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.