iCIMS Hacks: Compliance, Offers, and ATS Workarounds (2/20/26)

This System Admin Insights session dives into new state laws banning stay-or-pay clauses and what they mean for offer workflows. The group unpacks compliance impacts in California and beyond, candidate experience risks, and practical iCIMS workarounds using offers, iForms, and integrations. Plus member Q&A on notifications, custom fields, and admin best practices.

https://systemadmininsights.com/

Transcript

Welcome everybody to System
Admin Insights. My name is Alex Marcus, and this is
a community of highly creative and highly highly technical skilled
system admins who are getting the most value out of
ISIMS. And welcome to anybody who's joining us for the
first time. We are recording this session and it will
be posted to Circle internally here, by Monday for everybody
to watch at any time. The transcript is also searchable
by Circles AI, which that means so that means that
all of our calls become resources to support this community
in getting the most value out of ISIMS. The audio
from the session will be posted to the SAI podcast,
which is linked to lower left corner of the platform.
And we like to get started with a little gratitude.
So I will,
share my gratitude for Vivian today.
Vivian
has successfully
launched her book,
and it's out there in the universe in ebook form
on Amazon.
It is gonna be out in paper book paperback.
In a couple of weeks, we're reviewing the the proofs,
make sure that everything looks great. If you're on our
all time top 10 leaderboard, be happy to send you
a free paperback copy, so just DM me and let
me know.
What else do we have in chat here?
We've got a congrats. Thank you, Julie.
Thank you, Tanya.
Vivian, I've been I've been workshopping,
new titles for you. I'm thinking professor by Fiat.
Thanks, Greg.
You've given him ideas.
Greg sent an email back saying that I should teach
a course about it.
Professor by decree. I don't know. I don't know. But,
but, yeah, it is truly it's both erudite and accessible,
so I encourage everybody to check it out.
Alright. Thanks, everybody.
So,
let's see. Oh, a reminder too that if you would
like to get SHRM credit for attending this session,
we post that code now as a comment on the
video
by Monday. So just go to the ISIMS channel and
filter for recordings. Let me share my screen so this
is not just me talking about it. Where are we?
We're right there. There we go.
So if you go to the ISIMS channel and you
go to recordings
and you go to a previous 1,
there we go. There's a Sherm credit right there.
That's how you find that.
And then you just submit that. We don't have to
do anything for you in the back end.
Okay. So, 1 more reminder actually, or announcement rather.
We're gonna change something on the back end with how
the SAI events are set up. So if you see
any cancellations, I can't stop that. Doesn't mean that the
calls are canceled. There's gonna be a new,
thing to RSVP for in the platform. So don't worry
if you see cancellation emails.
I'm not gonna send out, notification emails when I build
a new 1 so as not to spam you, but
just that's just a head up heads up.
Alright. So today,
we wanted to do a segment that we call in
the news. We wanna spend about 15 minutes talking about
something topical.
And Caitlin
shared something that was not on my radar,
which is the this item here. So California bans
stay or pay
employment
clauses, and I really had to read this carefully to
fully understand what's going on. Here's a summary.
Basically, California just banned a practice where companies made new
hires sign agreements saying, if you leave before x date,
you owe us money. I didn't really realize this was
a thing, but it's a thing. The things companies were
trying to collect ranged from sign on bonuses and relocation
cost, training fees,
visa and immigration expenses, and even vague
losses like lost goodwill
or lost profit.
Can you imagine? Essentially, the debt was a financial anchor
designed to keep people
from leaving. So starting January first 20 26, those clauses
are legal in the great state of California unless they
meet strict conditions.
For example,
sign on bonus repayment is still allowed, but only if
it's a separate document, and the employee gets 5 days
to review it with an attorney and the repayment is
prorated.
Tuition because all all candidates have an attorney just on
standby to do this kind of thing.
Tuition reimbursement repayment is still allowed under similar guardrails.
New York has similar legislation in the pipeline. We see
this a lot with stuff in in in HR law
that it starts in California and then New York picks
it up next, and then maybe Colorado, and next thing
you know, the whole country's doing it. Or, you know,
companies who are hiring in 1 of those states among
all this hiring that they do, they have to adopt
it just to be compliant in that state.
So my first question to everybody is,
in chat,
does this impact you in some way, either because you're
California based or you hire in California?
I'm curious to see if anybody's actually gonna have to
deal with this.
Tanya says yes. Okay.
Great.
Greg says yes.
Michelle says yes. Patrick says yes. Okay. Great. So, I
wanted to to just pick everybody's brains for a second
here. My first question is this this 5 day window.
So mandatory review periods like California's new 5 day window
slowing on offers,
slowing down offers, the the bane of the recruiting process.
Right? We've we've made an offer. They're ready to go.
And next thing you know, the offer takes too long
and they drift.
How is your team handling compliance lag
without tanking the candidate experience, and is there a way
to make the wait feel
intentional
rather than bureaucratic?
If you haven't thought this through yet, we can just
brainstorm too. But,
how do we how do we make this a thing
that doesn't doesn't cause our our
candidates who are ready to go to fall off?
From a technical perspective, this is gonna have to be
an offer clause in offer management.
Yeah.
From
a timing perspective, though, there's really no way
within the offer tool to expire
a clause specifically. It'll either have to be a clause
or an I or I form. Yeah. I forms
do have
expirations.
So Greg Greg's got his hand up. Tanya's got her
hand up. Greg, why don't you go ahead?
Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. Just brainstorming. Probably
we'd have to do a combination of I form or
an offer.
I this is I'm gonna I know I've harped on
this before. This is this would have been great if
this is not an excuse for ISIMS to jump back
in and revisit the whole form of some type of
conditional logic for offer modules. This is it.
Because this is like, it's the comp the the the
compliance legal landscape is just getting really wild out there,
but that's a story for another day.
I I would say though
yeah. It it it's I've got mixed feelings about this
article because I do get what they mean by, look,
you know, sign on bonuses, relocation expenses. There there are
some really key expenses, especially that are incurred by the
employer. But things like,
the rest of the stuff,
equity, everything else have to do with training,
That that's always been naturally born by the by the
employer, and I think going beyond that does does does
make it messy. In terms of compliance, I think this
is where you get your your your both your legal
and your your PR or your branding folks together,
because you can wordsmith this. You can make it seem
like we're giving you 5 days just so, you know,
along the life so that you could so we can
give you the space and time to explore your our
benefits, ask your questions. I think there's a way you
could spin it.
But it has to but but it has to be
done in a way that the the candidate
feels like it's not just compliance. It's really in their
favor, which it is in a way.
But then we if we have to set some type
of expiration
that right now, like like, for instance, it's the iForm
right now. It's the only I can think of that
to be the fastest way to deploy unless ISIMS responds
in the future with some type of new development.
Thank you, Greg. Tanya, what are your thoughts?
So,
just a heads up, I was informed by my legal
team when we were discussing it that Colorado,
Wisconsin, and Massachusetts also have some similar legislative books.
Uh-huh. So,
what we decided to do because we still use I
forms for our offers is we actually split our language.
So we do drop downs so you can select, you
know, appropriate sign on language for your offer letter. We
split it into sign on and repayment drop downs and
then reload and repayment drop downs because
for
our businesses where they can, they do wanna make sure
that they're protecting their investment. You know, if we give
somebody a sign on to come work for us or
pay for their relocation,
we don't want them leaving 30 days later because somebody
else offered them a job. That's right. And we're footing
that bill.
I do think some of them, like Greg said, are
a little ridiculous, the things they're talking about, like loss
of goodwill or lost profit.
I think that's a bit much, but,
I think it ultimately will push push a lot of
companies away from doing sign ons or relocation in general.
Yeah. I think that's true.
Cheryl said, kinda glad I no longer live in California
and work for a California company.
Funny. Greg said, I give DC another 6 months before
they release something similar. DC, Colorado, California, the big 3
that influenced the rest of us. Yep.
Patrick says there's talk in the GovCon DC world that
this is coming soon to DC. There you go.
There you go. Great. Second question. From handcuffs to culture.
So a couple of you have already pointed out that,
you know, framing this as handcuffs is maybe,
going a little overboard. Right?
So it it there are legitimate reasons to do things
like this that protect the company's interest. Totally get that.
If you can no longer use repayment clauses as a
retention lever, how does your talent strategy change?
Do you pull back on big upfront investments like relocation
sign on bonuses? Tanya, you already spoke to this. Or
do you bet harder on culture
or something else?
I think you have to use more of your culture
leverage, and you're probably looking at,
you know, for on-site roles, more local candidates. You know,
you're you're shrinking your candidate pool Yeah.
To kind
of make this easier to navigate as an organization.
Because even if you're looking at doing a sign on
and you have to do that separate agreement and then
the 5 days, like, that's a lot of
work to maybe not get a hire
at the end of a process. So Yeah. That's a
great point. Patrick said, going to be a fine balance
of culture
and
growth opportunity and compensation. Agreed.
Other thoughts on that?
You might end up seeing the, you know,
bonuses being tied a lot more to something some type
of deliverable, a long term deliverable.
So, you know, it might be profit. It may be,
some some type of guarantee. So they'll attach that to
that piece.
You might,
see that relocation
could be something that's had that they're offering less and
less. And they could use this as cover,
even though they may have been planning to scale that
back anyway because of what's been happening with the with
the market lately. So,
this is probably a great excuse for those companies, I
think it was mentioned earlier, that wanna scale back on
sign on bonuses except for just those very few rows.
This might be the cover they need. I'll be like,
well, don't blame us. We're just trying to comply with
California, and we can't we we're just trying to do
our we're just trying to comply as best we can.
So this might be the cover that some companies are
needing.
That's interesting.
Cheryl said coming from health care with huge sign on
bonuses, reloads, etcetera in their contracts, I'm sure a company
will find a way around this. And And Tanya said,
I also think it will shift when people look to
leave. We previously used sign ons to make up for
a bonus someone might be walking away from, and now
they'll have less incentive to walk away before bonus payout.
That's a great point.
Alright. Last question, then we'll move to our member questions.
System and workflow implications.
How do you build a compliant offer workflow that accounts
for different state rules
without making onboarding feel like a legal deposition?
What does a compliance aware ATS process actually
look like?
This is a really tough 1.
Without conditional without
clause automation is what they used to call it for
offer. Without clause automation,
you can build offer
details tab
conditional logic
that kind of hacks clause automation.
So, essentially, certain fields are only available for certain kinds
of offers at which point that clause is then populated.
That's that's as close to clause automation as you can
get from a system
perspective.
If you need to automate it in any way, shape,
or form, this is 1 of those places where
an API tool
is probably gonna be your best bet, like a doc
queue
type of tool
because then you have the ability to build a lot
of those rules in a secondary system,
and and control what gets pushed into ISIMS. Has anybody
built anything
from an offer perspective
that gives you the ability to do some clause like
automation of some kinds around your offers?
I've seen it done. It's just not common.
So nobody on the call?
I can imagine that those vendors are gonna be doing
well. I think I can imagine them starting to to
market their roles market their operate their solutions.
This makes a lot of sense. For those that have
to do that,
yeah. I think, you know, I could I could I
could see ISIMS trying to partner. You know what? Funny
as it is, this would be a great acquisition for
ISIMS if they're hear hearing this. This is a you
know, if they can get a company like that,
maybe a shortcut this. You know? Acquire 1 of those
companies if you if you've got the the pockets, and
then, you know, have this pop up as a feature.
I
a lot better than because we have another company now.
I've got an I juggle integrations.
If they could just kind of be great to have
something like that for ISIMS.
It's gonna get more and more complicated. As soon as
yeah. You figure next year or 2, there's gonna be
more of these laws coming up. You know, you throw
in the Canadian guest ghost law. Things are getting really
comp I feel like we need a a separate compliance
module just to keep keep track of things.
Greg, I have a new title for you.
ISIM's m and a advisor by Fiat.
Tanya, that's a really cool workaround.
Yeah. It really is. So so, Vivian, they used to
have this in in offer, and they were it was
under development. So when offer was first built, when offer
was first proposed and brought out, the second phase of
offer was supposed to include claw include claw
Claude's automation.
Ah. And for a whole lot of reasons I won't
get into, it got tabled. Got it. And,
unfortunately, it was never really realized.
Got it.
See, Patrick said we are struggling with paid transparency right
now for the states that require that on the job
description.
Our workaround was updating the state code with an asterisk
as a stop measure to remember to disclose the pay
on the job description.
That's very clever.
Yeah. I like that.
That is sysadmin ingenuity. Yeah. Yeah. Just a simple Yep.
Visual reminder. Yep. Yep. Really good. Really good.
I see Cordell's typing.
Any other thoughts on this? Like, building up a compliant
auth workflow
that counts for different state rules? Cordell said, maybe this
sign on reload clauses
will go away and could be added as a benefit
like vesting in the company 4 0 1 k. If
you stay 6 months, you get your bonus.
Mhmm. Yeah. I see what you're saying.
Yeah. It's a good point. Okay. Any other thoughts on
this topic?
If not,
let me jump over to
the platform,
and we're going to
take a look at the leaderboard. So congrats to everybody
who is in our 7 day
leaderboard.
I would like to
give a shout out to folks who are our all
time leaderboard members here. Again, if you'd like a paperback
copy of Vivian's book, just DM me, let me know,
and we will get 1 out to you.
Alright. Coming events.
Coming events, we have
unfiltered,
real ATS conversations
with Alex Marcus and Vivian Larson. So,
as a follow-up to Vivian's book, Vivian and I are
gonna be on LinkedIn biweekly for a couple months here.
We're gonna try it out. Never done that before. Very
excited.
And, you know, the idea is is not to try
to be, quote, unquote, thought leaders. LinkedIn has enough of
those. The idea is to be thoughtful practitioners telling stories,
having conversations
that are both human and techie at the same time.
So hope you can join us. That's Monday, February 20
third at 12 PM eastern, and we're gonna do that
biweekly for a couple months to to kick the tires
on it and see if folks like it.
We have our regular call every Friday at 1 30
PM eastern.
On Wednesday, March fourth, we're doing a product deep dive
with Candidate. FYI,
product deep dives are an opportunity
for for you to ask very technical questions of somebody
who can actually answer them. So unlike a conventional sales
call where you're looking at a slide deck with logo
board and, like, cherry pick stuff, like, they're really gonna
go under the hood and answer any questions you might
have. So if you're looking at a,
if if your interview scheduling needs aren't being met by
your current investment, you can check this out. They have
a really strong tool, and I really I really like
the team. It's a founder led team,
and we we we really try to only bring inventors
that we feel confident that they're gonna they're gonna do
right
by by your investment if you move forward with them.
You're not gonna end up in sales funnel. There'll be
a form you can fill out if you're interested in
them getting in touch with you.
And then in March, we have a couple of other
deep dives. We're doing echo,
echo employee referral
solutions.
They are a, again, a founder led team, very committed
to customer success.
And then we're bringing in endorsed.
So this is in response to the AI spam
issue. And if you haven't seen Terry's comments on how
he's kinda hacked that, very interesting stuff. So I encourage
you to check that out in the system.
Natively, he did this. But there's also tools that will
do it. Obviously, there's a there's huge market potential for
cut for a company that gets this right because everybody's
wrestling with this right now, not just ISMs, but all
ATS vendors. So endorsed is 1 that we're talking to.
We're also talking to Tofu.
Endorsed was suggested to me by an SAI member, a
leading member who are implementing it at their platform. That's
why I was interested in seeing that. We normally don't
bring product deep dives into the Friday calls, but we're
gonna do it once a month if and only if
it is highly topical. And we feel like the the
general audience here of members would really be interested in
seeing it. So,
encourage you to come prepared with your questions about AI
resume spam and also,
questions about accountability.
Right? Every vendor I've I've talked to
talks about the black box issue and what's really going
on under the hood in a way that leaves me
thinking,
what would Vivian have to say about this? Right? So
bring your tough questions. I prep them. I tell them
they're gonna rake you over the coals, so don't hold
back.
Alright.
And then we also have that's it. So the other
ones are still in the works.
And with that, we will jump over to our member
submitted
questions.
Let's see. What do we got today?
Tanya, did we talk about this 1? You a technical
support chat outage, was that resolved?
Yeah. Cheryl helped me out. I guess they had put
up a notice that they were
at a team meeting or something in that window, and
I just didn't see it that day. So
Got it.
Cheryl, did we talk about this interview management notifications last
time? You wanna talk about that?
Cheryl?
I I had put I don't think we talked about
it last time. I was just looking at the interview
management, the newest,
interview module,
and I realized, like, it had changed. And I was
like, when did this happen, and when did I miss
it?
Anything I should be aware of, like, any negatives that
I should be aware of as I dive in.
But as you can see, that's the new notification. So
you have your default ones that still exist, and then
you can create new ones. And I was just like,
oh, yay. We finally got something like that. So
I had totally missed it in the the I think
it somebody said it was the winner update.
So if anybody has any feedback that, you know, maybe
things I just should be aware of as I start
to go down this route, by all means, let me
know.
Notification set. So
Greg said I see it too, and we're a legacy
UI client. He's in the process of configuring it over
the next month or 2. So, Greg, what have you
what have you learned about this so far?
I mean, the funny thing is I never noticed any
change. They just kinda delivered it that way, which the
only thing that makes it really easy is that for
those of us who've played with the offer module, this
is very offer module like. So it just makes the
transition easier. I'm like, oh, I know this interface. I
just just replace what I learned in offer module with
with interview module, and then go ahead and start just
editing my templates accordingly. So I found it really easy.
It's if you haven't played with it, it's it's very
easy to search, mix puts,
just a very easy design. And,
for the for the templates, for my people who have
to actually edit these, they find it.
They like the search function,
pretty,
just very easy to find. Archiving is very simple.
I think this framework that they're using, which I I
see repeated over and over in different areas of the
platform,
it's very smooth and and,
surprisingly mobile friendly. It's not meant to be mobile friendly,
I know, but it it does play well with my
my phone.
Michelle, thanks for adding this context.
You said this was in the last release. If you
had notifications set up already, those remain the default and
are still working. Good to know. You can review what
is currently set up by clicking the view default button.
If you wanna set up custom ones, you can now
do that by selecting create new. You have the option
to set up custom verbiage for different meeting types, in
person, video, or phone, and you can set up notifications
for certain categories of jobs, but I found the filtering
pretty limited.
That gets a like.
That's super thorough. Thank you, Michelle. Anything else you wanna
add to that?
Michelle, I'm not sure if your audio is working.
You may have to allow audio in browser.
Yeah. Sometimes. So,
folks have experienced that they need to go to the
browser settings, find the audio, and allow it,
because we're in Circle now and not Zoom.
Okay. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for for that
feedback.
Cheryl, anything else you wanna ask the group about this?
Nope. That was it. Okay. Great. Thank you for the
question.
Liam said the variable for the different meeting types has
been a big hit with our TA teams.
Good to know. Good to know.
Alright. So, Jessica, Jessica, are you on the line today?
I don't see Jessica in here, so we will go
to
Cathy, are you on the line?
Nope.
Let's see. We will go to
Ingrid is on the line. Ingrid, so your question was,
I'm trying to delete data in a field we no
longer need before I repurpose it.
This is this is such a Vivian question, by the
way. So, does anyone have an example of an import
file that they imported themselves to delete data from a
field? I thought it was as easy as adding the
relevant field ID and the asterisk asterisk asterisk, but should
know better. Vivian, is this advisable? What's the right way
to do this?
So do you know you can delete fields from your
system and then just add new ones?
Yes.
Alright.
I didn't think well, it's kind of 1 of those
things. I started down that road, and I'm like, okay.
I did that with the other field. I ended up
just having them delete it.
But, yeah, you're right.
Yeah.
So that's literally know for future now.
My best advice would be to do this. There's really
never from a database perspective, there's not never a great
argument for repurposing a field that has data in it.
Okay. Because there's always going to be whenever
SQL
in the developer world, people say SQL is sticky. And
what that means is that SQL has this annoying ability
to remember things that you think are long gone, but
they're somewhere in the database
in a historical record that you just don't see as
an as a user interface level user.
And from a a ghost's perspective, when I'm trying to
support something and a customer is coming to me and
there are problems with it resolving or it having goofy
things show up in results or you're getting
erroneous
responses
when you're trying to run data, this is often the
rabbit hole that you wind up having to fall down
before you figure out what the customer's problem is. So
the best advice is if you're going with a new
dataset and the data is not the same,
always, always, always put a z or an x or
something in front of the old field so that you
know it's the old field when you pull it up
in reporting and build a new field. And if you're
almost at your custom field limit,
in a previous now, you know, we've talked about custom
field limits can be raised. So you can go from
 to 400. You have to reach out to your
help desk person if there is not a good argument
to remove yours, to remove some of the fields.
But, in that case, they're always gonna ask you to
try and do a field delete before they will raise
your custom field limit, and it does slow your system
down. So it's not a great idea unless you have
a good argument for it.
But deleting a simple field, deleting a single field
is pretty simple. It's just a help desk case. You
enter the case. You tell them the exact field ID
and tell them to remove the field from your system,
and then all the data goes with it.
And it it's gone, and you don't have ghosts that
could potentially cause you reporting problems down the line. So
my best advice is don't
delete the field if you can and start fresh.
However,
to properly answer your question, if you really have a
burning need,
it's a matter of creating an export field with the
system ID for the field like RCF, JCF,
whatever the number is, and then doing a hide, show,
or hide column with 1 or 0
in the column. So, essentially, if you're gonna hide, it's
a 1. If you're gonna
not hide, it's a 0. So you would create an
import file,
import the values into the the system with the RCF
column. You're gonna need the folder too. And it really
this is very highly oversimplified.
There is a very complex
import export,
method,
and it can cause, like, a a bunch of fun
pain that you'll have to wanna work with the help
desk on. But you can import and override or import
and hide
single select list options
or multi select list options. I'm stressing that for a
reason. Field types.
If it's just a single select list, there is no
automated or system import way to modify it. So if
it's a list options field, you can modify it by
import. If it's
just a single select field, you cannot.
Make sense? Everybody, any questions? That was a lot.
There was a lot. The last piece was a little
bit a lot, but I was trying to take notes.
Easy peasy. Yep.
Be sure to reference the recording. We'll have recording in
if you wanna review that. But thank you for your
time. We did it now, you know, on on this
a while back. At the very least, we did now,
you know, on custom fields and running a custom field
report and that kinda thing.
Go ahead. Yep.
Tanya has a response.
When you tried to lead a field a while ago,
you were told that you'd have to sign a waiver
to do so.
That is not unheard of. I have heard of that.
It's not that might be a new policy that they're
requiring everyone to do it. They didn't require everyone to
do it when I worked there.
But
they need to cover their butt because once it's gone,
it's gone,
and there's no way for them to go back and
get it. So that's that makes sense that their legal
team is asking for that now.
Yeah. Absolutely. I was just
I want it to be for a waiver for this
specific field sign and new waiver for the next 1
because we've you know, if your admins are changing and
they don't know what they don't know,
it can
be problematic if it's left wide open. So
Ashley, also, do you know do we know if there
are any plans to raise the custom fields to higher
than 400?
It can be done. I don't recommend it.
We had
a huge, huge customer that they can raise it to
.
Yeah. So
the person that we did this for was 1 of
the enormous enterprise customers, you know, million employees globally.
And what wound up happening is they had to get
isolated on their own server so that they had all
the horsepower of their own server. It just causes all
kinds of noise
in the search engine when they're trying to run the
search to be very oversimplified,
and their system was very slow.
So it's
 is a limit for a performance reason, and it's
really not recommended to go over it.
So,
if you
are at a point where you feel like you need
more than 400,
it might be time to do an optimization
and get rid of some old stuff if you can.
You know, thanks, Greg, for mentioning,
trying things and test.
Vivian, from your experience so so a test environment usually
requires an extra spend.
What size company
when does that make sense for a company to invest
in a test environment?
It's not a size thing. It's a complexity thing. Okay.
So if you're a company that has a lot of
integrations, if you're a company that has a lot of
various use case login groups,
so
you have
multiple business entities within your system, or you have
compliance sensitive
kinds
of positions. So I had a government contractor,
who wasn't very big. They had about 2000 employees,
but they were actually recruiting CIA agents.
And so there was some very incredible sensitivity and security
requirements around who could see what and the jobs and
the people that were actually applying to the positions.
So if if there's a good reason why
you could potentially have some serious negative implications
if people see things they shouldn't, that's a great argument
for making,
to get a test environment. Because then if you're gonna
make a single change or tweak something, you can test
in a in a place where it doesn't impact production
to see what that impact will have downstream.
So it's not necessarily
a
size of company
requirement. It's more of a sensitivity
to change.
Thank you. It's a great call out. Any other comments
on deletion
of fields?
Ingrid, thank you so much for the question. I forgot
to mention when I was talking to the calendar that
we have something very exciting coming up next week. So
we have a show and tell session. This is something
we're gonna be doing monthly, and I know it's super
tiny. But Jessica Smith from Court has volunteered to talk
to the group about how she's using Apply Network,
and we also have a special guest who,
has deep knowledge of Apply Network because he is the
product manager for Apply Network. Is that right, Vivian? Yep.
Right? So we're gonna tag team here. We're gonna get
a an SAI member who's gonna show us how they're
getting value. I'm gonna get answer additional questions. That's gonna
be a great 1 next week.
If there is something that you would like to share,
we have a link down here for
member showcase.
Member showcase is the same thing as show and tell.
So if you would like to share something
that you have done that is cool in your system,
we got a little form you can fill out here.
We'll get a notification, get back to you. We do
these once a month.
We would love to see how you're getting
amazing results
from ISIMS.
Alright.
Let's go to
Ingrid, do you have another question? Wanna talk about this
1?
Yeah. I'm on a roll today, I guess.
Oh
0, yes. Okay. Sorry. I've been I've been working on
a bunch of different things today.
Yeah. Okay. She just answered it. I didn't think so,
but I was I thought, well, at least I try.
Yeah. I'm just,
I'm trying to take, inventory of, you know, what fields
are profile fields and what we're actually you know, are
also in the I forms, and we have about
hundred I forms. So
so
That's that's okay. Thank you. Appreciate it. Do you so
here's just a question. Do you have access to the
back end where you can build your own? Yes. Yes.
So that's helpful. Yeah. The I think the biggest issue
I don't know if anyone else has run into that
that uses a lot of I forms. My biggest issue
with I forms, and I know it's a little bit
tangent, but
is you have that permission to see the back end
of the form, but the permissions on the form, you
have no visibility on. And it's the it's the most
time sucks situation every single time when we have issues
with who can see what
that we have to go to go to ISIMS and
ask them, and then they you know, we have, you
know,
quite a bit of marketing groups. So
they're like, well, tell us you need to go through
they basically want you to go in as a candidate
or or as the user
and look at your permissions. And I'm like, I don't
can you just tell me? You you you can see
it.
So, yeah, it's just 1 of those frustrating things.
Thank you.
Alright. Thank you for the question.
Alright.
So,
now we're gonna open the floor to anybody on the
call. Actually, Tanya had 1 comment here. She said, that
is my biggest complaint about iForms. I've asked be given
access to the permission screen countless times. Best advice is
to document when you set it up originally,
right, which is not helpful after the fact, but, yes,
document, document, document. It's a great call out. Yeah. And
then, if anybody's in the product pioneers, 1 of their
upcoming
meetings is about this. I forget if it's the March
or April session, but
if you are, keep an eye out. So
Got it. Thank you. Greg
cosigns that. I have begged ISA support to give us
a capability, but I know it's buried in somewhere they
can't flush out. Yeah. It's a user friendly interface, so
keep asking because it's if they can flush it out
or you can get to it, it's not something that
will require them much work to give to you. I've
seen it before. Yeah.
I have I had them send me screenshots 1 day
of it. So I'm like, tell me what order to
give you the permissions in that makes this easiest, but
it takes me longer to write out the permissions and
to actually make the changes.
Mhmm.
Yeah.
Alright. Well, thank you for the question.
Now
the floor is open. Who else has a question today?
No question too big or too small.
We go real deep on some stuff. Sometimes
folks who are new to the group are a little
overwhelmed, but if even if it's a newbie question, that's
totally fine. You'll get some great answers.
I have a quick question, actually. Sure. So I'm actually
working on a new event notification.
So, you know, that's what that is is basically for
those those who haven't really played with this. I move
someone into a stat a status,
and that designated status will trigger some type of,
e notice to go out, an email. So everything's based
on, like,
a a built
email template and a search that I've built out. So
I provided a lot of information to support like we
normally do because we can't we can't, of course, right
now, do that ourselves. That'd be great if we could.
But they I asked what I had a little twist
to this 1. And I asked them, and they're they're
looking into
it, which is,
can the Invent email that gets sent out by the
Invent notification,
can they tweak
the the from email address? So if I want it,
for example, the from to be not our do not
reply,
if I wanted it to be from
the act from the actual job
the job recruiter,
is that possible? They haven't said no, but they're looking
into it because it's the first time we ever asked
and never cared. I wasn't sure if has anybody ever
when they send out their event notifications,
asked support to send it from a very specific email
address?
I think it can be done.
However,
it's a global if I'm remembering the setting correctly, it's
something I haven't touched in a long time. So don't
quote me on this 100 percent. But there's a global
setting
that the send from is either the user or the
do not reply.
Got it. So I'm fairly certain that it can be
done, but you're gonna turn off in all of your
notifications
that the do not reply email is the default email
when you send something.
Yeah. That's cool. I'm pretty sure there's a global setting
that lets them do that, but it's probably why they're
not suggesting it to you
because yuck.
Yeah. No. I I told them if if it's something
that can't be done or, like, a situation like you
just mentioned where it's gonna be kind of an or
nothing deal, I'm I was told just tell me, I'll
tweak the email template accordingly, and then we'll go ahead
and just work with what we've got.
It's not a show stopper. It was 1 of those
things like, you know, it's nice for the the ex
candidate experience, but there's a way around that I could
just tweak the email template to to kinda direct candidates
accordingly.
Thanks.
Great. Any other thoughts on that 1?
Alright. The floor is open.
Christine, you often have something. Anything for us today?
Sorry. Tanya?
Off of mute.
The only thing I've been experiencing lately
that I don't I originally thought maybe it was user
error. It's happened to me maybe 3 times.
If I'm inside of a,
the job profile and I'm specifically in the candidates,
tab or whatever,
and I'm
sending an email communication
to multiple people
within said
status or bin, whatever it might be.
I have been having trouble with people
those multiple people either receiving it
and or
some not being able to respond to me.
So when it first happened, I just thought it was
me. I did something goofy. I did something wrong, whatever.
But now it's been, like, 3 times that this has
happened. So I don't
know what exactly might be triggering that because it's not
something that I do a ton, but I just have
had a lot of reps that I've actually been working
on lately and have just needed to, you know, very
quickly send an email, the same email, same template to
multiple people.
If you're doing it frequently,
you could be hitting some of the,
big
messaging systems, spam filters. Mhmm.
So this was something it was more of a problem,
like, in the late
teens
that we were running into a lot with Yahoo and
Gmail specifically where they were throwing everything that was sent
from a customer system
into,
spam folders just because that customer was a big user
of campaigns
from the system. So they were sending, like, hundreds of
emails out of their system in an average week,
and it started to get them flagged as a spammer.
Yeah. I don't know if I'm doing it enough or
and or that I'm doing it to more than, like,
literally 2 or 3 people at a time. It's just
been sort of a weird thing. So okay.
But the inbound 1
strikes me as your IT team meeting to whitelist
IPs.
Okay. Yeah. We've done that. Like I said, that 1
was has happened last. I just was gonna throw it
out there just to see.
I'll keep watching it. Thank you. I'll,
hopefully I I think what I've just been doing is
literally just been sending it quickly individually.
But, you know, it's not supposed to work that way.
No.
You know, it makes me wonder,
is there a tool for
testing email deliverability that doesn't involve making
what I what I used to do is I would
do my email address plus test 1, plus test 2,
plus test 3 at at Gmail dot com or whatever.
Is there another way to go about that?
Question.
There's something called Mailtrap, a team inbox that creates as
many inboxes as you need.
I'm a fan of something called YachtMail.
It's not specifically what you're asking for, but for creating
fake email addresses. Yeah.
I use YachtMail all the time because it's Yeah. I
wanna do it in bulk somehow. Like so even even
that's a burn the burner email, so that's great. But
but, like,
some way to do that in bulk, there's gotta be
a way to do that.
Wonder wonder I mean, wonder wonder how how do SaaS
companies do that internally?
I don't know the answer to this 1. Yeah. What
what is your question again? So my question my question
is, like, I wanna test deliverability
on emails coming out of ISIMs
without just using, like, 10 test profiles with it's the
same email address, but plus test 1, plus test 2,
plus test 3. Right? You know, like, email marketing
software has this built in. I don't know if CXM
has it built in, but, like like so to avoid
the sit the the the situation that Christine's talking about
where she's only gonna know if somebody reaches out to
her and the people who never got it,
right, she never hear from. So there's a whole industry,
I just noticed, that it was called email bulk email
validation.
I guess it's it's kinda used for that. It's like,
if you, a, wanna test your list to see how
many bounce back, how much is kinda, you know, what's
not great.
There's a lot of companies out there seem to be
doing it. Not endorsing anyone, but just, like, here's, like,
a couple, like, company, ZeroBounds,
Validity,
Sendest, Mail.
They all seem to,
GMAS is another 1. They all seem to be basically
offering
a service,
where you can do diagnostic or validation of your of
your list and see, okay, get a get an alert.
Is this getting listed as spam? Is this getting list
flagged? Does is this getting a bounce back? So that
especially, I think that would make the most sense if
you're getting charged, if you're a if you're getting charged
for, mass emails,
or if you suspect a lot of your stuff is
not getting through, that might be some good tests out
there. I wonder if ISIMS could do an email deliverability
audit.
I you know what's interesting?
I have an LMS tool. In there, they've got it
built in for those who need to test, like, their
it's mostly used for
validating your connections between your SMTP,
or if it's make sure it's, you know, it's not
being flagged as spam. But it's kinda like you you
mentioned earlier. Your marketing tool has a built in. Yeah.
But, yeah, some of these services that you said, that's
kinda what they do.
I don't know if they're free, though.
I think you might have to dump they might give
you, like, maybe 1 you could probably test with 1
or 2 emails, but if you wanna do a bulk,
they may charge for their services. Yeah.
Interesting.
Sounds like product spotlight.
Totally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alright. The floor is open. Who else has a question
today? Tanya, I saw your hand shoot up briefly. Was
that a miss Cleck, or did you have something? I
have a quick question. So I'm gonna drag us back
to event notifications for a second. Sure. So I am
working on cleaning up our email template library.
It got a little out of hand. And some of
the ones I'm looking at right now and trying to
figure out the best way to handle them are ones
that have been previously used in event notifications.
I have a list, but I wanted to make sure
it was right before
I tried to archive stuff.
And
so
when you save an event notification, it doesn't actually save
the template it's referencing.
It basically is just taking that to build the
email in the event notification.
Does that mean I can delete the template without impacting
the event notification?
I tried asking technical support and got a very wordy
not straight yes or no answer.
There isn't a yes or no answer to it. So,
there's 2 ways to build an event notification. You can
either build the email itself within the event notification or
you can use a template.
So if someone has used the template as their initial
and then edited it within the event,
it's no longer using the template.
Mhmm. So
they could be using your template, or they could be
using the event itself
as where the email template is.
There's no way for them to specifically
identify that systematically,
whether someone edited it in the course of building it
for you. And editing could be as simple as, like,
adding a space
Mhmm. Or something along those lines. So
this the
this is a naming convention thing. I always advise everyone
when you're building an oh, search template or when you're
building an email template that's gonna be part of an
event notification, put EVN in the front of the title
so so it's very clear that it's part of an
event notification.
Then ask the support desk to give you a list
of all your event notifications and any templates tied to
them.
And if it is not showing 1 of those EVN
templates as the template tied to it, it's the notification
itself where the message is built.
Yeah. So they told me they couldn't pull a list
of the email templates that were tied to event notifications.
They said it's for you manually. They they can't. They're
right. They can't do it. Actually, there's no way for
them to extract it. But if you push hard enough,
they will actually have someone sit there and build you
1. So they I've done it. Sent me a list
of the body of the email templates, which means I
have to go back and figure out, okay. Is it
this 1, that 1? They couldn't pull titles of the
email template, they said.
But I know for some of our
email templates, I built them with recruiting workflow variables, and
they needed to switch them to form variables.
So those were all modified. So those ones I can
probably archive then because it's not the actual template
that I created being used,
if I'm following what you were saying.
Yeah. So
think about when you're when you're building an email itself,
when you're you pick the template and then you're modifying
the body somewhat. You're no longer using the template. It's
the same concept.
Okay. Alright. That's what I was just trying to confirm,
before I started archiving some stuff.
Thank you.
Alright. The floor is open.
Cheryl has a callout
in comments.
Just an FYI, if nobody's if you're not looking at
comments, it looks like the LinkedIn
button
is not working on the portal
at the moment on her portals at the moment. So
it's something for everybody to look at to see if
it's affecting more than just you,
more than just Sheryl.
And then, Ingrid, you had another question.
Yeah. I just another iForm question. If you take
if if I I have an existing iForm that has
a synced field
to a profile, if I wanted to update that on
the iForm to just like a prepopulated
read only field, is that doable? Can you do that?
Or
You have to create a new field.
Okay. Thanks.
It's totally possible.
Just a little side note, though. This isn't, like, another
tangent. But,
if you're integrated in any way, meaning that that form
goes out to an integration of any kind, like a
background check integration or an assessment integration,
don't do this without creating a second version of the
form.
It's always best practice whenever you make any modifications to
the form to create a v 2
and then sundown v 1 if there are integrations involved.
If there are no integrations involved, no. You you can
do it, and nobody will really notice.
But it can also create some reporting fund for you
later down the road if you
don't have a v 1 and a v 2 and
a clear cutoff
for that previous version. Because if you call the field
the same name and you search that field,
how do you know which 1 you're looking at? Are
you looking at the old 1 or the new 1?
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Thanks for the question, Ingrid.
Yeah. I I know a lot of people have learned
that lesson the hard way, changing something and
forgetting that it impacts the integration. What's the best way
to,
prevent that from happening?
Document.
Yeah.
Yeah. There's no systematic way. You just keep good documentation.
Yeah.
Did any any customers put their documentations
in, like, a chatbot interface?
Because because we talk about documentation. Documentation is great. I
know I created 100 pages of documentation for my my
previous employer, and then it was, like, it was digestible
for me because I understood I wrote the whole thing.
Right? But at that time, we didn't really have chatbots.
Like, has anybody taken documentation and put it in a
secure chatbot interface so they could just be like, hey.
I'm doing this. Tell me what I should watch out
for?
So we're,
we we created our own internal,
chatbot tool. So they're
upgrading them where we can make saved chatbots that are
shareable. So all our documentation is going in that as
human and humanly possible. I've played around with it myself,
and it's
so nice. You don't have to scroll through pages trying
to find what you want,
ask your question, and go.
I love it. I I knew somebody I knew somebody
would be doing that. That's that's great. Like,
because you need you need something that's easy to access,
and navigate.
Greg did that for his MBA MBA classes. Oh, yeah.
Notes, papers, case studies. Absolutely.
Yeah.
Cool. Alright. We got time for 1 more question if
anybody has another question today.
Going once.
Going twice. Any more questions for the group today?
And if not, we're about to wrap up.
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