iCIMS Hacks: Remote vs hybrid, Excel formulas, and speed (10/10/25)

In this System Admin Insights session, members explored when remote truly becomes hybrid, why Excel is the best place to test formulas before moving them into iCIMS, and how too many formulas can slow dashboards. Practical, real-world admin tips from Alex, Vivian, and Ty to keep your iCIMS running efficiently.

#iCIMS #HRTech

https://systemadmininsights.com/

Transcript

Alex: Fantastic. Welcome everybody to System Event Insights where Isom's users get together and share tips, tricks, best practices, war stories, all of the above to help each other get the best value from their company's Isom's investments.
 Alex: We like to kick off every session with a little bit gratitude. Share something in chat that you're grateful for today.
 Alex: I am grateful for pumpkins and fall, weather, finally, so many cool decorations going up. Grateful to break up my flannel shirts again that I've been waiting for me all year long.
 Alex: When else do we got here? Thankful AI hasn't spoofed me yet on Sora Patrick. Not that you know, not that you know of yet.
 Alex: Vivian, grateful for a very big tomato harvest and pumpkin harvest, right? How many pumpkins did you have? 
 Vivian Larsen: So far 16 and there's another 10 on the vine. 
 Alex: 16 what are you going to do at Pumpkin 
 Vivian Larsen: feed my neighbors chickens. 
 Alex: Okay, there you go. Send Paul a couple. Grateful great law of people. All right, let's go ahead. I am going to we don't have our normal deck prepared today.
 Alex: Sorry about that. So I'm going to jump right on over to our member submitted questions, and by the way, is Jenny on the call?
 Alex: Okay, oh, here she comes. Great. Actually, I'm going to ask Jenny a quick question before we get started. Jenny, Jenny, fair.
 Alex: I have a quick question for you, Jenny. 
 Jenny Fair: I am here, yes, sorry. 
 Alex: Hey, so in our planning document, we had something about success stories help desk and I can't remember if we were actually going to move forward with that topic today.
 Jenny Fair: Yeah, I just answered your text. My apology is I was on a call. No, I don't I don't think I was grabbing that one.
 Alex: Great. Okay. So it's a mystery. We'll talk about it later. Let's go ahead and dive into our Isom's channel. 
 Jenny Fair: I can try and think of a few by the end of the call though. So 
 Alex: stay 
 Jenny Fair: there. 
 Alex: Fantastic. Great. Let's see. Left-call questions and it looks like we don't have any submitted questions here. Cheryl, did we talk about this?
 Alex: What location company profile? 
 Cheryl Callaway: Um, I 
 Alex: don't know what we did. 
 Cheryl Callaway: Oh, I don't know. 
 Alex: Okay. So is this so you said when you created your location or company depending on how old your system is, wink for US remote.
 Alex: Did you add the word remote to the address or city or leave it blank? And yes, I chose the country.
 Alex: Does anyone know if it It matters. 
 Jessica Smith: I'm sorry. 
 Cheryl Callaway: So 
 Jessica Smith: I believe we added it in as the city name. I don't know that it matters. I can't verify one way or the other, but I can mention that even when we've had in as the city name.
 Jessica Smith: And even when it is sometimes referenced obscurely or a certain way in the job A LinkedIn specifically is pretty specific about how they want you to mention it.
 Jessica Smith: And so, sometimes if you don't have it in there a certain way or if you don't have the hashtag, ally-remote, then they won't pick it up as a remote job.
 Jessica Smith: It'll show just as a job with no city and it won't display in, like if your jobs are indexed or if you have paid job slots with them.
 Jessica Smith: And so, I know it does actually matter for them, not so sure about the other job boards or places. I think like most Google for jobs and stuff if you have remote in there it can kind of pick it up but I know LinkedIn in particular is kind of picky.
 Cheryl Callaway: Okay so LinkedIn if it does not say remote no or sorry if it does not say remote yes then they may not pick up anything without the city like because it's just it's just like United States or something like 
 Jessica Smith: that. Correct yeah 
 Cheryl Callaway: and 
 Jessica Smith: well and it doesn't matter about the look like on the location, you need to have it in the text of the job ad for LinkedIn because we've had it listed as the city on the location in Isom's and LinkedIn does not pick it up.
 Jessica Smith: You have to say like this is a remote job or use their hashtag. 
 Cheryl Callaway: Got it. We used LinkedIn a lot so I'm thinking I'm sitting here and I adjusting this. And 
 Jessica Smith: I apologize because it's been a minute since we've had that issue come up and so I'm not sure if they make you use the hashtag or if just saying in there is enough, I just know that it has come up for us like is recently probably as last year and so it'd be worth looking into.
 Jessica Smith: I'm sure your rep can pretty quickly verify to what it needs. 
 Cheryl Callaway: So good point. I'll definitely write down to me to reach out to our rep about this. Um, I guess a better question than also is, um, if you have like a remote position, and this is for everybody, if you have a remote position, but they have to be in a certain city, and they still have to go into the office
 Cheryl Callaway: , let's say once, at least once every month, do you actually write that as like a remote job or no? Because I would assume candidates would see that as remote because they're required to go to the office even though it's once a month.
 Vivian Larsen: Wouldn't that be considered hybrid? 
 Angela Biehl: This is fascinating, because our whole company has been going through transitions with this, with return to work, and I think every organization identifies this differently.
 Angela Biehl: We use the telecommute option that yes or no, because we have some positions that are remote, but we really want someone that's actually local, just in case there's a need for them to do an event or an on-site presence even if it's once a quarter or something even more rare than that, but for hybrid 
 Angela Biehl: within our organization that in the past that could be one day a week, two days a week, four days a week, and I think a lot of organizations have different definitions of what those means.
 Angela Biehl: So we've been really specific in the job post language 
 Cheryl Callaway: about means, but it's tricky with the hashtags and designations for Canada. Yeah, we don't want to go down the route of having to specify in a field or anything like that.
 Cheryl Callaway: So we were kind of thinking the same thing like first, at first we're all thinking it would be a remote.
 Cheryl Callaway: No, put remote in the title, talk about why they don't consider it remote in the sense of you know, you 
 Alex: do have 
 Cheryl Callaway: to go to the office because when we look at remote, yes, we're thinking, oh, that means totally remote. So I have no idea.
 Cheryl Callaway: That's why I thought I'd get some opinions here. 
 Alex: I think a key distinction is who's paying for the commute, right? So if you're calling people in once a month or quarterly or whatnot, and the company's willing to fly them in from Beijing or whatever, that to me, that sounds like a fully remote and not hybrid position.
 Cheryl Callaway: That's a good point. I like that idea also. I mean, of course, we don't want to get too nitty gritty, but at the same time, I like that idea of kind of 
 Vivian Larsen: saying, I would just say that's a travel requirement. but you're, 
 Alex: you require 
 Vivian Larsen: 100% travel. 
 Alex: Yeah. 
 Vivian Larsen: Yeah. 
 Cheryl Callaway: Yeah. I like that. 
 Alex: I like that. 
 Cheryl Callaway: Thank you. So that's a good point. I like that whole point of like travel requirements. So I'll like that down also.
 Alex: Cool. Great question. Thank you. All right. So the floor is open. Who has a question today? 
 Patrick C IW: Alex, I have a question. 
 Alex: please go 
 Patrick C IW: ahead. Is it possible in ICMS to have custom calculated columns? 
 Vivian Larsen: Kind of. What, it depends on what you're looking to achieve and where. 
 Patrick C IW: Kind of part of our time to fill, time to hire metrics in those areas. I'm looking to do some customized formulas within the platform instead of exporting it into Excel.
 Vivian Larsen: So the problem with formulas is that they are only available in an output. So essentially, can they be shown on a dashboard as part of an output?
 Vivian Larsen: Yes. Can you filter off of them? No. So if you're going to create a dashboard report with the output of a formula in it that is possible, it's not really recommended, though.
 Vivian Larsen: So it depends on what you're trying to achieve. So the thing to remember about anything that you're going to do with formulas, and I'm going to get on my soapbox here because I had the fear of God put into me by one of the platform developers at one point about formulas.
 Vivian Larsen: Every time you run any formula, it runs on every record in your system. So if you have a million people records in your system, people job, et cetera, records in your system, and you're running a formula, it isn't just going to run on that one record.
 Vivian Larsen: It's not candidate A plus job A that it's running on. It's running on every single person record in your entire system and every single job record in your entire system every time it runs.
 Vivian Larsen: So if you're putting it on a dashboard what happens in that case is your load times are going to be impacted by it because if you're putting multiple formulas on a dashboard every time they run every record in your entire system just to load that dashboard.
 Vivian Larsen: So it really depends on what you're going to try to do with it. There are a number of pros and cons and quotients essentially to using formulas.
 Vivian Larsen: I'm not a fan of them for that reason if you've got a very big database. If you've got a small database and you don't have a lot of data in it, then go ahead with the blessing, but be careful.
 Vivian Larsen: Cheryl, you have something to add. 
 Cheryl Callaway: I do. So we have a whole bunch of custom formula fields and we can actually use them as filters and output.
 Cheryl Callaway: So I don't know if that's something new or different, but I know like we can and I do a lot of reporting on them and we also use them for like entrance criteria.
 Vivian Larsen: I was totally told never do that. 
 Cheryl Callaway: I 
 Vivian Larsen: mean 
 Cheryl Callaway: we I agree that you know you may have issues like that is like we do have certain areas of issues so I'm not promoting that by any means.
 Vivian Larsen: We 
 Cheryl Callaway: have our own issues however at the same time you know we we have a lot of people in our system but I don't know how many so 
 Vivian Larsen: yeah there was a large finance company a colleague of mine was trying to help who had a hundred and fifty formulas um that were part yeah there were all part of their their comp, and then as they continued to grow, the formulas had to be changed because they were part of their comp calculations, and 
 Vivian Larsen: they got more and more unmanageable and started competing with one another every time they ran. So, you know, I've seen the bad side of formulas, which is probably why I'm not a fan of them.
 Vivian Larsen: To answer your original question, it really, if you're trying to run, time to fail, and like one simple calculation, don't listen to me.
 Vivian Larsen: But if you're trying to do a lot of complex stuff, like figure out your comp scale or anything like that, don't do it.
 Alex: Yeah, Patrick, can I ask you what was it that you're hoping to do with a cognitive field? 
 Patrick C IW: What we're trying to do is we're trying to show a percentage of like our time to hire target is 40 days.
 Patrick C IW: And we want to be able to show that live what percentage of those are we hitting whenever that happens. and the exact team wants to see a live output of that on the dashboard.
 Vivian Larsen: Couldn't time based metrics get you close to that? 
 Patrick C IW: It gets me the time, but not the percentage of what jobs are we hiring under that 40-day time mark. 
 Vivian Larsen: Okay, so what you'd be looking for is one simple formula of what percent to job this number. So yeah, that again, like I said, let's take my advice with a grain of salt.
 Vivian Larsen: That's not bad. I would 
 Patrick C IW: not have a 
 Vivian Larsen: problem doing that one. If it's something simple like that, that will run fine on a dashboard even if you've got a lot of records in your system.
 Patrick C IW: So 
 Vivian Larsen: run it in Excel. The tip with any formula is if you can write the formula to work in Excel, it will likely work in Isom's with a tweak or two.
 Vivian Larsen: And so because we can't write formulas at the user admin level of access, it's something you're going to have to open help desk case to get assistance in creating it.
 Vivian Larsen: The only other thing to think about is where do you want to put it? So when you create a formula, you need a location for where it's going to live and it chooses one of your custom fields.
 Patrick C IW: Okay, and I submitted the help desk and they have come back and said it's not possible. 
 Vivian Larsen: Um, so again, it's not possible because they're not going to figure out the math. What you're going to need to do is just drop it in chat GPT, tell me how to figure out the percentage for in an Excel formula and then give it to them.
 Vivian Larsen: I recently had one written for a customer by doing exactly that where 
 Patrick C IW: I 
 Vivian Larsen: basically asked it to give me the exact formula in Excel 
 Alex: and I put that into the case and they wrote it just fine. 
 Patrick C IW: Okay. 
 Vivian Larsen: Okay. 
 Patrick C IW: Awesome. 
 Vivian Larsen: Yeah. General, they're not going to do the math for you. You've got to do the math for them. 
 Patrick C IW: Okay. Yeah. I don't have a problem doing the math for them is, you know, if I do the formula and send it to them, they can go ahead and create it.
 Patrick C IW: But we don't have the ability to create it on our end though, right? 
 Vivian Larsen: No. Formulas are not an area of the system that you have access to because you could write your own integrations.
 Vivian Larsen: If you did that, somebody very savvy would be able write their own integrations. That's why they don't give you access to it because it would break them then they'd have to support and they don't have no documentation on it and it would be a nightmare.
 Vivian Larsen: So just one other little caution about it. So what you're trying to figure out, you're trying to figure out the percentage of open jobs that have not hit 40 days, 
 Patrick C IW: right? We're trying to find out what jobs were hired, what percentage of jobs were hired under our 40-day fulfilled target.
 Vivian Larsen: So that map just I'm just running the math on my head here so basically what you would be trying to figure out is where the higher date versus the created date of the job 
 Patrick C IW: is 
 Vivian Larsen: greater than 40 days. 
 Patrick C IW: Yes. 
 Vivian Larsen: Say it like that. Yeah, it's it's just that is very simple and you should be able to do that. 
 Patrick C IW: Okay, and our database is not large So all the stuff with the comp and everything. I don't think that'll be a problem And it right now.
 Patrick C IW: This is the only formula. They want to see there I'm this one report of sending it out weekly last week because I was out sick and they're like well We had this wonderful platform.
 Patrick C IW: Why can't it do it for us? So all week I've been tinkering with it and that's when I hit the brick wall from ChatGPT, you have to submit a request to have that customized formula of column created.
 Vivian Larsen: So I've got the formula, and I just need I sims help best to create it for me now. Nina has an idea that I think has some merit.
 Vivian Larsen: Can you explain a little bit more what you're trying to ask? 
 NinaVoelker: So I think you can use the count percentage. If you've got a total of 10 jobs And four of those jobs are, you would have to use your group by like your output grouping to say these are the ones that are under 40 days, these are the ones that are over 40 days, and then there's a percentage.
 NinaVoelker: So if I'm looking at mine, I can see, you know, of all of these candidates who are submitted, what if I use that count percentage output column, I can see the percentage based on the other grouping.
 NinaVoelker: So you use the total in your group by, and then you would use under 40 over 40 whatever that is.
 NinaVoelker: And you should be able to get a percentage for each of those. 
 Patrick C IW: Okay. 
 Alex: So Patrick, big picture. You're running into a phase of analytics maturity where at some point, you're going to reach some limits and what can be done natively in items.
 Alex: And you may start to think about a power BI or a tableau. So do you currently have a Power BI or Tableau?
 Patrick C IW: I do not. I have mentioned to my leadership that I would love to have some kind of training in Power BI or Tableau.
 Patrick C IW: And they're not on board with that yet, but I think I'm starting to get them to come around to it.
 Patrick C IW: And 
 Vivian Larsen: one just little thing from a maturity perspective, when you may not be there. But in general, when you get to a point where leadership is starting to ask for some complex data analytics.
 Vivian Larsen: That's where ICIMS typically tells you you need a data warehouse integration and do the complex analytics, either in a Power BI, a Tableau or a Data Warehouse.
 Vivian Larsen: ICIMS is limited in the amount of basically calculation that it can do and analytics that it can do. And that's why those solutions exist.
 Vivian Larsen: You can get almost anything you're looking for in the audit trail via API. And you can get that information into another system that can do a lot more of this complex analytics that I sense is able to for you.
 Alex: And then Patrick also to give you the extreme far end of what's possible right now. This is something that we've been kicking out the tires on the last couple of weeks.
 Alex: So I have some test data in here and I asked it what percent of jobs were hired under 40 days time to fill in.
 Alex: I'll explain what this tool is. Yeah, so what this is, this is an AI analytics tool that can connect to a database and it gives you dashboards that you can talk to, all right?
 Alex: And then you can ask it to just create something that has not been already configured, all right? So in the spectrum of practice for analytics, you have analysts manually doing spreadsheets, right?
 Alex: Then you have stuff that is natively possible within the ISMS platform, right, then you have Power BI and then at least my hope in my theory is that you have this, right, this is brand new.
 Alex: It's only been around for about eight months, so I'm not officially endorsing it, but I like to share this with the community so that we can all see like what is possible and what's coming down the pipes.
 Alex: And I didn't give any further instructions than just what percent of jobs are hired under four days time to fill in a gaming this nice pie chart right there and some breakdowns.
 Alex: And 
 Vivian Larsen: that's within our our test config 
 Alex: platform. Yeah, this is our test. We have a one month trial of this so we're we're playing around with it and seeing what's possible.
 Alex: Oh, 
 Patrick C IW: wow. Okay, that's great. Yeah. 
 Alex: Cool. Great question. Thank you so much. 
 Vivian Larsen: Yeah, I tried mean is approach first because I think Nina, you're right. You could probably get the majority of the way there natively before the formula and then go to the formula if you don't get there.
 Angela Biehl: We tried that exact suggestion earlier this year and struggled to get it to work right. The only way we could get it to work right was to create a target custom field and have like a drop down option of over our under so that we could group those results based on whether they were filled in the target
 Angela Biehl: date. And we have done that. We're building a data warehouse now, but that's worked really well for us for the past year, when we started, we initially had the dashboard reading for last month, because you have to go in and bulk edit those jobs.
 Angela Biehl: They aren't automatically updated by a formula in ICEMS. But you can calculate it off of an automatically-felt calculated number really easily and just have a system admin or someone really bulk update those so that the dashboards are accurate or have the dashboards look back so that you know that they're
 Angela Biehl: always completely accurate where it's last quarter or last month. 
 Patrick C IW: Okay. I didn't think about that approach. I mean, look at that as well. Thank you all very much, everybody. 
 Alex: Thanks for the question. All right. Who else has a question today? The floor is open. No question too big or small.
 Alex: I don't 
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): have a question, but I wanted to share something this week that we had an issue with. It had to do with MFA for a vendor, and we don't have very many vendors that get into items, but one of them couldn't log in.
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): I actually remembered Ariel asking that question a few months ago. And I went back in the search and I found the call that it was on.
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): It was when you guys were at NYU. And I was able to speed forward to the time and the conversation using the search and buying Christine and Ariel sorting it out.
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): I called got the MFA reset for that vendor and it was fixed like within 20 minutes. And it was just because of being able to search on our our previous conversations that we've had.
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): So I just wanted to thank everybody. That 
 Alex: is fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that. I'm glad that the platform is adding value like that. That's been a dream of ours, all right?
 Alex: That over time enough system admin wisdom would be accumulating in here that folks can get really deep answers like that at their fingertips.
 Alex: So I'm so glad to hear that. 
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): Thank you. 
 Alex: Yeah. I had 
 Vivian Larsen: a question from one of my clients this week and this is phishing. But has anybody noticed an appreciable change in the responses through the chat on customer service over the last two months?
 Alex: You're talking about the AI chat or with two teams? Yeah, 
 Vivian Larsen: I sims AI chat. 
 Alex: I had 
 Vivian Larsen: a customer make an observation that they've noticed that the quality of the answers or the consistency of the answers is different in an untangable way and they're So I wanted to see if anybody has had the same kind of feedback, or if anybody's had the same kind of experience.
 Vivian Larsen: I asked her to post in the SAI general, but she has not had a chance to do it just yet.
 Vivian Larsen: Well, 
 Alex: I'll share our poll results. We got 12 votes on this. And a significant perspective, a significant percentage here, haven't even used it yet.
 Alex: It's about 17 percent, haven't even tried it yet. I do recommend trying it. 
 Vivian Larsen: Are you getting that you're? 
 Alex: Interesting. 
 Vivian Larsen: Yeah. 
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): And sometimes it has been about things that I've brought to the calls. So sometimes I'll ask about like formulas. Or fields that exist and it'll tell me that.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): I can do something and actually can't. Um, one time I was asking about if you could, you know, manually update the status of an offer letter and it told me that I could and gave me all these steps on how to do it, but that actually wasn't possible.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): Um, and then so it kind of, and then it sends me as like the reference, you know, articles like just the generic articles of whatever I'm talking about, but it will like say very definitively one way or the other like.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): No, cannot do this or yes, can do this and then I'll dig down deeper and find that that is actually inaccurate.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): So I do report that to the TSE. Normally, I'll take a screenshot and I'll say, hey, maybe you need to update the chatbot.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): But I noticed that happened to me a few times and so I kind of just straight away a little bit.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): Or at least I 
 Vivian Larsen: take it 
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): with a grain of salt, like I and I have to go in and really dig. And if I can't find it specifically, I have to like take it to, you know, a TSC to actually confirm, but I don't really just take it as, you know, at face value.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): A 
 Vivian Larsen: good thing to always look at when it gives you a response is the age of the document that it refers because the way I see them writes their updates to some of their, I'm sure all of you have come across as they release notes when a change has been made, but don't always go back and update the source 
 Vivian Larsen: data. So if you're looking at an offer management question and it's referencing one of the original releases for the release docs for offer management, there might be a release note later down the road that has given you a change to whatever functionality it's talking about.
 Vivian Larsen: That's something I've run into. Has anybody else ever noticed that? I've 
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): noticed that as well. I do always also check the date Because yeah, there are some stuff that it's pulling from like 2022 or something that I am like okay This has been you know a hot minute or it doesn't specifically say like this is only legacy because I we use new isems And so sometimes it will say
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): like it doesn't specifically say this is only legacy isems not new new isems And 
 Vivian Larsen: so 
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): sometimes that's also got me into a pickle with the chat was well I asked, you know, what's the bulk amount of records that you can, or the maximum number of records that you can bulk update at one time, and it was giving me the answer for legacy, and then giving me an article for legacy.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): But the article didn't also didn't say that it was for legacy only, and then only come to find out later that, you know, that only applied to legacy and not new items.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): It was a much smaller number for new items. So yeah, that's a great point. and I definitely always check that first whenever I read an article.
 Ariel Hsieh (she/her): Well, 
 Vivian Larsen: thanks everybody. I'll reassure my client that she's not the only one that feels that way. You 
 Alex: know, I think about this a lot in terms of, so all of us are very technically literate and I use jet bots all the time.
 Alex: All sorts of different vendor products. I'm curious what the, what folks opinions are on, let me just launch this over here one moment, here we go.
 Alex: In 2025, how useful are chatbots for technology workers, specifically, right? How often do you find yourself spending five minutes with a chatbot?
 Alex: And most recently, I had this experience with Stripe and QuickBooks, their versions of their chatbots because we had an integration issue internally at IRD.
 Alex: And Stripe was sending invoices over to QuickBooks, turns out it was through another vendor that we know about a third party, right?
 Alex: And these were things that had already been paid in Stripe. And so I tried to use the chatbot functionally and ask my questions.
 Alex: And of course, after five minutes of chatting with the chatbot, the chatbot said, your question is too difficult. Please contact support and look it back to you in 24 hours, right?
 Alex: And I just wish I could have escalated it much more quickly not wasted those five minutes, looking for an answer that I knew it probably wouldn't be able to give me.
 Alex: But as you think about your experience across all the different things that you're interact with, how are you feeling about it these days?
 Alex: So this is this is very interesting and I'm not surprised at all. So we've got everybody answer this bowl. Here we go.
 Alex: So we've got But 10% saying very useful, 50% saying somewhat useful, 30% saying rarely useful, and 5% saying not useful at all, that very much resonates with my experience too, and it's interesting.
 Alex: And I'm sure we'll get better. But Vivian, why is this the state of things today? Because I don't want to just dis-ISM's chatbot, these results are very similar to the results that we ran specifically for for Isom's chatbot.
 Alex: Why aren't chatpots better right now? 
 Vivian Larsen: So, this isn't just a dig on Isom's. I don't want to get my hands slapped. Well, 
 Alex: exactly. That's kind of the point I'm making. It's like the technology itself is still developing. 
 Vivian Larsen: I've been in the tech industry for over 20 years. And one of the things that has consistently been a pain point for me in all of those 20 years is tech documentation.
 Vivian Larsen: Tech documentation is a point in time problem. Meaning, I'm a developer, I write software updates, I'm going to write a document on how I did what I did and what it's supposed to do.
 Vivian Larsen: That's a point in time thing, and it's posted and submitted as, this is what this functionality is, sign blessed and delivered in them, then most organizations in software because how fast software evolves, never go back and update that 
 Alex: original 
 Vivian Larsen: source document. So, as new code is written and new functionalities are added in, there are dependencies on that original architecture that happened, that original document never changes, but the functionality it describes has evolved and or changed and then completely remixed or resigned as the code
 Vivian Larsen: changes. And so, in general, in every software platform that I've ever worked in, you start to get these regressive problems where the original tech doc is wrong and all these chat bots are being trained on the library of tech documentation that is out there and so what you're seeing is it's not the 
 Vivian Larsen: chat bot that's the problem, it's the source documentation never having been fully updated and kept up to date. Tech documentation and the people who write it, it's a very specific skillset and a very specific type of mindset to write that kind of tech documentation.
 Vivian Larsen: And those folks are often the first to get rift. They're off at the first to get cut in my experience at every organization I've ever worked at.
 Vivian Larsen: That group is always under fire. And consistently there's not a lot of priority put on ownership of that library of documentation and its functionality.
 Vivian Larsen: And so now I think those chickens are coming home to roost. As you're seeing these chatbots try to be built because they're all being built off of outdated and not information.
 Vivian Larsen: That's my opinion on it, but it's an educated one. 
 Alex: If I had to notice a trend, I would say that B2C platforms, large B2C platforms, tend to be better. Paul, you mentioned Subly.
 Alex: That's a subscriber management platform. 
 Paul Day: Yeah, it's like if you want to start your own subscription box service. And yes, so I went, I did some account management through there.
 Paul Day: And the chatbot was amazing. Out of, say, out of the 15 times I reached out to them, one time I was forwarded to an actual rep.
 Paul Day: Everything else I was able to do through the chatbot, That was just awesome. 
 Alex: Amazon's amazing 
 Vivian Larsen: for reason. They have a huge tech doc team, because I know people that work on it. Oh, 
 Alex: interesting. Amazon I also say stands out, I think about the experiences that I've had where I've been able to resolve pretty much everything without talking to a tech support person.
 Alex: But I do see how much it goes back to what Vivian is saying. And I think it has a lot to do with how that stuff is managed, because like, you know, like 
 Paul Day: Subly, for example, totally different industry, right? Everything's all different, but they have a different way, like you have your own section in your account with consistent updates to what's happening to the platform.
 Paul Day: It's like on the left side of your screen, it's called like what change or what updated. And that thing always lives there.
 Paul Day: And if something changes, you get a notification that won't go away unless you go in there and read it, right?
 Alex: So it's like 
 Paul Day: a, it's kind of like an ever-living thing instead of something that's updated on top of other things. Like Vivian mentioned, yeah.
 Paul Day: Very 
 Alex: interesting. Okay, great subject. Next question. What else has a question today? Um, 
 NinaVoelker: I have a question on feedback forms. I don't know if this has been discussed, but I noticed in the recent release that there are some changes coming with feedback forms.
 NinaVoelker: One of them is really awesome, but I haven't figured out how to use it yet. The reporting capabilities, right? So if you're using the team's feedback forms in the past, it wasn't reportable, and I was just getting ready to switch them over to a different feedback form because they weren't reportable,
 NinaVoelker: but that's coming. But the hidden feedback until submission has anybody run into challenges or has anybody noticed differences in that because our interviewers look at the feedback of the previous interviewers so that they know the questions to dig into, right?
 NinaVoelker: Like, oh, they just happened to mention that they like to travel six months of the year, next group dig into that.
 NinaVoelker: So has anybody run it to challenges with those being hidden from the other interviewers? Anybody 
 Alex: with interview feedback form reporting experience? You 
 Vivian Larsen: couldn't record on it before it's brand new, right? Right. 
 NinaVoelker: The reporting is that the other, the reporting I'm excited about if anybody knows how to get those output columns would love to hear that.
 NinaVoelker: But the really big one that I'm concerned about is that it's hidden all feedback forms. So if Alex, Vivian and I are all three interviewing, Alex and Vivian can't see my feedback form details until they've completed their interview and submitted their feedback.
 NinaVoelker: back. So, to me, that's going to be a huge barrier for a process because that's, you know, we work as a team when we're interviewing.
 NinaVoelker: And 
 Angela Biehl: we've asked about this in the past because we've actually had the opposite issue where there's a sense that people on team interview feedback are looking at other feedback to adjust their comments, but doing so in a way that is more associated with group think as opposed to critical, you know, feedback
 Angela Biehl: . And so I think it's actually hidden that way by design to avoid that. So I'll be interested to hear if it's possible to not have it hidden.
 Angela Biehl: It 
 NinaVoelker: says it's not. It's in the release notes. It says this update is not configurable. So I'm trying to figure it out before my team melts down, you know, because we use this.
 NinaVoelker: We use each other's feedback. 
 Vivian Larsen: So, are they taking away a functionality in this release? 
 NinaVoelker: I 
 Vivian Larsen: would get ahead of that if I were you and just simply put a case in stating this new release goes against our use case and explain why.
 Vivian Larsen: Very often, when there's a functionality that breaks something for enough customers, they'll quickly put out a monthly fix to take away why it broke.
 Vivian Larsen: So if enough of you go back and say, hey, hiding this, making this hidden means I can no longer use this functionality because it messes my entire team's process up.
 Vivian Larsen: That'll get in front of the development team and you'll get on the bug fix monthly update schedule much more quickly, if more and more people are saying you're taking away functionality I use.
 NinaVoelker: Thank you. 
 Vivian Larsen: Welcome. 
 Alex: Thanks for the question, NIDA. Who else has a question today? No question too big or small. And if you're relatively new to the group or relatively new to items, don't be intimidated by some of the deep technical stuff that we talk about, everything is fair game.
 Townsend Wilkinson: So I have about 10 years of experience in items. But I'm starting a new role as an actual items admin on Monday.
 Townsend Wilkinson: I 
 Alex: was 
 Townsend Wilkinson: curious if anyone had any tips for a new admin coming into a system that's, you know, it's about five months old and still pretty fresh out of implementation.
 Vivian Larsen: There's just 
 Townsend Wilkinson: any general tips. 
 Vivian Larsen: Document everything. I 
 Tawnya Fairchild: was going to say the same thing. So I moved into our system admin role after our system was 
 Vivian Larsen: about 
 Tawnya Fairchild: four years in and we're still having to go back and document and go okay oh we have this in two places that's fun let's fix that and so the more you can document right up front the better off you'll be 
 Townsend Wilkinson: awesome tip I would 
 NinaVoelker: optimize your source information your statuses because so much is built on those things and if you don't have it right a lot of times your recruiting team is not going to know why it doesn't, like why it's not functioning as smoothly as it could but they'll be able to feel it.
 NinaVoelker: But if you optimize like your source information, your statuses, your permissions, all of those things that Vivian, you will get less questions.
 NinaVoelker: Plus 
 Vivian Larsen: if you make updates, the other thing is develop a good system for yourself for how to document changes. It's very easy for a system to get out of, so you go through the exercise of documenting all of this stuff and then the changes made in your documentation is no longer valid anymore because there's
 Vivian Larsen: changes and no one wrote down. So create yourself a single source of truth, whether it's a SharePoint doc or something where you have it written down and any changes that you make, you go back and you update that original source information.
 Vivian Larsen: If you add an entrance criteria, update it in your source doc. Just create yourself a regular process to keep stuff updated.
 Vivian Larsen: Because remember, many of us work in silos where we're the only person in the entire org that does our job, you get hit by a bus tomorrow.
 Vivian Larsen: How does somebody come in and failure shoes if it's not written down anywhere. So that's that's kind of the argument how many of us are walking in places where we're going to hit by a bus.
 Vivian Larsen: But you know what I mean? 
 Townsend Wilkinson: If 
 Vivian Larsen: something happens to you and you can no longer explain what you did, have it somewhere where someone else can find it.
 Vivian Larsen: Cool. 
 Alex: Rob suggests winning the lottery. 
 Townsend Wilkinson: I would 
 Alex: say taking a look. I would say taking a All right. 
 Rob Bursee: I'll 
 Alex: go ahead. Leave the 
 Rob Bursee: buses at home. We'll 
 Vivian Larsen: take a limo everywhere. I would 
 Alex: say take a close look at user dashboards. Yeah. Often coming out of implementation, the user dashboards are the conventional things that a lot of customers see.
 Alex: But the user experience is very closely tied to how customized the dashboards have been. And so each user group has their set of things that they really want to see.
 Alex: So I would suggest that as a project too. 
 Townsend Wilkinson: I 
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): was also just thinking of reviewing the candidate experience. So looking for ways where you might be able to save some time or make recommendations for improving the candidate experience depending on how it was built.
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): Yeah. 
 Vivian Larsen: Cool. 
 Townsend Wilkinson: Yeah, the onboarding needs a little work. Otherwise, it might be fresh in your mind with going 
 Vivian Larsen: through it. 
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): You probably had a lot of ideas when you were applying that you could 
 Townsend Wilkinson: mention 
 Shuree Sockel (Enterprise): as real-world experience. A 
 Townsend Wilkinson: lot of my time out 
 Vivian Larsen: there implementing the The internal portal was always the last priority. So the employee experience was almost, I'd say, 90% of my customers put that in the also ran category where it wasn't a focus.
 Vivian Larsen: It was an, oh, yeah, we built an internal portal, but not a lot of focus was paid to the internal portal.
 Vivian Larsen: So I'd just take a look at the internal candidate experience and make sure that it matches your external and very, at least document it for yourself, because very often it was kind of an afterthought.
 Vivian Larsen: So if you're five months old, that might be something to think about a quick improvement. Yeah, 
 Townsend Wilkinson: I did. 
 Alex: Townsend is that enough to work on? Oh 
 Townsend Wilkinson: yeah, yeah. 
 Alex: They 
 Townsend Wilkinson: told me to be hitting the ground running, so I think I've got a lot to run with. Great. 
 Alex: Thank 
 Townsend Wilkinson: you. 
 Alex: If you ever get bored, Or just ask, all right, great. Well, let's go to our networking breakouts. We're going have three or four people in a room.
 Alex: We'll spend about eight minutes there and then come back and talk about what's going well with Isom's challenges that you're having, whatever else is going on in the world of TA tech for you.
 Alex: If you're not into breakouts today and you need to jump off, that's totally fine. I'm going to wait for some folks to leave here before opening them up.