Is hiring for your small team killing you?

Everybody who’s ever been involved in the process of hiring someone knows how tough it is to keep track of the entire pipeline— managing a never ending bunch of emails, calendar invites, feedback, and attachments. The problem is glaringly apparent in smaller teams, with no dedicated HR. This post explains how we used Cubeit to solve the problem for us, and how it might be useful to other small teams in managing their hiring, or indeed managing and organizing any of their content. (If you know someone who’s bitched to you about how tough it is to organize and keep track of their email, you should point him/her here — but only after you read the whole thing, and are convinced of it yourself!)

For those unfamiliar with the concept of Cubeit, here’s a quick overview of what we are trying to do.

Cubeit is a mobile app which lets you add any sort of data into a collection. Every piece of content is represented as a card which shows you only important information.

What are collections and cards?

1. Cards — Think Google Now cards, where the most important information is displayed to you front and center. For example, a flight card extracted from your email which shows you the date & time, flight number, boarding gate, etc. and pushes the unimportant stuff (like the T&C) out of your view.
2. Collections — Folders are dead. A collection is a group of heterogeneous data (represented as cards) pulled from multiple apps and content sources which put the task at hand at the forefront of the app. Put cards together to form collections and do just about anything — express an idea, plan an event, save diverse content about a particular topic, or just about anything else.

Before Cubeit (or B.C.)

Before we tested Cubeit for this use case, we were using email, as it is still the dominant form of communication for any hiring activity (in small teams even more so, because of the lack of resources to pay for a complete hiring solution). From my own experience, a typical email chain for a prospective employee will start off with a resume and other attachments. To get feedback, I copy colleagues on the same email chain. Comments come back to me in the form of unstructured text. I take the comments into account and move on to the next step — meeting the candidate. This adds another reply on top of the email, where I discuss times and venues to meet, and finally round it off with a calendar invite to the relevant people. After the meeting, there’s another round of emails from the stakeholders to decide whether or not the candidate is a good fit.

Imagine scrolling through a mail chain with 50 messages and 10 people cc-ed, and trying to find the final date and venue of the interview in between all the noise.

According to me this process completely broken. A few problems I can see right off the bat -

1. Being mobile — I prefer catching up on candidate profiles, interview dates etc on my commute to and from work, leaving more time for my actual work when I am at my desk. This simply isn’t possible with the above workflow. Why? Read on.
2. Search — It is tough to find the information I want on email, especially when I am on the phone. Imagine scrolling through a mail chain with 50 messages and 10 people cc-ed, and trying to find the final date and venue of the interview in between all the noise. Or even trying to compile the comments by a particular person. It’s a nightmare.
3. Multiple apps — Email was envisioned as a communication tool, and into it we have now thrown files, meetings, task assignments, reminders and what not, all in a bid to do more. However, the central problem remains — email is built text first, and any other data type you need to interact with needs to open in a different app. This problem is even more apparent on your mobile, where every action you take — clicking a link, opening a file — takes you to a different app and makes you lose context.

How does Cubeit work?

The screenshot below shows Cubeit in action, with a collection created to organize the hiring task for one candidate. What is immediately apparent is that we are trying a task first approach to the problem, and are not constrained by data type.

We started off by adding an email from Suraj (the prospective candidate) into the collection, and from then on Cubeit takes over. The 3 important items in the email — the LinkedIn and Behance profiles, and the resume — are extracted automatically, and displayed as cards (clicking the cards leads to the content opening within a Cubeit browser).

Collaboration is made easier. The collection is shared with the stakeholders, and feedback is quickly and neatly taken in notes. Notice how all data types are visually distinct and not obfuscated within the email text. I can quickly scan the collection and see what I want to know.

More magic now. The reply on the email conversation is tracked by Cubeit — dates and times are extracted into a calendar invite, and location is translated into a Google Map card.

Contacts from the phone and interview notes from Evernote are extracted and displayed within the collection.

After Cubeit (or The Future)

As you can see, there is a neat flow from the first email all the way to the post interview feedback, incorporating multiple types of content from multiple apps, all in the same place. The benefits are obvious.

1. No more switching between multiple apps trying to find what I want. It’s all organized in one place.
2. Quick search — The visual nature of collections means I don’t have to scan through tons of email text to find what is important.
3. Content first — Cards put the important information first with summaries and actionable buttons, enabling you to get more done.
4. Truly mobile — Everything is possible, even with the limited screen size of your phone.

There is a neat flow from the first email all the way to the post interview feedback, incorporating multiple types of content from multiple apps, all in the same place.

It’s also not hard to imagine that the cards and collections framework gives you a lot more freedom to work with your content. You could put a bunch of articles together with a video to learn that new Italian recipe, or you could add a bunch of related web link along with a few notes while you are ideating for a project at work (say goodbye to the links in document framework). The uses are literally limitless.

Want Cubeit? We’re in closed beta now and have only 20 invites to give away to people who think Cubeit can dramatically improve their lives. Click this link — and sign up on the website.

I would love to hear feedback. Do you think Cubeit is awesome? Or just another app? Or do you think there’s something we are missing? Do you have a feature you want added? Hit me up in the comments or write to me at mithun@gridants.com.