Anyone who does mechanical work appreciates the impact the right tool can have on a job.  For instance, the other day I needed to open up a cover that was held down by six screws.  I first tried a screw driver.  The screws were so tight, they didn’t even budge.  But because the screws had shaped heads I was able to use a wrench instead.  Minutes later the cover was off and I was examining the impeller for a seawater pump.

Well, the same lesson of course applies much more broadly including processes at work.  Yet, we often make do with abusing Excel (or now Google Docs) and/or email resulting in far more effort and breakage (stripped screw heads?) than would be required.  That’s why we chose to go with an applicant tracking system (in our case Jobscore) for our current recruiting effort at USV.  Without it I doubt that we would have been able to handle the volume.

Continuing in the same vein, I wanted to use a tool to help me schedule the roughly 25 phone screens that I will be conducting.  I settled on tungle.me which seemed like a good fit.  Then I promptly screwed up big time by not understanding how the tool works.  My error resulted in exposing some email addresses of applicants to each other.  I have already apologized to those involved directly, but it was a clear case of where I should have spent more time learning and testing the tool first.

Having now done so, I have actually figured out a way to use tungle.me for this purpose (I will write a separate post on that because my use case isn’t supported perfectly).  Once again the net effect was fantastic.  Instead of a lot of of back and forth, I was able to schedule the bulk of the screens with a single email.  Each successfully scheduled appointment results in a confirmation message that with one click transfers the information to my calendar.  I am not sure yet whether I will use tungle.me more broadly, but for scheduling a large number of calls over a condensed period of time it beat email hands down.

Anyone who does mechanical work appreciates the impact the right tool can have on a job.  For instance, the other day I needed to open up a cover that was held down by six screws.  I first tried a screw driver.  The screws were so tight, they didn’t even budge.  But because the screws had shaped heads I was able to use a wrench instead.  Minutes later the cover was off and I was examining the impeller for a seawater pump.

Well, the same lesson of course applies much more broadly including processes at work.  Yet, we often make do with abusing Excel (or now Google Docs) and/or email resulting in far more effort and breakage (stripped screw heads?) than would be required.  That’s why we chose to go with an applicant tracking system (in our case Jobscore) for our current recruiting effort at USV.  Without it I doubt that we would have been able to handle the volume.

Continuing in the same vein, I wanted to use a tool to help me schedule the roughly 25 phone screens that I will be conducting.  I settled on tungle.me which seemed like a good fit.  Then I promptly screwed up big time by not understanding how the tool works.  My error resulted in exposing some email addresses of applicants to each other.  I have already apologized to those involved directly, but it was a clear case of where I should have spent more time learning and testing the tool first.

Having now done so, I have actually figured out a way to use tungle.me for this purpose (I will write a separate post on that because my use case isn’t supported perfectly).  Once again the net effect was fantastic.  Instead of a lot of of back and forth, I was able to schedule the bulk of the screens with a single email.  Each successfully scheduled appointment results in a confirmation message that with one click transfers the information to my calendar.  I am not sure yet whether I will use tungle.me more broadly, but for scheduling a large number of calls over a condensed period of time it beat email hands down.