It all started with a nonchalant post in the SourceCon Facebook group. At first, I misread the post as “Zapar” and pondered how Jason Gorham was using one of Stacy Zapar’s recruitment workflow strategies?
That thought was quickly diminished as Zapar herself later requested a SourceCon Hangout to discuss Zapier. The idea was brilliant, but like most sourcers, I’m still asking myself, “what is Zapier?”
“This is automation that will not put recruiters out of a job,” brilliantly stated Katrina Kibben.
“Zapier is a simple tool for automating integration processes. I use it mostly to get two systems to communicate that generally don’t (like Google Sheets, MailChimp, Eventbrite, and Asana),” added SourceCon’s Grandmaster runner-up Sarah Goldberg.
Straight from its website, “Zapier is an online automation tool that connects your favorite apps, such as Gmail, Slack, MailChimp, and over 750 more. You can connect two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks without coding or relying on developers to build the integration. Move info between your web apps automatically so that you can focus on your most important work. It’s easy enough that anyone can build their own app workflows with just a few clicks.”
It’s no secret that recruiters and sourcers alike love automation! But can Zapier’s automation help us throughout our busy day? “I use it to automate a lot of the little things that wind up taking a ton of time out of my day, time that I can then get back and use for sourcing! The interface is intuitive, and the library of pre-built Zaps is pretty extensive. The advice they give to test it is pretty helpful, too.” added Goldberg.
For those of us still learning about Zapier, a Zap is an automated workflow between your apps. For example, you may have a Zap that saves your Gmail attachments to Dropbox and another Zap that saves emails that you star in Gmail to a text file.
Saving time throughout the day is unquestionably a strong incentive for using Zapier. Every recruiter and sourcer could use more time to find, interact and engage with candidates throughout their diligent day.
Here is one of my favorite tricks from the Zapier blog on how to permanently save new Twitter search results. “Whether you’re monitoring a brand, keeping tabs on a developing story or saving tweets containing a certain hashtag, Zapier can automatically archive new Twitter search results straight to a Google Docs spreadsheet. You’re able to pull in not only the body of the tweet but its time and location along with details about the profile it came from—the individual’s name, follower and following count, location and more.”
And another on how you can get an alert every time SourceCon publishes a new article, “Instead of consistently checking a site or RSS reader, let new posts of your favorite blog arrive right in your inbox.”
Oh, and what about this one? Queue sharing with Buffer on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+! “Buffer is a super handy tool to schedule and track social media postings, and when hooked up with an RSS, it becomes a convenient way to streamline sharing new blog posts. This method is preferred over directly sharing new posts right to social media sites because with Buffer you’re able to look over your queue and make any final edits before your content is later shared.”
In true SourceCon style, the community gets what the community wants. Since the sourcing community is looking to learn more information about Zapier, we have scheduled a hangout on Zoom Monday, May 5 at 2:00 PM CDT. This won’t be your typical webinar, but a hangout discussing the potential of using Zapier in your recruitment workflow. You’ll hear from Kibben, Goldberg, Susanna Conway, Jess Roberts, Steve Levy and of course, Zapar.
In fact, here is why Zapar is excited about the upcoming Zapier hangout: “I’m always looking for ways to automate the time-consuming manual tasks in our daily recruiting lives to free up more time for the important stuff like sourcing, screening, pipelining, candidate engagement and relationship building. (Oh, and anything with the word Zap in it sounds good to me. haha) Can’t wait!”
If you missed us on Friday, May 5th, check out the recording here.
