You want to be a G-Recruiter?
Consider it if you’re an independent, or work where Outlook is considered an ATS, or you track candidates on Post-Its and file resumes on your hard drive in the folder called “RESUMES.” Or you’re simply tired of working the way someone else thinks you should.
G-Recruiter, as its maker Amitai Givertz describes it, is a mash-up of free Google tools that automate most routine and many mundane recruiting functions. “G-Recruiters are people who combine Google’s free services and related tools to replace conventional recruiting products and services,” he proclaims on the G-Recruiter website, built, appropriately, on Google sites.
Using Google desktop, a browser (preferably Firefox), and such free Google services as Gmail, search, Google Docs, and its RSS reader, Givertz has built a powerful recruiter desktop that can be customized to the user’s tastes and needs. Remarkably, everything is free. Just as remarkably, Givertz has packaged all the essentials for easy downloading, and has posted a series of tutorials and videos that show you how to make everything work.
You do need some computer chops to assemble the pieces and customize it, but you don’t need to be a geek to do this.
“Nobody in their right mind would want to go through what I went through (to build this),” he confessed. “But it’s done, so it should be painless.”
Because this is a labor of love, rather than one of profit, you won’t find a step-by-step manual. Plan on spending a little time tinkering, especially if you’re not all that familiar with things like RSS, email filtering, or iGoogle. I promise you, these are easy tools. And if you do need help, there’s a Google Group full of G-Recruiters eager to assist.
What you have for your investment of time is a recruiter dashboard that can automatically conduct candidate searches, retrieve resumes, filter and file them, while you do other things. Inbound resumes are automatically processed, sorted, and the candidates sent an acknowledgment.
That’s just a sample. As your skill with the tools grows, you’ll find yourself adding elements and fine-tuning to streamline the work process to best fit your needs.
“What I’ve done is create a Frankenstein,” Givertz told me the first time we discussed G-Recruiter. “I heard about using Google at SourceCon and I thought I’d give it a try.” Piece by piece, over the course of a year, he cobbled together the parts that would become G-Recruiter.
He used Google because it was familiar to him (and nearly everyone else in the world), it is free, it has multiple tools, also free, continues to develop new ones, and it operates in the cloud, meaning everything is portable and nothing has to be maintained by the user, the way, say, a proprietary program would have to be.
When other recruiters saw what he had built, Givertz began giving it away. It wasn’t long before a community of G-Recruiters arose. Now they share tips, problems, and solutions. And they sing the praises of Mr. Recruitomatic and his desktop.
Typical is this from cloud recruiting evangelist Michael Marlatt: “Ami is doing some fantastic things around leveraging Google applications as a “one-stop-shop” (free) recruiting desktop that has yet to be matched by anyone in the industry. Impressive stuff…”
It was Marlatt’s 2008 SourceCon presentation that set Givertz on the path to becoming, as he says, “A bona fide cloud recruiter and G-Recruiter.”
Givertz funds his project with donations and a $15 a head charge to get a recording and copies of handouts from his G-Recruiting webinars. (You can attend them, for, what else, free.)
Whatever that doesn’t cover, he pays for himself. His other job is running AMG Management Advisors, a salesforce development and talent management firm, that among other services, conducts specialized candidate searches. His other, other job is running Brown Bag Recruiter, a recruiter training site, that, like most everything Givertz does, is mostly free.