Collaborative Recruiting Using Airtable

My first couple of years managing user research projects, the two things I automatically reached for when starting a new project were Google Sheets and a blend of various recruiting tools (UserInterviews, Respondent, social media, etc). If any sort of analysis or phone screening was needed, I’d export results from recruiting tools into Google Sheets, and then take notes and organize participants from a master spreadsheet.

It was a little messy, but it worked for projects that I was recruiting for on my own, and it was usually easy to explain my methods to a teammate who might hop into the spreadsheet to help with phone screening.

In the last year, I’ve begun working with a client who has a complex target participant and is super hands-on with the recruiting process. Once I’ve found a candidate that I think is a good fit, it’s really important to run it by our client — their specialized knowledge is key, and it helps ensure that each person we speak with in a small qualitative study is someone they’re really excited about hearing from.

In our first project with them, I decided to use Google Sheets much the same way I had in past projects, and then gave the client access to the spreadsheet so they could check in and give feedback on participants as I found potential matches. This turned out to be a bit of a disaster.

There wasn’t an easy or direct way to inform the client of updates to the sheet, so I’d often just send an email about new candidates I added (“Screened a couple new potential participants — in particular I think Lisa is great”), but this was sometimes overwhelming and confusing, and required they switch between email and Google Sheets for giving feedback and learning about potential recruits. It also meant they had to parse through a messy Google Sheet full of rejected candidates. It quickly became a pain point for both me and the stakeholder, and I began to look around for other options.

So, for our second project with them, I decided to switch to Airtable, which I hadn’t used before. Initially I was enamored with just one thing — the Send Record feature. On its own, this would have been convincing enough to make the switch. Basically, it’s just the ability to send a single row of a spreadsheet to someone’s email — and it arrives cleanly, in a form-type layout. It allowed me to send an email to the client directly from Airtable upon adding a promising candidate — and without the client having to ever leave their email, they could get all the information they needed and send feedback by just replying to the email.

The Send Record feature in Airtable formats a spreadsheet row super neatly into an email, allowing clients to review a candidate without ever having to go to Airtable.

This was a huge success for me because it meant that each candidate I sent along to them received individual feedback in an organized way, and that the feedback was closely associated with that participant’s record rather than lost in a large email thread.

(Disclaimer: This tactic has worked great for me because I’ve been using it for (mainly) challenging recruiting tasks where I might be passing up to 40 potential candidates along to stakeholders over the course of an engagement, in order to find 5 or 6 good fits. YMMV depending on the scope and scale of your research!)

Over time, other features of Airtable have made it a standout tool for collaborative recruiting, and I don’t think I’ll go back to Google Sheets to centralize anything beyond the simplest recruiting task.

What are some of my favorite things about using Airtable for recruiting so far?

• The stakeholder can see all the candidate’s information & relevant links (for example, link to a recorded phone screener) in one email, and respond to it without switching over to a new tool or having to check a Google Sheet to see whether I’ve added anyone new for them to consider.
• I can get clear feedback on individual candidates straight to my email, and update the Airtable accordingly.
• It’s much more readable than Google Sheets for collaboration and sharing purposes. It’s more presentable as well, in case stakeholders log in to take a look.
• I can pull up a candidate’s record in full while I phone screen them, instead of having to horizontally scroll across a messy spreadsheet row (see below).

An easily accessible form view of each spreadsheet row means I can say goodbye to the dreaded horizontal scroll while I’m on the phone with a candidate.

A Couple Features I’d Love to See in Future:

• It would be awesome if email responses to the Send Record feature could automatically import into a new column in the table. For example, if a client replies with a note, “Jay looks pretty good — let’s hold onto him and decide later,” that could go directly into a Client Notes column of the table.
• Or, some sort of interactive email option from Airtable, like Send Record With Dropdown Question, so that I could give the client some options to select from each time I send a candidate for their review: “Approve/Deny/Maybe”
• UserInterviews.com integration! Currently I could export my UI results as an .xls file and then import that into Airtable, but it would be really cool to connect a UserInterviews project to a base and have the base dynamically update as potential recruits roll in.

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of Airtable’s capabilities — I’d love to hear how other folks are using it for recruiting, or about any cool features I might have missed!