Recruiters, get with the times. You are wasting far too much time copying and pasting data from Word document. Give me 10 minutes to get your life back. Let me explain. I search for all of my clients and route them back through the company where I work so I can W2. Long story short, I really don’t like to 1099 because I once had an issue getting paid, and I won’t deal with that again. On LinkedIn, when I flip my status to show that I’m looking for 1099 (that I’ll convert to corp to corp), I get a spike in recruiters where it might have been only 3-5 a week to about 5-10 a day. Many ask for additional information I guess to attach to my file they want to keep on me. Some ask for me to just send it back in an email. Some want me to fill out a “form” in Word. It isn’t really a Word form, just a document with a table.
Here is part of one I was just sent:
It isn’t hard for me to quickly fill it in, and I’m sure he wants to make it as easy as possible for candidates so that he gets a higher rate of responses, so from that aspect, it works. For you as a recruiter, however, I guess you must copy and paste pieces of this into Excel or some kind of CRM to add me to your master rolodex, what makes you valuable. I’ve done some recruiting for my company too. I know that your list of contacts and how you’ve managed those relationships continues to pay you. If you are sending me these kinds of Word documents, I guarantee you are wasting too much time copying and pasting.
Here is how you can get the data fast and easy. Moreover, it makes it really simple for these candidates to reply over their phones too. If you have Office 365, go to https://forms.office.com. You will see something similar to this:
Create New Form
Give it a good name by just clicking on Untitled form and changing it. It is up to you to add a description or not. Maybe you might want to just give the candidate a disclaimer of how you might use the data and won’t sell it to people trying to get them to buy a new warranty for their car.
Click Add question.
You get this and are able to select what kind of data gets saved. I like choices whenever you can use them because you can keep them from fat fingering data, and it helps you group sort and filter later.
You can even select Multiple answers on this in case you want to ask them something like this:
Keep hitting Add question until you have everything in there that you’d like. I added a few more here and ordered them how I wanted.
Now, at the top of the page, see where it said Preview? Click it. You will see how it will look for the people when you send them the link. But wait there is more. Look at the top right of the page. It will show you what it looks like in a mobile view. Click on that. This is how mine looks:
Pretty, right? Hit the back button there and click on Share.
It defaults to only allow people within your organization, but you can check it so that anyone with the link can respond. Then copy the link or start an email. If you want to collaborate with other people on your team to ensure the form looks just how you’d like, you can share it for that reason. Send it out. And the magic is when you get your responses. When you click on Responses tab, you will see the number of response, the average time it takes to complete, and its status. It will also allow you to open it in Excel. From there, you can copy and paste hundreds of responses into SharePoint or your CRM, or forward them to the clients you are head hunting for.
So, before your next big event, you can make one of these forms, open it up on a tablet, and let all of your booth’s visitors fill it out, or you can send it via Indeed, LinkedIn, Twitter, or email. Just let the system work for you. Do what you do best and leave the data collection up to the machines.