your search results to load more slowly. But you can always come back into this screen and make adjustments at any time!

For more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel and watch our social networks or your PCR login screen. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.

Video Transcript

Welcome to this week’s Two Minute Tuesday, Main Sequence’s series of short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

We’ve been together in this video series for a few months now, and we think it’s time to discuss the relationship. Specifically, the relationship between the major record types in PCRecruiter. While most users will never need to or want to know how the SQL database under the hood of PCR is laid out, a mental picture of how records are related can be helpful – particularly if you’re building an advanced search query, custom report, or planning a development project using the PCRecruiter API.

PCRecruiter uses a relational database with multiple tables to contain different kinds of information. For example, there is a table for companies, a table for names, and a table for jobs. Each table has columns of data for the specific attributes of that record type, such as a city, title, middle name, and so on.

Every record in the main tables has a unique global identifier so that the system can track which records are related to each other and how. Setting things up this way allows the same piece of information to be used in relation to multiple records, or to be easily re-associated with a different record at any time.

PCRecruiter is somewhat unique among recruiting systems because it uses the Company record as the central record type, although a company record can really represent any group of related names or jobs, not just an actual physical company. While it may appear that the names and jobs are ‘part of the company,’ the Company record itself just contains the info about the company. The people and jobs associated with that company are in the Name and Position tables. So, when you view the names belonging to a company, PCR is actually querying the Name table of the database for any records that match the global identifier of the selected company.

The critical advantage here is that a name can be moved from one company to another simply by changing the company identifier, allowing a candidate to become a client, or a vendor to become an employee, without duplicating or recreating their contact record. All of that person’s activity logs and attachments (which, incidentally are kept in their own separate tables), stay linked to that name no matter what jobs or company the name is associated with. Over time, PCR’s company-centric database structure lets you build up a much clearer picture of where your contacts have been and how they relate to one another.

The connection between jobs and candidates is managed in the same way. When you view an applicant Pipeline, you’re looking at records from the Interviews table. Interview records (which in PCRecruiter terms represent any step in the recruiting process – not just phone and face-to-face interviews) include things like the date, time, and status of that step in the process, but they don’t include the information about the job or the candidate. Instead, they include the global identifiers indicating which job and which names those pipeline records are pertinent to. This setup lets you have multiple candidates tied to multiple jobs, regardless of what company the job or candidate are associated with.

In fact, most of the time your candidates will belong to the ‘default company’, which is a special company record that PCR uses to group all the names that don’t belong to any more specific company. A talent pool. When you place someone, PCR changes their company identifier to the one from the job they were just placed in, effectively making them a name under that company, but without losing or changing any of the history they came with.

Fortunately, as you interact with your database, whether that’s through PCR itself or a third-party tool using the API, the software builds all the structured queries necessary to navigate the database and return the info you want, whether or not you fully understand how it’s all connected. If you do need more specifics on the tables in a PCRecruiter database, contact our support team at support@mainsequence.net.

And for more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel and watch our social networks or your PCR login screen. If you have any suggestions for future episodes, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.