Hire, Google’s New Candidate Tracking App, Explained
Today, Google rolled out a new application tracking system (ATS) called Hire that aims to help smaller businesses keep track of correspondence with their potential employees.
What does it mean that Google’s introduced this feature? Should you use it for your business? And what does it not offer that you really ought to have?
First of all, companies and candidates have been using ATS technology for years. Especially for larger companies, ATS’s are necessary to keep track of who’s coming through the company pipeline. However, with smaller companies, correspondence often happens the “old-fashioned way”: write to a candidate, shuffle through past correspondence by searching their name, keeping hard-copy files on each person, etc.
Hire streamlines this process by keeping all a candidate’s information in one place. Information that candidates share — such as a resume and contact information—is passed onto employers and consolidated into one profile. In addition, Hire syncs the candidate’s calendar invites and past correspondence so you don’t have to dig back through anything to find out what’s been said between company and candidate. Hiring managers can even trade feedback about the candidate within their profile. Additionally, Hire works as an overlay on Gmail so you don’t need to master a whole new interface to work with it.
If you have a small business and don’t have the resources for recruiters, Hire might be a good tool to pick up. It may help you keep your on-boarding operation organized and clean. The fact that technology behemoth Google is jumping on the bandwagon of helping small companies to organize their potential hires means there is a massive demand for ATS’s across the board. Without one of these applications, your life will probably be a lot more frustrating.
Here’s where Google Hire doesn’t help you. It optimizes your time, but it doesn’t optimize your decision. It can organize a bunch of candidates, but it can’t tell you which ones would be best for your business.
Ultimately, the most important aspect of hiring is finding the right fit between your prospective employees and your business at large, and no matter how well you organize your candidate lists, most job boards will not help you determine fit. Google Jobs will help you find and attract more candidates, and Google Hire can help you organize them — but how will you know if they are the right candidates? Tools like SquarePeg are taking on that challenge by measuring critical non-resume attributes such as personality fit, cultural fit, and environment fit—which are as critical as skills and experience when it comes to successful hiring.
For that, an ATS or a job board simply can’t help. Pre-hire assessments at the sourcing stage are far better equipped to figure out which candidates you should be talking to before they ever get entered into your ATS.
SquarePeg aims to build a more personalized approach to the job search. If you choose to use SquarePeg in conjunction with an ATS like Google Hire, you’ll get a curated list of candidates with which you can manage correspondence with ease.
Using all the tools at your disposal to find the right employees for your company is not as hard as you might think. The world’s most forward-thinking companies are building platforms for companies like yours to make sure that you have the best possible experience hiring, working, and succeeding.
