In my recent speaking session about recruitment technology innovations at the brilliant Recruitment Tech Event in The Netherlands I kicked off referring to Slack as one of the most innovative technologies to change the face of recruitment in 2016. I just love how Slack has taken collaboration to the next level. Something you would have expected from the likes of Google, trying to revive their Google Wave initiative, which was ahead of its time and was suspended back in 2010.
What I wasn't aware of while presenting, was that only three weeks later Slack would unfold their master plan to become the dominant social and collaboration hub. Not only was there the announcement of the Slack App Directory with over 160 apps to extend Slack’s collaboration power, but also the launch of an $80M Slack Fund backing developers to make Slack integrations part of their core product.
Slack Killing Email
For those still wondering what Slack is, Slack is a fantastic cloud-based collaboration product. It simply lets you do all of your team communication together in one place, combining messaging and file sharing in one app. Not only is it capable of replacing email (finally), all content inside Slack is searchable, including files, conversations, and people. Although originating from the IRC era, it totally fits in how the next generation workforce communicates. Like being in your messaging app, real-time and providing context to conversations, but also giving easy access to your documents thanks to integration with tools like Dropbox and Google Drive. This doesn’t necessarily mean communication gets a lot cleaner, but making it better searchable and allowing integration with other tools does help to make things become more efficient.
I firmly believe recruiters should get more out of their comfort zone, learning from other professions, trying out technology that hasn’t originally been developed for recruitment, using it to help improve the way they hire. Slack can exactly do that and their Apps Directory now has opened a lot of doors to actually help make recruitment more efficient.
Slack opening up further integration potentially could also be very powerful now we see the recruitment tech industry rapidly developing. New startups with new products see the light of day every single day. It is great to have so many companies working on new cool tools, but this also brings the risk of the recruitment technology industry becoming very fragmented. It sometimes doesn’t make it any easier for recruiters or HR tech buyers to decide in what technology to invest. Integrating multiple products in one platform could be a solution, and that’s exactly what Slack is providing.
Apps for Recruitment
So, what Apps could potentially be useful? Well, apart from having a a dedicated HR category, there’s actually already a couple of apps specifically well suited for recruitment:
1. Breezy HR
Breezy HR, a brilliantly simple hiring tool, helps organising candidates visually, like Trello for hiring. Breezy HR is an existing recruitment product, but connecting it to Slack allows you to stay up-to-date on new candidates, positions and other HR related activity without having to leave Slack. Trello, which was released at a TechCrunch event by Joel Spolsky about 5 years ago, originally is an innovative collaboration technology to organise projects. Thanks to Breezy HR this is a perfect example of how existing technology such as Trello can be transformed into a great recruitment product.
2. Lever
Lever’s Slack integration makes it easy to engage your entire team in the hiring process. From the Lever app, users can post announcements to Slack channels using mentions on individual candidate profiles. This will automatically push the contents of the note, along with a candidate overview, to the specified Slack channel. This could be useful for sharing a promising new applicant, reminding interviewers to leave feedback, organising a quick debrief to determine next-steps, keeping the team informed of the status of any offers extended to candidates.
3. Blitz
This little gem, Blitz, seamlessly adds instant messaging to all your recruitment media and hiring efforts, allowing real-time engaging of talent interested in your company and converting them into actual recruitment leads. Blitz gives potential candidates a low-barrier, direct communication channel to you and their future colleagues, directly on Slack. Instant communication between potential candidates and recruiters is one of the most underused elements in the entire candidate experience, even though it is such a powerful instrument in customer experience. Blitz uses automated pre-screening questions before candidates can actually enter a chatroom (all questions must answered correctly to enter). Other questions can be added to serve as a structured questionnaire for the recruiter or hiring manager during the actual chat.
And there are many more. Integration with UberConference lets you easily set up and record candidate video interviews. Integrating with marketing tools allows you to initiate online marketing campaigns or track candidate experience and scheduling assistants will help you to plan interviews and meetings with candidates or hiring managers.
Of course, teams that are not open to collaborate will probably not change their behaviour using Slack and their Slack channels will become silent soon. However teams willing to discover Slack or even develop new apps for it will quickly see the benefits and become more efficient.
AI and Machine Learning
So, what do you think? Could this become the ultimate recruitment platform? I definitely think we will see more from Slack and new integration in the following months. My expectation is also that new apps will bring interesting new features of artificial intelligence and machine learning to let us do our jobs even more efficient or automate larger parts of it.
I would be very keen to learn how you are using Slack, for recruitment or other purposes. Please share your experience – good or bad, or recommended Slack channels in the comments below.
UPDATE: Slack pricing model includes different plans, depending on how you are planning to use Slack, with the free unlimited plan having some limits. The enterprise plan is announced for 2016. Before paying for a Slack plan, it may be worth checking if others in your company already have a license. This could result in considerable savings on your recruitment budget.