Two Minute Tuesday: Custom Applicant Tracking Report

In the final Two Minute Tuesday of the current ‘season,’ we’ll walk through the creation of a custom applicant tracking report. This is a great way to export data about your placements, either contract or permanent, for use in Excel or other systems.

In the final Two Minute Tuesday of the current ‘season,’ we’ll walk through the creation of a custom applicant tracking report. This is a great way to export data about your placements, either contract or permanent, for use in Excel or other systems.

This will be our final TMT video for a while, as we’re planning some more long-form training video content for 2017. Thanks so much for watching! If you have any comments or suggestions for something we can explain in about two minutes when we return, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net

Video Transcript

Welcome to the final Two Minute Tuesday for 2016, Main Sequence’s series of short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to help make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

On occasion, you may want to export information about your placements, either permanent or contract, as a comma separated text file for further reporting or analysis in Excel, or for import into some other system. The most flexible method for accomplishing this task is to create a Custom Applicant Tracking Report. Let’s take a look.

First, we’ll open the ‘Reports’ area of the main menu. To configure our own custom report, we’ll go to the Action menu and select the Custom Applicant Tracking Reports tab. We don’t have any reports in this area yet, so we’ll click the ‘Add’ button at the lower right corner.

Like many other areas of PCRecruiter, this screen contains expanding and collapsing sections. It’s our first visit to this screen, so the sections are all collapsed. We’ll expand the first section, and give the report a title. We’ll call it ‘Custom Placement Report.’

We’ll skip over the Header sections for now and open up the Position Body Rows. Here, we’ll choose fields from the job and from the company or department it belongs to. For example, the position’s title, company name, positions ID, and the user it belongs to.

Next we can expand the Interview Body Rows. Remember that in PCRecruiter, the term ‘Interview Record’ refers to any of the Pipeline stages that connect a name and a job to each other. Placement records are simply a special type of Interview Record, as a placement can be thought of as the concluding step in an interview process.

In this area of the report, we’ll select the fields we want from the Name record and the Placement record, such as the first and last name, and the dates involved. If your data contains both permanent and contract placements, you’ll want to include the Interview Type as well. We can also include the EEO Source if we’ve been tracking candidate source data for these placements.

Now, if we expand the ‘Header Rows,’ we can see that PCR has already populated the headers based on our selected data, but we can edit the headings. For example, we may want to change the column headers to clarify that the Arranged Date is actually the date when the placement was made, and the Appointment Date contains the starting date for the role. The ‘Save’ button is at the bottom.

To run the report, we first need to click ‘Reports’ in the main menu to refresh the options so we can see our new custom report. Then we’ll choose Pipeline Reports from the report menu, or just search for the report by its name. We select the date range to report on, and we remove the default job status filter here, as it would limit our report to only the Available and Internal positions, which isn’t what we want for this purpose. We can use the Filter by Interview Type / Status option to pick permanent placements, contract, or both.

The ‘Print’ option in the action menu lets us preview the data, and we can use the ‘Export’ option in the action menu to download a CSV.

Two Minute Tuesday will be taking a hiatus in the new year so that we can focus on creating some more long-form video content, but we still want you to follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, join the PCRecruiter LinkedIn users group, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and watch the PCR login screen and blog for all the latest.

Although we’ll be shifting off of our weekly video schedule, at least for the time being, you can definitely expect to see more videos and exciting announcements via these same channels in the very near future.

Thanks again for watching, and if you have any topics you’d like to see covered when Two Minute Tuesdays come back, send an email to TwoMinuteTuesday@mainsequence.net.

Two Minute Tuesday: Chrome Shortcuts

Since many of our users are working with Chrome for the first time, or aren’t familiar with some of the handy shortcuts that can be used in it, we thought we’d dedicate this week’s edition to keyboard shortcuts and other tricks for Chrome that’ll come in handy as you work in PCRecruiter.

Since many of our users are working with Chrome for the first time, or aren’t familiar with some of the handy shortcuts that can be used in it, we thought we’d dedicate this week’s edition to keyboard shortcuts and other tricks for Chrome that’ll come in handy as you work in PCRecruiter.

Download the PCRecruiter Chrome Shortcuts sheet

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

While PCRecruiter will work in major modern browsers like Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari, the recommended browser and the one that Main Sequence’s development team tests everything with first is Google Chrome. Since many of our users are working with Chrome for the first time, or aren’t familiar with some of the handy shortcuts that can be used in it, we thought we’d dedicate this week’s edition to keyboard shortcuts and other tricks for Chrome that’ll come in handy as you work in PCRecruiter.

We’ll be referencing the Windows versions of all the shortcuts we mention in this video, but in most cases Mac users can swap ‘control’ for ‘command’ and use the same key combinations. Let’s start with some basic keyboard shortcuts that you can use in just about any program.

First off, if you’re copying a document into the system you’ll want to use: CTRL+A, to ‘Select All’ and ‘CTRL+C’ to ‘Copy.’ When you’re ready to paste, you can use CTRL+V. One special trick unique to Chrome is to hold SHIFT along with CTRL+V, which will paste the plain text of your copied content, stripping all the formatting. This can be really useful when cleaning up a messy job description.

When we’re reviewing a long list such as a Rollup or Search Result, or a longer form or custom layout, we can use the Home and End keys on the keyboard to jump to the top or bottom. We can also use the Space bar to jump a short way downward, and Shift+Space to jump back up a bit. If the portion of the screen you’re trying to affect isn’t responding to the keyboard, you may need to click on the scroll bar or somewhere else within that frame to tell Chrome that’s the one to focus on.

Speaking of frames, sometimes you want to reload the upper or lower frame of PCRecruiter. Using the browser’s main refresh icon or the F5 keyboard shortcut will reload the whole window and log you out. Instead, right-click inside of the panel you want to reload, and choose Reload Frame from the context menu.

Let’s talk tricks for tabs. We’re looking at a list of names and we want to compare a few records. Clicking an item loads it in the lower window, but by using the ‘middle click’ option on the mouse, usually by pressing down on the scroll-wheel if there is one, we can open the links in new tabs under the current one without leaving the window. If there’s no middle click on the mouse, holding CTRL while left-clicking on a link results in the same behavior.

The middle-click is also a handy when dealing with tabs. Middle-clicking on a tab, even if it’s not the one in front, will close it. And if you accidentally close any tab, CTRL+Shift+T will always re-open the most recently closed tab. If you have a few tabs open, you may want to try CTRL + TAB or CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to flip back and forth through them, or CTRL + a number key to jump to tabs 1 through 8. Ctrl + 9 always goes to whichever tab is at the far right.

Lastly, if you want to gain maximum screen space and really focus on the PCRecruiter window you’re working in, you can use the F11 key to toggle in and out of Full-Screen mode.

You can go to this link to download a printable guide to these shortcuts. There are many more to found at Google’s Chrome Support site. Once you get into the habit of using them, you’ll find yourself navigating in PCRecruiter faster than ever.

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

Postcards from Cleveland

Main Sequence has always been #ClevelandProud, having started here in 1998 and remained a locally-owned and operated organization. Since 2016 was an absolutely epic year for our city, this holiday season we send our clients and friends these “Postcards from Cleveland“…

A Big Year for Cleveland

This year in our hometown, the world-class Cleveland Museum of Art, Public Square, Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and Cleveland Hopkins International Airport all revealed eye-popping makeovers; the Flats entertainment district on the Cuyahoga River came back into full swing; our hometown hero Stipe Miocic won the UFC Heavyweight title; the downtown area exploded with spectacular new hotels, apartments, restaurants, and breweries; the Lake Erie Monsters AHL team won the Calder Cup; the city earned kudos for hosting the Republican National Convention; the Cleveland Indians made it to the World Series; and the Cavaliers came back from a 3-1 loss to become NBA champs, celebrating with 1.3 million fans at the parade.

All of that on top of what Clevelanders have come to consider “the usual”… the country’s largest performing arts center outside of NYC, the nation’s second-highest ranked hospital, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, one of the most acclaimed orchestras in the world, our beautiful lake and 21,000 acres of public parks… and of course, the amazing people who develop, support, and sell PCRecruiter!

A Big Year for PCRecruiter

This year was also big for PCRecruiter, which continued to gain capability through new features, partnerships, and integrations. The PCRecruiter mobile app, Outlook embed, and Chrome plugin were especially improved and appreciated by our customers this year.

PCRecruiter is already lined up to deliver even more value and performance in 2017, with a brand new mobile-optimized job board, a top-shelf analytics package, expanded timesheet functionality, and dozens of other improvements coming your way over the next twelve months.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, join our LinkedIn Users Group, or YouTube to stay in the loop, and watch the lower portion of of your PCRecruiter login screen for all the latest blog posts and updates.

To our friends, customers, and supporters close to home and around the world, we wish you all a happy and prosperous new year!

(Several Cleveland photos in this year’s greeting are courtesy of Erik Drost – check out his work on Flickr and Instagram – Licensed CC 2.0)

Two Minute Tuesday: Available Date Field

The ‘Available’ date field on a name record seems like any other date field in the system, but it does have some special properties when used in conjunction with the ‘Contractor/Temp’ Status. Today’s video shows you what it can do.

The ‘Available’ date field on a name record seems like any other date field in the system, but it does have some special properties when used in conjunction with the ‘Contractor/Temp’ Status. Today’s video shows you what it can do.

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 here 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.

In this week’s video, we’re going to be looking at how to use the ‘Available’ date field on Name records in PCRecruiter, which can make it easier to see who’s open for placement and who is currently off the market. This is primarily useful to those of you doing contract placements or temporary assignments, but it may come in handy for others as well. The ‘Available’ field, in short, is where we store the date on which the person will be free, and it can be searched like any other date field in the system, but there are some special properties associated with the field when the contact has been designated as a contractor.

First, we need to set the Status of the Name record to ‘Contractor/Temp’. Most Names in your database will have the default ‘Candidate’ status. We simply switch the field and save the record to flag them as someone we would be considering for non-permanent placements.

Next we’ll look for the ‘Available’ field. Where this field shows up on the screen will depend on your custom layout of the Name record. It’s a standard field that comes with the database, so if you don’t see it, you can add it to your screen by using the ‘Customize’ feature.

Now, this contractor is on vacation until January 9, so we can either manually type in that date, or use the calendar popup to choose it before saving the record. The other way in which the ‘Available’ field can be filled out is via the Contract Placement screen. If we’re placing this contractor on an assignment and we fill in the optional ‘Contract End’ date for the Placement, that date will also be pushed into the ‘Available’ field on the contractor’s name, indicating that they’ll be available again once the assignment is over with. If the ending date for an assignment should need to be updated or changed, we’ll want to update it from the Placement record rather than updating the ‘Available’ field on the name directly so that the two dates are consistent.

Now that we have a date in the field, any time this name turns up in a search result, we can see an availability indicator. If the date in the Available field is in the past, or is empty, the contractor will be labeled as Available in the results list. If the date is in the future, they’ll show up as Not Available.

Another place where the Available date comes into play is the Contract Search option, which we can find in the main menu. This is a special search feature that only returns names with Contractor/Temp status. When we use the options here, the same Available field from the Name record will be used to indicate the contractor’s availability. This means we can see who’s open and who isn’t, even if they are not nor have ever been actually placed on any assignments.

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