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.