How we use Jira Service Management for our recruitment process! - Part 1

[#1]

For small & growing organizations, hiring great people is the only way to accelerate growth. However, setting up a recruitment process from scratch might feel a bit overwhelming. Therefore, you want to invest a maximum of your efforts in talking to the prospective employees, rather than setting up various tools & processes. 

A couple of years ago, at Amoeboids, we were in the same dilemma. So we decided to set up our recruitment process in the tool that we knew best, Jira service management (JSM).

This article is the 1st of 2 part series. Here we give you all the details about how we went about setting up the entire thing. 2nd article will focus on some minute details and should help you in making the maximum out of this recruitment project.

Creating a separate project

First of all - even if you are doing a PoC to set up your recruitment process in JSM, we recommend creating a separate project for this. After all, you don’t want to end up making a mess of an existing project for this pilot. 

Further, we will recommend creating a Service project since the candidates will be our ‘external customers.’ Managing the recruitment process in a service project can also encourage your HR team’s ‘service mindset’ towards the candidates. In the long run, you can even set up SLAs in Jira service management to ensure prospective employees are getting timely responses and resolutions.

Note: We are not using the default ‘Recruitment project template’ for Jira Work Management product. Using that, you won’t be able to communicate with the candidates but only do the tracking internally. In contrast, service project ensures that the candidates are treated as external customers and receive the intended communication.

Creating a new issue type

Once the project is created, it is time to create a different issue type to track prospective employees. We have created a ‘Candidate’ custom issue type for this. You can name the issue type based on your liking & needs. You can even reuse an existing issue type, but make sure that it is clear enough to convey what it refers to.

We even recommend cleaning up your project so that only the ‘Candidate’ (or whichever you created) issue type is available in that project. Although this is not mandatory, it does help, in the long run, to keep things clean.

Setting up the workflow

Arguably the most crucial step in this entire setup process is configuring the appropriate workflow. Now, your workflow could be a bit different than ours, depending on your recruitment process. 

For us, the recruitment process is a combination of at least four-five steps. These are

1. Receiving interest from the candidate
2. Arranging a telephonic interview
3. Getting the candidate to appear for an online test
4. Arranging one or more virtual interviews with the candidate
5. Sending out an offer letter or communicating rejection at any of the steps

To address all the possibilities, here’s how the workflow looks like in Jira.

Note - The workflow allows rejection of candidates at all appropriate statuses based on various reasons - including rejection, withdrawal, position on freeze, etc. It is possible to arrange multiple interviews with the same candidate within this workflow. This works very well since we sometimes conduct up to 3 interviews before making a final call about the candidate.

End to end flow

Above is your basic setup. Apart from this you will need to ensure appropriate internal access for HR folks & for the recruitment panel. Candidates will get access to their requests in the capacity of JSM customers.

Next step involves setting up request types based on open positions. So every time you have a new position to close, you add that as a request type. And if a position is closed and you don’t need to accept any additional requests - you can just remove the request type from all portal groups. Whenever the same position opens up again, you just assign a portal group to that request type and it becomes available on the customer portal.

Candidates will be able to apply for the open positions from JSM customer portal. 

Candidates click on the relevant open position and see the form fields that are part of the corresponding request type. 

We allow ticket creation to anyone without logging in & that ensures a smooth experience for the prospective employees. At a later stage they can always create an account on our JSM and see status of their candidature.

User facing statuses

Keep in mind that we are using a service project. Requests in the service project can have different user-facing statuses than what the configured workflow says. This is helpful to prevent the leaking of unintended information to the candidates. Here’s how our mapping between internal & external statuses looks like:

What else?

Well there are some more things to keep in mind while designing your JSM project for matching your recruitment workflow. We will go over those in the part 2 of this series.

Have you tried using JSM for your recruitment? How did it go?

[Victor]

Awesome!! I love the idea even for big companies! Did you gather metrics about every status? I think there are a lot to gather which could make you improve your processes:

• How many applications have been received for X position or for X role
• Time taken to review applications
• How many telephone interviews have been scheduled
• How many applications were rejected
• Reasons for rejection
• How many 1st online interviews have been done, how many of these have ended in rejection and how many have gone on to 2nd phase (so with each phase)
• How many candidates have accepted 1st offer, how many have rejected 1st and accepted 2nd.
• How many candidates have rejected an offer and the reason why
• Etc...

[Anand Inamdar_Amoeboids]

@Victor thanks for the comment. We do collect all of that information and some more. I plan to put it up in the 2nd part of this post.

[Anand Inamdar_Amoeboids]

Part 2 of this article is posted here - https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/How-we-use-Jira-Service-Management-for-our-recruitment-process/ba-p/1903706

[Danuta Twarog]

@Anand Inamdar_Amoeboids thank you for the inspiration, I created such a form, and as we didn't want to spear JSM licenses so I used automation to move the ticket to Jira, and did the whole process there - thank once again :) 

[Anand Inamdar_Amoeboids]

Thank you @Danuta Twarog 
I am glad you found the approach useful :)