Screening Job Candidates With Trello + Zapier | Desmond Morris

At DoSomething.org, we hire a lot of interns. Hiring a lot of interns means we have a lot of applicants. Each applicant needs to be reviewed and screened by multiple people. The intern application process is straight forward. We ask that people send cover letters and resumes to a position specific email address. We often ask them to also include other pertinent information to that same email. Things like GitHub username and project links are common asks for our engineering positions. Then these "applications" pile up in an inbox that a few interested parties have access to. We then have a few stages that we like to progress applicants through before we make any decisions. The stages include a phone call, code screening and a face to face interview. Tracking this process with email alone is very difficult, especially when there are multiple "reviewers" involved. This is where Trello comes to the rescue.

We recently started using Trello to manage different internal processes across various teams within our company. It has been a success so far and many people, me included, are genuinely happy with it. Features like voting, commenting and attachements make Trello a great candidate for the task at hand. The idea is to setup position specific boards for candidates with columns for each stage of the interviewing process. You want to invite any people who have may have input on hiring for that position to the board. The challenging portion of this process is in having to add each applicant to the board. We need to automate this. Say hello to Zapier.

"Zapier enables you to automate tasks between other online services". With Zapier, you can connect a Gmail account and trigger an action when an email is received to an inbox. The received messages are then parsed and then added as a card to a board to a connected Trello account. It also handles attachments. So, email attachments easily become card attachments. Zapier provides a simple wizard style UI that making the setup fairly simple and straightforward.

When all is said an done, you now have a system that leverages the un-opinionated collaborative power of Trello to track email job applicants without having to manually seed candidate information. We recently gave this setup a spin when reviewing engineering intern applications for this upcoming summer and it made the usually tedious process enjoyable.

I would be interested to hear if anyone is using Trello + Zapier similarly.

Learn more about Trello & Zapier: