Supercharge your hiring using Jotform Tables

If you’ve ever had to hire someone, chances are you’ve experienced a staffing scenario that may have gone a little something like this:

• Your growing startup just raised a new round of funding. You need to hire aggressively across all functions to meet your new growth goals.
• The corporation you work for is reinvesting in a new marketing, product, or operational strategy that requires new or additional skill sets. You need to quickly build out your team to tackle your organization’s key initiative(s).
• You’re the head of talent acquisition or recruitment for your organization, and you’re dealing with complex hiring processes.

Regardless of the situation, the success of your hiring process will hinge on a number of factors — not least of which is how you manage that process. In a 2015 report, Capterra found that of the recruiters and talent managers who use some form of recruiting or applicant tracking software, 94 percent said the software improved their hiring process.

Indeed, such software solutions can help you reduce the typical back-and-forth communication and manual work involved in hiring and speed up the process, both for your team and your candidates.

Jotform Tables helps you manage the entire process efficiently — from scheduling interviews, to collecting candidate data, to assigning tasks to the interviewing team, to tracking candidate progress — saving you time and energy so you can make the best decisions.

What do current hiring processes entail?

To determine which tools best serve your hiring needs, it’s important to understand the process of hiring today. For many companies, hiring now involves thorough processes for handling and evaluating applicants. Best practices like quantitative scoring, collaborative interviewing (where each team member tackles a core value or topic), and qualitative testing/assessment can all be part of the process. And a more complex process requires more overall organization.

Managers in many small businesses, organizations, and startups have to handle their own hiring, without an HR team to assist (in addition to their regular duties). This means workflows and feedback loops have to be more structured to lead to successful outcomes.

And resumes (typically PDFs) aren’t the only forms of candidate data employers track. Now there are also applications through online forms, a candidate’s professional and social sites, and (depending on the role) cloud-based project submissions. Employers need flexible tools that can collect and share these different types of information across solutions.

How to supercharge your hiring with Jotform Tables

With Jotform Tables, you don’t have to use separate software tools to manage hiring data. Your applications, screens, resumes, project assessments, surveys, and feedback requests can go straight from PDF or form, to Jotform Tables.

There, you can easily collaborate on tasks, manage and organize a variety of candidate data, and share insights with other stakeholders. Additionally, you’ll be able to chart a candidate’s progress through Calendar view or make side-by-side evaluations of multiple candidates in Cards view.

Here are three ways Jotform Tables can supercharge your hiring efforts.

1. Applications, form screens, and evaluations

In a perfect world, your job postings will garner interest from a lot of great candidates. That means a ton of applications heading your way.

Whether you use a Jotform template or create your own application form, you’re on your way to an all-in-one hiring software solution.

In Jotform Tables, you can see the data for all your submitted applications in four different views: Spreadsheet, Cards, Calendar, and Uploads (Uploads view is especially valuable when comparing multiple resumes in one screen). Viewing candidates holistically allows you and your team to quickly identify the cream of the crop.

Once you have your contenders, it’s time to narrow your list even further. Normally, this is where the traditional phone screen comes in. Instead, consider the “form screen.” Juggling even short phone interviews can play havoc with your daily schedule. And while a phone screen allows you to hear the timbre of someone’s voice as they answer questions, you’re usually also furiously scribbling notes or typing them into a laptop — not ideal for giving your full attention.

On the flip side, a form screen (getting written answers to questions central to the role via a form you create) asks the same questions, gives you a great sense of your candidate’s thought process, saves precious time, and enables you to collect all of your candidate information in one place.

After all the assessments or projects have been submitted and final interviews have taken place, you’re ready to evaluate the candidates and recommend a hire. Jotform Tables makes it easy for stakeholders to give their feedback directly in the table. You can then filter and sort by candidate for a clear view of how each was rated. The evaluations of your top finishers will contain all the necessary detail you need to hire with confidence.

2. Internal and external communication

Jotform Tables makes it easy to grant access, assign task ownership, and share notes on candidate, interview, and evaluation progress. In addition, stakeholder access is flexible so you can make your table public (anyone can view it), limit it to those within the organization (company access only), or make it private (for certain individuals only). For private tables, you can choose between collaborator and read-only permissions, so everyone has the access they need to move the hiring process along.

A key part of the hiring process is communicating with your candidates along the way. Unfortunately “ghosting” (when a company stops responding to a candidate’s messages) has become a thing in recent years. In fact, a collection of recruiting stats by Lever points out that 65 percent of interviewed candidates said they “never or rarely” received notice of a final decision. A bad candidate experience can come back to bite you, especially if negative reviews surface because of it.

Keep your candidates in the loop with Jotform Tables. You can use the Form Builder to send autoresponder emails whenever a candidate submits an application. You can also reply to candidates directly from Jotform Tables (as long as email address was a required field in their application form) by using the Reply button in Single or Cards view. Simply remove their original submission information from the message.

For post-interview communication, you may want to consider calling any applicants who made it as far as the interview stage but ultimately didn’t make the cut. According to Balance Careers, you “owe the candidate the courtesy of a call even if you follow up the call with a rejection letter.”

3. Workflow efficiency

Don’t interrupt your workflow by exporting candidate data from one tool to another. Since your collected data is automatically funneled to Jotform Tables, your efficiency gets a boost. And Jotform Tables has the functionality you’ve come to expect and the flexibility to handle different data types.

Fill your columns with alphanumeric data, checkboxes, resume and CV PDF uploads, video, and advanced formulas. Organize your hiring tasks for easy management by filtering your submission data just like any other worksheet. Need to drill down into a specific candidate’s details? Hover over your candidate, click the blue View button, and get a single view of all their info.

Jotform Tables is just one component of an all-in-one data-collection platform. This platform takes your hiring workflow to the next level by helping you

• Collect job applications through the online Form Builder
• Aggregate and categorize data, then share and collaborate on tasks through Jotform Tables
• Visualize your hiring data and decision-making with the Jotform Report Builder

Hiring with Jotform Tables

Sure, we’re biased, but one longtime JotFormer swears by using Jotform Tables for hiring. And in full transparency, I have to agree since he hired me!

In the words of Chad Reid, Jotform’s VP of marketing and communications: “Once we interview candidates, I send an evaluation form so that everyone can weigh in. Jotform Tables makes it simple to see how each candidate fared. When I make my hiring recommendations to our CEO, I include the evaluation form table, sorted by candidate, to give a clean look at how each interviewee fared. By default, Jotform Tables makes all of the candidate names different colors, so it looks crisp and professional.

“The fact that I was able to get applications, screenings, evaluations, and take-home candidate challenge submissions in one tool is pretty amazing. Jotform Tables really helped because I was able to not only collect great information, but share the data and get a better view of our applicant pool.”

Enabling your team to do the best job they can helps everyone have the best hiring experience possible. Jotform Tables gives you the power to organize your submitted applicant data, streamline the hiring process, and bring everyone together for your next round of hiring.