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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.