How To Use Highrise to Manage Recruiting and Hiring

Recruiting and hiring employees is a complex process, involving a lot of people and moving parts. You've got applicants, resumes, portfolios, and follow-up tasks by the dozens -- or hundreds!

Highrise can help you manage the process from beginning to end.

Step 1: Create a Group

Identify the people who will be most involved in the hiring process, and create a group in Highrise for those people.

This is also a great way to keep information that could be sensitive available to only the people who should have access.

Step 2: Set up a Case

A Case gives you one central location to organize all information around hiring. You could set up a Case for general hiring, or a Case per open position you're trying to fill.

Step 3: Autoforward your emails to the Case + Group

Every Case comes with a dropbox address. This is a special email address used to file emails to a Case.

Every Group also comes with a dropbox address, which will set permissions on incoming emails to the associated group.

You can use these two rules in combination with the +fw rule to forward emails directly to your case and group. Any incoming email and associated attachments will be sent to the Case and to Good Morning, your group inbox, where members of your Group can review them. Highrise will also create a new contact for them (as applicable), and include their information there as well.

For example, our own team has jobs@highrisehq.com  autoforwarding to our hiring Case, and we ask any job applicant to apply there. We also have a hiring Group to process and filter the applications so we set up our autoforwarding using both the hiring Case and Group with the +fw rule.

Step 4: Apply tags to applicants

As applicants come in and are reviewed, you can remove them from Good Morning and tag them in any way you'd like to identify them.

You could do a straightforward yes  or no , or you could go a little deeper, for example, 1st interview , offer pending , etc.

Filter by any tags you create or view any activity of the tagged contacts to stay on top of the hiring process.

Other tips

• Create email templates to easily communicate with applicants, this is a great way to make sure every single applicant is responded to, even if it is to say no.
• Use Broadcast to communicate with applicants in bulk to save time.
• Keep notes on specific candidates on their specific contact page.
• Tasks make it easy to keep interviews scheduled across your entire team, and even allow you to attach a specific contact to the task.