Highrise for Recruiting: A Better Way to Manage Your Talent Pipeline (Part One)

March 24, 2012 at 1:56 PM by Jon Bischke

We've spoken with hundreds of people in the last year about how they recruit and build their team. One of the common threads that has run through these conversations is how unorganized most people are about keeping track of folks they've reached to about joining their companies. This isn't surprising as we too have been those unorganized company executives in the past and definitely felt the pain of not having the right information in front of us about potential candidates.

We often ask, "When you meet someone in the real world or virtual world who you think might be a good fit for your company, how do you keep track of your interactions with that person up until the point they apply to work for you?" The answer we get? It's a good mix of "Excel spreadsheets", "e-mail folders", "pencil and paper" and of course the always effective "in my head".

Does anyone see a problem here?

Now occasionally we'll meet a company that is systematized with this and admittedly, the bigger the company, the more likely they are to have this dialed in. But whereas Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSes) have been designed from the ground up to be a great place to keep track of people once they've already applied, most ATSes do a poor job of handling people who aren't official applicants. This is a challenge for a lot of companies and particularly for startups.

I'd like to offer a suggestion for now (until better solutions come to market): Use Highrise. Highrise is a lightweight CRM app produced by the good people over at 37signals. It's simple enough that most/all people in your company can use it but powerful enough to do the job for this purpose. A few other advantages of Highrise:

  • It's cheap. We have over 5,000 contacts in Highrise (different types of individuals as we use Highrise for more than just recruiting) and it costs us a whopping $49/month for our entire company. Most ATSes are more expensive than that and a CRM app like Salesforce is definitely more expensive. Highrise is a great way to have organization without breaking your bank.
  • It's user-friendly. You don't really need to train people how to use Highrise. There are some advanced tips that won't be readily apparent the first time you use it but most everybody should be able to do the basics with little training. That's important when you're a fast-moving company.
  • It's social. When you're recruiting it helps to know some information about the person you're talking to. Highrise actually does a reasonably good job of allowing social information including Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to be pulled into the app. This can make a big difference when you're trying to assess whether someone is a good fit for your organization.

In part one of this series we'll go over some of the "Getting Started" basics of using Highrise. First, you need to ask yourself why you need to be tracking anything at all? After all, these people haven't applied for the company yet. You aren't phone screening them or interviewing them. Why bother with anything right now? Well here are just a few reasons why having a tool to organization interactions at this stage can be incredibly important:

  • People who aren't looking right now but might be looking in the future. Let's say you're at a conference and you meet a guy who you think might be perfect for your company. In passing they mention that they're happy where they are right now but are likely going to look for something new at the end of the year. Are you just going to keep that in your head? We hope not.
  • People who look interesting but aren't right for the company just yet. This is the inverse of the situation above. Let's say that in Q3 of this year you'll look to hire a new VP of Sales. You are at a party and you meet someone who could foot the bill. However, you aren't ready yet to fill that role. How do you make sure you don't forget to reach out to that person when the time is right.
  • People who are interested in your company but haven't officially applied. Let's say that you reach out to someone about working at your company and they're interested in hearing more. However, they aren't ready to officially cast the die and hop into your hiring pipeline. They ask a few questions, want to hear a little more, etc. This process may unfold over weeks and months. You can just store all this information in your email but what if it's not just email (e.g., phone conversations, face-to-face, etc.). And even if it is all email, piecing together the conversation can be very inefficient.

These are only a few of the scenarios in which having a tool to track interactions is important. There are many more.

Now there's a question of what to store in Highrise. This will vary from candidate to candidate. At a minimum we suggest to put their name, company, title and contact information. That's CRM 101. We'd also suggest to put in their LinkedIn and Twitter profile URLs. Highrise makes this easy and can actually pull in partial LinkedIn profiles and recent Tweets directly into Highrise. A few notes on where you met someone are great to if you met face-to-face. For example, if a person is a PHP engineer but has mentioned they're learning Ruby, that's a great thing to take note of.

There are some other things that you may want to do to super-charge this once you have the basics down. On feature to try is tagging. You can take people across skills (e.g., "Javascript", "WebAnalytics") , assign candidates to people in your organization with tags (e.g, "Steve", "Mary") or tag candidates with locations (e.g., "SFBay", "NYC", etc.) which is nice, especially if you have multiple offices or are open to remote employees.

One under-utilized use of tagging is for pipeline tracking. Highrise doesn't really handle pipeline tracking well but you can mimic this a bit by assigning tags like the following:

  • New - When you come across someone who looks like an interesting fit for your company but you haven't had any interaction with the person, assign them the "New" tag.
  • Contacted - Let's say you find someone on LinkedIn and send them an InMail. Now you can add the Contacted tag (removing the New tag if need be).
  • Open - This tag can be used to indicate that you have some sort of dialogue established with the candidate. You can periodically review the list of people with the "Open" tag to see if there are any actions that you should be taking.
  • Closed - This tag can be used when someone is hired at your company ("Yea!!") or declines the opportunity to apply ("Boo!!"). Candidates will stay in your system but it's clear that, at least for the time being there's no need to do anything more here.

There might be some more sophisticated ways to tracking your pre-applicant pipeline but these four basic tags work pretty well for most companies.

The next feature you might want to use in Highrise then is Tasks. Tasks are awesome because they can help you achieve Inbox Zero (you know, that mythical circumstance where you actually have no messages in your Inbox...). Right now, if you're like most people who do any amount of recruiting you probably have a lot of recruiting-related emails in your Inbox. Some of them you need to deal with, others you don't and might include circumstances where you're waiting for time to pass or waiting for action from someone else.

Tasks allow you to push those messages out of your Inbox, only to return when the time is right (or at least better). All you need to do is send the email to one of your Highrise dropbox email addresses (more details on how to do that here). The best part is that not only will it remove the email and have it return at a later date (which you can specify), but it'll also copy that email into the notes in Highrise of the person you're emailing with so they'll be a central record of communication for future purposes.

One last note, add the email dropbox addresses to your address book and configure them with user-friendly names like "Next Week - Highrise" so you can just start typing that into the To: field on your email client and have it auto-complete. BTW, dropbox emails can also be bcc'ed (or cc'ed but bcc is cleaner) when you want to respond to a candidate right away but want to have that conversation stored in Highrise for future reference.

So that's it for now. We're going to be returning to this subject in another post and covering a few more advanced hacks that will be very useful to you as you scale your recruiting efforts. The main takeaway that from this post should be that if you aren't using something to track talented people before they apply to work at your company, you should be. Highrise is just one of many options and we only recommend it because we feel it's a good one. We don't have any relationship with the 37signals folks or make any money from recommending it (although it's fair to point out that Entelo has Highrise integration so that if you use Entelo for recruiting it'll be even more powerful if you are also using Highrise).

We really hope this is useful and please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We'd especially love to hear from those of you who have ATS platforms that track candidates before they officially apply and what your experience has been with them. Happy company building!

How to Email an Engineer

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