blog
Posted On Monday, May 10, 2021
Author: Philip Sampson (Account Director)
No doubt the first thing most readers wondered when they saw the title was “What the bleeding heck is Zapier?”.
Put simply, it takes something that should be an extremely technical job, requiring an absolute coding wizard to achieve, and makes it so that your average person can perform this magic with a simple and intuitive visual tool. No coding required.
Let me explain…
You see, many software solutions have something called an API (Application Programming Interface) which allows other software solutions to communicate with it. A perfect example would be how your ATS pushes job posts to job boards. Sites like Indeed have an API which allows your ATS to connect to it securely and post a job by piping the details straight into their system without having to interact with their website that is only really there to ask as a human friendly interface.
API’s are completely proprietary and as such, if you don’t know the correct 1s and 0s to fire at them then you will have no chance of connecting and communicating with them. This means that unless two software solutions are designed to work with each other, then they won’t be able to…. Unless you…
What Zapier does is integrate with a ridiculously large range of APIs for solutions like Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365, LinkedIn, a multitude of email service providers and workflow management services, CRMs, accounting solutions, calendar apps and pretty much anything you can think of. There are actually over 3,000 applications it can interface with and link together!
By knowing how to communicate with all of these individually, Zapier can act as a middle man and facilitate actions based on triggers between all of them. Just look at this list of apps Zapier can link JobAdder with and here’s a list for Bullhorn to get an idea!
Zapier runs off a trigger based system. One API will send Zapier information when something happens which can set off a trigger. Then you can decide what to do based on the trigger. You can even use conditional logic to process the information and take actions based on the data being sent through.
Obviously you have an ATS to keep track of everything but some people like to also keep data in spreadsheets. This could for a number of reasons from just old habits to more practical reasons like creating specialised sheets that you can use to track and analyse performance of recruiters, maybe with a graph or two.
You can have Zapier monitor your ATS and, for example, say a recruiter places a candidate, then Zapier can analyse the placement and update the recruiter specific spreadsheet with the information of your choice. This can be then used to visualize and analyze performance of that recruiter.
You could have Zapier monitor your ATS and upon a new candidate being added, it can also add their details to an email marketing solution like MailChimp or Aweber so that they start to receive your drip email campaigns, updates and more.
By linking your ATS to an invoicing system with Zapier, you can have invoices auto-generated and sent out. Of course, we would recommend just creating drafts and sending them to you first to confirm correctness before sending out to your client, but this still cuts out a lot of steps and can save some repetitive work.
Zapier is a super simple tool that you can use to do some super powerful things. Once you get started you will find yourself looking at every task you regularly do and wondering if you could automate it, even if at least partially, with Zapier.
While the best thing about Zapier is how much time it can save you in the long run, the nicest thing about it all is that you don’t need to write one line of code and nearly anyone can use it with minimal practice thanks to its ease of use and super friendly interface.
So give us a try and if you find something really cool to do with it then let us know, we love nerding out on automation