simplicant blog

Newly Added Features

farhan.ahmed — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:33:02 +0000

Thank you for all of your valuable comments and suggestions on how to improve Simplicant. We are happy to announce the release of next version of Simplicant with some of the changes highlighted below:

Job Details Page:
On popular demand, we have introduced a new job details page so that you can manage all the internal information regarding job opening easily. You can enter additional information for internal use, post notes or upload additional files related to the job opening.

Take Additional Files from Applicants:
We have added an option to let you add file upload fields in job questionnaire so that now you can take those additional files (cover letter, picture or anything) from applicants when they apply for the job.

Login Link on Simplicant Home Page:
Some of our customers forgot their Simplicant login page address and in order to avoid such situation again we have added login link to Simplicant home page for your convenience.

Job List Searching & Sorting:
You can now search any job in your account using the job search option on the job listings page. Moreover we have added sorting option on all columns on job listing page so that you can sort them as you like!

User management:
No need to delete a user from Simplicant account when they stop working for you, all you have to do is make them inactive. This way they will not be able to login and the data which was added by them will remain intact.

If you have any questions or feedback about this feature, please let us know at support@simplicant.com or at our Feedback Forum.

Share applications by e-mail

Administrator — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:46:41 +0000

A lot of our customers have told us that they want to be able to send resumes from their system to other people in their company, who are not necessarily added as users in their Simplicant account, and get their feedback about the candidates. In many cases, the intended recipients of the resumes were team leads, direct supervisors, interviewers, and sometimes even C-level executives. To cater to this need, we have recently released the “Share Application” feature, which lets you share an application from within Simplicant, to anyone else through e-mail. Simplicant also gives you the option to send the applicant’s questionnaire response (if any), messages exchanged with the applicant, and notes saved against the application along with the resume.

How it works:

From the Application Summary page, click the Share button.
Simplicant asks you for the recipient’s name and e-mail address, your personal message for the recipient, and what other items (messages, notes, etc.) you want to send along with the e-mail.
After filling out these details, you click the Send button, which sends an e-mail to the recipient with the candidate’s resume and other selected details.
To give feedback, the recipient simply replies to the e-mail with their comments at the beginning of the e-mail. These comments are saved as Notes against the relevant application, and you, the user, are notified of the response by e-mail.

Keeping our promise of simplicity, we have kept the flow of this feature as simple and intuitive as possible, and hope that you will find it a very useful and easy-to-use feature. If you have any questions or feedback about this feature, please let us know at support [at] simplicant [dot] com or at our Feedback Forum.

Welcoming feedback with open arms

Administrator — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:56:41 +0000

User feedback is one of the best things that could happen to a service-oriented organization. It gives the organization knowledge of what customers are really looking for, and saves them from firing shots in the dark and hoping that users will be excited about their new and upcoming features.

We at Simplicant understand this and want to harbor the power of your feedback, in order to make Simplicant more useful, while keeping the application simple and user-friendly.

To achieve this, we are proud to announce that we have launched the Simplicant Feedback Forum, powered by UserVoice. The forum allows you to submit your ideas, feature requests, bugs and other feedback about Simplicant, and cast your votes or post comments on the ideas already submitted by other users.

You can access the forum at http://feedback.simplicant.com . You can also give your feedback by simply clicking on the small Feedback button (shown in the left) you see on the right side of the screen in the Simplicant user panel and home page.

Receive job applications by e-mail!

Administrator — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:44:28 +0000

A lot of customers have asked us to make it easier to integrate Simplicant with their current hiring process, and for candidates to apply for job openings. For the past few weeks, we have been working hard on a new feature that does exactly that.

Many candidates are used to “e-mailing their resumes”, and many startups and small companies are used to receiving job applications through e-mail, and then tracking these candidates on spreadsheets and similar tools. Moving to an applicant tracking system usually means changing most of these habits for both the employer and the candidates. However, Simplicant allows you to continue receiving applications by e-mail, and be able to track them through Simplicant at the same time!

How it works:

Upon sign-up, you get a free e-mail address at which you can receive applications. By default, this address is jobs@yourdomain.simplicant.com. This address is directly linked to your Simplicant account, and candidates can send in their resumes and applications to this address. Simplicant then parses these applications, and they appear under the “Applications” tab in your Simplicant account, and can be tracked just like normal applications!

For example, company XYZ used to ask their candidates to apply to jobs@xyz.com. XYZ decides to sign up for Simplicant. Upon sign-up, Simplicant automatically generates the address jobs@xyz.simplicant.com. XYZ just asks their website administrator to change the address on their Jobs or Careers page from jobs@xyz.com to the new address jobs@xyz.simplicant.com. Candidates can now send in their applications to this new address and XYZ management can track these applications in Simplicant. Really, it’s that simple!
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Track your applicants’ status in style!

Administrator — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:55:09 +0000

Now you can track the detailed status of each of your applications in Simplicant! With this feature, you can find out which of your applicants are in which stage of the hiring process, e.g. New, Screened, Interviewed, Hired and so on. In addition to this, you can even define your own hiring work-flow, and change the work-flow stages that are provided by default. For example, a software firm may want to use multiple interview stages, “Technical Interview” and “HR Interview” followed by “Final Interview”.

On the applications page, you can view the status of each application as shown in the screenshot on the right. You can also sort and filter the applications based on their current status in the system. The system also tracks when an applicant status was changed, the to/from status, and the name of the user who changed it. This “History” option is available from the Application Summary page.

And if that isn’t enough, each stage has its own color to make the system more intuitive and for you to be able to quickly identify candidates’ status. These colors are also customizable, and you have a whole set of colors to choose from!

To change your hiring work-flow and select colors for each, go to the “Stages” tab within the Settings page. Here you can add new stages to your work-flow, edit the current ones, assign colors to each of them, and remove the ones that you do not need.

The feature is up and running, and is available on both new and existing accounts (all packages)! A note for existing customers: The new status has replaced the old “Processed / Unprocessed” status field.

If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to get in touch with us at support [at] simplicant [dot] com

Your job board in a widget!

Administrator — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:24:09 +0000

When our customers sign up for an account, many of them complain that they aren’t very comfortable with completely replacing their Careers page with the simplicant jobs page, typically because they have a lot of other information on the page, for example what kind of people they are looking for, how it is like to be working at the company, and so on.

Listening to our customers (as we always do!), we are proud to announce the new Jobs Widget feature! With this feature, you can show your job openings within your careers page, simply by embedding a code snippet in the HTML. Any changes to your job openings in simplicant will be reflected in the widget, so you don’t have to worry about making changes to your site every time you add/modify/delete a job opening. When candidates click on a job opening in the widget, they will be taken to the job details page, from where they can apply for the job.

We obviously care about the aesthetics of your website and Careers section, and therefore allow you to change the look and feel of your widget, so that it blends in with the rest of your website. Custom CSS gives you complete control over colors, font sizes, list images, and a lot more.

To change the look and feel of your widget, and to get your widget code snippet, just go to the Widget page in the Settings section. You can also preview your widget on this page before finalizing it and embedding it in your website.

We believe that this is a major step forward towards seamlessly integrating simplicant with your website, and we hope that you will find this feature useful. In case you need any help or run into any problems, feel free to contact us at support [at] simplicant [dot] com!

simplicant goes into public beta!

Administrator — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:42:23 +0000

Confiz Solutions announces the launch of simplicant: a simple, web-based applicant tracking system designed for small businesses.

April 17, 2008 — With most business solutions geared towards large enterprises, Confiz Solutions brings a new twist to the market by launching simplicant: a simple hiring solution for small businesses. simplicant is born from the philosophy that despite the widespread availability of applicant tracking and resume management solutions, none of them really solves the hiring problem for small businesses. Almost all the solutions come with high price tags, and are bloated with features like ERP integration and succession planning that are irrelevant to small businesses, leaving them with no choice but to rely on informal methods to manage job applications.

simplicant allows SMEs to move towards a more organized, cleaner job applications management system. simplicant is the first web 2.0 applicant tracking system and brings the spirit of web 2.0 into hiring. It is completely web-based (Software as a Service) and makes use of powerful web 2.0 concepts like tags, rankings, search and collaboration to make the hiring experience easier, smoother and quicker.

“In the world of SMEs, hiring the right people can be the make-or-break factor for success.” says Tayyab Javed, Product Manager for simplicant. “In order to succeed in today’s highly competitive market, the management of these companies needs to focus all their time on their core business, and have little time to spend on activities like hiring. This leads them to hire average people, and is the first step towards disaster. This is where simplicant comes in. simplicant brings sanity to the madness by making it easier to advertise job openings, communicate with applicants, collaborate within the organization on hiring decisions and recruit the perfect candidates quickly”

simplicant currently offers the following feature-set:

Powerful ways to organize applications and resumes
Full-text search for searching through resumes & applications in seconds
Tasks for collaborating with colleagues throughout the hiring process
Job questionnaires to make applicant screening easier
A hosted, customizable job board
Complete list of features and screenshots on the Tour Page

Pricing: simplicant is built on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, and is currently offered in four packages: lite, basic, standard and pro, each tailored for a different company size. All the packages come with a 90-day free trial, while the “lite” package is completely free. There’s no sign-up fee and users are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis for paid packages. Detailed pricing information is available on the Pricing Page

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Attach files to applications!

Administrator — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:45:12 +0000

We are proud to announce another much-requested feature: attaching files to applications! simplicant now allows you to attach as many files as you want to each application within the system! This could be anything from completed forms to test results to interview notes to copies of the applicant’s documents.

You can access the Files section from the Application Summary page. Each application has its own set of files that you can view in the Files area, which can also be used to attach new files to the application.

Please feel free to let us know if you are experiencing any problems with this feature, as well as ways in which we could improve it. Also, we’d love to hear how you are using this feature to make your hiring experience better!

Spanish support released!

Administrator — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:25:02 +0000

We are proud to announce that simplicant now supports internationalization and the first language, after English, that we are supporting is Spanish! Users can now view the site (www.simplicant.com) in Spanish by using the “Change Language” option on the top-right corner of the page. Accounts created through the Spanish version will have their default language as Spanish. This means that all their screens, including the job board, will appear in Spanish.

We hope that this will be a major step towards making recruiting simpler and more fun, all over the world!

If anyone is interested in helping us translate simplicant to another language, get in touch with us at support [at] simplicant [dot] com.

Customize your job board!

Administrator — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:28:55 +0000

You can now customize your job board to match the colors of your company and your website! Combined with the already built-in feature of using your logo on your simplicant job board, you can now make the look and feel of your job board fully match your company’s website.

This feature is accessible through the Job Board page in the Settings area. We are using the Yahoo! UI color picker, which makes the whole process of customizing colors simple and intuitive.

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