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.