Video Transcript

It’s time once more 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.

In a previous episode, we talked about saving links to commonly used searches on your MyPCR screen for easy access. That’s great for general searches that you run all the time, but if you need to adjust the criteria for different purposes, the better method is to save the search query in the advanced search window as a starting point for repeated use. Let’s see how that works.

Let’s say we regularly source candidates who live near a major city in Ohio, speak Spanish, and have a cell phone number on file. We could run that search and save the results on a Rollup to search within, but we’d need to remember to add any future candidates who fit that profile to the list on a regular basis or we might miss someone. Instead, we’ll build and save that query.

We’ll go to Name in the main menu, and then select the Advanced search option.

First, let’s build our location search. We’ll select Zipcode radius, click the target icon, enter the city and a radius, and click search. Then we accept the list of zipcodes. We can repeat the same process for the other major cities in Ohio until we have all the ones we want. Now we set them all to “OR” matching, because we need records that contain any of these zipcodes, not records that contain all of them.

Now we add the Language criteria. In this database, we’ve got a custom Name field called Language. We’ll choose ‘Custom Fields’ from the first menu, and then select the ‘Language’ field. We’ll set the operator dropdown to ‘Equal’ for an exact match, and then use the popup to select ‘Spanish’ from the list of available values in the database for that field. Now we click ‘Add’ to lock in that criteria. Notice that the dropdown here is set to ‘End Group / And’ so that all of the Zipcode “OR” searches are grouped together, with the Language as a must-have criteria afterward.

Finally, want to make sure these folks have a cell phone number on file, so we’ll leave the first dropdown set to ‘Predefined Fields’ and then choose the ‘Cell Phone’ field. For the operator dropdown, we want to pick ‘is not empty’. Then we click ‘Add’ again.

Now, rather than running the search, we use the Save icon from the Action menu, and give this query a descriptive name so we know what it does. Keep in mind that we are saving our search criteria, not the search results, and that any queries we save are only accessible to us, and not to any other users. Now, each time we need to search Ohio candidates who speak Spanish and have a cell phone, we can go back to Advanced search and use the ‘Open’ icon from the Action menu. Then we select one of our saved searches, which pre-loads the screen with the stored query. After that we can supplement it keywords, or add and remove criteria to refine the search for the task at hand, leaving the saved version untouched and ready for next time.

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 PCRecruiter login screen. If you have any ideas for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.

Video Transcript

We’re back again with 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 a few ways to shortcut the entry of position records… particularly if you are always putting the same info into the same fields. Today we’re going to look at Position Templates as a way to save and recall job info that you use regularly.

Before we jump to the templates, let’s take a quick refresher on setting default values for fields. If we have one or two fields that we always put the same values into when creating any new job, we can preset them in our own custom record layout. We click on the Customize option in the Action menu from any job, and then find the field we want to alter. The menu icon to the right of the field brings up the option to set a Default starting value for that field. We can always change the value afterward, as long as the field hasn’t been marked as Read Only.

One commonly set Default that requires some special handling is the “Show On Web” dropdown, which indicates whether the job is visible to the outside world in your PCRecruiter job board or job feeds. It normally defaults to the ‘Show’ option, but if you’d like all of your fresh jobs to begin offline, even if they’re marked as ‘Available,’ you can set the Default value to “-1”. This translates to the ‘Do Not Show’ setting.

Ok, so what if we have a more complex job template that we want to store and reuse, including job description contents and so on? First, we find an appropriate existing job, or create a job record specifically to use as a source. We can delete this job after we’re done, although some users will create a ‘Templates’ company record and keep all of their template jobs there for reference or later use.

After saving the job, we use the ‘Templates’ option in the Actions menu. We’ve got a list of the existing templates above, and an option at the bottom to add the current job as a new template. The template name will automatically be set to the title and ID of the current job, but we can change the name to anything that we want. We can also include a brief description of the template. Then we save it.

Now, let’s use the plus icon to add a new job to the database. At the bottom of the ‘Add Position’ window, there’s a “Use Template” option. We find the template we want, and use the ‘Action’ pulldown to select it. The same pulldown is used if we ever want to delete any templates. The system will then populate all of the fields from the template into the record we’re creating. We can make any changes we need, and then save this new job.

One last thing to bear in mind is that templates can only store and recall fields that are visible on the screen at the time, so if your custom position layout doesn’t have some of the fields that the template was built to fill in, they’ll be left blank on your new position.

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 PCRecruiter login screen. If you have any ideas for future Two Minute Tuesdays, send an email to twominutetuesday@mainsequence.net.
We’re back again with 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 a few ways to shortcut the entry of position records… particularly if you are always putting the same info into the same fields. Today we’re going to look at Position Templates as a way to save and recall job info that you use regularly.

Before we jump to the templates, let’s take a quick refresher on setting default values for fields. If we have one or two fields that we always put the same values into when creating any new job, we can preset them in our own custom record layout. We click on the Customize option in the Action menu from any job, and then find the field we want to alter. The menu icon to the right of the field brings up the option to set a Default starting value for that field. We can always change the value afterward, as long as the field hasn’t been marked as Read Only.

One commonly set Default that requires some special handling is the “Show On Web” dropdown, which indicates whether the job is visible to the outside world in your PCRecruiter job board or job feeds. It normally defaults to the ‘Show’ option, but if you’d like all of your fresh jobs to begin offline, even if they’re marked as ‘Available,’ you can set the Default value to “-1”. This translates to the ‘Do Not Show’ setting.

Ok, so what if we have a more complex job template that we want to store and reuse, including job description contents and so on? First, we find an appropriate existing job, or create a job record specifically to use as a source. We can delete this job after we’re done, although some users will create a ‘Templates’ company record and keep all of their template jobs there for reference or later use.

After saving the job, we use the ‘Templates’ option in the Actions menu. We’ve got a list of the existing templates above, and an option at the bottom to add the current job as a new template. The template name will automatically be set to the title and ID of the current job, but we can change the name to anything that we want. We can also include a brief description of the template. Then we save it.

Now, let’s use the plus icon to add a new job to the database. At the bottom of the ‘Add Position’ window, there’s a “Use Template” option. We find the template we want, and use the ‘Action’ pulldown to select it. The same pulldown is used if we ever want to delete any templates. The system will then populate all of the fields from the template into the record we’re creating. We can make any changes we need, and then save this new job.

One last thing to bear in mind is that templates can only store and recall fields that are visible on the screen at the time, so if your custom position layout doesn’t have some of the fields that the template was built to fill in, they’ll be left blank on your new position.

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 PCRecruiter 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.

This week, we’re taking a look at PCR Capture, the free extension for Google Chrome that saves data entry time by importing and updating contacts in PCRecruiter from website content.

To install it, we just search for PCR Capture in the Chrome Web Store, and click ‘Add to Chrome’. Once we’ve added the extension, the PCR logo appears in the toolbar. This will display a notification icon whenever you land on a supported web page.

When we first open the plugin, we need to enter our PCR login URL, username, password, and database. Once that’s done, we’re ready for action. First, let’s check out the Options panel.

Capture has a Basic mode and an Advanced mode. In Basic mode, any contact we capture is handled automatically with no added user interaction. We’ve got the option to create all contacts under the database’s Default Company, the company name detected in the contact’s data, or a specific company record we define here. We can also select a Rollup list to add all of the captured names to.

In Advanced mode, we have the ability to view, confirm, manipulate, and augment the contact data before saving it. We also get manual control over duplicate merging. This last option lets us disable the confirmation popups after each capture, or to set them to automatically close after a moment. Let’s enable Advanced mode for this demonstration, and walk through a sample Capture.

We’ve browsed to a web page that PCR Capture recognizes, and so a popup appears here in the corner, prompting us to capture the contact. The icon on the toolbar also gets a green plus. When the Capture panel opens, we see that there’s already a record in the database that matches this one to a significant percent. We could click to go ahead and add this contact as a new one, but we’ll click the existing matching record and select ‘Next.’ The detected company data also has a match. We can either use it, or search and select a different company. We click ‘Next’ again. On the final screen, we can review the data and choose which information to keep. The icons along the side show whether each data point is coming from the existing record in PCR, or the site we’re capturing from. We can click on each field and select which version of that data point we want to keep, and we can use these buttons to add additional info by hand before saving. The notification popup here confirms that the record was updated, and we can click on it to jump right to the record.

PCR Capture is totally free, and will update automatically as our team adds more exciting new features and functions in the future.

For all the latest on PCRecruiter, watch our blog posts on your PCR login screen, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, join the PCRecruiter LinkedIn users group, and subscribe to this YouTube channel. 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 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.

This week we’re giving you an overview of the PCRecruiter Resume Inhaler, an optional add-on that runs on your Windows PC. While the tools in the PCR web interface and the PCR Portal for MS Outlook allow us to drag in a bunch of resumes and parse the contact info from each one to create a new record, this still requires confirmation and interaction for each import. If we’ve got a backlog of resumes on the hard drive or an email account that’s just collecting incoming resumes, being able to inhale all of them into the database without reviewing them one by one can save a ton of time. The Inhaler will find and parse the contact data in each resume or CV, use its algorithms to identify the name, address, email, and so on, and then generate a Name in your database’s default company record with the resume attached.

Once the program has been installed and registered on the PC, we can configure it from this window – when its running in the background, the Inhaler simply appears as an icon in the system tray at the lower right. We can designate a directory on the local drive or network as the source, or we can connect to a folder on the local email program. We have the option to search for resumes in the subfolders of the selected folder, and also a checkbox to enable added capabilities for recognizing contact info from outside of the US. We can use the Actions panel to enable or disable these sources at any time, and to turn on the monitoring feature, which automatically checks for and imports new resumes from the specified locations every 15 minutes. If we leave the monitoring off, we can use the Actions menu to manually trigger an import at any time. While we’re here in this menu, let’s check out one or two of the key items found in the screens underneath it.

The Connection Settings panel is where we’ll enter our PCR login URL and account details. The Inhaler will put this username on the records it generates, and it’ll give all of the generated Names a status of ‘Unverified’ rather than ‘Candidate,’ so it’s easy to tell which of the records have contact data that hasn’t been vetted by a human yet. We can also specify a Rollup List in the target database to group the imported records for convenient review later on.

In the Preferences panel, we can adjust a variety of finer points, but the Link to Position items are probably the most powerful to be aware of. This feature tells the Inhaler to check the folder name or the email subject for a matching Position Id, so we can direct people to mention the Job ID when emailing their resume, and pull them right into the pipeline for the appropriate job. Check the article in our Learning Center (https://learning.pcrecruiter.net/resume-inhaler) for the specifics on setting this up. The Preferences panel also includes the settings for whether Resumes that appear to already be in the database should be ignored and moved to a ‘Duplicates’ folder, or whether the system should import them and optionally update the fields on the matching record with the newly imported contact info.

Also worth noting is the ‘Filters’ tab, which gives us the ability to assign incoming records to different users based on keywords found in the resume or the email. We can also set up additional mail boxes and directories to monitor, or additional databases to import to.
Once everything has been configured, we either enable the monitoring, or use the Actions menu to manually start the process, and we can see the new names arriving in the system immediately.

For more info on the Resume Inhaler, get in touch with your Main Sequence representative. And for more Two Minute Tuesdays, watch our blog posts on your PCR login screen, subscribe to this YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and 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 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.

Today we’re going to be looking at an exciting new feature for creating and working with contacts and attachments in the PCRecruiter Portal for Microsoft Outlook. As of our most recent Portal update, you can now save time with the convenience of Drag and Drop. Let’s see how it works.

This email here contains some files that we want to attach to a Company in the database. We’ll locate the Company, open it, and now we’ll drag the email into the PCRecruiter area of the screen.

A number of options appear. “Add Company Attachment,” at the top, will allow us to take the email itself or any files that came along with it and attach them to the currently open Company record. We can create a Global Attachment instead by dragging to the option here at the bottom. We also have the option to generate a new Name record for this contact, using the ‘From’ email address on the message. If the contact is already in the database, we can also generate an Activity on their record.

If we’re back at the Company Search screen, we can still drag an email over, but now we’ll see all of the Recently Viewed companies currently displayed. We can select which of them to attach the files to. Paging through the recently viewed records allows us to attach the items to different Companies.

You’ll find the dragging feature extra helpful when you receive an email with an attached resume. If we view a Name record rather than a Company, the options at the top include adding or replacing the Resume for the current Name, in addition to those for creating general Attachments, or writing an Activity.

We can even apply this technique to Rollups. When a Rollup list is active in the viewing pane, dragging an email over will place the record bearing that email address on the current list. If the record doesn’t exist, we’ll be prompted to create it. And just like with names and companies, when we’re viewing the list of Recent Rollups, dragging an item into the window presents all of the current choices. We just drag to the one we want, and drop.

The drag and drop capabilities even work with multiple selections, allowing us to create several new contacts at once, add a group of Names to a list at the same time, attach multiple files to a record, and so on. Not only that, but we can even drag and drop resumes and other files from the local hard drive into the viewing panel just like we can with emails.

To try it out for yourself, make sure you’ve got the most recent Portal update installed, and if you’re an Outlook user but not using the PCR Portal, get in touch with your Main Sequence representative for details.

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