Two Minute Tuesday: IMAP Email

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) email services are ubiquitous and useful, but not commonly understood. Today we’ll talk about the difference between traditional POP (Post Office Protocol) email access and IMAP, and how IMAP interaction with PCRecruiter underpins some of the most important CRM features we offer.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) email services are ubiquitous and useful, but not commonly understood. Today we’ll talk about the difference between traditional POP (Post Office Protocol) email access and IMAP, and how IMAP interaction with PCRecruiter underpins some of the most important CRM features we offer.

If you have any comments or suggestions for something we can explain in about two minutes, 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.

This week we’re going to talk about IMAP email accounts and how they interact with PCR. IMAP is one of the two most common methods of connecting to an email account, the other being POP, or “pop”.

POP stands for “post office protocol,” and it works very much like traditional post office box. Your email client, Microsoft Outlook for example, connects to your mailbox at your mail hosting provider, and downloads all of the contents, leaving the mailbox on the server empty. While this does afford local access to your emails when you’re not online, it means the mail is now stored only in the mail client you downloaded it to. If you check the same mailbox from your phone, it’ll be empty. Your Sent Items and other folders will also be only up to date on that one mail client.

With IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), however, the mail stays on the server. Your mail client simply displays and manipulates the messages where they are. This means you can connect to the same email account from multiple mail clients, all of which will stay in sync with each other because they’re all just reflecting what’s in the mail folders on the server. These days, with ubiquitous internet access, and the need to access the same email account via multiple computers or mobile devices, IMAP is the most common setup.

So, how does this work with PCRecruiter? Well, PCRecruiter has its own optional built-in email client. While all users have the option to send email out of PCRecruiter from various screens, the PCR Mail client lets you receive email in PCR as well. This can really shorten the process of creating Name records from or importing resumes from received emails, or quickly accessing the Name record when a contact emails you.

The other big advantage here is Activity tracking. Each time you send or receive a message from someone whose email address is on a record in the database, PCR can log the text of that email as an Activity on their record, and as long as the original email still exists on the server, you can jump right to it from the person’s name record. Having all of your email communication automatically logged as part of the Name record in PCR can be a powerful asset.

PCRecruiter’s IMAP synchronization runs 24 hours a day. So even if you never use the PCR Mail client at all, once the connection to your IMAP email account is set up, you can send and receive email on your mobile phone, in Outlook, or anywhere else, and the activity logs and emails will be accessible from within PCRecruiter. And, any emails you send out from PCRecruiter will be synced as sent items in all of your other email clients.

For more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, join the PCRecruiter LinkedIn users 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Routing Rules

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday examines the often overlooked ‘Routing Rules’ feature, which automatically places candidates and jobs on Rollup Lists based on their job titles.

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday examines the often overlooked ‘Routing Rules’ feature, which automatically places candidates and jobs on Rollup Lists based on their job titles.

If you have any comments or suggestions for something we can explain in about two minutes, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net

Video Transcript

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

PCRecruiter has a number of handy little features tucked away here and there that users may be unaware of. In this video we’ll look at just such a feature: Routing Rules. In a nutshell, Routing Rules place Name and Position records on specified rollup lists based on their Title fields. This can be a useful organizational tool for grouping candidates and jobs automatically as they’re entered.

To configure this feature, we’ll start from the System menu and search for “Rules.” In this database we haven’t got any rules defined yet, and having never visited this screen before, we also don’t have any menu items pinned. We’ll start by pinning the ‘Add Rule’ item to the Action menu. Now we can add a rule.

For this demonstration, let’s say we want to start grouping C-Level candidates. We’ll keep ‘Name’ as the Rule Type, because this rule will be applied to Name records, but the same process we’re about to go through would be applied if we were routing Position records based on their Job Titles.

First we’ll name this Rule. Now we start adding titles. When we click ‘Add’ the system will display the Titles table, if we’ve got one in this database, so that we can select titles from the list. In this case, we’re going to add titles manually and set up some partial matching. We want anyone whose job title begins with “Chief,” so we’ll enter “Chief” followed immediately by the wildcard character, a percent sign, in the box. Then we click ‘OK’. We can click ‘Add’ again to include more titles, like CFO, CDO, CEO, and so on.

Next we click ‘Add’ in the lower box to choose what list, or lists, people with these titles should be placed on. For this example, we’ll make a fresh list by clicking ‘Add Rollup’, filling in a description, and saving. Now we can select the list we just made.

The same process can be repeated for as many combinations of titles and lists as you please. Now let’s see it in action! We’ll use the record adding wizard to parse the contact data from a resume we’ve received. The title on this one is Chief Operating Officer.

After saving the record, if we look at the Rollup area, we’ll find that she has been automatically linked to the specified list based on her title. The same action would occur if she had self-registered on our job board with that title. And if we go to a record that’s already in the system and update the title to one that matches the rule we created, that’ll get placed on the list as well.

For more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, join the PCRecruiter LinkedIn users 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Mail Tagging in Portal

In our latest Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re looking at Mail Tagging in the PCRecruiter Portal for MS Outlook. This recently-released feature lets you color-code senders in your Outlook inbox based on the Status field from their name in PCRecruiter.

In our latest Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re looking at Mail Tagging in the PCRecruiter Portal for MS Outlook. This recently-released feature lets you color-code senders in your Outlook inbox based on the Status field from their name in PCRecruiter.

If you have any comments or suggestions for something we can explain in about two minutes, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net

Video Transcript

Welcome back for 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 this week’s edition, we’re going to look at the new Mail Tagging enhancement available in the PCRecruiter Portal for Microsoft Outlook. This new option lets you color-code your emails based on the status of the contact record in PCRecruiter, making it easier to spot emails from candidates, clients, managers, and so forth in your inbox.

First off, you’ll need to make sure that you’ve got the latest version of the Outlook Portal. If the feature we’re reviewing in this video doesn’t seem to be there when you open Outlook, you’ll want to visit the Downloads area of our website at PCRecruiter.net to get the latest installation file.

Now we’ll launch Outlook and check it out. The first step is to open the ‘Options’ item from the PCR Config section. Before proceeding, you’ll want to verify that the ‘Server IP/URL’ section points to www2.pcrecruiter.net, rather than simply www.pcrecruiter.net. The ‘www2’ URL is the current PCRecruiter hosting domain, and this new feature requires Portal to be connected to the current PCR servers rather than the older PCR 8 version.

Now we’re going to select the new Mail Tagging tab. In the dropdown at the top, we’re going to select the email account that we’re working with in the Portal.

Next, we’re going to use the ‘Configure Category Colors’ option. This pops up Microsoft Outlook’s own Color Categories tool. I’m going to create a ‘Candidates’ category that’s green, a ‘Hiring Authority’ category that’s blue, an ‘On Assignment category that’s purple, and a ‘Reference’ category that’s orange.

Now we can use the checkbox list to associate some or all of PCRecruiter’s Status options for Name records with a category color. We can associate multiple statuses with the same category if we want to – for example, we can place emails from Hiring Authority, Employee, and Manager records all in the same blue category. When we’re done lining everything up, we click ‘Save & Close’.

As a final step, we’ll right-click on the headings in the message list, and choose ‘View Settings’. We’re going to click on ‘Columns’ and add the ‘Categories’ column to the view.

Now, whenever we check email, the Portal will look up the sender’s address in our primary PCRecruiter database, and will color-code these messages based on the Status field on the Name record. If the same email address is found on more than one Name, the color code will be based on the record that was most recently active. The color coding may not be instantaneous depending on the synchronization between the PCRecruiter Portal and the data servers, so if you’re not seeing the colors applied, just wait a few minutes and they should start showing up.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Custom Fields

Configurability is one of PCR’s key strengths, and we’ve talked about user-adjustable layouts and settings in many of these videos. This week, we’re going back to basics and looking at how to create a Custom Field.

Configurability is one of PCR’s key strengths, and we’ve talked about user-adjustable layouts and settings in many of these videos. This week, we’re going back to basics and looking at how to create a Custom Field.

If you have any comments or suggestions for something we can explain in about two minutes, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net

Video Transcript

Welcome back for 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.

Configurability is one of PCR’s key strengths, and we’ve talked about user-adjustable layouts and settings in many of these videos. This week, we’re going back to basics and looking at how to create a Custom Field.

You can add virtually unlimited Custom Fields to your Name, Company, and Position records to contain just about any data point you require. For this example, we’re going to make a custom ‘Category’ selection for our positions to help group them for searching, sorting, and reporting.

First, we’ll head to the System area and open ‘Custom Fields’. If you don’t see this option, your user login doesn’t have the admin permission necessary to make and edit Custom Fields. We want to define a Custom Field for our Position records.

Below we’ll see a list of the existing Custom Fields. We can delete them, change the ‘Sort’ value, which controls the order they appear in on some screens, set the ‘Action’, which indicates what type of data we’re putting into the field, and set the ‘Default Values’ for the field if it’s going to be a multiple choice. Please note that deleting a field’s definition from this area simply de-lists it for the purposes of searching, reporting, and so on. If you’ve already completed this field on individual records or placed it in custom screen layouts, it’ll remain there until you specifically remove it.

We’ll click the ‘plus’ icon to add a new field, and give it a name, which can be up to 25 characters long. The sort order can be left alone in most cases. The ‘Action’ dropdown defaults to ‘No Action’, meaning that this will be a plain, 255-character text field. It also includes options to designate the data as an email address, phone number, web address, date, currency value, dropdown, and so on. For our ‘Category’ field, we want users to be able to select from a list of categories, and we want them to be able to select more than one at a time, so we’re going to choose the ‘Multi-Select Checkbox’ Action.

After we save, we can use the ‘Default Values’ link to put in our options. Each one can be up to 35 characters long. If you have a lot of choices, you can also use the ‘Import’ option.

Now that the field is defined, where does it show up? Custom fields can always be found under the “Details” navigation on any record. When we define a custom field, it doesn’t ‘exist’ for any specific record until some data is put into it, so the default display here is only going to show fields that have data in them already. We’ll select ‘Show All Fields’ to see the full complement of empty fields we might fill in.

If this is a field is one you’ll be using regularly, you’ll want to add it to your main screen. We’ll use the familiar ‘Customize’ option on the record. When we click in any of the spaces, typing the name into the dropdown should bring up the field we just defined. After saving, the Category field is now available for use on all the positions we view with this 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 ideas for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.

Two Minute Tuesday: Notes vs. Activities

In this Two Minute Tuesday, we’re going to talk about a subject that some users can find confusing. Namely, when to put information about a contact into the Notes and when to put it into the Activities. While PCRecruiter’s flexibility means you can often put your data wherever you find it most helpful to have, there are some clear-cut situations in which one or the other of these areas of the record is better suited to the job.

In this Two Minute Tuesday, we’re going to talk about a subject that some users can find confusing. Namely, when to put information about a contact into the Notes and when to put it into the Activities. While PCRecruiter’s flexibility means you can often put your data wherever you find it most helpful to have, there are some clear-cut situations in which one or the other of these areas of the record is better suited to the job.

If you have any comments or suggestions for something we can explain in about two minutes, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net

Video Transcript

It’s time for 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 this episode we’re going to talk about a subject that some users can find confusing. Namely, when to put information about a contact into the Notes and when to put it into the Activities. While PCRecruiter’s flexibility means you can often put your data wherever you find it most helpful to have, there are some clear-cut situations in which one or the other of these areas of the record is better suited to the job.

At the simplest level, the Notes area is for saving annotations to the record; things that aren’t in the candidate’s resume or don’t necessarily fit into a specific field. Your Notes might include information about their family or hobbies, or details about their job search or relationship with the company they work for. Notes are included in the system’s keyword index, so if you use the Keywords search box, any words stored the Notes will be included in that search. In addition, you’ll see the first 250 or so characters of the Notes when you hover your mouse over the contact’s name in your search results or Rollup views, making it a good place to jot down details you want to reference quickly in these contexts.

When you enter a Note on a record, the system stamps it with the date and time of entry and the user who entered it, so it can be tempting to use the Notes area to keep track of events like phone calls, meetings, interviews, and so forth. However, the date on your notes is simply the date that note was saved, which makes it tough to record a past or future event. The date and username are essentially just meta data within one large text document, not discrete pieces of trackable info.

If you want to keep track of what’s you’ve done or will be doing in regards to a contact outside of the context of a position Pipeline, you’ll want to record Activities instead. The system automatically writes some Activity records when you perform actions like adding or saving records, sending emails, and so on, but you can also create your own custom Activity Types under the System area to track things like cold calls, the date when you received a document, or when you sent a LinkedIn connection request. You can even set up Result Codes to log the outcomes – like whether that LinkedIn Request was accepted.

Because the Activities track the Username, Date, Activity Type, and the memo text as independent fields, you can filter, sort, search, and report on them to get an idea of what happened when, and who did it. You can also attach Activities and their follow-up events to your Schedule, so they track not just what you’ve done, but what you plan to do.

So, in short, when you want to supplement a record with searchable freeform information, the Notes are a good place to do it, but if you want to track something that occurred or will occur, then Activities are the better choice.

For more Two Minute Tuesdays, subscribe to this YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, join the PCRecruiter LinkedIn users 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.

GetApp Category Leader - ATS

GetApp, a leading business software directory and review site, has released it’s latest Category Leader rankings, highlighting the top 25 cloud-based business applications in key business application categories. Main Sequence is pleased to announce that PCRecruiter was given a Top 5 slot in the Applicant Tracking category.

The rankings, which give business owners a short list of the best options to consider, are based on the following five criteria:

  1. Quantity and rating of user-submitted reviews.

  2. Number of integrations with other listed apps.

  3. Mobile app availability and rating.

  4. Social media presence and following.

  5. Security survey responses (modeled on the Cloud Security Alliance’s self-assessment form).

These rankings are completely independent of any commercial relationships between GetApp and the software vendors, taking into consideration factors including real user opinion, compatibility with other software products and mobile devices, security, and market presence. These rankings help provide an easy-to-follow overview of important factors for the buying process.

Main Sequence is glad to be recognized as one of the top solutions available in a reflective representation of the leading business applications on the market.