The Weekly Dose II: Google Hire’s New Gmail Add-on

So, this week I’m giving you two doses of HR Tech because so much is happening in the space I just couldn’t get away with one thing this week! Google Hire, the ATS for SMBs, just released a new feature for their system that is something recruiters will really like!

If you haven’t heard of Google Hire, you really need to check it out if your a business under 1,000 employees and your business uses the G-suite. The G-suite being you do your email in Gmail and you use Google Calendar.  That’s important because the only way you can use Google Hire is if you’re a G-suite shop.

If you don’t use the G-suite, don’t waste your time, you can’t use Hire, no matter how bad you might want to give it a look.

So, what’s new with Hire? 

Hire isn’t even that old. It’s really only been on the market for about a year. So, basically it’s all new, but Google released a new Gmail add-on to Hire that is really great.

Check out the video below, but basically, the Gmail Hire add-on allows recruiters to do most of the heavy lifting in Hire, in Gmail, where most recruiters spend most of their time anyway (within their email program communicating with candidates).

The Hire add-on allows recruiters to easily see if a candidate is already in their system or will be a new candidate, makes it seamless to add a new candidate into Hire, and also lets them move candidates along the recruiting process from within Gmail, so they aren’t moving back and forth between Hire and Gmail.

Hire already logged every single candidate interaction within Gmail into Hire, but this allows recruiters to work within the G-suite in a very normal way without bouncing around between programs to interact and moves candidates through the stages of hiring.

One aspect I really liked within Hire is the ability for recruiters to reject a candidate right in Gmail, and choose if they wanted that message to go out immediately, or wait for a certain timeframe before sending. This lets recruiters immediately complete a candidate they absolutely know has no shot, and be more efficient with their time in touching candidates less.

If you’re using G-suite for email, calendar, etc., and you have less than 1,000 employees you should demo Hire, even if you’re happy with your current ATS. Why? Because it’s Google silly! Hire is inexpensive and Google will continue to innovate this product at a rapid rate.


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: The Top 100 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) in 2018!

This week on The Weekly Dose I’m taking a look at my #1 all-time favorite report that was released last week by Rob Kelly over at Ongig! The Top 100 Applicant Tracking Systems in 2018 is an annual report that Rob and the Ongig team have been putting out now for four years.

The ATS market is really hard to get data. This report measures 118 ATS platforms out of more than 1,000 on the market, but the 118 in this report make up the vast majority of the marketplace. I love this report because of how robust the data is. The report pulls ATS information from 4200+ employers, which makes it more comprehensive than anything else you’ll find.

So, what have learned about the ATS market in 2018? 

Taleo is getting killed! In 2017 their market share was 25.51% on Ongig’s report, in 2018 their market share dropped to 19.11%. While this isn’t exact, you can bet the Oracle/Taleo people are freaking out and some folks are getting fired! My hope is this will spur the Taleo folks to finally see their solution has fallen behind the marketplace and we’ll see big innovation from them in the coming years.

Greenhouse is moving upmarket and taking market share in a big way! Greenhouse is getting most of this market share increase from Taleo, Kenexa/Brassring, and Jobvite (who all lost market share since the 2017 report).

Don’t look now but Google Hire just became a real threat to all SMB ATS providers! In 2017, Google Hire came in at .22% market share #44 on the list. In 2018, Google Hire is .78%, #23, but has increased their client growth by 312%! Almost triple anyone else. Don’t sleep on Hire!

While Greenhouse is killing everyone in overall growth, iCIMS and Workday are also growing at a very high rate. Suite HCM talent solutions (like Workday Talent, Ultipro, SAP, Oracle, etc.) have some built-in advantages to growth. If you’re using their HCM, you’ll feel pressure to use the rest of the suite. But with the growth of Greenhouse, iCIMS, Lever, SmartRecruiters, etc. (best of breed talent solutions) we see a clear indication that organizations that see talent as a priority are choosing the better tech over the suite solutions.

The ATS market is growing. Ongig measured 50 different ATSs in 2014, and 119 in 2018. One major reason is you can make money selling ATS solutions primarily because most companies don’t switch ATSs often. So once you get in, you’re usually there for a while. Plus, the options at the SMB level are now very robust with Google Hire (they want us to just call it “Hire”), Workable, BreezyHR, and Newton (now integrated with Paycor).

So, how should you use this report? 

I love this report because it truly gives every talent acquisition leader a true picture of how vast the ATS market is. The ATS is foundational to your TA Tech stack and the choice you make for your ATS will dictate many decisions you make in how you recruit talent.

Do I go right to the most used? No, but I also don’t ignore the most used. There’s a reason people are using Taleo and Greenhouse. They work. There’s a reason some systems are growing and some are not. Figure out what those might be, it’s very telling!

If you’re an SMB you have a bunch of low-cost ATS technology you should be looking at. So, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using an ATS, even if you only hire one person a month. While “Homegrown” ATSs are still used widely, please don’t go develop your own ATS, it’s not worth your time or effort with so many great products already on the market.

Go check out the report – it’s one of the best reads you’ll have all year in TA Technology!


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Jobalign – Hourly Candidate Engagement

This week on The Weekly Dose I review the hourly candidate engagement platform Jobalign. Jobalign’s candidate engagement platform helps employers Attract, Engage and Hire Hourly Employees.

Jobalign is a technology that sits between job boards and your ATS and fills the gap in engaging an hourly workforce that might want to apply to your jobs that probably don’t have a desktop computer and might not even have a smartphone.

So, what’s the ‘gap’ you might ask! Basically, there’s two the first is when candidates abandon applying for your jobs, which is a shockingly high amount of potential candidates. If all you rely on for applicants is your ATS application process, you’re missing out a large number of candidates.

Jobalign is a mobile-first platform where candidates can actually apply through SMS text messages, and it’s bi-lingual. Jobalign’s text-to-apply automation by itself is something most organizations who have large hourly hiring processes should look at.

The second gap is after apply. With an hourly workforce, you might have 24 hours to engage a candidate before they’ve moved on to another employer. Jobalign’s platform will begin working immediately in automating the screening process, so candidates are never waiting for next steps.

What I liked about Jobalign:

– Recruiters can send text messages right from the platform to candidates who apply and go through the screening process so your recruiters are only using one platform to communicate with hourly candidates, and not having to jump back and forth between their cell, your ATS, job boards, etc.

– Built-in Intelligent Sourcing Engine. Jobalign works with over 100+ job boards, local sites, and their own database of millions of hourly candidates to help you source hourly talent.

– Jobalign can also host your hourly career site to make sure your jobs are fully mobile optimized, which will help considerably with lowering the abandonment rate.

– Pay for performance. Jobalign works on a Pay per Applicant model. Basically, if they don’t deliver applicants you don’t pay. Two types of models, one that is considerably cheaper that uses their apply technology, and one more expensive that includes all of the auto sourcing technology.

Jobalign truly understands the hourly workforce and are advocates for helping them find jobs. I really like Jobalign’s Smart Apply Process via phone that will basically build a resume/profile automatically from how the candidates answer the questions. This helps both the candidate and companies.

If you do a lot of hourly hiring and you’re struggling to get enough applicants, process those applicants, or just need to do all it better, Jobalign is definitely a technology you should demo.


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Greenhouse Recruiting Software & ATS

The week on the Weekly Dose I review the popular applicant tracking system Greenhouse. I first learned about Greenhouse in 2015 and wrote about as a startup SMB ATS, but it was time to update that review and let you know how they’ve grown.

Since my last review Greenhouse has grown considerably (3,000+ customers) and has a number of companies using them with over 25,000 employees, so we can easily place them in the mid to enterprise market in the ATS space. Definitely, if you’re in that 1,000 to 25,000+ world, this is one of the stand-alone recruiting platforms that you must consider.

The “enterprise” HCM suites (from vendors like Oracle, Workday, etc) are generally able to support the complex IT requirements of big companies, but the Talent Acquisition module has been an afterthought and not really designed to support world-class TA functions. Greenhouse does both – handle the global complexities but with a focus on delivering the tools needed for a strategic, high-performing TA function.

What I like about Greenhouse: 

– The only ATS I’ve seen that has a built-in candidate experience survey.  If Candidate Satisfaction is important to your organization Greenhouse customers have a significantly higher rate than others based on Talent Board results.

– Built-in CRM tech allows you to keep pipelines engaged and nurture candidates in your database. Sourcing Quality Report which not only tells you where you hire the most candidates from but how far into the process do candidates get via each source.

– Blinded ‘take home’ assessments that help reduce hiring bias within the organization, combined with interview kits for hiring managers to ensure you improve diversity and inclusion within your organization.

– Predictive analytics that can help show you if you’ll be able to fill the positions you have open at the time needed, allowing you to adjust sourcing as needed to reach goals.

– Recruiter/hiring manager auto-alerts when candidates have been in process for too long, which kills candidate experience.

Greenhouse is the real deal when it comes to ATS technology. I can’t really do justice how much you can do with them, especially on the collaboration side of working through the interview process with everyone involved from approval through hire. If you’re looking to upgrade your talent acquisition technology Greenhouse is a great foundational piece to start with.

Greenhouse is definitely one to add to your demo list if you’re in the process of selecting a new ATS. I’ve yet to speak to a TA Leader who was using Greenhouse and left them because they wanted to find something better. I’ve spoken to many who have left others to go to Greenhouse and seem really satisfied.

You can also check out Greenhouse at their annual conference in New York – OPEN 2018 April 2-4where Patty McCord (one of my favs!) will be keynoting.  


Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Great_Recruiters – Real Time Recruiter Ratings!

This week on The Weekly Dose I review the Recruiter rating technology, Great Recruiters! Great Recruiters is not a yelp-type rating site type of technology. There are some on the market that do that now, but just like Yelp/TripAdvisor/etc. you run into problems with a free market unsolicited feedback sites.

Great Recruiters looked to take what we all want as Talent Acquisition Leaders and make it super simple and fast to gather data about recruiter performance from those who are actually being serviced by that recruiter. Not only does Great Recruiters measure recruiter performance, but it also measures your candidate experience in a real, timely way.

The technology is built to use with any sized recruiting team in virtually any type of recruiting – Corporate, staffing, RPO, you name it. If you have a team of recruiters or one recruiter, you can get feedback instantly from candidates on how your recruiters are doing. Great Recruiters allows you to gather recruiter insights from known candidates (candidates you know the recruiter is working with) and also gives each recruiter a unique url to gather feedback more broadly.

What I like about Great Recruiters: 

– Recruiting leaders get a dashboard of their entire team with easy access to all the feedback on each recruiter. In fact, both the TA Leader and the Recruiter get an instant notification when new feedback arrives.

– Great Recruiters gathers both solicited and unsolicited feedback. The first one is what you think, it’s the one-to-one candidate to recruiter relationship. The recruiter works with a candidate, you can easily see that in your ATS, and a survey is sent out to the candidate. The technology also allows you to gather unsolicited feedback as well through a unique url. Maybe you have a recruiter at a career fair and you want to measure that experience.

– Great Recruiters measures five key traits on each recruiter: Are your recruiters Genuine, Responsive, Experienced, an Advisor, and Transparent. 1 to 5 scale, 5 being the best. If your recruiter averages a certain level they can obtain a Great Recruiter rating badge to use on their social profiles.

– There is also a box on each survey for freeform comments, and the data shows that roughly 60% of candidates will add comments. Plus, it also asks each candidate if they have anyone who they would like to refer to the recruiter, with the hope being a great experience will lead to more referrals.

– Great Recruiters does one more really cool thing. Within the dashboard which each recruiter has access to, for their own data, they also have access to a “Knowledgebase” which is a learning tool where your recruiters can capture their best practices and share them within the team.

I feel in love with this technology because I don’t know of one Talent Acquisition leader that is responsible for a team of recruiters who wouldn’t want to use this immediately! It’s the ultimate recruiter performance/feedback tool, that will drive better candidate experience. Plus, it’s a Detroit-based team that put it together!

Clearly, if you run a team of recruiters, let’s say 10+, this is something you need to demo. If you run teams of recruiters at 100+, I would demo and implement as soon as possible, because here’s what I know. About 10% of those recruiters on big teams are just cruising and your managers have no real data to turn them over. This tech will drive recruiter behavior and performance in a way you don’t have currently.

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The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @MintMesh Crowd Sourced Referrals and Recruitment CRM

Today on the Weekly Dose I review the TA technology, MintMesh! Mint what? Sounds like a strange combination of refreshing gum and a media device I’ll get sued over! MintMesh is, in fact, a platform for crowdsourcing referrals from your trusted networks to solve your most pressing hiring needs.

With MintMesh users can actively engage with their network to provide referrals and be rewarded for those referrals through the MintMesh platform. I know you’ve seen and heard of employee referral automation, and MintMesh can easily do all of that.

BUT, Wait! There’s More! 

Truly, this isn’t an infomercial! They really have way more!

MintMesh is actually a full-blown talent acquisition CRM. MintMesh allows you to build talent networks and create talent pools (as many as you want, in whatever way you want), and from the system, you can begin to reach out and nurture those pipelines of talent.

MintMesh also gives you access to within minutes build position related “Microsites” for targeted recruiting of referrals that can be shared with your employee’s and hiring manager networks. When a candidate visits these sites they can show interest without a resume, and the built-in Artificial Intelligence will reach back out to them to finish the process.

What I like about MintMesh: 

– Referrals get their own ‘portal’ access where they can message alumni to ask questions, network with hiring managers and employees of the department they are interested in, all controlled by recruiters who decide which groups they should have access to.

– From within the platform, you can easily create a Microsite featuring a specific job, then go to your talent networks and invite the entire network to go to the microsite and apply, refer or just get more information on what you have.

– Oh, yeah, it’s also full-blown employee referral automation with a rewards system, you control. Want to reward for just referring, and not hiring? You can do that. Want to refer to both? You control it. Cash or a point-based system.

– Employees can also share feedback on a referral from within the system, that only you and the hiring manager will see.

– For referrals that don’t match a currently opening, MintMesh’s A.I. will continue to match, so when an opening is put into the system that matches the previous referral, the system will automatically reach out to them to apply.

Like I said, this is way more than employee referral automation! It’s really a full CRM that is built on an employee referral automation hiring process. Because it’s a full-fledged CRM, you can do so much with it.

So, why does MintMesh sell itself as Employee Referral Automation? Because we (talent acquisition pros and leaders) understand employee referrals and the process. Most of us still don’t really understand CRM and it’s capabilities, so MintMesh built something powerful that we could understand and use.

Who needs this? Really any organization that needs to hire consistently, and is having a hard time doing it efficiently. Well worth a demo, as the system costs $1/employee per month. 500 employee company? That’s $6,000 for full employee referral automation and CRM! You can not beat that price, and this is actually really good tech that is easy to use.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @CrowdedWork mine the gold in your ATS!

This week on the Weekly Dose I review the TA technology Crowded. Crowded is a platform that fixes what’s wrong with most ATSs! What’s wrong with most ATSs? Let me explain.

A typical ATS does one thing really well. It posts jobs to your career site and collects applicants from those jobs posted. From there it basically allows you to digitally move applicants through your hiring process. That’s a normal ATS. Heck, that’s about 90% of the ATSs on the market.

What big issue then becomes what do you do with that huge database of applicants that you have? This is why Crowded was built. You spend a ton of money and resources filling your ATS with talent. If you are like most organizations in the world, that talent then sits in your ATS and dies (figuratively). Once most applicants apply for a job and enter your ATS they are never heard from again. This is a major problem!

Just because you didn’t hire this talent the first time they applied, doesn’t mean they might not be your next great hire, or a great hire a year or two down the road. Crowded is a technology that integrates with your ATS, pulls out your jobs and your applicant database and re-matches them on a constant basis. Crowded then allows you to reach out to these ‘newly’ found candidates and engage them with your current jobs.

Not only does Crowded do this matching, but Crowded also updates each candidate in your database. So, that entry-level engineer who applied two years ago, but you didn’t have anything, now becomes that Engineer with two years of experience working at your competition that is no super valuable and someone you desperately want to hire! That is why this technology is so powerful and needed by most organizations!

What I like about Crowded: 

– Can be used by both staffing, RPO, and Corporate. We all use ATSs, and we all face the same issue using ATSs.

– Bi-directional data exchange, which basically means all the cool stuff Crowded is doing, ends up back in your ATS (system of record) for compliance sake.

– Crowded allows your recruiters to communicate via email and text through their platform with each exchange being captured and uploaded back into the candidate ATS profile.

– Crowded has some built-in intelligent automation that will actually allow the system to automatically reach out to candidates that match your jobs at a certain level, so your recruiters don’t have to. Funny thing – almost no corporate TA shops use this, but staffing and RPO do! Why? You tell me! This is a brilliant use of technology and efficiency, everyone should use it.

– Data analysis from Crowded will help you make more strategic talent decisions. Crowded’s technology will show you data on what schools, companies, etc. you’re hiring from, and which ones are getting interviews, etc. This way you can be more strategic about where your team is spending its time and resources. The system will also show you apply vs. hired skills gaps.

You are sitting on a gold mine of talent in your ATS database, but you don’t ever mine it! Why? Because most ATSs suck at search, and most TA shops suck at searching our ATSs and then believing anyone in there has talent! The Crowded platform automates this process and bubbles up great talent that your team has been ignoring forever! Every single company has great hires in their ATS database waiting to be hired, but most of us never will. With Crowded, you’ll start to see these hires happen almost instantly.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Will Blockchain Change Recruitment?

So, I didn’t make millions of dollars on Bitcoin and quite frankly it pisses me off when I miss bubble like this! At this point, you’re probably tired of hearing about Bitcoin and Blockchain. I’m thankful for the bubble because it forced me to learn what the heck Blockchain is!

I think Blockchain will play a role in TA Technology in the near future. When you think of how we hire people, based on some sort of profile and/or resume, we are putting a ton of trust into something that is basically made up by an individual with little or no checking to know if it’s legit or not.

We know most people exaggerate or flat out lie on their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, Facebook profiles, etc. In a very simple sense, Blockchain is built to ensure that no information about a transaction is lost and it’s validated by everyone else in the network.

What if everyone you hired had a ‘blockchain’ resume? Where you felt 100% confident that everything on their resume or profile was 100% accurate. Sounds very interesting, right!?

I’m not sure, but I think this is where Blockchain plays a role in HR and Talent Acquisition in the future. What if we had ‘one’ unchangeable profile/resume for every single person on the planet? One common way to present all of your education and work experience that was validated. It’s a little big brother-ish to think about, but it’s not beyond reason.

I mean how long until Google forces us all down this path!? 😉

It would definitely make us feel more confident in our hiring. It would force people to rethink not giving notice, starting a job, but then they leave after a few days, all kinds of crazy things we see candidates do but it never ‘hits’ their permanent record. What if your blockchain profile would show the times you accepted an interview, then no call/no showed it!? Oh boy! I would sign up for that!

What’s the benefit to candidates? This is ‘your’ profile. This is your life. You own it. If you did great work at a job and some supervisor that hated you was trying to bad mouth you behind your back, that would no longer work. Your good work would speak for itself. Unchangeable would be the facts.

Plus, Blockchain as a resume profile would be completely transparent. This would make you ‘findable’ to every employer. If you’re a rock star, you should get paid rock star money. A blockchain profile would benefit people who are really good at what they do. It would suck for people who are bottom feeders!

I don’t know if this will happen or could happen, but it’s exciting to think about a world of resumes and profiles that were easy to navigate and completely trustworthy. I can wait for flying cars, let’s get the HR Tech industry on this situation right now!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech – iCIMS buys TextRecruit

iCIMS made big news this week by acquiring the best-of-breed recruiting software TextRecruit. TextRecruit is a program that uses text messaging, live chat, and artificial intelligence to help companies hire faster.

One of my 2018 predictions was that ‘Text’ messaging for recruiting would go mainstream. When you look at most corporate TA tech stacks the one missing component, surprisingly, is still the lack of integrated text messaging capability. Sure your recruiters are sending text messages to some candidates through their personal smartphones, but all that data is lost.

Companies like TextRecruit and GoCanvas.io are offering organizations the ability to text message candidates, from an integrated platform that is much more effective than single text messages from smartphones. These newer text recruiting platforms allow organizations to message many candidates at once, and ensure this data from both sides is captured and usable for the future.

Capturing both sides of a text conversation between organization and candidate should be a big deal for organizations who take compliance seriously.

So, what does this merger of iCIMS and TextRecruit mean?

Right now, it will be mostly business as usual. iCIMS will keep selling their recruiting platform with TextRecruit being an integration partner in the iCIMS marketplace, and TextRecruit just got some giant inside information on selling to iCIMS current and former clients.

In the future, it’s fairly easy to see that iCIMS will probably take advantage of developing fully integrated text messaging and screening into their main platform. Within the next three years all organizations, large and small, will be using some sort of messaging capability to connect and maintain a connection with candidates. Email isn’t dead, but it surely isn’t the primary means of connection for GenZ and Millennials.

iCIMS is really the first best-of-breed unchained HCM talent platform on the market to go all in on messaging. Some ATSs in the market have text messaging capability, but nothing close to what TextRecruit is capable of, so this is a huge win for iCIMS. Full enterprise HCMs with talent modules, for the most part, aren’t even close to having this capability, and it might be years before they can get there.

iCIMS will still have aggressive competition from Greenhouse, Jobvite, Lever, SmartRecruiters, etc., who are all building much more robust messaging capabilities with their ATS systems. iCIMS true advantage from buying TextRecruit will be on the enterprise side of the market where Taleo, Silkroad, Workday, etc. are now even farther behind iCIMS from a capability standpoint.

2018 should be an interesting year for merger and acquisition within the TA-Technology space as the five years prior to this year the amount of money invested into TA technology has been off the charts. You have a ton of small TA tech companies that are ripe for purchase and a bunch of ATS providers looking to build out a full function Recruiting end-to-end platform.

T3 – @W_e_d_g_e video screening

This week on T3 I take a look at Wedge. Wedge is a video technology designed to be used by both candidates and employers. Besides having the worse twitter handle in the history of HR technology (underscores are bad for a handle, four underscores are a death sentence!), there could be some real application for both sides of the hiring equation to use this easy to use tech.

For candidates Wedge was designed to give them something they could use that was quick and easy from a video perspective to show employers who they are beyond the normal text-based resume. The system asks each candidate five random questions and gives each person one minute to respond to the question. Then the candidate gets a unique URL they can share with employers, along with their resume to get a complete package of who you are as a candidate.

Employers can use Wedge as a video-based pre-screen, picking specific questions for candidates to ask, or even designing your own unique questions. These video files can then be shared with hiring managers, or anyone else involved in the hiring process. These files can also be uploaded into your ATS as attachments.

Very soon, Wedge will be releasing a new version that allows employers the ability to do text-based searches of the transcript of these videos. As you can imagine, in video-based answers candidates could talk about experiences and skills that don’t show up in a text-based resume, but would be things your hiring managers are looking for.

Wedge is one of those TA technologies that is very narrow in what it is trying to do. It’s simple and straightforward to use. This simplicity is its real strength. It doesn’t try to be something it’s not. It does one thing. It allows you to easily get a short video of candidates answering questions you want for your hiring managers. That’s it.

It’s easy to use and inexpensive and doesn’t need anyone from IT to get involved for you to add a video component to your hiring process. You can embed the process on the front side of your application screening process, or pick and choose positions you feel it might be more critical to have a video component as part of your assessment.

There some large-sized organizations currently using Wedge, but it’s my opinion that this tech is basically designed for low volume SMB TA shops. The larger the volume, the more you really want this tech embedded into your ATS, or within a video platform that gives you a more robust dashboard.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to add video to your application process that isn’t very involved, Wedge might be right for you!

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net