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.