In any industry, bringing on new starters is never a straightforward process – and recruitment is no different. You’ve sourced potential candidates. You’ve gone through the recruitment process. And you’ve made the hire. Now it’s time to onboard, train, and integrate your new recruiter.

Whether they’re new to recruiting or they’ve been doing it for years, your newly hired recruiters need to get up to speed with your firm’s ways of doing things. That includes workflows and software. Most specifically, they need ‘new recruiter’ training on your applicant tracking and candidate relationship management tools.

In this blog post, PCRecruiter’s Drew Rothman looks at key strategies for successful new recruiter training, whether they’re learning the software, the job, or even both things at the same time.  

Give Them A Process

Each recruiter and every recruitment firm has their own unique way of doing things. Sure, they might use similar methods, but as part of your organization, new recruiters need to do things your way, at least in the beginning. If, further down the line, someone wants to adapt or improve on the processes, that should be welcomed.

When tackling new recruiter training you need to ensure they understand your business goals, the key performance indicators (KPIs), and the expectations for getting the job done. Standardized workflows allow you to easily track both candidate and recruiter progress. So when it comes to using a central repository of client and candidate data, you’ve got to ensure that everyone’s doing it the same way. 

A sequencing tool can help new hires to learn both the software and the job of recruiting. Giving new recruiters a process to follow, combined with automations such as follow-up emails and text messages, makes it so much easier to get up and running in no time at all. Without a process, recruiters essentially have an open box of tools, but no guidance on how to use them properly.

Provide A Mentor

In some respects, recruitment has a lot in common with sales. The key difference is that instead of pushing a product, you’re selling candidates to companies with open roles, and open roles at companies to prospective candidates. 

Mentoring a New Recruiter
Assigning a mentor to a new recruiter can help them get up to speed on both the market and the technology.

Knowing the niche is vital in establishing a recruiter’s credibility with both candidates and clients. It’s also essential when handling common pushbacks and comments from candidates in a specific area. Mentoring can help a new recruiter to learn the market they’ll be working in.

When it comes to mentoring, there are different schools of thought. It’s common to assign a buddy to provide support, help them in the right direction, and answer any questions. That said, some firms prefer to throw new recruiters in at the deep end and get them straight on the phone.

Teach them the Tools 

There was a time when the two most valuable items in a recruiters tool kit were a phone and a list of telephone numbers. Today, there are still some sectors where this rings true. However, with the rise of online social media platforms, and messaging in all its forms, recruiters have to go where the candidates are. This might mean communicating across a variety of channels, like email or Twitter.

Recruiters who’ve been in the industry a long time, are more likely to be comfortable making calls and sending emails. On the other hand, younger generations who’ve grown up with text messaging and social media are likely to be less comfortable picking up the phone and talking to someone. In fact, recent graduates might never have cold-called anyone, ever. 

That’s why training should be personalized to fill the skills gap, and support new recruiters in adapting to your ways of working. Scripting calls and shadowing experienced recruiters is one approach for phone-based recruiters. Meanwhile, video tutorials or face-to-face training on how to use other communication tools can help level-up skills.

The tools you use depend on the industry you’re recruiting in, and the type of candidates you’re hiring. These days, a phone call can feel intrusive to some, whereas a brief message, whether sent by text or on social media, can be read and responded to at the recipient’s leisure. A phone call demands a response right away. Video calls need scheduling and have become the norm in the wake of the global pandemic. 

Whichever communication channel your recruiters are using, it’s fair to say that getting hold of candidates can be a challenge.

How Sequencing Helps with New Recruiter Training

With a sequencing tool, you can create a customizable workflow which prompts recruiters to take specific actions in a specific order. For example, say a candidate doesn’t respond to a phone call. After a certain amount of time, they might be prompted to send a text message notifying the candidate of the call. Sequencing can also include automations – like sending an acknowledgement email after a specific task is completed. 

Sequencing helps new and existing recruiters follow a pre-defined process with little or no training. They can essentially work out of one screen with a clear, task-based workflow. This puts everything recruiters need to do to make a placement in one convenient spot.

With PCRecruiter’s sequencing tool, you can create a clear task-based workflow that your recruiters can step through effortlessly.

An easy task-based interface makes recruiting automation simple.
Using a tool like PCRecruiter’s Sequencing can make it easier for a new recruiter to get started by providing them with a clear, step-by-step approach to the day’s tasks.

You want people, not software, to run your recruiting business. Finding the right software can be a challenge. You’re going to have questions, but are you asking the right ones?

Whether your chosen vendor requires a one-off transaction or a subscription service, recruiting CRM software is a significant outlay for your firm. It’s also the beating heart of your business. Your chosen software needs to perform well every day, and allow recruiters to get on with what they do best. 

Balancing the cost of your investment with the business value it brings is no easy task. There are multiple variables to consider, including your firm’s preferred workflows and unique approach to making hiring decisions. After all, you want people, not your software, to run your recruiting.

PCRecruiter’s Jim Lombardo and Chris Cyrus have over 30 years of recruitment solution sales and consulting experience between them. In this post, they’ll share their tips for what to ask your staffing or recruiting CRM software vendor to ensure you get the right solution for your business. 

For those new to the business, let’s start with what recruitment software has to offer. 

What Is a Recruiting CRM / ATS?

Recruitment software is used by placement firms and executive search pros to handle the administrative side of the recruiting process. It helps them to source, track, and manage talent from prospect to placement. 

An end-to-end solution typically combines aspects of an applicant tracking system (ATS) with candidate and client relationship management (CRM) tools to support the entire recruitment lifecycle. 

Recruiting software also provides related functionality that can help to speed up the process, such as:

  • Job postings
  • Workflow automation
  • Reusable forms 
  • Boolean CV / resume search
  • Multi-function lists
  • Configurable reports
  • Recruitment analytics 
  • Email and voice integrations

The Benefits of a Recruitment CRM / ATS

The right software can unlock significant business benefits. If you’re not already using an ATS/CRM at your recruiting agency, here are five ways it can add value:

  1. Automation: Automate routine and repeatable administrative tasks, like sending notifications and communications. 
  2. Information Retention: Build a pool of current and past roles, candidates, and clients for instant access and faster future searches.
  3. Communication: A single repository for logging all email, voice, and text activity makes it easier to track history and communicate more effectively.
  4. Error Reduction: Ensure candidate and client information is correct and up to date with a single source of truth, reducing duplication and related mistakes.
  5. Analytics: Use the available data to gain competitive insights into both candidate and recruiter performance. Easily identify areas for improvement. 
Questions to ask your potential recruitment CRM vendor

Whether you’re just starting up your recruiting firm or considering a change of recruitment CRM, it’s important to ask the right questions to get the right solution and the best deal from your vendor. 

Here are some key questions that Jim and Chris recommend:

What’s the pricing model, and how much will it cost?

Every recruitment firm has a unique budgets and unique needs. Paying for unused licenses or unnecessary functionality is not cost-effective. Ask how your potential vendor defines ‘users’, how they handle adding or dropping users, and what costs are involved in setup and training. As most software as a service (SaaS) software is offered on a subscription model, it’s important to know whether future updates are part of the package or an additional cost.

If you’re considering self-hosting, there’s also cost of hardware and maintenance to consider.

What kind of support do you offer?

With the implementation of any new software, there is always going to be a learning curve. The flatter this curve, the quicker recruiters can get back to the job of recruiting. With a training and support package from the get-go, it’s much easier to get up and running, and get back to business without a lengthy introduction.

Ask who your point of contact will be. Do you get an experienced trainer to help guide you through using the software and offer advice regarding best practices? It’s also useful to know what post-setup options are available, like a learning management system (LMS), videos, or documentation to help you further down the line. Ongoing personal support can also be invaluable. Don’t forget to ask what the hours for support are, where the support team is based, and whether support comes with additional fees.

How can I post and update jobs?

With all the heavy lifting going on within your software, it’s important that job postings can be easily shared with job boards and other external platforms, without having to copy and paste information from one location to another. This is especially important when you want job postings to be consistent across different locations, or you want to allow candidates to flow in from multiple places. How does the potential vendor put jobs out to the world?

Am I able to extract data to generate reports and analytics?

Forward-thinking recruiters are using data to speed up sourcing and selection, and accelerate the time to fill open roles. Data can also be useful for analyzing candidate and recruiter performance. To get the best value from your dataset, it’s vital that your recruiting software offers reports to reveal useful business insights, and enables you to continuously improve as an organization. Ask what reports and analytics they provide and whether you can generate your own or export to common formats.

How do I get legacy data in or out?

A woman on the phone
When shopping for staffing or recruiting software, have your questions ready and take plenty of notes on the demo.

If you’re moving from one staffing and recruiting software to another, another important consideration is the successful migration of your existing data. This process can take time to get right. Data from a spreadsheet can typically be imported by you as an end-user, but a full data migration of jobs, resumes, and record history can potentially take weeks. How does your prospective vendor ensure a smooth transition without impacting day-to-day business or creating costly downtime? What fees are involved in migrating the data? And if you decide to leave, what’s involved in getting your data out?

Is this going to work with my existing email?

Bringing in new software shouldn’t involve redefining your entire software stack (unless you want it to.) When it comes to email, altering email habits to accommodate a new system is both time-consuming and unnecessary. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook, or any other major email client and provider, make sure the software you choose can easily work with your existing account. Ask about integrations that would help you sync contacts, calendars, attachments, and forms between your email and recruitment CRM.

How does it track voice and SMS communications?

Recruiters spend a lot of time on the phone. Ideally, you want your staffing software to offer a single pane of glass over the entire recruitment process. That includes SMS and voice communications. So it’s a reasonable expectation that the system should allow you to sync with services for dialing out or sending a text messages easily. Find out what systems your vendor works with and to what degree, and ask about tracking of activity in general.

Does it enable me to enhance my existing talent pool?

The right staffing software will elevate your hiring game, and building your own private database of candidates and clients will pay dividends on future searches. To that end, what functionality does it have to enable you to broaden, and deepen, your existing talent pool? These days, there are a wealth of clever services out there to help you uncover best-fit passive talent. Does the software easily integrate with services such as seamless.AI, HireEz, or ZoomInfo’s TalentOS?

Will my data be secure?

It’s imperative to pay attention to the security of your private database. With plenty of high-profile cases of data breaches, there can be lasting reputational and financial damage if something goes wrong. Ask the vendor who can access your data, and what security protocols they have in place. Find out how frequently the data is backed up and how easily it can be retrieved if something goes wrong.

You’ll also want to verify whether the vendor themselves intend to makes use of your data. Will your data be used research, aggregation, or even resale? Is it comingled with data from other users?

PCRecruiter is ready to give you answers.

PCRecruiter has been helping recruiters source, track, and hire since 1998. Over the years, our offering has evolved alongside recruiters’ needs and advances in technology. We understand the wide range of business models and service requirements that recruiting pros need.

We’re proud to have served over tens of thousands of recruiters around the world through our ATS / CRM. We are both happy and qualified to answer the questions above and more.

Let us answer your questions and show you around our recruiting tech. Book a free demo today.

For some recruiters, self-hosting is still the most cost-effective and efficient way to manage their ATS and CRM. For others, SaaS makes the most sense. So how do you know what’s right for your recruitment firm? And is there a vendor who can offer you both? (Yes. PCRecruiter).

Whether you’ve been in recruitment for decades, or you’re just getting started, your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sit front and center of your business. Their value to your day-to-day activities is unquestionable. 

If your current software license is due for renewal, you’re about to heavily invest in new hardware, or you’re building a recruiting business from the ground up, it’s a good time to reevaluate your options. But should you choose self-hosted or SaaS?

In this blog post from PCRecruiter, company co-founder Martin Snyder looks at the key differences between self-hosted and SaaS, and the advantages of each type of setup. Why? Because unlike other vendors, PCRecruiter still offers both options to ensure we can provide the best fit for a wide range of needs.

What Is Self-Hosting?

A self-hosted solution run by the user’s company on their own IT systems and servers or from a data center which is not owned by their software vendor. This is also known as an ‘on-premise’. In a self-hosted set-up, the software is purchased outright via a license, typically renewed on an regular basis. 

Self-hosting works well for companies who already own or pay for the services required to facilitate it. So if you’ve already got a web and database server, storage infrastructure, technical and administrative support, and software maintenance services in place and working well, then all you need is the software. In this set-up, the software is a capital expense – a one-time purchase.      

What Is SaaS?

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Software as a Service (SaaS) is the more popular alternative to self-hosting. SaaS is delivered over the Internet and does not require the same level of installation or maintenance. It eliminates the need for you to self-manage complicated software and hardware installations. SaaS is sometimes referred to as on-demand software or web-based software. It’s also sometimes referred to as “hosted software” because SaaS is hosted by the vendor who manages updates, security, access, and availability. SaaS uses a subscription model, so you pay on a recurring basis, often monthly.

SaaS doesn’t require the expensive IT infrastructure needed to self-host. In most cases, SaaS can run from any device with a browser or sometimes via a dedicated app. SaaS eliminates the need to buy and maintain your own hardware and networking infrastructure. In this way, SaaS helps to keep the capital costs down for IT hardware and equipment. It also means that your software becomes an operating expense (OpEx).

Self-Hosted or SaaS

In many ways, recruiting is a very narrow economic process. But the definition of a ‘recruiter’ is very broad – from an independent headhunter working at home to the HR sourcer at an international corporation. The one thing they all have in common is that recruiters tend to be ‘people’ people, not ‘tech’ people. They need a solution that fits their day-to-day needs without adding an unnecessary layer of complexity. 

In the distant past, the only option was for businesses to use a self-hosted or on-premise solution to meet their IT needs. It’s still the traditional way of setting up major IT infrastructure – and there’s nothing wrong with that. But as the saying goes: do what you’ve always done, and you’ll always get the same results. For some recruitment firms, this approach still works and they get great results. For others – particularly recruitment start-ups – SaaS offers a better solution.

Here are some key points to consider when comparing self-hosting with SaaS:

Continuous Delivery

There are many reasons to choose SaaS. If you lack the IT infrastructure to self-host, or if you’ve got any concerns whatsoever about the stability of your database, a SaaS vendor can take care of that for you. The other considerations are uptime and availability. If you’re not able to guarantee the stable and continuous delivery of your recruiters’ every day software tools and network, then SaaS is also a good option.

IT Resources

While major recruiting agencies may have lots of IT assets, smaller firms often have fewer resources. SaaS gives these companies access to a much more powerful software stack than they would otherwise manage themselves.

Smaller organizations also benefit from only needing a handful of user subscriptions. On the other hand, large enterprises can sometimes find self-hosting a more cost-effective way to add tens or hundreds of users (see Economic Models). 

Data Security

Most recruiters would agree that their most prized asset is their database. 

Self-hosting gives recruiters the reassurance that, with proper security in place, only they will have access to their data. There’s no need to be concerned about the vendor relationship and what could potentially happen with their data when it’s hosted by a third-party provider. Fears over a data breach, cyber threats, or even the sale of data are common concerns. Some less reputable ATS providers may even stipulate that if you import data into their SaaS, they own or can make use of the data. If you’re looking into any SaaS option, always ask the vendor for the specifics about who has access to and ownership of the database!

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For every company around the world, there are ever-tightening regulations around data privacy. Recruitment is no exception. A data breach or cyberattack can be costly in terms of reputation and financial damage. Self-hosting gives you complete control over where the data is stored, who can connect to it, and even direct database access to the contents if needed.

Conversely, self-hosting means the entire security of your database rests upon your own network and IT capabilities, which could make you more vulnerable to issues rather than less. A reputable SaaS provider should have a highly secured hosting setup and regular security audits to ensure safety of the system, as well as be compliant with any applicable data protection regulations. This may offer you more peace of mind than managing things yourself.

Updates & New Features

With self-hosting, updating and getting new features can potentially be a time-consuming and costly process. It may impact business functionality, and generate downtime. SaaS is hosted by the vendor, so any updates and new features are handled centrally and automatically, and are therefore much quicker and easier to roll out. 

The other aspect to consider is timing. With SaaS, updates and new features are rolled out on a continuous basis. With self-hosting, it’s more typical to receive less frequent updates because of the complexity and disruption to services. Digital SaaS updates put the control in the hands of the vendor. Self-hosting updates tend to happen on-demand, putting control in the hands of the owner.

Another factor of increasing importance is how well the software can connect to other tools in your recruitment software stack. While a SaaS vendor may be able to offer software integrations through their own application programming interfaces (API), technical or contractual requirements often limit these to the SaaS provider’s own domain or infrastructure. Choosing to self-host may mean giving up some of the more robust features that rely on specific hardware and software behind the scenes. If you are currently self-hosting and have pre-existing integrations that you want to continue using when making a switch, it’s vitally important to ensure you can keep those connections.

Economic Models

As with most business decisions, cost is a make-or-break factor. Your decision to self-host or subscribe to a SaaS depends on your preferred economic model. When you self-host, the software is purchased as a single product. It’s owned. In countries like the US, for tax purposes, the value of this asset is said to depreciate in value over time. SaaS, however, is handled like a rental or lease. This means it there’s no depreciation. It’s an expense, and it gets taken as you spend it. 

Most SaaS vendors have three distinct fees: setup, user fees, and workload. For recruitment software vendors, workload equates with storage, updates, and data maintenance. The more storage you need, the higher the cost. SaaS user fees are generally per-user/per-month, whereas self-hosted configurations generally involve an initial startup fee, plus an update fee. This means that as the number of users increases, the cost per user decreases. There is a level where self-hosting can represent a huge saving when compared with SaaS user fees, but that tipping point tends to be at much larger organization sizes.

Which One Is Right For You?

Despite the increasing popularity and advantages of SaaS – it’s still not for everyone. For every recruitment firm, what’s most important is to balance innovation with necessity and cost with functionality.

Thankfully, with PCRecruiter you can take your pick. While the vast majority of our users go with the SaaS model, we still offer a self-hosted solution for those who require one. The software is substantially identical, with the exception of some of the more advanced features, making it possible to move your data from one model to the other if your business requirements change in the future.

If you’re not sure which makes sense for your company, our sales consultants are trained to help you compare the various options, and determine the right one for you. Get in touch with us today.

Whatever your recruitment vertical, when it comes to making the right hire, social media is an essential tool for sourcing the best candidates. But it’s not as simple as pushing out a job posting across multiple social channels and expecting the best candidates to come calling. Find out how to get social recruiting right by reading the latest blog post from PCRecruiter in collaboration with Steve Gipson from Recruiters Websites. Read it now.

Recruitment is one of those industries which, in terms of processes, hasn’t changed much over the years. The core principles have remained pretty much the same since people first started hiring. However, as it currently stands, with so many opportunities on the market, the emphasis falls heavily upon employers (and their recruiters) to make their organization an appealing place to work for both prospective and existing employees.

Regardless of the recruitment vertical, when it comes to making the right hire, social media plays an increasingly important role in sourcing the best candidates. As digital natives, who have grown up with social media, continue to trickle into the talent pool, social media recruitment is fast-becoming an essential tool for attracting the best talent.

We spoke to Steve Gipson, Sales Manager at Recruiters Websites, about making the best use of social media in recruitment.

Why use social media recruitment?

In today’s war for talent, an employer’s social media presence is no less than an expectation for prospective employees, with 56% of candidates actively seeking jobs on social professional networks like LinkedIn. On the flip side, nearly 60% of North American recruitment firm employees believe social media is the best source for candidates. These figures represent a clear shift in the way recruitment gets done. Candidates evaluate prospective employers from their social media presence. Likewise, recruiters use social media as part of a more targeted talent acquisition strategy, which enables them to identify and engage with potential hires.

Although social media enables recruiters to reach a wider talent pool, it’s not as simple as pushing out a job posting across multiple social channels and expecting the best candidates to come calling. Different social media channels appeal to different demographics. For example, in 2022, Facebook’s largest user group is people aged between 25 and 34. Instagram is similarly popular with that audience group, but it equally appeals to slightly younger users – around 30% of whom are aged 18 to 24. With this in mind, recruiters need to carefully consider which social media platforms to target in order to drive the right applicants through the door.

Welcome to the world of social recruiting.

What is social recruiting?

Social recruiting – also known as social hiring, or social media recruitment – is a way of sourcing potential candidates through social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, and other online channels, like blogs. However, it is also a way of marketing an employer brand by raising awareness about their value proposition to potential employees.

In order to engage in social recruitment, employers need to build out a presence across social media channels as part of a wider effort to enhance their employer brand. In doing so, they can promote their brand values, offer an insight into company culture, and invite engagement from prospective future candidates.

The rise in social recruiting correlates with changing generational habits around the use of social media in working-age prospects, with social networks reaching 90% penetration in the U.S. during 2022.

How is social media used in recruitment?

Recruiters use social media in two main ways. Firstly, many recruiters still follow the age-old model of using job postings and paid advertisements to announce and promote available roles. However, instead of using print media, they appear on social media. Secondly, they use social media as a tool to drive traffic to a job site, whether that’s an external recruiter or a company’s own website.

Whether as a recruiter you use one or both of these methods, the most important thing is to have a clear strategy for reaching your target audience. If you’re posting on Twitter, but the most ideal or suitable candidates hang out on Instagram, your recruitment efforts are going to be wide of the mark.

Recruitment has always operated within different verticals, and within those verticals, specific niches. The platform you choose to promote your latest opening needs to align with your target candidates. With an estimated 70% of the global workforce considered passive talent, targeting potential candidates through the right social channels is a strategic way of reaching people who aren’t actively seeking a new position.

The benefits of using social media to hire

Social media is an important channel for boosting your employer brand, demonstrating your expertise, promoting your company culture, and employee value proposition. It’s important not to think that having a wider reach means all the hard work is done for you.

The vastness of the Internet means you have the potential to connect with more of the right candidates for the role. That’s why making strategic use of social media is so important. What that reach actually gives recruiters is the potential to drill-down and uncover suitably qualified and experienced candidates based on the role’s criteria, whether that’s a particular type of degree or a certain number of years experience.

Unlike static job boards or print media postings, social media content helps you to broaden your reach with company information and open roles, increasing your chances of engaging with both passive and active candidates. Drawing upon established employee networks and connections can also help to attract the right talent, as they share and re-share social content which might lead prospects through the door.

Promoting your employer brand and job postings through social media is also a much more time-efficient and cost-effective way to reach candidates, as opposed to more traditional one-to-one methods such as cold calling potentials or even attending job fairs.

Strategies for using social media in recruitment

Most recruitment professionals are highly disciplined and plan the next day’s calls the day before. For recruiters new to employing social media tactics to bring in the right hire, it’s important to treat social media in the same way as your call list. Consistency is key.

Here are six strategies to consider when implementing social recruitment:

  1. Focus on the right channels to find your target audience, and don’t be afraid to look beyond the main players – certain industries have developed their own niche social platforms.
  2. Clear and consistent social media profiles are essential for presenting your employer brand and delivering content relevant to potential candidates, aligned with your company’s culture and overall brand values.
  3. Social media is awash with images and video because it attracts engagement. Relevant and on-brand visual content is a sure-fire way to increase engagement from potential candidates.
  4. Encourage employees to share your posts. The number one way people discover a new job is through a referral. When employees share your posts, you not only tap into their network, but you improve the chances of finding the right hire through personal recommendation.
  5. Paid ads on social media can be surprisingly affordable and can be targeted based on a range of key criteria, from current job titles to relevant experience. They’re also easier to track in terms of engagement.
  6. Content marketing is a great way to build a connection with your target audience, from videos and images to blogs. Use social media to point potential candidates to content that can provide added-value and a stronger connection with your brand.

Simplifying sourcing from socials and the wider web

The right technology can also help your social recruitment efforts.

PCR Capture is a seamless browser plug-in from PCRecruiter which enables recruiters to import and update candidate data found on a variety of popular websites, job boards, and social networks.

With PCR Capture, you can import new candidates and clients, and also update existing records by merging data. You can even use it to look up names you find online and determine whether they’re already in your database, with quick access to contact functions.

To learn more about PCR Capture or how PCRecruiter can help you make more of your social recruiting strategy, contact a representative today.

Over 50% of recruitment leaders are investing in employer branding. What’s the appeal, and how can it benefit your business? In the latest blog post from PCRecruiter, we explore the importance of employer branding and how it can make your hiring more effective, and benefit your bottom line. 

An image of a woman happy about her employer brandingWhatever business you’re in, your brand is your reputation – not just to your customers or clients, investors and other stakeholders, but to the people who make up your organization. Without them, there is no business.

That’s why getting the right talent through the door to fill the right roles in your organization is so vital for your business success. After all, you don’t want to waste time and money on acquiring and onboarding the wrong people for your organization.

However, in a competitive job market where you need to be quick on the hire to secure the best people for your business, attracting the right talent is easier said than done. That’s where employer branding can help. In this blog post, we explore the importance of employer branding and how it can make a difference to the effectiveness of your hiring process.

What is employer branding?

Employer branding is the perception of your business amongst your prospective workforce and your current employees.

Like your business brand, which defines your value proposition of your products or services within a particular market, your employer brand defines your value proposition as a place to work, develop a career, and grow as a person within the employment market.

Your employer brand embodies the essence of your enterprise, representing your people, policies, and values. In the same way that a consumer brand is designed to create attract customers, create familiarity, earn trust, and build loyalty, your employer brand is more than just your approach to managing people and business, it runs much deeper. Employer branding helps define and communicate your organization’s unique cultural and ethical standpoint, as reflected by your employees and your business actions.

Whether you’re looking to hire a part-time cleaner, or an experienced CEO, it may seem counterintuitive to focus on your offering, rather than theirs. But those prospective hires not only need to know that their skills, experience, and talent are a good fit for the role and your business, but also what they’re getting in exchange by becoming an employee.

Why is employer branding important?

Your employer brand is important because it helps to communicate what kind of employment experience you offer prospective candidates, what kind of experience they can expect when they come to work for you, and why they should consider working for you in the long term.

Effective employer branding communicates a positive message about working for your organization, encourages engagement, and creates a buzz around your company as a desirable place to work. Think of it as marketing for your role as an employer to existing and future employees.

If that sounds like an additional layer of complication over what your HR department or recruitment team does, it’s worth remembering that you already have an employer brand. It’s up to you to shape perceptions and the way it works best for your hiring efforts.

A recent study by LinkedIn revealed that the number one obstacle for candidates looking for a job is not knowing what it’s like to work at the company. So guess what 75% of those candidates look for before they put in an application? Employer brands. 

How can employer branding benefit your business?

The bottom line of effective employer branding is that it boosts your bottom line. So let’s dive a little deeper into that.

First impressions count. So getting employer branding right brings the right candidates knocking on the door, and if you’ve been actively pursuing the right hire, it welcomes them inside. That’s important because candidates have a world of openings to choose from.

To make your organization stand out in a competitive market, you need to make your offering more appealing to them. With over 50% of recruitment leaders investing in and deploying a proactive employer branding strategy, the competition for the best candidates is heating up. Standing by and doing nothing isn’t an option unless you want to get lost in the pack.

By more closely aligning your employer brand with prospective hires, it can significantly boost your recruitment efforts. LinkedIn’s study revealed that an effective employer brand results in:

  • 28% reduction in turnover
  • 50% more qualified candidates
  • 50% reduction in your cost per hire
  • 1-2 times faster hires.

There’s also a positive impact on engagement and retention. An effective employer brand makes it easier for recruiters to introduce your organization to prospects. And it’s only as good as the people that work for you. In fact, it’s the message that they put out about your organization that does the most employer branding work for you.

With the right organizational culture in place, you can begin to grow that positive messaging and become a trusted employer, someone that people enjoy working for, and one that they’re happy to champion to others.

How the right recruitment software can help

The right recruitment software won’t do your employer branding for you, but it can be a valuable tool for delivering the right message at the right time to prospective candidates.

Communication is a key to acquiring the right talent. You need to ensure a cohesive experience of your employer brand at every touchpoint of the hiring process, and you also need clear oversight and control over the entire recruitment process.

PCRecruiter provides scalable CRM and ATS functionality with a host of features designed to make communication with candidates quicker and easier, from seamless integrations for SMS and Email campaigns to automations for identifying the best candidates.

See what PCRecruiter can do for your recruitment.

Every day, recruitment organizations handle huge volumes of sensitive data in file types that are common targets for ransomware. Data security may not be at the forefront of what you do, but it’s critical for maintaining client and customer trust and your business reputation. Find out how the right applicant tracking software can handle your data security needs.

When it comes to data security, all recruiters need the right level of training and awareness. But the right applicant tracking system (ATS) should be able to handle data security, freeing up recruitment professionals to focus on their core business.

Your applicant tracking system (ATS) is the gateway to a goldmine of personal and enterprise data. And with recent and ongoing developments in data privacy regulations, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a data breach can be costly, inflicting irreparable damage to your client’s and candidate’s trust and your company’s reputation. 

Whether your sensitive data is held in a public cloud, private cloud, or on premises, recruitment firms and HR professionals have an obligation to ensure data security and compliance with data privacy law and regulations. So how can you protect company, client, and candidate data from the threat of cyberattacks, unauthorized access, or even accidental exposure? 

Let’s take a closer look at data security in recruitment, and how you can mitigate the risk by taking the right preventative measures. 

What is data security?

Data security involves protecting digital information from corruption and unauthorized access wherever it resides, in transit, at rest, or at the end of its lifecycle when it’s no longer required. Digital data security can be enacted in a number of ways, including encryption, masking, and tokenization. It also requires additional measures to mitigate data breaches, including backup copies and secure storage.

Why is data security important?

Research shows that in 2020 there were nearly 30,000 cybersecurity incidents worldwide, with 3,236 in the public sector and 2,935 in the  information industry. In the same year, there were over 300 million reported ransomware attacks – where attackers threaten to permanently prevent access to a victim’s data unless a ransom is paid. 

Unsurprisingly, two of the most targeted file types are database file extensions (like .db) and SQL (Structured Query Language) which is the standard language for manipulating database, and relational database management systems. Both of these file types are commonly used by every type of recruitment professional, from recruitment agencies to HR departments.  But with the right ATS in place, there’s no undue cause for alarm.

What are the different types of data security?

Organizations of every size have a raft of data security measures at their disposal. The right security solution, as part of a wider internal security strategy, will take account of the risk, compliance regulations, and sensitivity of specific datasets to deploy the right level of security control. This helps to mitigate the risks in data handling and storage.

Recruitment is one example of an industry that deals with a constant flow of incoming and outgoing flow of personal and organizational data. And like other industries, there are common data security measures that can be put in place for reducing risk and avoiding a breach. These include:

  • Encryption 
  • Backups and recovery
  • Secure storage
  • Authentication
  • Access controls

An ATS that’s compliant and secure

As a provider of recruitment CRM / ATS hybrid, PCRecruiter handles large volumes of sensitive data every day – between 8,000 and 9,000 separate databases ranging from 100MB to 7TB in size. So for us, data security is business critical and a core part of what we do.

Our ISO certified data center has a rigorous security process for entry, 24/7 staffing and caged equipment. Whilst we can offer bespoke levels of security encryption (including asymmetrical encryption for organizations who wish to encrypt their own data) all of our data undergoes industry standard encryption. And anything leaving one of our data centers is automatically encrypted, such as quarterly backups, which are removed and stored securely in a vault. Plus, we back up to two separate geographic locations in case of a natural disaster or security incident in one location. 

Our software is regularly scheduled for pen testing (ethical hacking) to evaluate the robustness of its security features. In addition, developers go through extensive training in data security. For third-party developers wishing to utilize our application programming interface (API), we provide access tokens which restrict access to specific functionality. 

Alongside these security measures, we offer opt-in security settings for recruiters. These include the following Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) settings:

  • Invalid password lock out
  • Email authentication
  • TOPTP (time-based one-time password)

Peace of mind with PCRecruiter

Since 1997, Main Sequence – the company behind PCRecruiter – has built a strong reputation for being one of the world’s most trusted and successful developers of recruitment, sourcing, and applicant tracking software. PCRecruiter is a software as a service (SaaS) built on its own operating system and platform with cybersecurity baked in. It provides thousands of recruiters around the world with data security they both need and trust. 

Find out more about our commitment to the highest standards in data protection and adherence to compliance regulations in our blog post PCRecruiter is ready for the GDPR.

Decades of working alongside top firms around the world has given PCRecruiter insight into what recruiting technology works and what doesn’t.

Every recruitment organization is different, with its own style, strategy, and approach to making hires happen. Whilst there’s no magic formula for success, there are some common traits which help recruitment firms gain a competitive edge.

Decades of working along side top recruitment firms from around the world, across a wide range of industries and markets, has given PCRecruiter a clear insight into what works and what doesn’t. It comes down to the right investment, recruiting technology, and autonomy.

Many traits are common sense and largely controllable: owners who are engaged and work hard, choosing markets that are hot, and making sufficient investment into their businesses.

Some are not as intuitive or controllable: personal charisma of key players, odd-couple leadership teams, and generalization versus specialization in key markets and roles.

So what sets top-performing recruitment organizations apart from their competitors?

➀ The right investment

Investment is not just about spending money, especially as spending money in itself doesn’t automatically result in success. Cultural investment is crucial for any organization to be effective. From investing in the right leadership team to sourcing people who are the best fit for both the position advertised and your company values, successful organizations are built on a solid workforce culture. But that doesn’t necessarily mean focusing entirely on employee contentment. Research by Gallup suggests a key driver in employee retention and business success is to create high levels of engagement, where employees are treated as stakeholders in the company’s future.

No matter the size of your business, success is dependent on a number of moving parts, all of which have a powerful role to play in delivering your core business. And like any complex organization, good performance depends on many variables. Yet a strong pattern does emerge: recruitment firms that continuously optimize and refine their workflows, and who make training and development a central activity, seem to perform better. This is true even across large businesses with many sets of tools and team members.

Sometimes the right solution might involve throwing dollars at vendors of technology and professional services, but without the involvement of leadership and effective non-dollar cultural and educational investments, no technology or technique on its own will automatically provide a competitive edge.

➁ The right recruiting technology

Technology is increasingly becoming a key differentiator for recruitment firms looking to take the edge on their competitors. As organizations seek to drive efficiency and cost-savings through programs of digital transformation, they look to cutting-edge recruiting technology to provide their teams with ways of working smarter and more effectively. In a world of ‘Big Data’, recruiters are faced with ever-growing volumes of data and databases. At the same time, services and industries are niching down, catering to very specific market audiences with very defined knowledge, expertise, and skills.

While a growing number of recruiting software solutions provide increased levels of automation for repetitive or easily automated tasks, this doesn’t signal a need for fewer recruiters. What it does is free-up recruiters to focus more on their core business: recruiting.  For that reason, recruiters wholly dependent on manual processes are likely to experience a growing and inevitable disadvantage, even as the middle of the pack dramatically thins out.

➂ The right autonomy

We’re heading into the era of Autonomous Business Processes (ABP):

  • In the early stages, this includes auto-generation of repeatable documents, such as fee agreements, offer letters, and onboarding/contracting pieces.
  • In more mature stages, it includes servicing tasks and supports within the organization, including the routing, visualization, and reporting of task and disposition items to department entities, managers, and team-members.

These developments are now rapidly pairing with voice, email, text, and virtual meeting spaces. COVID massively accelerated virtual workplaces, and those changes will not unwind.  The result is a tendency toward socialized and digitalized networking, less risky experimentation and creativity, and more ‘work as a lifestyle’ as teams put themselves and their tools together.

Autonomous organizations can be highly effective because their business processes tend to run without the day-to-day or hour-to-hour involvement at C-suite level. This frees up business owners and leaders to spend more time on strategic decision-making because the workflows in the organization are fine-tuned to deliver and repeat key performances needed for its economic model and to handle exceptions however they occur.

Final thoughts

In terms of technological choices, recruiters who have proven their ability to adapt and continuously improve are the likely to outperform their competitors, for the simple reason that they’re able to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Successful solutions can come from global recruitment giants or single-person startups. What matters is education and iteration to continuously grow and drive results. Top-performing firms recognize that investing in the right recruitment software solutions is essential in the tooth and claw evolutionary battle of business competition.


Martin Snyder - President & Co-Founder of Main Sequence Technology, Inc., developers of PCRecruiter recruitment technology
Martin Snyder leads regulatory and organizational compliance for Main Sequence Technology. As a co-founder and principal of Main Sequence, he helps provide executive and policy leadership as an active manager of the business. Mr. Snyder has a background in sales, recruiting technology design/implementation, SMB tech, and consumer finance.

Podcasts are a great way to get the latest recruitment industry insights, topics, and trends. Listen anywhere, on-the-go for actionable tips you can take with you the next time you step into the office. Need help getting started? Read PCRecruiter’s list of six top recruitment podcasts.

There’s no better way to stay up to date with the latest recruitment industry trends, than by listening to your favorite recruitment podcast. On your daily commute or whilst relaxing at home, listen whenever, wherever to get your daily dose of insight into the recruitment industry. 

Whether you’re looking for an in-depth interview with a recruitment industry leader, tips and tricks you can take into the office with you the next day, or a beginner’s guide to the fundamentals of recruitment, the right podcast can take you deep inside the world of hiring. 

But if you’re new to podcasts, new to recruitment, or searching for something that fits your recruitment niche, it can be difficult to know where to start. So, here at PCRecruiter, we’ve compiled our shortlist of top recruitment podcasts.

Read on to get listening! 

Recruitment Podcasts


Talk Talent To Me

Recruitment Podcasts: Talk Talent To Me

https://talktalenttome.com/

Drawing on a deep talent pool of recruitment leadership, Talk Talent To Me takes listeners on a rollercoaster ride through talent acquisition. Covering everything from strategies, metrics, and techniques through to current industry trends, it features top talent leaders on the front line of modern recruitment. The show is hosted, produced, and edited by Hired’s Content Marketing Manager, Rob Stevenson. We like the depth and breadth of talent interviewed, from VP’s of Global Talent, to CHROs.


The Recruiter Startup Podcast

Recruitment Podcasts: The Recruiter Startup Podcast

https://anchor.fm/recruiter-startup-school

With over a decade in the industry, Dualta Doherty has a hands-on approach to setting up and successfully running a recruitment business. Each episode, the founder of Dualta Doherty & Partners and this very podcast, is joined by recruitment agency leaders from around the world to talk about what it takes to start up, scale up, and operate at the highest level of recruitment. We enjoy hearing about the successes and challenges of recruitment industry leaders, and the valuable insights into setting up on your own.


Recruitment On The Go

Recruitment Podcast: Recruitment On The Go

https://soundcloud.com/recruitmentonthego

Everything you ever wanted to know about recruitment in daily, bite size pieces. Hosts Caitie and Mingus give you the latest lowdown on recruitment trends, top tips and tricks, plus all the tools and resources you need to maintain a competitive edge in the recruitment industry. Ideal for recruiters, HR specialists, and talent acquisition managers alike, each episode offers inspiration and insight, wherever you happen to be. We listen out for the actionable recruitment tips provided in each episode.


Recruiting Future

Recruitment Podcast: Recruiting Future

https://recruitingfuture.com/purpose/

The self-styled ‘calm voice of recruitment continuity’ offers insight, inspiration, and inclusivity in the fast-paced, ever-evolving world of recruitment. With a particular focus on the future of talent acquisition, each episode covers a different aspect of the industry, from technology, and automation to diversity and inclusion. With an eye on the future of work, guests are typically recruitment thought leaders and pioneers from the wider business world, who share ideas and experiences designed to inspire listeners and drive change. We like the focus on giving a platform to new and diverse voices in recruitment.


The RecruitingDaily Podcast

Recruitment Podcast: The RecruitingDaily Podcast

https://recruitingdaily.com/podcasts/recruitingdaily-podcast/

Going behind the scenes of the world’s most influential talent acquisition teams, the RecruitingDaily podcast is a one-stop shop for the latest insights into recruiting, sourcing, and talent acquisition. Each episode drills down deep into a complicated topic, breaking it down into understandable chunks in order to help recruiters take their game to the next level. We enjoy the sheer variety of content, from equity audits to using virtual meetings to streamline recruitment processes.


The Elite Recruiter Podcast

Recruitment Podcast: The Elite Recruiter Podcast

https://pod.co/the-elite-recruiter-podcast

Benjamin Mena’s show covers a broad range of recruitment-related content, taking listeners on a journey through money, marketing, sales, leadership, and placement. Along the way, you’ll pick up tips, tools, and tricks from some of the best in the business. Hear the stories of top recruitment professionals, how they got to where they are now and the mindset that got them there. We like the Elite Recruiter Podcast for its vibrant and insightful look at the industry.


So you’ve reached the end of our list, only to find your favorite recruitment podcast is missing? Get in touch with PCRecruiter and let us know why we should give it a listen! And for even more podcasts, check out our Top 5 HR Podcasts blog post as well!

App Specific Passwords for Gmail

Changes to Google’s security policies at the end of May could affect your ability to send/receive @Gmail address mail from PCRecruiter. Setting up an app specific password will help to keeps your Google account login secure and in sync with PCRecruiter.

Creating App Specific Passwords for your Gmail account improves your security and may be imperative for PCRecruiter users who have an @gmail.com account linked to the database for incoming or outgoing mail.

Secure your Gmail with app specific passwordsAs of June 2022, Google no longer supports the use of your primary Gmail username and password when connecting from third-party apps and devices. These changes imposed by Google are part of a strategy to strengthen account and application security.

One of Google’s alternative options is App Specific Passwords, which are additional passwords for your Gmail account that you designate for use by one specific site or app. Creating separate passwords, rather than using your main Google password across multiple apps and sites, isolates any security risks to one site or service. If that App Specific Password should ever be compromised, it can be disabled without interrupting or exposing any other services associated with your Gmail login.

How does this affect PCRecruiter users?

This new policy will only affect users of @gmail.com addresses. It is not currently being applied to Google Workspace or Google Cloud Identity accounts. If you are using Google’s email servers but have your own domain name associated with the account, you may continue to use your existing password, but we do recommend switching to a more secure method for security’s sake.

In regards to our recruiting software, PCRecruiter, this policy change should only impact your ability to send or receive email within PCRecruiter if you are using an @gmail address with a standard Google password.

Example Sign in with Google Button
Google Sign In Button Example

You will find Sign in with Google buttons on PCR’s Outgoing Mail (SMTP) screens. These are the preferred method of connecting your Gmail account to PCRecruiter. If you see a button like the one shown here and use it to authenticate with your Google Account, an App Specific Password is not necessary.

Setting up the App Specific password option is a viable method of upgrading your security with PCRecruiter or any other services you may be using your plain Gmail password on when no Sign in with Google method is available. For those using IMAP to read or write activities for incoming mail, App Specific passwords are required at this time. See Google’s info on creating these app-specific passwords here.

If you need further assistance, contact PCRecruiter Support.

We love podcasts – they make commutes and grocery shopping fun. There are so many great HR podcasts available, covering every topic under the sun, so we’ve compiled a list of a few favorites which will keep you inspired.

We’re really keen on podcasts here at PCRecruiter. Why? Because they can make boring commutes or grocery shopping much more interesting!

There are a variety of HR podcasts available – covering topics from employee perks to corporate branding, and everything in between. We’ve prepared a list of some of our favorites and hopefully these shows will help you stay on top of changes in the industry and gain a little inspiration from those leading those changes. Here they are in no particular order:

HR Podcasts


Emotion At Work

HR Podcasts: Emotion @ Work

https://emotionatwork.co.uk/podcast/

Started in 2017, the Emotion at Work podcast is led by Phil Willcox and dives into the full spectrum of professional emotions that people experience at work. Phil’s belief is that emotions should be at the center of everything we do as they are so impactful throughout our lives – especially in our jobs. The episodes are released monthly and are a true deep dive into the chosen topic.

Phil speaks with industry professionals about a variety of themes, including emotion control, emotion expression, digital body language, shame, and other pressing social issues in the workplace. Phil and his guests share their personal stories and aim to build a greater knowledge of emotion among the listenership. The podcast, and its themes, are built on the vision of Phil’s company and look to educate and train people in emotion in any organization.


Talent Magnet

HR Podcasts: Talent Magnet Leadership Podcast

https://www.talentmagnet.com/podcast

Every week, Mike Sipple, the co-founder and CEO of Talent Magnet Institute, has discussions with thought leaders, industry executives, and a variety of HR professionals to better understand the sector. The topics they cover include business, relationships, community, and life in general. It’s a brilliantly varied podcast that taps into each guest’s personal experiences and how those have shaped their successes as well as their failures.

Founded in 2001, Talent Magnet was built with the objective of transforming business leaders and their organizations into ‘talent magnets’. They’ve become a trusted name in talent and aim to develop the skills of their clients, making them better leaders, and making their teams better because of it. With that goal in mind, they want the culture of quality leadership to work as a ‘talent magnet’ so that businesses that commit to improvement attract the talent they need.


#WorkTrends

HR Podcast: #WorkTrends

https://talentculture.com/worktrends-podcast/

#WorkTrends, hosted by Meghan M. Biro of Talent Culture, is a podcast series and Twitter chat that revolves around current HR news and features experts from around the industry. With over 400 total episodes, there is a serious back catalog for new listeners to tap into.

Some of #WorkTrends’ most recent episodes show just how varied the topics can be so matter what part of HR you’re interested in they’ll be something that grabs your attention. Seriously, check out their last few installments:

  • The Everywhere Workplace – Prioritizing Employee Experience
  • The Urgency Epidemic – Prioritization & Productivity
  • Building a Courageous Work Culture: Why it Matters
  • Myth Busting Common Video Interview Concerns
  • Military Hiring – Diversity, Inclusion & Business Success

The Recruitment Hackers

HR Podcast: The Recruitment Hackers

https://www.therecruitmenthackers.com/podcast

The Recruitment Hackers is a community of talent acquisition professionals whose mission is to promote best practices, tools, and industry trends. They’ve grown into a network of experts and a part of that connectivity is through The Recruitment Hackers podcast.

The weekly content deals with a wide range of themes, including recruitment automation, optimizing the candidate experience, and harnessing culture to attract the appropriate kind of people. The podcast prides itself on offering real-life examples of companies that are recruiting successfully as well as proven strategies to grow your talent pool. Best of all, they don’t get caught up in trends and make an effort to point out the gimmicks that are springing up in the recruitment space.


Chad and Cheese

HR Podcast: Chad & Cheese

https://www.chadcheese.com/

Of all the podcasts on this list, we think it’s safe to say that this one has the best name. Branding themselves as the snarkiest industry experts out there Chad Sowash and friend-of-PCRecruiter Joel Cheesman have built a platform with a number of different podcasts that cover European HR trends, HR startup critiques, and interviews with other recruitment pros to name a few.

Their particular style might not be for everyone’s taste but they definitely aren’t afraid to be open and honest about their views. It’s clear that whether you like them or not, they have a genuine wealth of knowledge and experience, over 40 years between them, and that makes this podcast well worth listening to – just get used to their lack of filter(!).


These podcasts are just a small selection of a huge range of available insight that is out there in audio form. We hope you check the suggestions out, and get as much from them as we have.

Do you have any HR podcasts or recruitment industry podcast favorites? Comment below and let us know what they are.

Times change and recruiters can’t just rely on a spreadsheet of contacts, quick thinking, or a ‘roll-up list’ in LinkedIn to get ahead in an industry which never slows down. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) offers recruiters a custom built technology that can support them in their work to deliver great candidates to great employers. To show how that pairing is made easy by an ATS we want to show you 5 key benefits of the software.

Times change and recruiters can’t just rely on a spreadsheet of contacts, quick thinking, or a ‘roll-up list’ in LinkedIn to get ahead in an industry which never slows down. 

An Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) offers recruiters a custom built technology that can support them in their work to deliver great candidates to great employers. To show how that pairing is made easy by an ATS we want to show you 5 key benefits of the software.

Repeatability

What do you do with the other candidates that you didn’t put forward for your latest role? 

You’ve cultivated 10 of the brightest marketers for a recent commercial role and you’ve placed 1 of them straight into the job (nice work by the way!) But now you’re left with 9 additional shining stars
 So what do you do with them? 

Well, with an ATS you can easily transpose your broader inventory of existing candidates into new roles. Simply put, an ATS helps you put the right people in the right places – so you have them all, ready to go, as soon as a new opportunity lands (or you go out and create it!)

Richer Data

We all love to drop in on LinkedIn and check out candidate history. But all too often, the details given barely scratch the surface. What about everything they don’t write about – things like their ambitions, their home life, their lifelong, unflinching love of the Chicago Cubs –? 

With an Applicant Tracking System you can save all that rich, personal data on your candidates in one place – to give you a true, more three-dimensional profile to take forward.

Specialist Database

Feel like pursuing a niche? As you build up multiple candidates for a new position you’ll realize you’ve actually farmed up a good herd of industry specific talent. You can make and save great contacts within that industry and then propel your dedicated flock toward them in a move that’s guaranteed to land in the right spot.

Success Support

Customer service and success support are absolutely critical when implementing any kind of software. After all, if you can’t use it, what’s the point in having it? 

An ATS is only going to deliver the benefits you need if it’s configured to your requirements. We only come to understand that by listening to what you really need. We’ve been in business for over 20 years and have adapted our levels of service over time; while understanding that every recruiter is different.

Automation & Efficiency

We’ve grouped these two together because automation feeds into and supports efficiency. A lot of recruiters are still using databases and pulling out information themselves. A properly configured ATS can scan your emails, set reminders, notify contractors – and much more besides. 

On top of that, call recording and dialing history features help to automatically fill out the CRM component of your system. No-one likes having to backfill an activity log, and with an ATS you don’t need to.

The bottom line is that recruiters want to save time by increasing speed. They have to compete to get the best employers and candidates on their books and Applicant Tracking Systems support that goal to a tee. 

At PCR we support everyone – from one user offices up to massive multinationals – in exactly  the same way; with expert support at every step.

 

Want to go bigger and better in recruitment? Contact PCRecruiter today.

GetApp’s quarterly ATS ranking showcases the leading Applicant Tracking cloud apps in the North American market. PCRecruiter has been once again ranked in the Top 10!

GetApp research team identifies and evaluates hundreds of products, focusing on the top 10-15 cloud-based software products in the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software category. They then creates the Category Leaders list to help business owners and decision-makers  in evaluating their ATS technology options.

The ranking highlights key factors that small businesses should consider when assessing which software products may be right for them. These factors include user perception (“user reviews”), compatibility with other systems (“integrations”), mobile offerings (“mobile”), technical capabilities (“functionality”), and product security (“security”).

Check out the rankings at GetApp’s site or contribute your own review of PCRecruiter.

GetApp Category Leaders constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, GetApp or its affiliates.

PCRecruiter is ready for the GDPR

Main Sequence’s guiding principles in regards to EU Data Protection Laws are to:

  1. Remain continuously informed about the status of actual legislation, current recommended best practices as presented by the EU government, data protection authorities, and pertinent private industry exemplars, and accomplish technical requirements associated with compliance.
  2. Ensure that customers are offered the longest practicable lead time to make required changes and minimize business disruption, including any ongoing obligations to Main Sequence, associated with Main Sequence’s compliance, or non-compliance, with relevant EU Data Protection laws.

The Genesis of GDPR

The pertinent law, scheduled for full-effect 25 May, 2018, is EU Directive 016/679, headed “General Data Protection Regulation”. The now-standard acronym is “GDPR”. The GDPR law is presented as lengthy assembly of principles related to nearly every aspect of handling information.

The GDPR is structured around detailed and defined roles for the various parties involved with handling information. The persons that are the subjects of information (candidates, clients) are called Data Subjects. The parties that process data (recruiters) are called Data Processors, and the parties that collect and use the data (such as Main Sequence) are Data Controllers.

The GDPR rule developed in light of the previous rule, and from a political process that unfolded over the previous decade. The political sticking points involved with international data protection are inescapable when subjecting firms with varying interests, assets, and exposures to various sovereigns, and arriving at dispute enforcement mechanisms that are actually compelling of good behavior.

So far, these structures have taken the form of quasi-treaties. One that was heavily relied on by Data Processors was known as “Safe Harbor”. Safe Harbor was built around a memo of understanding between vendors and US government agencies that the vendors would reasonably respond to EU data protection authority demands.

Eventually, the EU judiciary did not find that protection to be adequate, and in ruling C-362/14, the EU Court of Justice determined that Safe Harbor would no longer suffice for compliance with EU Data Authority rules.

This decision created immediate disruption and uncertainty for hundreds of cloud vendors and thousands of customers. In response to that pressure, the EU executive body (EU Commission) issued COM 566 (November 2015), stating that Data Exporters who had executed contracts with Data Importers containing unmodified EU provided standard Model Contract Terms (and appropriate appendices) would be compliant until further notice. These contract terms are explicit and comprehensive, although enforcement remains situational.

Main Sequence’s Status as Data Controller

Main Sequence interprets section (106) of Directive 016/79 (“The Commission should monitor the functioning of decisions on the level of protection in a third country, a territory or specified sector within a third country, or an international organization, and monitor the functioning of decisions adopted on the basis of Article 25(6) or Article 26(4) of Directive 95/46/EC.”) as authorizing us to continue offering EU Model Contract Terms until at least 25 May 2018 or such time as the EU Commission no longer recognizes the Model Contract Terms as sufficient safeguards under Directive 016/679.

Along with GDPR, a successor to Safe Harbor was created. It’s called Privacy Shield. Main Sequence is a certified participant in Privacy Shield as of 20 November, 2017. That certification may be found here.

In EU Commission COM(2017) 611 (final), the Commission states that: “In its Decision of 12 July 2016 (“the adequacy decision”), the Commission found that the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield (“Privacy Shield”) ensures an adequate level of protection for personal data that has been transferred from the European Union to organisations in the U.S.”

Main Sequence is satisfied that Data Controllers may use our services in the reasonable expectation that they will be found adequate under GDPR.

A key open question of enforcement for Data Processors appears to be the question of where data must be hosted. On 16 October, 2017, The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case United States v. Microsoft, which turns on the question presented to the court:

Whether a United States provider of email services must comply with a probable-cause-based warrant issued under 18 U.S.C. 2703 by making disclosure in the United States of electronic communications within that provider’s control, even if the provider has decided to store that material abroad.

On 23 March, 2018, The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, commonly known as the CLOUD Act, was signed into law. The CLOUD act contains a provision that requires email service providers to disclose emails within their “possession, custody, or control,” even when those emails are located outside the United States. This law rendered moot United States v. Microsoft, which was dismissed by the Supreme Court on 17 April, 2018.

This development removes a significant potential incentive for the EU to demand in-region hosting services.

PCRecruiter Compliance

In addition to the model contract terms, Main Sequence notes the following in regard to compliance with Directive 016/679:

  • PCRecruiter security settings will be set to high by default
  • Consent management tools already exist in PCRecruiter for opt-in and opt-in renewal + status notation. These tools are being streamlined and extended for GDPR, and GDPR specific training/consulting/configuration will be available to our customers prior to 25 May, 2018.
  • Data portability tools already exist in PCRecruiter to download individual data records as report objects. As with consent management, these tools will be streamlined and ready for use when the law comes into effect. The data portability requirements of the GDPR, in particular, are likely to be developed by enforcement practice subsequent to the 25 May, 2018 effective date of the regulation.
  • Main Sequence will provide complete database return to customers upon request.
  • Main Sequence will report to a customer any data breach within 72 hours of discovery.
  • Search and sort tools to facilitate removal of no-longer pertinent data at appropriate intervals already exist in PCRecruiter.
  • Main Sequence will perform all minimum legal requirements for EU Data Processors, and in the event of a default by Main Sequence of any EU Data Processor requirement, Main Sequence will release any EU Data Controller customer from any future contractual obligations and /or waive any early termination fees associated with closing a PCRecruiter account prior to contract expiry.
  • Main Sequence will actively monitor compliance responsibilities for EU Data Processors operating in the United States and processing EU Personal Data.
  • Pseudonymisation is not a required technique, but may lower exposure to notification requirements in the event of a security incident. It is unlikely that PCRecruiter records can be fully pseudonymised because direct identifiers (data that can be used to identify by cross-linking through other information that is in the public domain) such as addresses, phone numbers, etc. are essential recruitment information. Pseudonymisation features may be expanded in PCRecruiter (for example, “blinded” C/V’s) or coded candidate submissions which could work to limit further interrelationships between recruitment firms and their customers as pertaining to the GDPR
  • Main Sequence has no role in selecting a Data Protection Officer for customers, or in acting as one on behalf of customers.
  • Main Sequence recognizes that our customers may require support to configure PCRecruiter for essential tasks associated with their role as Data Controllers. Important steps for Data Controllers include, but are not limited to:
    • Documenting Security of Processing
    • Evaluation Pseudonymisation/Encryption
    • Assessment of Compliance
    • Data Breach Notification Planning
    • Estimating Data Protection Impact
    • Identifying Data Protection Officer
    • Design Data Acquisition and Maintenance for Minimum Impact
    • Review/Update Processor Contracts
    • Audit Record of Processing Activities
  • For customers requiring certification for PCRecruiter as a Data Processor, please refer to our Privacy Shield certification. For customers seeking information/training/configuration of Data Controller tools within PCRecruiter, please contact your Main Sequence sales consultant or submit a request to our online support system to schedule services.

GDPR Compliance Features

The following capabilities will be available upon request in the first week of May, 2018:

GDPR Data Fields

A GDPR tab on all name records, which contains new fields for tracking the Consent Date and Consent Purposes.

Consent Status Highlighting

Records with Consent Purpose set to Awaiting Consent or Revoked Consent are flagged in orange and are automatically opted out of all list-based email. Names that exist in the database at the time of activation will be automatically set to Awaiting Consent.

Consent Form Letters

Consent Form Letters are generated, which include ‘Insert Field’ merge tags leading the recipient to affirm or revoke consent. Selecting Deny sets the Consent Purpose field on the name to Requested Deletion.

Job Board Consent Requirement

A configurable consent agreement is added to the PCR Job Board so that all online applicants are prompted to affirm consent before proceeding to submit information.

Activity and Consent Log

The system adds New Activity types for tracking consent activity, and also adds a dedicated “Consent Log” panel for retaining all details and notes pertaining to consent collection.

Inactive Record Identification

An EUC Consent Purpose filter is added to the Identify Inactive Records panel, facilitating the location of inactive records and adding them to a list for Forgetting or other handling.

Global Change

A new Global Change option allows admin to apply consent setting to multiple records at once, such as all names that have Requested Deletion. All changes are recorded to the Consent Log.

Forget and Download

New Forget and Download action items appear for admin-level users, allowing them to relegate any single contact to the Forget Bin or to back up the record’s fields and attachments locally. An option also exists for ‘auto-forgetting’ records that remain without consent for a given period of time.

Forget Bin

Once ‘forgotten,’ a record is given an ID and sent to the Forget Bin admin area. The email remains visible in the bin only. The ID takes the place of the record in Position Pipeline history.

Earlier this year, SoftwareAdvice released their latest FrontRunners data. Main Sequence is proud to see PCRecruiter listed in the Masters quadrant, scoring 4+ out of 5 on most of the measured stats, such as Value (4.26) and Integrations (4.9).

FrontRunners is powered by Gartner Methodology and offers a data-driven assessment of the most capable and valuable systems for small businesses. It’s driven by real user reviews/ratings, and verified product data.

The content for the FrontRunners quadrant is derived from actual end-user reviews and ratings as well as vendor-supplied and publicly available product and company information that gets applied against a documented methodology. The results neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or any of its affiliates.

Two Minute Tuesday: October 2016 Update

In this Two Minute Tuesday, we’re looking at a handful of new changes that you’ll see on our hosted PCRecruiter servers later this week. We’ve added a faster way to upload resumes, revived the ‘Associate Rollups’ function for Positions, adjusted the Interviews list, and added a new ‘Scheduled Items’ column to the Rollups.

In this Two Minute Tuesday, we’re looking at a handful of new changes that you’ll see on our hosted PCRecruiter servers later this week. We’ve added a faster way to upload resumes, revived the ‘Associate Rollups’ function for Positions, adjusted the Interviews list, and added a new ‘Scheduled Items’ column to the Rollups.

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 Tuesday, and that means it’s time for another edition of Main Sequence’s series of short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to help make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

A few new change are going to appear on the PCRecruiter.net system this month, and in this edition of our video series we’ll give you the highlights.

First, a new ‘Quick Upload Resume’ option appears under the ‘Actions’ menu on the Name record. The existing ‘Add Resume’ option isn’t going anywhere, but the new ‘Quick Upload’ takes you straight to your system’s file browser. The full ‘Add Resume’ area allows you to copy and paste a resume, change formats, make edits, created a blinded copy, and so on, but if you just need to add or replace the resume and don’t need to view or interact with it, this new Action offers a slightly quicker route.

Next, you’ll find an ‘Associate Rollups’ option when you’re looking at the ‘Associations’ area of any Position record. This is a feature from older PCRecruiter versions that’s now made its way into the current release. Associating Rollups is a handy way to bookmark the groups of Names or Companies that you may have used for sourcing a particular Position, or to relate similar Positions to each other for easy access. By keeping a list of the companies you sourced from or candidates you found but didn’t end up actually attaching to the pipeline for the job, you can shortcut your future searches when handling similar opportunities.

You may also notice some tweaks to the columns you see when looking at a candidate’s list of Interviews. We’ve removed a couple of rarely necessary items, such as Contact Phone and Placement, and readjusted the widths and the orders of the remaining columns. This makes room for new items like ‘Written By’, which is the username of the person who created the most recent or furthest into the future Pipeline record connecting that Name and Job, and this column which shows the Appointment Date from that same record. If you’ve activated PCR’s pipeline integrations with Spark Hire video interviewing, IBM Kenexa Prove It! assessments, and so on, you’ll also see columns for those results. This new arrangement makes it easier to quickly see the current standing of the candidate for each job they’re connected to.

Finally, we’ve added a new column option to the Rollup Lists. By adding the ‘Scheduled Items’ option to your custom Rollup layout, you’ll see the date of the next item in your PCRecruiter schedule, not including Interviews, that’s tied to the given Name, Company, or Job. If you’re using Rollups for calling lists and other planning tasks, you may find this a helpful way to keep tabs on your next upcoming call or meeting related to that record. And if you’re not sure how to add columns to your custom Rollup layout, then you’ll want to stay tuned for next week’s Two Minute Tuesday!

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

Two Minute Tuesday: Copying User Settings

How do you give one user all of same settings and preferences as someone who’s already in the system? In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday, we’re going to look at how an admin user can duplicate settings from one user to another.

How do you give one user all of same settings and preferences as someone who’s already in the system? In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday, we’re going to look at how an admin user can duplicate settings from one user to another.

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

In an earlier edition, we talked about what to do when you want to remove a user from the database. What happens when you add a new user and want them to have the all same settings as someone who’s already in the system? In this week’s video, we’re going to look at how an admin user can duplicate settings from one user to another.

We’ll start by going to System and opening up the ‘Users’ section. If you don’t see this option, you’ll need to log into PCRecruiter as an administrator. Before anything else, let’s go into ‘Manage Users’ and find the account that’s got the prototypical settings we intend to copy. On the main information panel, we’ll want to verify that the ‘Model User’ setting is set to ‘Yes.’ Only the accounts designated as models will show up as sources to copy settings from.

Now let’s see how the process works when adding a new user. We’ll click the ‘plus’ to create a new account, and fill in the basic details like name, email, phone, username, and password.

At the bottom of this info panel, we have a dropdown to copy settings from a model user in this database. We can copy some or all of the basic settings. The ‘Security’ option is disabled by default, so if you do want to give the target user the same security settings as the model, you’ll need to check that box. Items that are checked by default include the custom layouts for name, company, and position records, position pipeline configurations, custom rollup list layouts and stage setups, and settings for which menu items are pinned and unpinned on various screens. There’s also an option to make duplicates of any form letters associated with the model user for the target user, but this is generally left unchecked. When we save, the new user gets the model’s settings, and we can adjust from there as needed.

What if we want to copy settings between users that already exist? We get to that panel from the Action menu on the user list, or from into the System’s main Users area. On the left, you’ll see the ‘Source User Name’ dropdown, which lists all of the model users in this database. The checkboxes for the various settings appear below.

On the right side, we’ll see a ‘Target Database’ dropdown. The default setup is to copy settings between users in the current database, but we can select a different database from the account if we have more than one. Just be aware that we can only copy settings across databases if the account we’re logged in with exists as an administrator account with the identical username and password in both the source and the target databases.

In the checklist below, we can either select all the users in the database as targets, or just specific ones. When we click ‘Save’, all of the selected settings on the target users will be replaced by the ones from the model user.

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

Two Minute Tuesday: Images in Emails

People often ask our training team how to add their social media icons to their email signatures, or how to put images into their form letters. Today’s Two Minute Tuesday covers using images in HTML emails.

People often ask our training team how to add their social media icons to their email signatures, or how to put images into their form letters. Today’s Two Minute Tuesday covers using images in HTML emails.

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 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.

Today we’re going to look at how you can add images to your emails in PCRecruiter, and particularly how to insert clickable icons for your LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social profiles into your email signature. These same principles apply for adding images to stationery, templates and form letters, and other emails.

But before we get started, a few general pointers about images in emails. Due to the lack of standards across mail reading apps and providers, getting images to show up consistently and reliably is not as simple as you’d expect.

Many email readers, most notably Microsoft Outlook, are set up by default not to download or display inline images until the recipient says it’s ok to show them. For this reason, always assume that none of your images are going to load. We’ll show you how you can supply alternate text to describe the images for those who can’t view them.

As a general rule, using fewer images means more predictable display, reduced chances of triggering a spam filter, and faster sending and receiving, so before inserting any image, decide if you really need it, and leave it out if you don’t.

Let’s edit the signature. From the System area, we’ll scroll to ‘Email Setup’ and open ‘Email Signature’. Now we’ll use the ‘Insert Image’ option in the toolbar. We can either use a web-hosted image, or embed a PNG, GIF or JPG file from the local hard drive.

On the “General” tab, we have the option to specify a web URL for the image. This causes the email reader to download the image from the web when the message is received, rather than embedding the image data into the email code. This keeps the message smaller in size, which can really speed things up when you’re sending a bulk mail. It’ll also prevent the image from showing up as an ‘attachment’ for anyone who has embedded images blocked by default, but remember that web-hosted images are hidden or blocked just as readily as embedded ones, so the method of inserting the image won’t likely improve visibility one way or the other. If you don’t have anywhere to store your commonly used logos and icons online, the ‘Server Image Store’, also found under ‘System’ in PCR, can serve in a pinch. The ‘Image Description’ box is where we’ll place the alternate description text for folks who can’t see the picture.

We can also change the display dimensions of the image. Most inbox windows are no more than 400-500px wide, so it’s currently considered best practice to crop or resize to that general maximum width for email use. It’s always better looking, faster loading, and more reliable to resize the actual image file rather than scaling it to a new size when it loads in the email, so if your picture is too big or too small, change the image file rather than using this feature if you can.

The ‘From File’ tab is used for embedding an image into the email directly. To do that, we click and browse. After the image is in place, we can click it and go back to the ‘Insert/Edit Image’ tool to give it that alternate description text in case it’s not displayed.

To make the image a link, we highlight it and then use the ‘Insert Link’ icon. Paste the appropriate URL into the box, and you’re done.

One bonus tip
 what if we want our LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook icons to line up side by side? That’s where an invisible table comes in handy. We’ll use the ‘Table’ option in the editor to create a 3 column, 1 row table. Now we can put the images into the cells of the table. The dotted borders we see while editing are guides that won’t show up when the email is sent. Try adjusting the properties of the table and the cells to create the layout you have in mind.

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

Two Minute Tuesday: Pipeline Automation

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday introduces you to the power of automation plans in the Pipeline. We’ll show you how to trigger a form letter and place an applicant on a list based on their movement from one stage of the recruitment process to another.

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday introduces you to the power of automation plans in the Pipeline. We’ll show you how to trigger a form letter and place an applicant on a list based on their movement from one stage of the recruitment process to another.

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 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.

Automating common tasks saves you time, and since a lot of your time in PCRecruiter is spent in the Pipeline, automating your Pipeline tasks can save you a lot of time. We looked at configuring the Pipeline Statuses in an earlier video, and today we’re going back to them to talk about Automation Plans. Automation Plans are simply a checklist of tasks for the system to perform when a specific trigger has occurred. Automations can be triggered by Pipeline moves, Rollup Stage changes, Profile submissions, and certain job board actions.

Here in our Pipeline, we’ve made a Status under the Out-of-Process type called “Turndown” which our recruiters use to indicate those candidates who were not interested in the offer. We’d like to send these Candidates a Form Letter thanking them for their time, and also place them on a Rollup so that we can easily find the people who’ve turned down previous offers, or perhaps filter them out of a search, if we should want to in the future.

To create the Automation Plan, we’ll head to System from the main menu, and we’ll search for Pipeline Setup. The configuration icon in the Action menu will take us to the ‘Manage Automation Plans’ screen. Now we’ll click ‘Add’ to create a Plan.

By default, an Automation Plan will run “automatically” without any user interaction, but we can check this box to insert a user acknowledgement popup before the Plan is run. This can be helpful if you’re creating an automation that you might want to skip on occasion, or if you just want to notify the user that they’re about to trigger an action.

Next, we’ll use this selector to choose from the available Statuses that we’ve configured for this database. Here we’ll expand the Out-of-Process type, and select our “Turndown” Status code.

Now we need to tell PCR what the Plan should do. In our case, we want to add the Candidate to a Rollup and send them a Form Letter. There are two emailing options in the Automation Plan – this first one is for sending a simple, plain-text email with no field data merged into it. This is good for generic notifications, but not useful for our purposes, so we’ll skip over that. We do want to use this ‘Copy to Rollups’ area though, so we will check this box at the far right to activate this section, and we’ll use the picker to choose the Rollup we want the Candidate added to.

Next, we’ll check the box to activate the Send Form Letter section. This box lets us choose an alternate email field from the Name record, but since we want to send the letter to the email stored in the Candidate’s standard Email Address field, we can leave the box alone. For the ‘From’ email, we want this letter to come from the person whose username is associated with the job. Finally, we’ll use the ‘Form Letter Name’ box to select the Form Letter we want to send from the ones we’ve created in this database. We can optionally override the name of the Form Letter with some other arbitrary subject line. Then, we save the Plan.

Going forward, when any user drags a candidate into the “Turndown” Status on the Pipeline, the Form Letter we’ve selected will be emailed to them, and they’ll be added to the designated list.

For more Two Minute Tuesdays, please follow us on Facebook or Twitter, join the LinkedIn PCRecruiter Users group, subscribe to this YouTube channel, 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: Profile Form Basics

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday video looks at the rudiments of creating and completing a Profile form. This is a high-level overview of a very deep feature, so we’ll get into more about Profiles in a later edition.

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday video looks at the rudiments of creating and completing a Profile form. This is a high-level overview of a very deep feature, so we’ll get into more about Profiles in a later edition.

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

Today we’re talking about the basics of Profiles. These are customizable, searchable forms that can be attached to names, companies, or jobs. Profiles for Names can also be completed directly by the contact via an emailed link or while applying to an online job posting. Profiles are great for skills checklists, candidate data sheets, phone calling scripts, and storing supplemental details for jobs and companies. They can trigger automations for sorting purposes, and with custom HTML applied, they can even be used for candidate presentation.

First let’s see how a Profile is used. From the Name record, we’ll pick ‘Submit Profile’ in the Action menu, and then pick from the list of the available forms we’ve created. After saving, the completed form appears in the attachments area of this record for editing or viewing. The text of the selected answers and text boxes is now searchable keyword content, just like this person’s resume and notes. If we search for one of the answers marked off in the form using the keyword search, we’ll find the records whose Profiles contain that text.

These forms are created from the ‘Profile Setup’ area under System. We click the ‘Plus’ to add a new form, and give it a name. You may also want to change the ‘Profile Type’ – in the ‘single’ mode, each record in the database can have just one of this form attached, while ‘multiple’ mode lets you attach many copies to the same record. Another important item is the ‘Allow Update’ checkbox. If you add, remove, or reword questions and answers in a Profile, the records that already have a completed copy attached will not reflect your new changes unless this box is checked. If it’s unchecked, the questions and answer options in the completed forms will remain as they were at the time when they were filled out.

Once we save the initial settings screen, we can build the form with the ‘Questions’ sidebar item. In the “Add Question’ popup, we put the text of the question into the left box, and if there are multiple answer choices, they go to the right – one answer per line. Below the answer box, we can specify the type of answer
 single line, checkbox, multi-line text area, and so on
 and if the question is required for the form can be saved. If it’s a required question and a dropdown, using ‘(Please Select)’ as the first option indicates to the system that nothing has been picked yet.

As we discussed earlier, all Profile answers are keyword searchable, but if you want the answer to any single-line or multiple-choice question to be copied into a distinct field on the record for visibility, searching, or reporting purposes, you can link this answer to that field. Just be aware that this only saves the Profile answer into the field, and not the other way around. Once the Profile has been completed for a specific record, changes to this answer in the Profile will update the linked field, but changes directly to the field will not be reflected in the attached Profile.

When we’re done adding questions, they can be re-ordered by dragging them up and down, and they can be removed completely by clicking the trash icon.

As you can see, there are many more options available on these setup screens, and you can expect a video about advanced Profile tricks in the future, but that’s all for this week’s Two Minute Tuesday. Please follow us on Facebook or Twitter, join the LinkedIn PCRecruiter User group, subscribe to this YouTube channel, 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: September 2016 Update

In this Two Minute Tuesday, we’ll take a departure from tutorials to show you a few of the more noticeable improvements to PCRecruiter that appear in our September update, due out this week.

In this Two Minute Tuesday, we’ll take a departure from tutorials to show you a few of the more noticeable improvements to PCRecruiter that appear in our September update, due out this week.

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.

This week we’ll take a departure from tutorials to show you a few of the more noticeable improvements to PCRecruiter that appear in our September update.

One change you’ll notice right off the bat is in the ‘Recently Viewed’ tiles that appear in the main Name, Company, and Position search screens. Where the previous versions of PCR would display only the most recent ten records viewed, the new version shows up to fifty. How many you’ll see at once depends on your available screen size, but you can use these arrows or dots to navigate, or even click and drag to see more. Look for more functions and enhancements coming to this area soon.

Another tweak you may find helpful is that the titles for your browser windows will now indicate the name of the PCRecruiter record they display. So, for example, when we right-click on this position and open it in a fresh tab or window, the browser tab displays the title and position ID. The same goes for Names, Companies, Rollups, and others. If you’re the sort of user who keeps multiple PCRecruiter tabs open at once, this will help you keep them straight.

We’ve also added some new features to the free PCRecruiter mobile app for Android and iOS, in addition to a round of speed and stability improvements.

First off, when you’re on a company record, you can now tap the ‘Names’ option at the bottom to see the people associated with that company, and you can tap the new ‘Add’ icon to create new contact records directly within the current company.

We’ve also got PCRecruiter integration into the native email application. When you select a resume file attachment from a message on your device, you’ll find that the PCRecruiter app is available as a target for handling it. After selecting “Copy to PCRecruiter,” you’ll get the option to simply ‘Inhale’ the resume into the default company as a new candidate, or to use something more like the ‘Add Resume’ utility to parse the contact info from the resume and verify or enhance it with more detail. If you select this option, you can also add the new record to a specific Company, Position pipeline, or Rollup list on the fly.

We have some very exciting new features to announce before the end of the year, so to keep on top of everything, watch our blog posts on your PCR login screen, subscribe to this YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and join the PCRecruiter LinkedIn users group. If you have any topics or suggestions for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Rollup “Call Plans”

In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re looking at the ‘Plan’ feature in the Rollup lists, which combines the Rollup and Schedule into a valuable tool for tracking your phone call lists for sourcing and business development.

In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re looking at the ‘Plan’ feature in the Rollup lists, which combines the Rollup and Schedule into a valuable tool for tracking your phone call lists for sourcing and business development.

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.

One of the primary uses of Rollup Lists in PCR is to keep track of your calling plans. In this week’s video, we’re going to look at the Plan feature, which helps you to keep track of who you’re planning to call each day, who you reached, and who you didn’t, by placing some or all of a list on your Schedule.

Every Plan starts with a Rollup list of contacts. We’ve talked about Rollups in an earlier Two Minute Tuesday. To use the Plan, we need to properly configure the Stages on our Rollups. The ‘Configure’ option is in the Action menu at the upper right corner. We’re going to work with the Stage Setup tab.

There are nineteen configurable Stages in Rollups, which you can use to track a variety of selection and ranking tasks. We’ll discuss this screen in more depth in a future video, but the key item for this process is the ‘Merge Plan’ column, which includes a simple Yes or No dropdown for each Stage. We want to set this to “Yes” for any Stage that requires future action – such as leaving a voicemail, or if the contact wasn’t able to chat when we reached them. Stages that are dead-ends, such as wrong numbers or lack of interest, can be left at the “No” setting.

Now that we’ve got that set, let’s walk through using the Plan. Here’s a list of Developers in Chicago that I plan to call. There are 400 people on this list, and I want to try to reach 20 of them each day. Let’s see how the Plan feature can help.

First, we’ll select the current page, which contains 20 contacts. Now we’re going to use the ‘Plan’ option in the Action menu. Here, we’ll select the date and a chunk of time in which we plan to try and reach these contacts. We can add notes about the project, a reminder alarm, and so on, before saving. If we click ‘Schedule’ and view the desired date, we’ll find our Plan holding the selected time slot.

When it’s time to execute the Plan, we’ll click ‘Open Plan’. We are now looking at the first selected subset of our Chicago Developers Rollup. It’s the same Rollup List, and all of the records remain on the list, but this Plan view is filtered to show only this Plan’s selected contacts. As we make the calls, we use our configured Stages to record the outcomes.

When we’ve contacted everyone, or when we’ve reached the end of the time we’d allotted, we select ‘Merge Plan’ from the Action menu. Now we will see our Chicago Developers Rollup List, minus anyone who has been given a Stage with a “No” merge setting. Now, we can select a group of results from this filtered view and create a fresh Plan to schedule more calls.

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: Finding “Lost” Contacts

Have you ever misplaced a record? It’s very difficult to permanently erase information from PCRecruiter unintentionally, so usually a record that seems to be gone is simply not where you’re looking for it. This week’s Two Minute Tuesday looks at some techniques for locating these ‘lost’ contact records.

Have you ever misplaced a record? It’s very difficult to permanently erase information from PCRecruiter unintentionally, so usually a record that seems to be gone is simply not where you’re looking for it. This week’s Two Minute Tuesday looks at some techniques for locating these ‘lost’ contact records.

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.

There are few things more confounding than trying to find a record you know should be there, but it just isn’t. In this week’s edition, we’re going to look at ways to find a seemingly lost contact. In almost all cases, the record is still there. You just have to know where to look.

If you think the record may have been deleted, the first place to check is the Recycling Bin. In older versions of PCR, this was on the MyPCR screen, but in PCR 9 you’ll find it at the bottom of the System menu.

When you delete records in PCR, they aren’t actually erased – they’re simply removed from the searching indexes, compressed to save space, and sent to this Recycling Bin. If you do see the missing record here, you can use the ‘Restore’ link to send it back to where it came from. You’ll only see your own deleted items, but admin users can use the pulldown to get to records deleted by anyone at all. If you do want to permanently delete one or more items, you can check the boxes at the left, and use the ‘Remove’ button.

If the person we were looking for doesn’t seem to be in here, it’s likely that he’s still in the database, but some or all of the data on his record has been somehow replaced, making him harder to locate.

Let’s say we were searching for the candidate by name and he didn’t come up. Perhaps someone has changed the first name from Bobby to Robert, so we’ll try searching for him by email address instead. Unfortunately, that’s not finding him either.

If we can’t locate him by his fields, we might be able to find him by his keywords. If his name and email fields were both altered, but his resume or profile is still attached to the record, then a keyword search for his name or other identifying data in those documents may bring up whatever record those items are attached to. We’re going to wrap the name in quotes so we find only occurrences of the first and last name together in that order.

But what if this is a client or some other contact that has no resume? That’s where the Activity text search box can come in handy. We’ll click ‘Activities’ in the main menu, choose a likely date range for some interaction with that contact, and enter the name into the ‘Text Search’ box.

Here he is! It looks like these activities are attached to someone with a different name. Let’s find out why. From the navigation menu on the Name record, we’re going to choose the ‘Change Log’. This area lists all major alterations made to this record, with date, time, username, and the original value. Aha. Here we can see that another user replaced all of Bobby’s info with someone else’s a few days ago. Now we just need to make a new record for this other person’s info, and put Bobby’s data back the way it was.

Of course, if none of these methods pan out, you can always check out the Snapshot backup from the previous day, or get in touch with Main Sequence support about restoring from an earlier archive.

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: Custom User Metrics Report

As any manager will tell you, keeping track of what your team is accomplishing is key to success. One of the ways you can do this in PCRecruiter is to create a Custom User Metrics report to monitor the activity records for a better grip on your recruiting KPIs. We’ll walk through the setup in this week’s Two Minute Tuesday.

As any manager will tell you, keeping track of what your team is accomplishing is key to success. One of the ways you can do this in PCRecruiter is to create a Custom User Metrics report to monitor the activity records for a better grip on your recruiting KPIs. We’ll walk through the setup in this week’s Two Minute Tuesday.

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.

If you’re in charge of a recruitment team, you’ll want to keep tabs on the activity of your users. One simple way in which you can do this is with a custom User Metrics Report. Today we’ll walk through creating one.

First, we’ll click ‘Reports’ in the main menu. To create or edit a custom report, we need to select the ‘gear’ icon in the Action menu at the upper right. Now, from the group of tabs, we’re going to pick ‘Manage User Metrics Reports’ and choose ‘Add’.

In the window that appears, we use the first section to name the report. We’ll just call it ‘User Activity.’ Now we’ll open up the first row of data.

Each section includes a box for the label, a selector to choose what sort of metric it represents, and a link for choosing the source of the data.

For example, we can label the first box “Outbound Calls.” We’ll check the ‘Activities’ box, because we’re going to base this metric on the Activity record created when an outbound call is made. Now we’ll click on “Select/Edit Sources” and specify all of the possible outbound call activities.

We can also use the ‘Interviews / Placements’ option to track events in the pipeline. Here, we’ll make a label for ‘Submittals’, and select our ‘Submitted’ interview status.

It’s also possible to use the ‘Positions’ option to get numbers on jobs that have been created, filled, closed, and so on. In this column, we’ll create a ‘New Openings’ label, set the selector to ‘Positions’, and then choose the ‘Available’ option as the source.

Now let’s see how it works. To run the report, we’ll select ‘Auditing Reports’ and click on our new Custom User Metric report. We can also search for it by name from the reports menu search box.

We select the date range to report on – for this example, we’ll select the entire month – and we can exclude users by unchecking their usernames and apply additional filters.

When we print the report, the row of labels we created appears under each user, with a count of the applicable records. So, in this report, we can see that the user EWATSON had 65 outgoing calls this month, 12 submittals, and 20 new jobs entered. Clicking on the number searches the database for the applicable records.

We’ll look at more advanced metric reporting options in a future video, but that’s all for this 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 PCRecruiter login screen. If you have any ideas for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.

Two Minute Tuesday: Pointers on PCR’s Parser

If you’ve used PCRecruiter to import a resume, you know how much time its built-in contact parser can save you in completing the fields on the 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.

If you’ve used PCRecruiter to import a resume, you know how much time its built-in contact parser can save you in completing the fields on the 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.

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

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Configuring Interview Statuses

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. In this Two Minute Tuesday 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.

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. In this Two Minute Tuesday 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.

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

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Deleting & Changing Users

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? In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re going to look at what an admin user can do with the records when a PCRecruiter user leaves the organization.

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? In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re going to look at what an admin user can do with the records when a PCRecruiter user leaves the organization.

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 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Rudiments of Keyword Searching

For this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re going to go over using Boolean keyword search methods in PCRecruiter to find the candidates, jobs, and contacts you’re looking for.

For this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re going to go over using Boolean keyword search methods in PCRecruiter to find the candidates, jobs, and contacts you’re looking for.

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 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Candidate Submittal Workflow

In our Two Minute Tuesday video this week, we’re going to go over one possible workflow for handling the submission of a candidate to the hiring authority. We’re also touching on pipeline email templates.

In our Two Minute Tuesday video this week, we’re going to go over one possible workflow for handling the submission of a candidate to the hiring authority. We’re also touching on pipeline email templates.

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 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: MyPCR Search Links

We’re looking at yet another way to customize and configure PCRecruiter to suit your sourcing and recruiting process in this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video. Today we’re walking through adding a custom search to your MyPCR screen.

We’re looking at yet another way to customize and configure PCRecruiter to suit your sourcing and recruiting process in this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video. Today we’re walking through adding a custom search to your MyPCR screen.

Note: The ‘invalid email’ search shown in this video is not valid for databases using the Lucene search engine.

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 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Customized Portal Ribbon

Attention users of the PCRecruiter Portal for Microsoft OutlookÂź! This week’s Two Minute Tuesday video is for you. We’ll look at how to tweak the ‘ribbon’ to save you some tab switching while you’re working.

Attention users of the PCRecruiter Portal for Microsoft OutlookÂź! This week’s Two Minute Tuesday video is for you. We’ll look at how to tweak the ‘ribbon’ to save you some tab switching while you’re working.

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 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Configure the Basic Search

For this week’s Two Minute Tuesday tutorial, we’re looking at ways to speed up your basic field searches by configuring your Basic Search form and results layouts.

For this week’s Two Minute Tuesday tutorial, we’re looking at ways to speed up your basic field searches by configuring your Basic Search form and results layouts.

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.

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.

If you’re one of our many Windows-based PCRecruiter users, you should mark July 29, 2016 on your calendar as the end of your free Windows 10 upgrade period.

The free Windows 10 upgrade offer was a first for Microsoft, helping people upgrade faster than ever before, and July 29th is your last chance to get in on the deal. After July 29, upgrading your Windows 7 or 8 machine to 10 could cost $119 or more retail.

Most Windows 7 and 8 software is compatible with Windows 10, and PCRecruiter 9 is no different. If you’re still using PCRecruiter 8, you can also move to Windows 10, but you’ll want to continue working within Internet Explorer 11, rather than the newer Microsoft Edge browser, which is only compatible with PCRecruiter 9. We still recommend running PCRecruiter 9 in Google Chrome, regardless of your operating system.

To get your free Windows 10 upgrade, visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-upgrade

Two Minute Tuesday: Relational Database Structure

In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re going to take a departure from how-to and take a broader look at how PCRecruiter’s internal database is laid out.

In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re going to take a departure from how-to and take a broader look at how PCRecruiter’s internal database is laid out.

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 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Geographic Searches

It’s Tuesday, and we have a fresh Two Minute Tuesday tutorial to share! This week’s video shows you a few ways to find records by their location which you might not have tried before.

It’s Tuesday, and we have a fresh Two Minute Tuesday tutorial to share! This week’s video shows you a few ways to find records by their location which you might not have tried before.

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 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.

This week, we’re going to look at techniques for searching your database by geographical area, and we’ll walk through a few simple searches, showing you some techniques you might not have tried.

Let’s start with phone number, since area codes can indicate where someone is located, although the portability of cell phone numbers means you’ll likely use this as a starting point and then re-filter your results. We can search the home phone, cell phone, work phone, and so on using the basic search form, but there’s also a comprehensive ‘All Phone’ option, which looks at every phone field in the record at once. To search by multiple area codes, we can use commas to separate them. For example, searching ‘All Phone’ for 416,647,437 finds everyone with a phone number near Toronto, Ontario.

We can use comma-separation with the City and State too. If we want to find people in Aurora or Naperville, we can select ‘City’ and enter ‘Aurora,Naperville.’ Now, there are a lot of cities called ‘Aurora’ and we only want results from Illinois, so we’ll add “IL” into the State search. PCR’s basic search treats these boxes as AND criteria, so it’s going to give us results with either Aurora or Naperville in the City field AND Illinois in the State field.

Similarly, using commas in the State field searches for multiple states. A search for OK,AR,LA,TX will find anyone in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, or Texas. But there’s actually an even simpler way to do searches across multiple states or regions like these.

If you do a Google Image Search for “zip code prefixes” you’ll find maps showing how the postal codes are arranged. The states we’re looking for all have a zip code starting with 7, so rather than searching the state field for four states, we can just search for 7 in the zip code field. If we want to search in a more specific area, we can use the first two or three numbers of the zip code. For example, searching 845,856,874,813 finds people near the four-corners of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, even though that area encompasses multiple cities and states.

You can also run a more accurate area search with the Zipcode Radius tool. (This feature works with postal codes from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan. Max radius 100 miles.) Let’s say we want to find anyone within 50 miles of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We can do that from the Advanced Search screen. We’ll select Zipcode Radius from the first pulldown. Now, we click on the Radius icon to the right of the field. I don’t know the zip code off hand, so I’ll select City, and begin typing. We pick the desired city from the list, set the radius to 50, and click ‘Search’. PCRecruiter returns all of the zip codes within the chosen radius, and we can click ‘Accept’ to add them to the Advanced Search. In the search results, the City column will indicate roughly how far the listed City is from the radius’s center.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: RingCentral

Partnered with us since Fall 2015, RingCentral brings SMS and VOIP connectivity to PCRecruiter. If you’re one of the many folks who’ve ask exactly how the two systems work together, this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video is for you!

Partnered with us since Fall 2015, RingCentral brings SMS and VOIP connectivity to PCRecruiter. If you’re one of the many folks who’ve ask exactly how the two systems work together, this week’s Two Minute Tuesday video is for you!

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 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.

This week we’ll be looking at how PCRecruiter works with RingCentral, an integrated partner that gives users the ability to launch calls from PCR records, get incoming call popups linking to the matching PCR records, or send SMS text messages to one or multiple recipients at a time, and all with full activity tracking and reporting.

Here’s the RingCentral desktop app popping up, and now PCRecruiter pops up an indicator showing that there are records in my database matching the incoming call’s phone number. Clicking on the popup brings up the names, companies, and jobs bearing that phone number. Now I’ve got instant access to the records relevant to this call.

Well, now that you’ve seen an incoming call, let’s look at the outgoing side of things. If we mouse over any phone field on a record, the icons to call or text appear to the right. If we click on the phone icon, the PCR dialing popup appears with a short countdown, and then launches the RingCentral app to make the call. The popup remains visible so that we can write in some activity text while we’re on the call.

If we click on the SMS icon, the dialer window appears and we can select from the available phone numbers on the record to send a text message. We’ll click on the mobile number, which launches a fresh text message window in the RingCentral app.

Any calls or texts you which make on your RingCentral phone number, whether from a PCRecruiter screen, RingCentral’s interface, or the RingCentral mobile app, will generate activities on any record in your database matching the phone number. This means that you can keep your business communications and contacts separate from your personal cell number and still do your job on the go. Call and text logs from RingCentral are synchronized back to PCRecruiter’s Activities every few minutes, so now if we check back into the Activities area, we’ll see the inbound call, outbound call and text message have all been listed.

If we want to send the same text to multiple recipients at the same time, which can be helpful in notifying several candidates about a new opening, updating people on the status of a job, and so forth, we need to start by getting the recipients’ permission to include them in our bulk SMS messages. Check your local laws and regulations on bulk texting.

When RingCentral is enabled, a new Form Letter is added to the system which can be sent to your contacts, asking them to text the word Subscribe or Unsubscribe to your unique RingCentral number. The resulting Opt In list can be found and worked with by searching for SMS in the System area.

The bulk SMS option appears in the Action menu on your Rollup Lists and Search Results. You’ll select the records you want and click the SMS icon. The popup window indicates whether any of the people selected aren’t currently opted into your bulk texts, with the option to send the pre-defined invitation Form Letter to them automatically from this screen. To send a text to those who have opted in, you’ll just fill in the box with your message and click “Send”. RingCentral queues them up and sends them as individual texts from your phone number so that the recipients can text or call back.

If you’d like to get started with RingCentral and PCRecruiter, contact your Main Sequence representative for all the details.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Transferring Records

Our Two Minute Tuesday video series continues this week with a discussion of how to move or copy records between one PCRecruiter database and another.

Our Two Minute Tuesday video series continues this week with a discussion of how to move or copy records between one PCRecruiter database and another.

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.

In this week’s edition, we’re talking about transferring records between databases. You might have a separate databases in your account for different markets or divisions
 situations in which the jobs, companies, and candidates in those databases would never mingle in any way. Another common reason for extra databases is for archiving records that you don’t need to work with anymore, but don’t want to delete. If you need a blank database added to your account, contact our support department; our hosted billing is based on your number of users and the file size of your data, so there’s usually no additional costs involved unless you’re adding new users or duplicating significant amounts of data into the second database.

Moving data between databases requires access to both the source and target databases using the same username and password. And, if you’re not a database administrator, you’ll also need permission on the “Data Transfer” security setting for your username.

There are two ways to copy or move a record. The first method is from a Rollup List. If you need a refresher on Rollups, check out the video from January 19. Here’s a Rollup list of names I want to move to my Archive database. I start by selecting the records I plan to move, either with this dropdown, or by checking off specific records.

Now I go to the Action menu and choose Move to Database, or Copy to Database. “Move” takes the record out of the source database after it’s been copied, while “Copy” leaves the original record intact. We’ll use the “Move” option in this example.

We select the database we want to move the records to, and choose a method for recognizing duplicate names, or disable duplicate checking entirely. Below, we have the option to group the moved records on a Rollup list in the target database. We also have the option to swap out the resumes on any duplicates in the target for the one coming from this source database. The old resume will be moved into the attachments area on the record.

When we click the button, the records are transferred, along with their attachments, resumes, activities, and so on. If there’s no company in the target database with the exact same name as the one they belong to in the current database, their company will be copied also. Because we’re not moving the jobs they applied to, their Pipeline records cannot be copied, but you can still see most of that history in their Activity records.

The other method of moving or copying records is on a one-at-a-time basis from the record itself. If you move or copy single records frequently, you might want to set this up.

When you’re customizing your record layout (see our February 16 video), you’ll find a “One Click Setup” option for moving and copying at the top of the layout customization screen. In this popup, you can configure the default settings for moving or copying. You can also set a ‘Source Label’, which creates a “Candidate Referral Source” custom field on the record in the target database so you can track which database the name originated from. Once that’s configured, you can add the “Predefined: Move Database” field anywhere in your layout. This creates a button on your screen. Just click the button, and the current record is moved or copied to the database you’ve select, using your configured preferences.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Pipeline Layout

The Pipeline is the heart of the applicant tracking process in PCRecruiter, and this week’s Two Minute Tuesday shows you how to get even more out of it by customizing the data fields you see on your screen.

The Pipeline is the heart of the applicant tracking process in PCRecruiter, and this week’s Two Minute Tuesday shows you how to get even more out of it by customizing the data fields you see on your screen.

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 make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

The Pipeline is the hub of your candidate tracking process in PCRecruiter, and like many other areas of the system, you can configure the layout to help you work more efficiently. And who doesn’t want to work more efficiently, right?

Customizing the Pipeline begins with the Customize icon found, as usual, under the Actions menu. When it first pops up, the sections are collapsed. Let’s look at them one at a time.

The first option lets you define which data columns appear in the grid. Key items you’ll probably want to include will be the name, interviews link, most recent interview, and current status. You can also add a star ranking tool, and stage icons for more nuanced candidate sorting.

The Default Pipeline Folder option lets you set a specific interview type to load when you first open the Pipeline. In this case, I’m setting it to ‘Presentation’ so I always start off looking at the fresh candidates.

If you’re including the candidate’s Company in the columns, the Additional Company Detail Felds section allows you to add more fields below the company name, such as the location, username, etc.

The Additional Name Detail Fields section does the same thing for the name column. Let’s give this area some special attention. By using this section, not only can you add helpful data points like the candidate’s contact info, sourcing details, and so on, but you can also add links to any custom profile forms you’re using. If I add my custom skill sheet profile to the layout, I’ll be able to see a link to it right in the pipeline for any candidate with a completed skill sheet in their attachments.

Expand Interview Type is a holdover from older versions. PCRecruiter 9 automatically expands whichever sections were open the last time you looked at a pipeline, so we can skip this area.

Rows Per Page, as the name suggests, defines how many rows appear in your Pipeline grid. It defaults to 20 and can go up to 100. Keep in mind that adding too many rows or fields to any layout in PCR can negatively impact screen loading speeds.

The Reporting Options section turns on a shortcut to the built-in Applicant Tracking Report right here in the Pipeline. When this box is checked, the Reports icon in the Action menu can run the Applicant Tracking Report report, pre-filtered to this one job.

And if you want to tear it all up and start over, checking the Remove Layout box and clicking Save will wipe out all of your customizations so you can start fresh. Any customizations you make to the Pipeline config will apply to the pipeline screen for all jobs you view with your user login.

We’ll look at more powerful things you can do with your Pipeline in future videos, but that’s it for this week’s Two Minute Tuesday. For more, 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Rollups as Search Filters

In this Two Minute Tuesday we’ll be revisiting the topic of Rollup Lists. We’ll look at how you can use a Rollup as a filter when building an advanced search.

In this Two Minute Tuesday we’ll be revisiting the topic of Rollup Lists. We’ll look at how you can use a Rollup as a filter when building an advanced search.

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 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.

In an earlier video, we discussed how to put records on a Rollup List. We’re going to revisit rollups in this week’s episode, and talk about how they can be used as a search filter.

Let’s say we’re trying to do some business development in Salem, Oregon, and we have an existing Rollup List of active contacts in the city that we want to exclude from this new project. While the main name, company, and position search screens can perform a basic search of up to three fields combined, to do a search that excludes something requires the ‘advanced’ search. But don’t let the word ‘advanced’ scare you – it’s not as complicated as it might sound.

From the main ‘Company’ search, we’ll click on the ‘Advanced’ option in the navigation menu. Now we’ll build a search query to find the Companies in Salem, Oregon which don’t contain any names from our existing Rollup list of contacts.

Advanced search queries are built from left to right, one line at a time. We’ll start with the City. In the first pulldown, we select a general search area. In this case, we’re going to choose Predefined Fields, because City is a predefined PCRecruiter field. We choose ‘City’ in the second pulldown. In the third pulldown, we choose what sort of match operation we’re doing. The ‘Equal’ operator is the best choice here because we want exact matches for the term we’ll be using. We could also use the ‘Like’ operator if we were doing a partial match. And in the last box we enter our search term: Salem. Now we click ‘Add’ to lock in this line of the query.

Now we can build another line for the ‘State’ criteria, so that we don’t get Salem, Massachusetts or Salem, Ohio and so on. Again, we start on the left with Predefined Field; then choose State; the ‘Equal’ operator; and the value ‘OR’ for Oregon. We click ‘Add’ again.

Lastly, we’re going to use our Rollup list of client contacts as a filter. From the first pulldown, we’ll select ‘Name Rollup’, because we’re going to be filtering the search based on list of name records. When we use a list as a search criteria, the only options are “on list” or “not on list.” We only want to find companies where the names are not on the list. We use the popup arrow to select which list we want to use.

The pulldowns here allow us to set whether each line will be treated as an AND or and OR within the search query. In this case, we only want to find records where all three of the criteria apply, so it will be “AND” all the way down. In other cases, however, you might use these pulldowns to group a few criteria together
 for example, asking the system to find records where the city AND the state match, OR the records are not on the rollup list. The arrows allow you to move the criteria up or down to arrange such groupings.

When the query is built as you wish, you’ll click the search icon in the action menu to run it. If the results aren’t what you had in mind, clicking the ‘Advanced Search’ item in the nav bar will take you back to your search query to refine the criteria and run it again.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Email Opt-Out

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday video is about PCRecruiter’s email opt-in / opt-out email filter list, which helps you maintain a list of safe email addresses for your bulk mails.

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday video is about PCRecruiter’s email opt-in / opt-out email filter list, which helps you maintain a list of safe email addresses for your bulk mails.

Instructions for this setup are available in the Learning Center.

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 very short videos with tips, tricks, and tutorials to make you a more powerful PCRecruiter user.

Nobody likes to be on the receiving end of unwanted emails, and depending on where you do business, it may even be illegal to send them. Fortunately, PCR can maintain a list of addresses that have been opted into or out of email sent from your PCRecruiter accounts, and can automatically filter your outgoing emails to comply with that list.

PCR keeps this list in its own separate data table so that any email address that’s been flagged doesn’t receive your email, no matter which of your databases the mail is sent from. The email list is kept independent of your name records so that an email address can remain blocked even if the same address is on multiple contact records, or if you delete the name and re-add it later on.

Let’s set it up.

If no email blocking list has been set up on this account before, we need to tell the system which of our databases it can ‘piggyback’ the new data table onto. We’ll go to the Email Setup area under System and choose “Email Opt-in/Opt-out List”.  Which database we choose to latch the new table onto isn’t that important, but we want to make it’s one we never plan to delete, so we’ll just select the database we use most often and click Save.

We can use the ‘Add Email’ and ‘Import’ options at the bottom of this window to manually add email addresses to this list. Clicking the ‘Add to Rollup’ option searches the database for names which contain emails found on this list and then adds the names to a rollup list for further modification or deletion. And we can come back to this area at any time to search, edit, or export the email addresses

The next step is to configure the wording for your opt in and out links. We’ll go to the Name Letters area under System and click on the configuration icon. The ‘Opt Out Link Text’ is the text of the clickable link as it will appear in your emails
 for example “click here to stop further email communication”. The confirmation text is the message presented to someone after they have successfully opted out
 such as “Thank you. Your email address has been blocked from future emails.”  Similar messaging options appear for the ‘Opt-in’ links. You can set whether people who opt out will be blocked from receiving any emails, or just those emails sent to multiple recipients at once.

The last step is to insert the link into your form letters wherever applicable. You’ll find the opt-in and opt-out links in the Insert Fields list, and they work just like any other mail-merge field. In general, an opt-out link should be accompanied by your mailing address and phone number. Once someone clicks on the link, their email address will be automatically added to the list under the System area.

As always, Main Sequence recommends that PCRecruiter users check with legal counsel or local authorities about how best to comply with the laws for sending email in their area.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Google Calendar Sync

It’s Tuesday, and that means another Two Minute Tuesday video! This week we’re talking about PCRecruiter’s ability to sync with Google Calendar, which is not only a great way to see and manage all of your scheduled items in one place but also allows you to work with your PCRecruiter Schedule using external software and devices, using Google as the intermediary.

It’s Tuesday, and that means another Two Minute Tuesday video! This week we’re talking about PCRecruiter’s ability to sync with Google Calendar, which is not only a great way to see and manage all of your scheduled items in one place but also allows you to work with your PCRecruiter Schedule using external software and devices, using Google as the intermediary.

Instructions for this setup are available in the Learning Center. Please note that, like many PCRecruiter API integrations, this sync feature may only be available to pcrecruiter.net hosted accounts.

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

Today we’re going to look at synchronizing PCRecruiter’s built-in schedule with your Google Calendar. If you use the PCR schedule for your recruiting appointments, but use Google Calendar for everything else, syncing them will let you see, and manage, all of the events in one place. Plus, by syncing your Google Calendar with your mobile device, Outlook, or other calendar management software, you’ll be able to work with your PCRecruiter Schedule using third-party software, with Google as the intermediary.

Before we can sync, we need to make sure that the user account in PCR has the proper security settings. Under System, we’ll select Users, and then Manage Users – if you don’t see these options, log into PCR as an admin, or have an admin user do this step for you. On the user record, we select Security from the sidebar, and then verify that the “Synchronization” option is set to ‘Import, Export’. Clicking Save stores any changes.

Now we can sync with Google. We’ll make sure we’re logged in with the desired PCR user account, and then search for Sync under the System area to get to the Contact/Calendar Sync Settings.

In the popup window, we see a red status indicator, showing that there’s no active connection to Google. We click “Connect” and pick the Google account we want to sync with from the list. We’ll click “Allow” to authorize PCR with access to this Google account. Now the status indicator is green.

Next, we’ll click the Setup option. In the Sync Setup, we’ll pick our time zone, and then select which PCRecruiter Schedules to sync. I have two configured in my PCRecruiter account, but I only want to sync this ‘Personal Meetings’ schedule with Google, so I’ll leave the other unchecked. Clicking “Save” activates the sync.

Now a new ‘Personal Meetings’ calendar will appear in my view on Google, and any changes made at either end will be reflected on the other. If I add an event to my “Personal Meetings” Calendar in Google, it will show up on the schedule in PCR. And if I move that event later in the day in PCR, it will be moved in Google too. Changes are synced roughly every five minutes, but often faster.

The sync only affects this particular calendar, and doesn’t alter or merge with any other Calendars you have in your Google account. We also recommend setting a distinct color for the synced calendar in PCR and in Google so it’s easy to differentiate.

One last note – if you’re still logging into the old PCR 8 web version for some tasks, we recommend that you only edit the schedule from PCR 9 after syncing with Google. Saving events from the PCR 8 calendar, particularly recurring items, can lead to synchronization problems.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Referrer Field

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday explains the ‘Referrer’ field, which is where PCRecruiter tracks the source of your new candidates as they register via the Web Extensions or your external job postings.

This week’s Two Minute Tuesday explains the ‘Referrer’ field, which is where PCRecruiter tracks the source of your new candidates as they register via the Web Extensions or your external job postings.

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

Today we’re going to look at the ‘Referrer’ field, which helps you determine where new names in your database are coming from. The field is automatically populated by the system, so you probably already have data in it, but you might not be aware of it.

On the MyPCR screen, clicking the ‘Web Candidates’ bar searches for people who have recently added their own name to my database via the web extensions. If I click on any name, and then look in the ‘Details’ area, I’ll often find a ‘Referrer’ field with a value in it such as “Indeed,” “LinkedIn.com” etc. This tells me where this person first registered from. How does that data get there?

Well, any time a job link is generated by one of the system’s external posting utilities or job feeds – scenarios in which PCR knows what site or service that apply link is going to be published on – the job link is has a source tag embedded in it. When someone clicks the link and creates a name record, the system records that source tag in the Referrer detail field.

If the candidate just browses their way into your website, or directly loads a job link which wasn’t tagged, then PCR tries to record the last domain name found in the candidate’s browser history prior to reaching the PCRecruiter screen. If there’s no Referrer data, then PCR may simply have been unable to tell where that candidate came from, or the name may not have been self-entered by a candidate.

So
 what if you’re manually sharing a job link on a website or in an email, and you want to control what appears in the referrer field to track the effectiveness of that posting or campaign? Easy. We start by clicking the ‘Add Links’ icon in the editing toolbar on the job record. This popup contains the direct links to this job in our job board. The first two links point to the job description page and, one step further, to the ‘new user’ form for that job. If you use one of these links, PCR will try to guess the referring source based on the browser history. The links at the bottom of this window go to the same screens as the two above, except you can manually alter the source tag. Simply remove the bracketed tag after the equals sign and replace it with the term of your choice when you post it, and PCR will put that value into the Referrer field.

We should point out that Referrer is not the same as EEO Source. Referrer is only collected when a new name is added to the database and doesn’t change if they apply to another job at a later date. Referrer is a record of where this person initially found you. The EEO Source is a self-reported “how did you hear about this job” answer, which the candidate may answer differently each time they apply. Also, if you want to search the Referrer field or add it to your custom layouts or reports and don’t see it as an option, you may need to go to the ‘Name Custom Fields’ area under System to define it first.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Blinded Resumes

In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday, we’re going to walk through the process of creating a confidential or “blinded” copy of a resume in your system so that it’s safe for sending to third-parties.

In this week’s Two Minute Tuesday, we’re going to walk through the process of creating a confidential or “blinded” copy of a resume in your system so that it’s safe for sending to third-parties.

Note: One piece of this video is slightly out of date due to recent updates. Rather than a ‘pencil’ icon when no blinded resume is present, you’ll see the option to upload or paste a blinded resume in addition to blinding the one on file as shown in the video.

Updated "Blinded Resume" Options
Updated “Blinded Resume” Options

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

This week, we’re looking at creating a confidential or ‘blinded’ resume in PCRecruiter, which is a common task to perform before sending a candidate’s information to a potential hiring authority.We’re going to start by quickly parsing a resume into the system as a new candidate record. We’ll click the icon at the upper right, choose ‘Name’, and then choose ‘Parse from Resume’. Clicking ‘Start’ launches the ‘Add Resume’ utility. Now we click ‘Open’ and select a   resume. The system parses the contact info from the resume header, and everything looks good, so we click ‘Save’ to store the new candidate.

Now, we want to create a blinded copy of the document that’s safe for distribution to a client. On the name record, we’ll click ‘Resume’ to view the stored document. The ‘blinded’ option appears in the side bar. At the start, there is no blinded resume and we simply see a blank document. To start creating the confidential version, we mouse into the document and click on the gray pencil.

This will launch whatever appropriate document editing software is installed on my machine – in this case MS Word – with a copy of the resume. Now, we simply go through the document, removing any identifiable information or details.

When all of the necessary edits have been completed, I just close the editing software and save, which causes the system to upload the document back to the PCRecruiter database. Clicking the resume area to reload shows us that the new blind copy has been stored.

Once I have this blinded resume on file, it becomes available as an option whenever I’m sending resumes out of the database. For example, when I select names to email to a hiring contact in the pipeline, the Blinded resume appears as an option in my list of attachable files. When both a complete and blinded copy of the resume are present, PCR will default to selecting the confidential version.

If you get a completely new resume from the candidate at a later date, you may need to update the blinded resume as well. If you don’t want to edit the current blinded resume, you can use the ‘delete’ option in the actions menu to remove the blinded resume from the record, and then repeat the blinding process with the new resume. It’s also worth noting that the original resume on file is the only one that’s used for keyword searches. The blinded resume content is purely for use as a confidential copy to share with third parties, and doesn’t affect the way a record is indexed by PCRecruiter’s internal search engine.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Quick Find

When we introduced PCRecruiter 9 in late 2014, one of the coolest new enhancements was the Quick Find box. This week’s Two Minute Tuesday will show you how the Quick Find can get you to the record you want and doing what you needed to do with it in fewer clicks than a full search.

When we introduced PCRecruiter 9 in late 2014, one of the coolest new enhancements was the Quick Find box. This week’s Two Minute Tuesday will show you how the Quick Find can get you to the record you want and doing what you needed to do with it in fewer clicks than a full search.

NOTE: This feature is only available on PCRecruiter.net hosted accounts.

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 very short videos with handy tips, helpful tutorials and hot topics related to PCRecruiter.

This week we’re going to look at the Quick Find feature, which was introduced with PCRecruiter 9, but which you might not be taking full advantage of. The Quick Find is a really handy way to get to the records you’re dealing with currently and perform a number of common tasks with them.

The Quick Find box is located in the upper right corner of your screen. To use it, you’ll just type any term into the field – this can be a name, a company, a web address, a title, a job ID
 even a phone number.

For example, let’s say I’m looking for a contact of mine named Hiram Smith. I type “Smith” into the box, the system returns up to five names, five companies, and five positions that have “smith” somewhere in their major fields. In looking at these results, we can see that in some cases Smith is the last name, and in some cases it’s part of the company name. In the positions section, there’s even a job title that includes “Smith”.

Which five records appear is decided based on the last date of activity or changes to the record. That way, the “Smith” I’ve been dealing with most recently is likely to appear in these Quick Find results. And if the Smith I want isn’t in the database, there’s a ‘plus’ icon so that I can add a record on the fly.

The icons below each result give you fast access to the major functions for that record. I can send Mr. Smith an email, view his resume, create an activity or note, add an attachment, submit a profile form, look at the pipeline interview records, or add his name to a rollup. Under the company results, I can also add a new name or job to a company. And from the position results, I can open the external posting panel, email the job info to someone, add a new pipeline record, view the pipeline, or record a placement.

Clicking on any record loads it in the lower panel and closes the Quick Find results, but if I simply want to close the results section manually, I can use the small ‘x’ in the upper corner.

This new way to get to your records isn’t a replacement for the full name, company, and position search screens that PCRecruiter has always had, but if you need to find a record you’ve touched recently and do something with it in a snap, the Quick Find can be a great shortcut.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Custom Layouts

One of the most powerful features of PCRecruiter is the ability to configure your fields and screens to fit your own purposes. Today’s Two Minute Tuesday walks through the process of configuring the custom layout of name records. The same principles apply to job and company records as well. PCRecruiter 9’s layout editor makes it a snap!

One of the most powerful features of PCRecruiter is the ability to configure your fields and screens to fit your own purposes. Today’s Two Minute Tuesday walks through the process of configuring the custom layout of name records. The same principles apply to job and company records as well. PCRecruiter 9’s layout editor makes it a snap!

If you’re using both PCR 9 and PCR 8 interchangeably with the same username, you may want to skip this one, as the older version may not be able to make sense of the configurations you make with the newer version.

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 very short videos with handy tips, helpful tutorials and hot topics related to PCRecruiter.

PCRecruiter 9 introduced even more flexibility into name, company, and position screen customization. Tweaking your screen layout to put your important info where you need it can help you get things done faster. If you haven’t done it before, we’re going to show you how.

Let’s customize the name record layout. Under the action menu, I’m going to choose the ‘Customize’ option. If you don’t see the icon, your account may not have the necessary permission to make these changes, so check with your admin user.

Right now, my screen is laid out with two columns. My monitor is wide enough for a third, so I’m going to add a column. I want to separate the contact information into its own group. I create an empty group and name it “Contact Info”. Now I can drag the contact fields into the new group, and I can click the menu on each field if I want to make it required or read-only, change the way it’s labeled, or give it a default value.

I want to add “Cell Phone” to this group. To add a field, I click the empty slot and start typing to find it in the list of available fields. Here it is. Oops! This highlight means that my selected field is already on the layout somewhere else, so I can just move it.

I can also use the ‘Add Group’ button to include larger panels such as the resume, attachments, activities, and so on. To do that, I select “Shortcut” instead of “Regular Group”. I can use the dropdown to select “View Formatted Resume” as the content of this panel, which will let me see the resume right on the record without going into the resume screen. Once I’ve created field groups, I can move the groups into any order I choose.

Let’s say I’ve got a set of fields that I don’t need to see all the time, but I do need all in one place. I can add more tabs to my layout to include them. I click this ‘Plus’ at the top and give the new tab a name. Now it appears here as an option. Before clicking it, I need to save the changes I’ve already made. Now I click on my new tab and add groups and fields to it.

Now let’s see the result. Here’s the new layout, and the new tab. This layout will apply to all names I look at while logged in with my username. The ‘View Formatted Resume’ panel is closed by default, but clicking on it expands it. PCR will remember which expandable panels I have open or closed, so I’ll see the same items expanded as I move from record to record.

You can customize your company and job layouts in the same way, and an admin user can copy one user’s layouts to others in the database to keep things consistent.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Stationery & Signatures

Today’s Two Minute Tuesday looks into creating signatures and stationery in PCRecruiter, and the reasons why you may want to have both. Even those of you using the PCRecruiter Portal for MS Outlook will likely want a signature configured for use with bulk emails and form letters.

Today’s Two Minute Tuesday looks into creating signatures and stationery in PCRecruiter, and the reasons why you may want to have both. Even those of you using the PCRecruiter Portal for MS Outlook will likely want a signature configured for use with bulk emails and form letters.

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 very short videos with handy tips, helpful tutorials and hot topics related to PCRecruiter.

In this week’s edition we’re going to talk about the email signature and email stationery features in PCR. Both of these items can be configured from the ‘Email Setup’ area under ‘System.’

When you launch an outbound email from PCR, you’ll always start with either an empty document, or with a saved template or form letter. When you’re opening a new, non-form-letter email, PCR usually gives you a blank page to type into. But if you have configured a stationery, then that stationery will be loaded as your starting point rather than the default blank document.

In your stationery, you can define not only a signoff for your email, but other elements like headers or sidebars or background images. You probably won’t want to get too wild with the layout though. Emails with lots of fonts, colors, and images not only can look unpredictably different on computers other than your own, but can also make spam filters a bit more suspicious, and generally tend to have a lower response rate than emails that are less fancy and more personal.

It’s possible to enable or disable the stationery at any time with the dropdown at the right of the setup screen. You can even store multiple stationeries in the system if you need to switch between them for any reason.

Many people choose not to use a stationery, but simply set up a signature. Using the dropdown on the configuration screen, you can set your signature to be automatically appended to the bottom of all blank emails you begin. Alternately, you can choose the “Select Signature for Each Email” option, which allows you to manually add the signature to your messages whenever and wherever you please by clicking this icon in the editing toolbar.

We recommend creating a signature even if you’re going to use stationery, because the signature is also used whenever you have a template or form letter containing the “current user email signature” merge tag. This is great for situations where multiple users need to send the same form letter, but want to include a personal sign-off. Just add the tag wherever the signature should appear in the form letter, and the system will place your signature there when you send that email to one or more people.

Remember, if you have both a stationery and signature active, the stationery will be loaded as the starting point for your one-off emails, and the signature will remain available for use in form letters or any time that you click the ‘signature’ toolbar icon.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: HTML Job Descriptions

In this Two Minute Tuesday we’ll look at best practices for entering job descriptions in PCRecruiter’s HTML editor. We’ll talk about the difference between using “Enter” and “Shift+Enter,” and about how to make sure your descriptions are clear of inline font formatting so that your jobs can be consistent on the web.

In this Two Minute Tuesday we’ll look at best practices for entering job descriptions in PCRecruiter’s HTML editor. We’ll talk about the difference between using “Enter” and “Shift+Enter,” and about how to make sure your descriptions are clear of inline font formatting so that your jobs can be consistent on the web.

NOTE: You can also use the ‘Tx’ icon in the HTML editing toolbar to wipe all formatting from your highlighted text.

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 weekly series of very short videos designed to highlight often overlooked PCRecruiter features, concepts, or best practices in a convenient couple of minutes.

In this “Two Minute Tuesday” we’re going to talk about job descriptions. PCRecruiter stores all job descriptions in HTML format, and PCR 9’s industry-standard HTML editor is largely self-explanatory, but understanding a bit about how it works with HTML can help you create more visually consistent job descriptions.

Proper HTML only describes a document’s structure, not its appearance. It “marks up” which parts are paragraphs, headings, or list items, but says nothing about their fonts, colors, sizes or spacing. If my job description only contains structure markings and not visual styling, it will automatically take on the styling of the website or document it appears in. Right now it’s being displayed in the default styling of the HTML editor itself.

This “Qualifications” line should be a heading. My instinct might be to change its appearance with the font size pulldown, but the better method is to mark the text as a heading, using this dropdown here. My website’s got rules about what styling should be applied to headings, so my job description’s headings should automatically follow those rules. As a bonus, if those rules change when I revise my website, I won’t have to update all my job descriptions.

Another thing you should be aware of is ‘shift-enter.’ If I’m typing within a paragraph and I hit enter, all I’ve done is added a line break into my current paragraph. When I hold shift and hit enter, the editor creates a new paragraph. My website’s already got style rules regarding how much margin should be between paragraphs, headings, and so on, so when I insert line breaks where I really mean to start a new paragraph, the spacing could be off. Shift- enter works in reverse while I’m working inside a list
 simply hitting enter creates a new list item, while using shift-enter creates a line break inside of my current list element.
Lastly, job description source documents often lack proper structure markings, so when you copy and paste into any HTML editor, including PCR’s, the software’s best guesses about line breaks, bullets, and so on may be incorrect. It’s always best to start with unformatted text or type descriptions directly into the editor if at all possible. If you’re using the Chrome browser, there’s a shortcut; copy your text, and then use CTRL-Shift-V, which pastes only the unformatted text into the editor. Then just re-apply the structure markup from there.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Import Contacts from LinkedIn

Another Two Minute Tuesday video is here! This time we’re going to walk through exporting your contacts from LinkedIn as a CSV file and importing them into your PCRecruiter database with the Generic File Mapper/Importer. This is a great way to load up contacts for a new recruiting desk or when you’re getting started with a fresh database.

Another Two Minute Tuesday video is here! This time we’re going to walk through exporting your contacts from LinkedIn as a CSV file and importing them into your PCRecruiter database with the Generic File Mapper/Importer. This is a great way to load up contacts for a new recruiting desk or when you’re getting started with a fresh database.

NOTE: This video was made in 2016 and some information may have changed. As of 2020, LinkedIn’s instructions for exporting contacts can be found here.

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 this week’s “Two Minute Tuesday,” Main Sequence’s weekly series of very short videos with tips, tutorials and techniques designed to help you become a more powerful PCRecruiter user in just a couple of minutes.

In this episode we’re going to walk through importing a list of contacts from LinkedIn, which can be handy when you’re just getting started with PCR or if you add a new recruiter to your office and want to load their connections into the database.

You can import them one at a time of course, and there are browser plugins that can shortcut the process, but if you want to bring all of your LinkedIn contact data into the system at once, here’s how to do it.
Under “My Network” on LinkedIn, open “Connections”. Now click this little Settings gear on the right, and under ‘Advanced Settings’ you’ll find an Export option. The default data format is a text file with comma-separated values, otherwise known as a .CSV, and that’s just what we want. Click export and fill out the Security Verification to start the download.

The data that’s included in the export will depend on your particular LinkedIn account and connections. I’ve opened my exported data in Excel and deleted all of the empty data columns to save myself some hunting in a later step.

Now, in PCR, we’ll go to the quick-add icon in the upper right, and choose Name. We want to Import a List.
Step one is to create or select a rollup list (see last week’s episode for more on those). I’m going to pick this empty list I made earlier. We can choose from a few pre-loaded data formats, but for this purpose we want the Generic Importer.

Now we browse for the CSV file. The default settings here are just fine for our purposes. After we click ‘Next’, we click in these boxes here to choose which column in the CSV should be imported into each PCRecruiter field listed on the left. My data only had names, companies, email addresses, and job titles, so I can leave the rest alone.

We click “Next” again, and specify how the system should handle any duplicates. I’m going to tell it to update any existing records in the database with the data from the CSV if the Name and Company both match exactly. If there’s no exact match, a fresh record will be made. Any contacts that have no company name at all will be imported into the default candidate pool company.

When we click “Import”, the system starts creating name and company records as appropriate for everyone in the CSV, and adds all the names to the selected Rollup so they’re easy to start working with.
As a final tip, you might want to consider having a blank database added to your PCRecruiter account for doing big imports like this. That way you can make sure the imported data all looks correct and clean before transferring the records from the empty database into your live one.

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: What is a Rollup?

In this week’s new Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re talking about Rollups. Rollup lists are one of the most powerful tools in the PCRecruiter toolbox, but are often underutilized or misunderstood by new users (and even seasoned ones). This video gives the overview, and in future editions we’ll get into some of the cool things a Rollup can be used for.

In this week’s new Two Minute Tuesday video, we’re talking about Rollups. Rollup lists are one of the most powerful tools in the PCRecruiter toolbox, but are often underutilized or misunderstood by new users (and even seasoned ones). This video gives the overview, and in future editions we’ll get into some of the cool things a Rollup can be used for.

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 this week’s “Two Minute Tuesday,” Main Sequence’s series of very short videos designed to highlight often overlooked PCRecruiter features, concepts, or best practices in a convenient couple of minutes.

This week, “What is a Rollup?” Rollups are one of PCRecruiter’s most powerful features, and yet they’re often misunderstood or underutilized by newer users.

In the simplest terms, you can use a Rollup to group together (or roll up) any bunch of names, companies, and/or jobs. Common reasons for grouping records are to save search results, which you can then sub-search and sort within, manage calling lists, send a bulk email or text message, filter job boards and reports, export and sync with other databases, and make changes to, delete, copy, or move lots of records all at once.

The most common way to roll records up is to run a search, select some or all of the records, and then click the rollup icon in the actions menu at the upper right. You’ll see your most recently viewed rollups presented first. You may be wondering about these name, company, and position columns. Well, think of every rollup list like a three-page pad of paper, with one infinite sheet for each of the three record types. These columns indicate how many of each type of record are on the list. In most cases, my lists will contain just names, companies, or jobs alone, but if I wanted to roll up all of my jobs, contacts, and candidates in Cleveland together, I could put them all on the same Cleveland list. Keep in mind that any one record can be on as many rollups as you wish, but the same record can’t appear on the same rollup more than once.

Now, if I wanted to add the records I selected earlier to an existing list, I’d just select a recent rollup or click “Rollups” in the sidebar to search within all of the lists in my database. But right now, I want to create a new rollup, so I click “Add Rollup”. The Description is all that’s required, but I may want to categorize the list or write a memo about what it’s for. When I click save, PCR generates a new list and puts my selected records on it. If there are a lot of records, I can minimize the window and go about my work in the system while the list is compiled.

You’ll also find a “Rollup” option in the navigation menu on names, companies, and jobs for managing a single record’s appearance on related lists, and a ‘Rollups’ option in the main menu, where you’ll go to manage and work inside of your lists in general.

In future episodes we’ll talk about some of the handy things you can do with Rollups, but that’s it for this week’s Two Minute Tuesday. For more, 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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Mobile App

In this week’s new Two Minute Tuesday video, we’ll take a look at the PCRecruiter Mobile App for iOS and Android devices. This free mobile app is a great way for staffing and recruiting professionals to access applicant and hiring authority data on-the-go. Being away from your desk doesn’t have to mean being away from your database!

In this week’s new Two Minute Tuesday video, we’ll take a look at the PCRecruiter Mobile App for iOS and Android devices. This free mobile app is a great way for staffing and recruiting professionals to access applicant and hiring authority data on-the-go. Being away from your desk doesn’t have to mean being away from your database!

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 weekly series of very short videos designed to highlight often overlooked PCRecruiter features, concepts, or best practices in a convenient couple of minutes.

This week’s “Two Minute Tuesday” is about the PCRecruiter Mobile App for Android and iOS, which we released in 2014, but which you might have missed. You can find the app by searching your app store, or going to the downloads area of our website. Best of all, the app is completely free for PCRecruiter 9 users.

The first time you launch the app, you’ll tap the “Change Login Url” option to give the app the web address of your PCR account. Then you can use your usual username and password to connect to a database in your account.

The menu in the upper right takes you to the search and add options for the major record types and to the Settings area where you can change accounts or log out. Tap “Add” to create a new record, or “Search” to do a basic search.

Most often you’ll use the ‘search’ box at the top of the app, which can find names, companies, and jobs all at once.

When viewing a contact, you can email, call, or text them right from the record using the built-in features of your device. And of course PCR will log an activity indicating that you hit the email, call, or text button.

You can also view the resume, and email it or share it to other apps, and work with activities and notes. If there’s a LinkedIn profile stored for this contact, you can jump right to it.

From a job, we can see the description and make changes to the basic fields on the fly, and use the Share icon to push the job’s web extensions link into an email, text, or tweet.

Tapping the PCR icon in the upper left brings the recently viewed items so we can jump back to them at any time.

This is just the first version of the PCR Mobile app, and we expect to add more cool capabilities and connections to it down the road. Download it from the app store today and consider giving it a five-star review!

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.

Two Minute Tuesday: Snapshot

Today marks the premiere of our new Two Minute Tuesday video series. Each week we’ll be posting a very quick video with a tip, tutorial, or topic that we think will be helpful to our users.

Today marks the premiere of our new Two Minute Tuesday video series. Each week we’ll be posting a very quick video with a tip, tutorial, or topic that we think will be helpful to our users.

This first installment talks about how to use the Snapshot service to review your previous day’s backup on our ASP, which is handy if you accidentally alter your form letters, custom data forms, or other PCRecruiter content in a way that can’t easily be reversed.

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

Happy new year everyone, and welcome to the first “Two Minute Tuesday,” a new weekly series of very short videos from Main Sequence Technology. We’ll be releasing a timely tutorial, terse topic, or tiny tip every week at roughly this time. Each one will be a quick overview of some often overlooked PCRecruiter feature, or some concept or best practice that we think can be highlighted for our very busy users in a convenient couple of minutes.

Kicking off the series, this week’s “Two Minute Tuesday” is about Snapshot.

Have you ever permanently deleted a record, mass-changed a rollup, or made some other edit to your PCRecruiter data that made you wish you could go back in time? Well, that’s what snapshot is for.

Let’s say one of my co-workers removed some content from one of my form letters by mistake. No problem.

I’ll start by going to my PCRecruiter 9 login screen in another browser window. In the address bar, I’m going to remove the “www2” and replace it with “snapshot2”. If I were using the older PCR 8, I’d be replacing “www” with “snapshot”. The rest of the URL stays the same.

I’ll send the browser to this altered address, and log in as usual. What we’re looking at here is a read-only copy of yesterday’s database backup. I can look at all of the data in the system exactly as it was the day before, but I can’t make any changes to it.

Now I’ll go to the system area, find yesterday’s version of the letter, and copy the contents. Now I can go to my live data and paste what was lost back into place.

Of course, if I needed to go back further than the day before, I could still contact Main Sequence support and arrange for a database restoration, but the snapshot is always there and always free for those times when you need to see what your data looked like when it was last backed up. Try it out on your account today.

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.

PCRecruiter is integrated with Intuit QuickBooks, making it possible to export information about your permanent placements and contractor hours timesheets from your recruiting database into your invoicing system. This brief overview video shows you how it works. If you’re a QuickBooks user (Windows desktop or online edition) and would like to get PCRecruiter connected, contact your Main Sequence representative.

Main Sequence has released an updated PCRecruiter API documentation, which details new methods and improvements for interacting with PCRecruiter account data. The API can be used by developers to create self-integrating assessments, background checking, onboarding, telecom, and other third-party tools and systems for recruiting or applicant tracking.

The new documentation can be viewed here: PCRecruiter Rest API Documentation. (Please note that the XML functions described in this documentation remain under beta development and may not be functional for immediate use.)

The Canadian Anti Spam Law (CASL), which was designed to stop spam from being sent to Canadians, goes into effect July 1, 2014. Many people remain unfamiliar with the law, even within Canada, despite its serious potential impact for any business that sends commercial email to Canadian recipients. So what is this law and how does it affect recruiters, staffing agencies, and HR sourcing pros?

WHAT does CASL apply to?

In short, any email, text, or direct social networking message that actively or passively promotes your services or your current job openings could be placed into the category of communications affected by this law.

  • CASL applies to any "Commercial Electronic Message" (CEM). A CEM is defined as any electronic message (emails, texts, some social media messages) that contains a message which encourages the recipient to take part in some type of commercial activity. This includes e-newsletters that contain a link to a sponsor's website, client satisfaction surveys, mass emails providing general information about your business or organization, etc. It also covers emails requesting consent to send future emails.
  • There are exemptions from the rule for certain types of messages. For example, you are allowed to send a single CEM to someone without prior consent based on a referral, as long as the full name of the person making the referral is disclosed in the message.

WHO does CASL apply to?

The law is very broad, applying to all CEMs sent to anyone in Canada or by anyone in Canada.

  • CASL stipulates that Commercial Electronic Messages cannot be sent TO or FROM anyone in Canada without express prior consent. Even if your company is outside of Canada, any emails sent to Canadian jobseekers, partners, or clients fall under the stipulations of the law. Although it may prove difficult to prosecute violators outside of Canada, the the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has stated that it will work with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US, and other regulatory commissions to enforce this law.
  • There are exemptions from the "express consent" rule for limited periods of time and under certain "implied consent" circumstances. Implied consent includes recipients who have made a purchase or your product or service, made a business deal, contract, or membership with your organization in the past 24 months. Implied consent also includes a 6-month period following an application or inquiry. If you haven't gotten express consent to continue sending CEMs within the implied consent period, you are required to stop sending CEMs at the end of the 6-month or 24-month time frame.

WHAT are the penalties for violating CASL?

Unlike other anti-spam rules (such as the USA's 'CAN-SPAM' law) Canada's anti-spam law has been given very large, sharp teeth.

  • The maximum administrative penalty for a violation by a business is $10 million, and directors and officers may be personally liable for their company's violations.
  • Individuals can be fined up to $1 Million.
  • Up until June 30, 2017, the penalties will be administrative only. After July 1, 2017, the law allows individual suits against violators. Receivers of illegal messages can sue for $200 per individual transgression up to $1 Million per day. Additional penalties may be levied for altering transmission data and other violations.

HOW can I comply with CASL?

Some of the stipulations for complying with CASL are the same as those for complying with the US CAN-SPAM law. Make sure that your emails include the following:

  • Your name (or the name by which you conduct business if different) in your messages.
  • Your physical mailing address plus either a telephone number, web address, or email address in your messages.
  • A link to a method of unsubscribing from future messages which takes effect within 10 days.

In addition to the above, but differing from CAN-SPAM:

  • Recipients must give express consent to receive your messages. This consent can be oral or written, although written consent is clearly better should questions arise.
  • You must retain a record of your consent confirmations.
  • Methods for collecting consent via a form must be clear and affirmative. The person opting in must check a box or perform some other action which is clearly marked with a description of its purpose. Asking the person to un-check a pre-checked box is not allowed.

HOW can PCRecruiter help me comply?

Although PCRecruiter has offered "unsubscribe" tracking for many years, the new CASL law has generated changes in how email is handled.  The next system update will include an 'opt-in / opt-out' function which can be used in form letters, custom forms, email signatures, and job board links. The system will also include methods for tracking the 6-month and 24-month 'implicit' permission allowed under the law.   The system will apply these settings automatically when sending email communications.  PCRecruiter also gains new options for adding and removing multiple email addresses from the opt-in/out lists, as well as capabilities for exporting and importing email addresses in CSV format.

If you send email to anyone in Canada, or you operate business in Canada, you will want to become familiar with this new law and make sure that your electronic communications comply with it.  This information is not intended as an offering of legal advice; please consult with your applicable legal authority regarding the CASL or any other compliance activities that you may undertake.  

If you desire assistance with implementing features in PCRecruiter, please contact your Main Sequence representative.
 

5 Tips for Building Your OWN Website

Over the past few years, an explosion of user-friendly platforms and tools have made it remarkably easy for novices to create attractive and functional websites. Following the trend, Main Sequence has seen an increasing number of executive search firms, staffing agencies, and sourcing professionals revising or launching new DIY websites, or moving to a CMS for recruiting website management.

While a self-built recruiting site can be a great cost saving measure, in a marketplace where your website is likely your primary advertising channel and initial point of contact with your clients and candidates, just having easy tools at your disposal isn’t always enough. You’ll want to make a good impression right from the start, and build a website that’s prepared to grow with your business. 

Main Sequence has put together a free eBook to set you on the right path. 5 Tips for Building Your OWN Website will give you helpful tips, pointers, and important food for thought as you plan to create or update your website.

Know someone who would find this info useful? Click here to share!
   

Software Advice Inc, 5000 analysisOur friends at Software Advice have analyzed the new Inc., Magazine "Inc. 5000." list and have compared it with the 2008 listing. Their conclusion is that the "HR ecosystem" has grown and changed, consolidating, gaining employees and generating more revenue than five years ago. We'd like to think PCRecruiter has something to do with that, naturally.

For complete details, check out their study at http://www.softwareadvice.com/hr/industryview/hr-ecosystem/

The results of the Software Advice 2013 Recruiting Channels Survey, sponsored in part by PCRecruiter, are in! Here's what they've found:

  • Current Use of Recruiting Channels: 97 percent of participating recruiters said they have used employee referrals to source new hires in 2013. Traditional job boards and company careers pages came in at number two and three respectively. Social media was a close fourth, with 80 percent of recruiters saying they have used these channels to source hires.
  • Channels Delivering the Highest Volume of Candidates: The channel delivering the most candidates into recruiters’ inboxes was still traditional job boards, while employee referrals came in second. Social media came in at a strong third.
  • Channels Delivering the Highest Quality of Candidates: While traditional job boards delivered the highest volume of candidates for recruiters, employee referrals still deliver (by far) the best candidates for open positions. However, more respondents said social media delivered higher quality candidates than traditional job boards.
  • Projected Use and Budget for Each Channel in 2013: Although traditional job boards, employee referrals and company careers pages were the top three most used channels, recruiters plan to invest more in social media in 2013.
  • Conclusion: The data would seem to support the hypothesis that social media recruiting is only going to increase in the coming years, but only time will tell.

For the complete results, check out Software Advice's slideshare here: http://www.slideshare.net/SoftwareAdvice/2013-23205044

Some people need both.

Some people need one or the other. Some people need one, then the other…

Many organizations have selected recruiting software when they want to track applicants, and selected applicant tracking software when they really had recruiting needs. PCRecruiter is effective as both an ATS and a recruitment software highly suited to conducting sourcing operations or operating an agency.

High-value recruiting is a choreographed and sophisticated interpersonal sales process. Failing to equip salespeople with appropriate CRM / Sales Automation tools can create obvious barriers. “Applicant Tracking” can be an unfortunate term in a recruiting context, because applicants are late-stage results of recruiting processes; by the time a person becomes an applicant, they are likely well down the recruitment track. The degree of recruitment v. applicant processing in the overall value chain varies by industry, business cycle, geography, and individual company cultures, but PCRecruiter is built to adapt to YOUR value chain.

Core CRM functions include;

  • Dealing with organizations as entities- as sources/targets/customers, either before or during activity touching the individual people connected to those organizations.
  • Creating maps of titles and names, and keeping those maps current as information changes.
  • Automations for email communication based on events, updates, and rules.
  • Flexible boundaries between candidates and applicants to support compliance tracking for EEO/OFCCP both before, after, or without expressions of interest in a particular position.
  • Clustering groups of organizations, names, or positions for marketing/sales purposes.

If you already have an ATS, but need technology to support activity that occurs prior to the entry point, PCRecruiter can integrate with your current process. If you need to track compliance and gain the value of the traditional ATS in a flexible, affordable way, PCRecruiter can fit that brief too. If you have open CRM and ATS needs, PCRecruiter is the only widely used solution with a portfolio of winning customers doing corporate direct-hire work and agency / third-party work on the same platform.

Host PCRecruiter in our cloud or your own!

A common misperception among solution buyers has developed because the terms “Web-Based Software”, "SaaS" (Software as a Service) and "Cloud" are often used interchangeably, but they often mean different things.  It's helpful to understand the usage differences between Web-Based, SaaS, and Cloud when selecting software systems; the differences can be meaningful.

Defining Web-Based Software v. Saas v. Cloud

Web-Based:

A “Web-Based” system is software delivered to end-users via a web-server, over a network using the TCP (Internet) protocol. (A network protocol describes how information is moved between devices on the network; the Internet protocol is a worldwide standard).  Virtually any software can be enabled to work over a browser, and can be marketed as web-based, so the term may also mean that a system uses native web technology, which delivers HTML and objects directly to the browser rather than some kind of remote control for users to operate non-browser usable applications on a server.     

Compared to the (preceding) software model that required software to be installed on each end-user’s computer or device, delivering software from a single computer (the web-server) over the public Internet (or a private network running the Internet protocol) offers huge savings in technical support and enables much greater performance (because one very fast computer is less expensive to buy and support than many computers), and greatly simplifies mobile access for end-users. These advantages are so compelling that today nearly all business systems offered or under development use the web platform for their basic architecture.

There are effectively (at least) four portions of any Web-Based software solution;

  1. web-server/storage infrastructure
  2. Internet connection
  3. actual software code, which is installed on the web server
  4. data administration/ software maintenance services

Almost any device can operate a webserver.  Every new Microsoft Windows equipped computer may perform as a web-server, but so can various coffee pots, digital cameras, and automobiles among other devices that can also serve web pages in our connected world.  PCRecruiter runs on Windows servers, but the concepts are the same on any web server.

Larger organizations typically possess all of the elements needed for a given solution except for the software code, which is either licensed for use by a software vendor, created by the organization itself to meet a business need, or rented. Smaller organizations may lack one or more of the required parts, and larger organizations seeking cost savings and flexibility may prefer arrangements where they do not need to provide ANY of the four parts, even with capacity to provide all four.

SaaS and Cloud:

The result is the now realized market opportunity for SaaS vendors to provide solutions where they provide all four portions.  That's marketed today as cloud vendors.  The term "cloud" arose from the graphic used on flow-charts symbolizing the Internet, which was shaped like a cloud. SaaS vendors all use the cloud, but organizations can use the cloud too: the so called "private cloud" which is just a fancy way of saying company-owned datacenter/networking arrangements. There is also a hybrid approach which is becoming more common: SaaS vendors create the software, but they use a second vendor (often Amazon, Google, or Microsoft) for cloud service, which covers the web server/storage and Internet connection. So in reality, there are "private clouds" where the organization can own/license everything, there are public clouds where either vendors or organizations can run systems but not manage infrastructure, and there are vendor clouds where the vendor does it all.

SaaS has great market momentum because of its ability to deliver high-function (and relatively low-cost per user for complex systems) to organizations regardless of their technical situation. Because of that momentum, many desirable software systems are no longer designed to be available for you to run on your own equipment- they can only be used in the SaaS model.

From a vendor standpoint, it's much more difficult to engineer systems to be customer installable and to then field support them. It's somewhat less profitable in many instances because of the lack of dollar margins associated with hosting and maintenance services and lack of recurring revenue for the whole solution (rather than a small % typically charged for maintenance fees).

Vendors (and Wall Street) also love SaaS because business process software tends to have relatively high potential for customer “lock-in”, which is a reflection of the barriers to selecting and deploying a replacement solution. SaaS vendors generally also have more expertise with their own software, which may lower their service costs as compared to the costs experienced by organizations supporting licensed software.

At Main Sequence, we always start by asking: what's best for our customer?

Each organization has its own balance relating to the four parts of web-based software solutions. SaaS vendors naturally may find it in their best interest to overstate the difficulties, costs, and risks of self-hosting a Web-Based solution, while larger or more dynamic vendors such as the ERP providers (SAP, Oracle/Peoplesoft, Dynamics etc.) and other highly software-centric providers may seek to offer a balance of SaaS and license options to ensure complete market coverage. Main Sequence is in the latter, larger, dynamic category.

Looking at user count as an independent variable, if there will be many users over a long timeline, licensing may be substantially less expensive over the lifecycle for solutions that offer that model. For shorter terms and lower user counts, SaaS may be much less expensive. This pricing behavior is likely to persist because SaaS vendors have limited incentive to separately price hosting and database administration services from the software itself, although the growing hybrid model may force changes in that direction.

Fixed v. Variable Costs

The key driver is fixed v. variable costs. If you already own and pay for three of the four required elements (everything but the software code), you may have mostly a "fixed cost" business case. Paying a vendor margin on stuff you already have is a hard way to save money. If you do not have the other three elements, it may be a variable cost case with a steep early curve, so your particular case might show extreme differences in total lifecycle expense, or your maybe your case does not favor either model.

Other significant decision points about delivery model may include the need for change control (e.g. separating your path from that of the SaaS vendor), specialized needs for unlimited real time interaction with the raw data, differential taxation treatment of licensed software compared to hosting services, availability and security considerations, your DBA and tech capabilities, and other localized factors such as privacy laws.

Self-Hosting Option

Regardless of the overwhelming market hype, self- hosting is entirely a reasonable thing to do to if your situation is suitable and the application software that you want is available for license. The important part to understand is that regardless of who provides the four parts, the end-user experience will generally be the same or very similar if they are using the same or very similar software code; delivery, infrastructure, and maintenance providers are typically indistinguishable to end-users if they perform equally well.

Saas Option

Main Sequence offers a top shelf SaaS solution, where we provide all four elements. We also offer PCRecruiter for license, which you can run on your own infrastructure or use on a public cloud such as those offered by Amazon or Microsoft. You can arrange to move between models to best suit your needs at any time during the lifecycle.

As with many other aspects of PCRecruiter, few competing vendors are as committed to VERSATILITY in their offerings.  Main Sequence sales consultants</a> can help you compare the various options- always with your best long-term interest in mind rather than a preconceived narrative from a vendor who only does it one way or another.

 

As an employer, you will be required to hire new employees from time to time. It is therefore important to familiarize yourself with the important aspects of the recruitment process. You need to understand the fact that the recruitment process proper planning. Since this is a crucial task, it should be done effectively.

At times, this process can become strenuous and time consuming. But you need not to worry because the new technology can help you perform this task quickly and without a hitch. With the implementation of the new recruitment process software, your hiring process becomes simple and effective. This software is designed to help you complete the entire recruitment procedure without a hitch.

Today, businesses are facing intense pressure to offer quality results in the shortest time possible. Conversely, the recruitment process has become a big priority and pivotal to businesses’ success. It is thus important to ensure that your recruitment system comes with wide and integrated functions that can help you get the needed talents without a hassle. To achieve this, you need to incorporate the latest and more effective recruitment process software.

Thankfully, there is a wide variety of recruiting software in the market today. It is thus very easy for you to find a good program to make your recruitment tasks successful. However, you have to be careful when you are purchasing your software because some are not very reliable. There are some unscrupulous software developers whose main aim is to make a quick buck from innocent customers. Therefore you have to exercise caution so that you do not fall prey to the inept developers. Choosing the right recruitment process software can have a major impact on your business.

Making sure that you get the right persons for the open positions in your company will help you realize your objectives. Qualified employees also allow you to reduce the operational cost, improve business profitability, enhance staff loyalty, and increase customer satisfaction. Choosing adaptable recruitment process software from the right software developer is important because it will help you to organize your recruitment process and monitor applicants throughout the selection process.

Another benefit of choosing the best recruiting software is that it allows you to streamline the entire hiring process without breaking your bank. In fact, many companies have adopted this process since it enables them to make savings on the recruitment process.

What is more, it reduces the amount of time spent selecting and interviewing candidates.
Additionally, the recruitment process software developers offering spontaneous online entry applications will offer enhanced applicant experience plus an optimistic relationship with your business. Another reason why you should consider using this recruitment solution is that it helps you to reduce the number of hard copies you receive from the applicants.

It can be very strenuous to go through large volumes of applications. The recruitment process software comes with features that will help you to pick the right employees by matching their credentials with the requirements. Nevertheless, you have to ensure that the program you purchase is user-friendly.

Is your staffing software helping you find the right employees, and more importantly, is it helping the right employees find you?

Recent research finds that employers are able to hire the best candidates when they advertise their job openings in a small number of places. That being said, it’s important for companies to make sure that their staffing software programs allow easy integration with most or all of these sources. Check out https://www.pcrecruiter.net for more info.

Today’s state-of-the-art staffing software solutions are capable of doing much more than just making the recruiting process easier and cheaper for your company. The best solutions will have the ability to integrate your job openings in the places where candidates are looking most, mainly job boards and social media sites.

According to Weddle’s 2011 Survey of Recruiting Trends, a majority of employers still prefer to post their jobs on commercial job boards – more specifically, targeted niche job boards – because that’s where the highest quality candidates are found.

The survey revealed that employers find the best candidates in the following places:

  • 40.7 on job boards
  • 12.9 percent through an employee referral program
  • 11.1 percent by posting jobs on their own websites
  • 9.3 percent on social networking sites
  • 5.6 percent through staffing firms
  • 5.5 percent by advertising job openings in newspapers

Furthermore, 77.3 percent of employers are posting more than half of their job openings online, while only 6.1 percent aren’t using the Internet at all for recruiting. The results have been great, with 50.8 percent of employers hiring more than half of their new employees online. And those employees are pretty talented, with 54.1 percent of employers labeling new hires found online as above average or among the company’s best workers.

So what’s the reason that employers are having such good luck finding high-quality candidates in these places? The answer is simple – because these are the same places job seekers are turning to in order to find work.

When it comes to job seekers, the survey found that:

  • 69 percent find the Internet helpful in their job search
  • 69.7 percent think they will find their next job through an online job board
  • 34 percent found their current job online
  • 58 percent visit at least one job board up to eight times per month

So, if your staffing software provider doesn’t allow easy integration with job boards, social networking sites, or other popular  recruiting sources, it might be time to think about finding a new provider.

The applicant tracking system market is continuing to grow, and as providers offer newer and better solutions, many companies are thinking about switching the service they currently use.

That’s the most important information to come out of “Talent Acquisition Systems 2011: Market Realities, Implementation Examples and Solution Provider Profiles,” a report released last year by Bersin & Associates. The report looked at survey responses from HR professionals and recruiters from organizations of all sizes and in all major industries.

According to Sarah White, who works as principal analyst of talent acquisition for Bersin & Associates, a lot of companies are choosing to work with providers that offer better support and a higher level of integration, and ATS companies that offer a large selection of products are doing the best. It’s commonly accepted that applicant tracking systems are just as important to the recruiting and onboarding process as interviewing and social networking.

Here are some key figures from the survey:

  • The ATS market increased by 11.1 percent to $837 million during 2010, which was slightly lower than the $861 million originally predicted by experts. The difference can be attributed to the slowing economy.
  • The survey predicted that the ATS market would grow by 12 percent to $937 million by the end of 2011, as high-end companies consolidate and low-end companies continue to expand.
  • About 50 percent of companies were planning to switch to a new ATS provider over the year, as new options and new technologies emerge.
  • The amount of time it takes to convince a company to commit to an ATS provider has increased from six months to up to three years.
  • A large majority of ATS providers offer a mobile solution in order to keep up with growing popularity.
  • More and more ATS companies are merging in order to offer a more robust suite of solutions to customers, such as search engine optimization or video services.
  • As social networks continue to become more and more popular, most ATS companies are offering the ability to integrate with LinkedIn, Facebook, or other sites.
  • Analytics have become more important than ever in evaluating a company’s application, interviewing, and hiring process.
  • Learning Management Systems are growing by 10 percent per year, while Performance Management and Succession Management Systems are increasing by 12 percent.

So, as you can see, applicant tracking systems and other similar technologies that make the recruiting and onboarding process easier, cheaper, and more efficient aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. If you’re not already using this technology, now is the time to jump on the bandwagon!

By now, most companies know how important it is to have a good recruitment software system in place. But how does your company value that software’s ability to integrate with social media?

Last year, Jobvite released its annual Social Recruiting Survey and introduced the new Jobvite Index, both of which unveil how recruiters are using social media. The data prove that social media is becoming more and more important in the recruiting process.

Overall, the number of companies planning to recruit through social media increased from 83 percent to 89 percent last year. At the same time, 64 percent of companies were using at least two social networks for their recruiting efforts.

“The data show that recruiting departments, like marketing departments, are reaching and engaging their targets in multiple social networks,” Dan Finnigan, Jobvite president and CEO, said in a company press release. “The fastest moving companies increasingly use the richness of profiles in LinkedIn, the power of online connections in Facebook, and the instant reach of Twitter to develop valuable talent pools and make new hires.”

Some other key findings of the survey include:

  • The number of companies that have hired through social media increased from 58 percent to 64 percent between 2010 and 2011.
  • Although companies still claim referrals bring the highest quality candidates, only 30 percent were planning to increase their referral budget, while 55 percent were spending more on social recruiting. Only 16 percent were paying more for job board postings.
  • As we previously noted, 64 percent of companies use at least two social networks for recruiting, while 40 percent of companies use at least three.
  • About 73 percent of social hires come from LinkedIn, while 20 percent come from Facebook, and 7 percent come from Twitter.
  • The fight for jobs isn’t expected to die down anytime soon, as 77 percent of companies anticipate an increase in competition, and 61 percent plan to recruit from their competitors.

“Jobvite’s new data confirms our research that social recruiting has become an essential element of today’s corporate recruiting strategy,” Josh Bersin, president and CEO of Bersin & Associates, said. “The data also points out that referral-based recruiting is a new ‘secret weapon’ for talent acquisition. Companies that focus heavily on referral strategies, enabled by social networks, are delivering the highest quality of hire at the lowest overall cost.”

Human Resources professionals at most companies are always faced with the challenging task of finding just the right candidates for any open position and that task is even more difficult in today’s economic environment.

Human Resources professionals at most companies are always faced with the challenging task of finding just the right candidates for any open position and that task is even more difficult in today’s economic environment.

High unenployment has dramactically increased the number of job applicants for many firms and created a larger pool of possible candidates on targeted recruiting searches.

Many larger companies aleady employ recruiting software to help them sort, categorize and evaluate potential recruits. That software has been too expensive for small and mid-sized companies. Until now. Smaller companies can now get the same HR recruiting, tracking and organizing packages through web-based services for a fraction of the cost.

The advantages are obvious. If smaller companies have the same tools as the big companies, they can take advantage of the larger pool of talent that is currently seeking work. By being able to access and assess more potential employees, the smaller company has a much better chance of finding the right person to fill any vacancy.

Using web-based employment recrutiing software, enables smaller companies to post jobs, accept applications, evaluate and sort candidates and more.

The Internet has become the go-to source for job seekers. With web-based recruiting software, it will soon be the primary source for job recruiters.

With the countless number of job seekers looking for work in today’s economy, it’s more important than ever for recruiters to pick the perfect person for the position.

In the past, it was easy for companies to publish their job openings in the newspaper or even hang a sign in their storefront window. We all know those days are long gone – so what should recruiters be doing to keep up with the changing times and find the best candidates?

With the countless number of job seekers looking for work in today’s economy, it’s more important than ever for recruiters to pick the perfect person for the position.

In the past, it was easy for companies to publish their job openings in the newspaper or even hang a sign in their storefront window. We all know those days are long gone – so what should recruiters be doing to keep up with the changing times and find the best candidates?

The answer to that question is simple: recruiters should be using web-based recruitment software.

The recruiting process itself has drastically changed throughout the past several years. First, recruiters kept track of potential candidates by keeping massive files filled with resumes and interview information. Then, the first-wave of recruiting software came along, allowing recruiters to download recruiting programs onto their computers so they could more easily keep track of candidate pools. Today, web-based recruitment solutions are more intuitive and efficient than ever before, making it easier for recruiters to do their job and do it well.

Here are some major benefits recruiters will find when using web-based recruitment software:

Cost-effective – Hiring the wrong person can cost an organization tons and tons of money, not to mention the emotional stress placed on the employee and their higher-ups. By allowing for the use of pointed, personalized questions, keyword matching technology, and other high-tech features, web-based recruitment software all but eliminates a recruiter’s chances of hiring the wrong person.

Customization – It’s easy to customize the interview and hiring process, but nearly impossible to find the time to schedule a personlizaed, one-one-one interview with every single job candidate. Most web-based recruitment software makes it easy for recruiters to pinpoint the questions they want to ask candidates, as well as the qualifications and experience they want those candidates to have.

Easy Upkeep – Unlike software that you have to download to your computer and update periodically, web-based recruitment software usually updates on its own without taking away from your time or interrupting your workflow. In addition, web-based software in general is faster, more secure, and easier to handle.

Integration – Long-gone are the days of newspaper classifieds. Most companies today advertise their jobs through an online job portal or a similar third-party job board. Most web-based recruitment software makes it easy to integrate your online job advertisements so potential candidates can simply answer a couple of questions or upload their resume, making it easier than ever for your to see whether they’re a good fit for the position.

Mobility – In today’s corporate world, there’s no such thing as a 9 to 5 job. It’s just as inevitable that you’ll spend time responding to work-related e-mails while sitting down to watch your favorite evening show as it is that you’ll be taking calls from your kids’ school while you’re sitting at your desk. As a recruiter, being able to move flawlessly between your work computer, laptop, and mobile phone is a must when it comes to getting the job done – and you’ll only find that kind of flexibility with web-based recruiting software.

Better collaboration – As opposed to older recruitment software, which had to be installed on every recruiter’s computer, web-based recruitment software makes it easy for the recruitment team to work together anytime, anywhere. This means one recruiter can review a resume and highlight it for another recruiter to read and call the candidate in for an interview.

Build a more productive organization – By using web-based recruitment software, recruiters will be able to do their jobs more quickly, more easily, and more efficiently – all contributing to the overall productiviness of the organization. And hiring the right person for the job the first time around will further enhance overall productivity.

High-tech candidates – The candidates that your company needs to recruit in order to succeed are already online. They’re working, socializing, and looking for jobs on the Internet, so it only makes sense to use a savvy web-based recruitment software that will place your jobs in front of the right high-tech candidates.

So regardless of whether you work for a small mom and pop business or a multi-million dollar corporation, finding the right web-based recruitment software will make your job easier, save your company money, and result in a better company overall.

Recruiting software makes the application and hiring process easier for both job seekers and employers. However, sometimes the process seems so easy that potential candidates are led to make critical mistakes, which may in turn prolong the hiring process for the employer.

Most recruiting software applications allow candidates to quickly input their information and either create a new resume or upload an existing document. Sometimes the process appears to be so easy that job seekers forget to go back and double check exactly what it is they’re submitting to their potential employer.

Simply typing in a bunch of nonsensical information or uploading an old, out-of-date resume can easily get you thrown out of the candidate pool.

Continue reading “Recruiting Software Doesn’t Prevent Resume Mistakes”

As if we needed more proof that supplementing your typical staffing software (Click here) with social networking is a good idea, a new report suggests just that.

The Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey 2010 found that the majority of companies are using social media as their primary recruiting tool. The report was based on an online survey of 600 participants between May and June.

The majority of companies have learned how to use social networking sites effectively, as 58 percent of survey respondents said they have successfully hired employees by using some form of social media.

Continue reading “Staffing Software Via Social Networking Still a Success”

If your business is continuing to grow and add employees you may want to look into using staffing software.

Staffing software is one of the most efficient and technologically advanced ways to manage employees. According to an article by wiseGEEK, staffing software is a series of applications that automate cleriecal and bookkeeping tasks that would normally be completed by people.

“Letting a computer perform these tasks not only gets them done more quickly – given a computer’s natural ability to multitask to the nth degree – but also frees up the people who formerly did those things for other tasks,” the article notes. “This is an important way for companies to get ahead, by letting technology help them create more time for new challenges.”

Continue reading “Staffing Software Benefits”

While applicant tracking has become a mainstay for many companies’ HR departments, users should beware of systems that don’t work properly.

Nicheboards.com, the world’s largest alliance of employment Web sites, recently conducted a study that found many applicant tracking systems don’t accurately record what job boards are sending candidates to their clients. This means companies that rely on applicant sourcing reports often have inaccurate information when making online recruiting decisions.

Many of Nicheboards’ clients find applicants through ATS, which are designed to help screen candidates and track their progress through the hiring process. ATS also can record information about hiring trends, including where the best employees come from.

Continue reading “Applicant Tracking Users Beware”

If you’re at all involved in the recruiting industry, you probably know what ATS is. If not, here’s a simple explanation.

An ATS, or applicant tracking system, is a software application that allows companies to electronically handle recruiting needs.

The purpose of an ATS is to help companies manage their recruiting efforts, including better management of resumes and applicant information. ATS information can be collected from internal applications on the company’s Web site or from job boards, according to an article by Wikipedia.

Continue reading “Applicant Tracking System – What Is It?”

If you’re looking for an information technology job, recruitment software could be working against you.

It’s becoming increasingly harder to convince resume screening programs you have the required skills for an in-person interview, especially in the IT field. According to an article by Network World, while recruitment software makes it easier for those in the HR department, it also may overlook some qualifications that would be noticed on traditional resumes.

Many recruiting software companies offer capabilities that range from recruiting to hiring to employee career development and training. The software, usually an SaaS model, allows recruiters and hiring managers to search out ideal candidates and allows job seekers to search listings, submit resumes and learn about companies.

Continue reading “Recruitment Software a Disadvantage to IT Job Seekers?”

If you’re a green company looking to hire, or a company looking to go more green, having a good ATS can make all the difference when it comes to finding the right candidates.

There has been a big push on going green lately, with the thought that doing so will not only help to improve the environment, but also will help to create more high-paying and sustainable jobs. Most recently, world leaders met at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to discuss how each nation can become more green.

In the meantime, President Barack Obama outlined a new strategy to stimulate job creation, and one of the central points to his plan is to generate green jobs by building environmentally friendly infrastructure and by providing citizens with the incentive to become more energy-efficient.

Continue reading “ATS Can Help You Go Green”

Most companies that are just beginning to invest in recruiting software usually purchase a “core HR software program.”

Core programs provide basic HR services needed by a company, regardless of whether they’re a small business or large corporation. These programs are used to streamline processes typically completed by the HR department, increase accuracy in information and reduce the amount of work required to update employee personnel files.

Several manufacturers have created core HR software programs for businesses, so it’s often hard to choose. But keep in mind that most companies need software that will focus on payroll, employee benefits and attendance tracking. Most core software programs will allow you to add expansion programs later on.

Continue reading “Recruiting Software at its Core”

If you’re an IT job seeker and are soon planning to look for a new job, you should make sure your resume is ready to go through the applicant tracking system gauntlet.

A new study from Spherion Pacific Enterprises found that almost half of the American IT workforce plans to change jobs during the next year. The study further found that IT workers have a higher job-seeking confidence than the overall workforce.

This means that plenty of IT workers are currently polishing their resume in preparation to begin applying for new jobs. For the most part, job seekers in the IT industry run into the same resume issues as other candidates, mainly how to fit all the information on one page and how to know what potential employers really want to see.

Continue reading “ATS for the IT Resume”

Trying to attract the suited employees to get to work for you might be massively difficult. Many extremely intelligent and coveted job seekers find several job leads, fashioning it even added essential that your personnel not overleap out with the prospect towards your succeeding excellent worker.

Since all, you’d detest for any suited employees nearby to go off to work for your challengers, wouldn’t your business? HR software can serve to ensure that you are cognizant about the desirable methods to fulfil a department opening. Although, with so countless options out at hand, how should you uncover the accurate platform?

First, appraise your business to specify its necessities and however you fancy to manage your recruitment. That which can be of use at a big corporation can represent exceedingly much for a smaller business. Regard where you envision your company heading in the near years in order to make certainly that you could not rapidly outgrow the recruitment package selection you determine to move on. package providers prevail that cater to employers in a kind of career industries with all assorted workforce sizes.

Continue reading “HR Software Can Find the Best Candidates”