Why Every Recruiter Should Have Slack

Slack is a company many will have heard of, perhaps some of you won’t. As the fastest growing workplace software we featured it in our Recruiter Hacks article some time ago – because we love it.

We therefore wanted to pay lip service to the platform in more focus.

Why? To further explain the tool, tell you how it can assist recruitment companies and specifically establish why the company is currently being valued at over $2.8bn.

We rely entirely on Slack for internal communication.

Like many amazing tools out there, it came about almost by accident. While developing the online game Glitch (which proved to be a failure), Slack was created and used for internal communication amongst the team.

After realising other companies may want to benefit from the tool, they raised $17m in funding. It then went on to reach a valuation of $1bn in just over 15 months, making it the fastest startup to do so.

What is it?

As a snapshot, it’s like WhatsApp groups for businesses, and it’s even free for small teams.

Despite the current valuation of Slack they still haven’t spent any real money on marketing.

Slack is intuitive and easy to use. Chats are split into private, team and topic chats, and separated with hashtags so you can cross-reference any subject.

Channel examples: Hot candidates, Industry news, Client information.

You can include messages, files, images and video, and search efficiently through old conversations.

Benefits

1. Information in one place

Rather than searching in several different places for information or documents, you’ll know where to look. Whether it’s job specs, candidate CVs or information on a client.

2. Direct Message/Private Groups

There’s no limit on the amount private groups you’re able to use on Slack. Direct message is available to anyone in your team, and of course instantaneous. Perfect for team discussions, talking with your team leader about the plan to target that new client, or sending Ed Hunter memes to the new starter who’s raising office pulses.

3. Integrates with another 280 platforms and tools

Whatever tool you’re using as part of your recruitment life, Slack will almost certainly integrate with it. Because the guys at Slack know how useful integration is to a recruiters life they’ll let you customise your very own Slack! Good of them eh? Here’s a link to find out how.

Want to Skype a candidate through Slack? No problem. Stick something in your to-do list? Yep. How about ordering an uber through a chat message. You got it.

Wondering what I’m on about? How about linking you’re internal communication system to these:

– Twitter

– Mailchimp

– Github

– Google Docs

– Google Hangouts

– Hubot

– Trello

– Dropbox

– Help Scout

– Intercom

– Zendesk

– WordPress

Some of these will be used by recruiters, some of them won’t. They simply serve as an example of how versatile the tool is and how you can utilise it in your everyday life.

4. Searchable

You know when you’re trying to find something in Outlook and it seems like you have to wait for a borrower to physically climb through your hard drive and manually search high and wide?

That’s a thing of the past.

Slack’s free version will save 10,000 messages and their content and find it for you within a second.

This also means you won’t have to frantically delete important messages, to create space on your computer so you can receive an incoming message. Which you later find out is a picture of your colleague’s dog on a skateboard. So, obviously critical it gets to you.

5. It’s free, or close to free depending on team size

For small teams Slack is free, forever. If you’re looking for all singing and dancing versions with larger groups it costs slightly more, but it certainly won’t break the bank! Details of Slack’s pricing strategy are here for you.

6. Share files quickly

If you need more memory than the 10,000 messages already provided, simply upgrade your pricing strategy. Even if you don’t… (and luckily for you) Slack will store your history for you, and let you upgrade later. Perfect if you need something a little ‘legacy’ from a time gone by and there are more recruiters in your team than there once was.

7. Access anywhere/Mobile app

You can access slack anywhere you can get on the internet. So, most places then.

Their mobile application means it’s so much more accessible than your email. Let me give you an example. You’re at a client meeting, you know your colleague sent you some information but you don’t know which folder it’s in, or what time it was sent. Now outlook’s trying to download your entire history before it will let you search.

With Slack it’s so much easier to search for and find messages, documents and information. Even if you don’t know what channel they used.

What others say

Still don’t believe us? Check out this video from Sandwich Video Inc: So, Yeah, We Tried Slack…

Slack 2015 Survey:

We spoke to a couple of the recruitment partners on Hunted who have been early adopters of Slack.

Jason Rumney from Intelletec (LA and London):

“Slack’s completely revolutionised the way we communicate internally. It’s made communication between our offices so much easier, I’m a massive fan. If you’re a recruitment business with offices in more than one location it’s a must have. They’re always adding features and I’m always excited for what they’ll be releasing next.”

Mathew Gollop from Connected Group (Hong Kong, Singapore, China):

“E-mail is an incredibly clunky tool for informal internal communications. Multiple replies clutter inboxes and messages are buried.”

“Slack has encouraged us to create channels to share information that may not normally be propagated. One example is that we created a ‘learning’ channel for sharing of recommended books, articles and videos that encourage personal development.”

“Slack also gives us an ability to share information quickly and informally and creates a ‘go to’ point for internal content.”

So we can get rid of Outlook?

No.

We’re not suggesting here that Outlook (or indeed any other email platform) is thrown on to the tech scrapheap.

Email is obviously great for formal communication with external partners and those times you need a serious message, with an email signature and corporate format. For anything other than this, there’s Slack.