Video Transcript

Here comes 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.

In computer terms, a parser is a program that takes some input and breaks it down into its parts for further analysis based on a set of rules. If you’ve used PCRecruiter to import a resume, you know how much time its built-in parser can save you in completing the contact fields on the name record. In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday, we’re going to look at three more things PCR’s parsing engine can do that you may not be aware of.

First up, Queueing Resumes for Parsing. If you have multiple resumes to import at once, you can save several clicks with the Add Resume Utility’s queueing feature. We’ll click the ‘quick add’ icon in the upper right and select ‘Parse From Resume’. Clicking ‘Start’ launches the familiar ‘Add Resume Utility.’ Now, rather than clicking the ‘Open’ icon to browse the computer’s drive for a resume, we’ll open up a folder on the machine that has multiple resume documents in it. Now, we highlight the ones we want – either with the mouse, or by clicking the first one and then shift-clicking on the last – and drag them to the lower area of the utility. Now we can see that there are 14 resumes in the queue. Then we can verify and complete the info on the first one, and click ‘Next’ to move right on to the next resume. When you have more than one document to import, this is much quicker than starting the process over for every file.

Now, let’s talk about the Clipboard icon. You’ll find this handy data parsing utility next to the Company Name field on Company records, and the Last Name field in Name records. This feature works in two scenarios. If we’re looking at a record that’s already saved in the system, clicking on the clipboard gives you a plain-text version of the major contact fields. This can be useful when you want to copy and paste someone’s info into an email or a document.

The feature also works when adding clients or other contacts without resumes to the database. For example, here’s the signature in an email I just received. I can copy it, go to the ‘quick add’, and choose ‘Manual Entry’. Here, clicking the clipboard icon launches a parsing popup. We just paste, and parse. Now the contact details are ready to save. The same trick works when adding a new Company record.

Lastly, let’s look at the Parsed History feature. This area is found at the bottom of the ‘History’ screen from the navigation menu on Name records, but really, you can think of it an alternate way to view the contents of a resume. When we click ‘Parsed History,’ PCRecruiter pulls the contents of the current resume on file for this person, and presents the education and work history in a convenient table. You’ll the time range for each item, and the parser’s breakdown of titles, locations, and skills deduced from the resume’s contents. Of course, the accuracy of this analysis will vary, depending on the formatting and wording of the resume, but it can be helpful for getting your bearings when you need to quickly skim a candidate’s experience.

That’s it for this edition of Two Minute Tuesday. For more, 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

Here comes 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 Pipeline is your hub for tracking the recruitment process, and so you’ll want the interview statuses in it to reflect your organization’s own unique workflow. Today we’re going to look at how to set up your database’s pipeline to mirror your process, which is key for effectively monitoring and reporting, plus setting up time-saving features like automated notification emails to candidates and hiring managers.

When you first get into PCR, a default set of Types and Statuses are already in place. ‘Types’ are the main categories and ‘Statuses’ are the subcategories within each Type. For example, we have a Type called ‘In-Person,’ with Statuses for first interview and second interview beneath it, and we have an ‘Out-of-Process’ Type, with Statuses to indicate why the candidate was not suitable for this particular opening.

If you’re a PCRecruiter admin user, you can adjust the database’s pipeline configuration by clicking System and searching for “Interview Status Codes”. When we go into this area, we’ll see a list of the Statuses to start with. We can edit or delete them with the Action dropdowns, or use the ‘plus’ icon in the Action menu to create new ones.

Each Status has a code, which is an abbreviated label for this stage in the process (10-character maximum), a longer description, and an indication of which major Type it belongs under. For example, if we wanted to add a Status for a second telephone interview, we’d click the ‘Add’ icon, create a code, give it a description, and use the pulldown to associate it with the Telephone Type. The Priority dropdown allows you to define the listing order of the Statuses within a given Type – they’ll be alphabetical if you leave it at zero. If your organization is required to do EEOC reporting, special codes can be created for that too.

You may also want to change the major Types. While new Types cannot be added or deleted, the system’s built-in ones can be relabeled or hidden. We’ll do that with this icon in the Action menu. In this screen, we can give the Types new abbreviated codes and long descriptions to suit our needs. We can also use these checkboxes to hide any Types that we don’t need. In this database, many of the Types have already been hidden away, and the first ‘user defined’ Type has been configured to act as an ‘Offer’ stage.

Relabeling the Types and creating custom Statuses gives us lots of flexibility. We could, for example, hide the ‘Telephone’ Type, re-label ‘In-Person’ to simply call it ‘Interviewed’, and then create Statuses under it to track in-person, phone, and video interviews. Just be aware that these settings will apply to all of the users and jobs in this database, so you’ll want to define your Types and Statuses broadly enough to suit all of the sourcing and placement steps you’d need to track.

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

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

Recruiting, staffing, and sourcing simply wouldn’t be a thing if everyone stayed in one job forever. But what happens when someone leaves your company? Today we’re going to look at what an admin user can do with the records when a PCRecruiter user leaves the organization.

When someone exits the scene, you may simply want to delete their account. User changes are made under System > Manage Users. We’ll select the user who’s gone, and then click the Delete icon in the action panel. This won’t remove or change any of the records that belonged to them – it will just remove their login account.

If the user is on temporary leave or may come back later, we can open the ‘Security’ panel. At the bottom, under Security Policy, you’ll find the ‘Account is disabled’ option. Checking this box and saving the record prevents the user from logging in without actually deleting their account.

Now, let’s say we’ve hired someone to take over the desk and we want to change all of the existing records for that account over to the new person. We can do this by clicking the icon to the right of the User Name field, and changing the username. We can also get to this panel by searching for Change User Name under System.

We want to enter the new username here – ten characters maximum. When we apply the change, PCR scours the database for all historical data created by this user and changes the username field on it to the new one. This feature is also handy when a user has a new last name and wants to change their username to match. One item to note – if the person was using PCR’s internal email client, those email records are stored in a separate database and will not be altered when you change the username. You’ll want to contact support@mainsequence.net for details on linking old emails to a new username.

What if we want to assign only the outgoing user’s jobs to another current user, or if we want to change only certain name, company, and job records? Well, an admin can change the username field on each record manually, but we can alter multiple records at once with the global change features under System.

We’ll search for “Change”, and then select “Change Positions.” The Predefined Field we want to alter is “User Name”. We can use the selector here to limit the changes to a specific Rollup list of jobs, or we can fill the ‘Original Value’ box with the old username so that the system simply finds and changes all positions marked with that username. The same principles apply to changing name or company records. When you use these global change features, the username field on the record is changed to the new username, while all of the activity history, interviews, and so on associated with it remain tagged with the original username.

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 topics or 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.

This week, we’re going to look at the rudiments of keyword searching. You’ll find keyword search boxes on the Basic and Advanced Name, Company, and Position search screens, among others. PCR’s keyword search includes the content of the Resume, Notes, Summary, Profile forms, and Keywords areas of your records, but it does not include data in discretely labeled fields, like ‘Job Title’ or ‘Last Name’. Our Lucene search engine, which offers searching of text file attachments as well as many more complex search queries and support for significantly larger databases is also available – contact your Main Sequence rep for details.

At the simplest level, we just enter a few terms separated by spaces into the keyword search box. Here, on the Advanced Name Search screen, we’ll enter marketing development sales. PCRecruiter will return records with any of these words in any of the keyword indexed areas of the record, ordered by relevance. If we want to limit the search to specific indexed areas of the record, such as the resume only, we can change the ‘Limit’ pulldown. We can also designate whether partial word matches should be included, such as “salesman” or “salesforce.”

To refine the search, we’ll need to use Boolean operations: AND, NOT, OR, and NEAR, as well as quotes and parentheses. Here’s how these work:

Using AND (all caps) before a term makes it a required criteria for the search results, while NOT excludes the term that follows it. For example, if we search marketing AND development NOT sales, we’re going to find records that contain the first term and the second one, but do not contain the third.

We can also nest search terms with parentheses. For example: (sales OR marketing) AND (development OR bizdev). When you use parentheses, the system runs the queries inside the parentheses first; so here we’ll only get back records with either of the terms from the first pair, and either of the terms from the second pair.

We can search for phrases by using quotes. For example: “business development”. Now we’ll get records with the words business and development immediately adjacent to each other.

To find words close to, but not right next to each other, we keep the quotes and include the NEAR operator. “Business NEAR Development” finds any record where those two words are within ten words of each other. We can narrow or expand the range by specifying a number. For example, “business NEAR5 development” will return records where those words are five or less words apart.

You can mix and match these techniques to create very refined keyword searches, but keep in mind that the more complex your query is, the more time it’ll take PCR to return the results.
When you get your search results back, you’ll see a letter indicating where in the record the terms were found. P for Profiles, N for Notes or Keywords, R for resume. Click on the letter, and the search terms are highlighted in context.

This is just the tip of the searching iceberg and we’ll dig into more related topics in the future. But for now, subscribe to this YouTube channel and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and watch your PCR login screen. If you have any suggestions for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.