Being an innovator in your industry comes with its fair share of both positives and negatives. One double-edged sword we’ve been dealt is growing quickly and in multiple states—and now countries. While we’re glad to be growing and improving each day, the evolution of our company and platform has, of course, come with communication challenges.
As a technology company that works to constantly improve our platform, email communications are inefficient at times and traditional instant messaging has proven too limited. For example, we have a team of engineers working on “what’s next” for Recruitics, who need to collaborate in real-time when a new idea needs to be fleshed out or a bug needs to be fixed. Likewise, we have teams of account executives, managers, sales persons and developers who all need to communicate quickly and efficiently to provide the highest quality customer service possible.
Luckily, being the tech junkies we are, Recruitics learned long ago that Slack--a team collaboration software--is the only platform that would allow us to communicate quickly, meaningfully and above all else, efficiently. Slack allows our company to communicate through text conversations in a number of self-created chat rooms called channels, as well as private messages that are even more reminiscent to traditional instant messaging than the former. This keeps us both organized and allows large groups to communicate in real time, a benefit many other companies are quickly catching on to.
As Slack continues to grow in popularity amongst corporate communication tools, we thought it would be helpful to share how we use the platform to help those who might be considering getting on board or who have recently adopted.
At Recruitics, we do our best to empower our entire team to think and act like entrepreneurs. Simply put, we believe everyone in our company, from senior leadership to the entry level, are capable of coming up with valuable ideas that can help make our platform better. That’s why our Slack app has channels dedicated to both platform help and ideas. The fact is, our engineers aren’t the only members of Recruitics working with our platform on a daily basis. This channel allows us to share input from our experiences working with the platform and clients. This helps us easily identify areas of our platform that we can continue to improve upon and discover new needs we’d like to develop for our end-users.
Being in a niche industry means it can be difficult to stay up to date on the latest news. We’ve all got our ears to the ground, but it’s hard to have all of your bases covered, and stay productive throughout the day. We use slack channels to post the latest headlines so every member of our teams can stay up to date, knowledgeable, and understand the context of the industry we’re creating our platform for. Furthermore, we’ve integrated RSS feeds into specific channels that will automatically post new blogs and news articles from top thought leaders and sources in the industry.
We believe all corporations can do a bit better at giving back to the communities they live and work in. At Recruitics, we use slack to organize our CSR campaigns and fundraising efforts. Whether we’re looking at the big picture, or at this month’s latest cause, we’re using channels to get our team members up-to-speed, excited and involved in our charitable projects.
Sitting in front of a computer screen all day can really detract from efforts to stay healthy and exercise. But there are little exercises you can do here and there throughout the day to stay fit and improve your health, without being distracting to your coworkers. Internally we refer to Recruitics by the shorthand RX and our #RX-ercise channel automatically calls out channel members at random to take a quick break for exercises like planks, jumping jacks, push ups and wall sits.
Just like every corporation, regardless of what teams you are on, or which departments you work in, we all need a way to effectively and efficiently communicate on a daily basis. Email get’s confusing with reply-alls, CCs and BCCs, and especially in the exchange of documents. Instant message applications can be great for one-on-one communications, but can’t always handle the bandwidth of an entire organization. Slack solves these problems for us and let’s us worry about the big stuff instead of sweating the smalls stuff like internal communications.
Not only has Slack streamlined our day-to-day communications, they’ve made them fun and more meaningful. Slack allows its users to integrate their chat platform with other platforms your company might be leveraging internally. For instance, many team members have recently begun using Asana as a task management tool. We’ve been able to integrate this platform with Slack to provide task updates within chats, saving team members the time of having to log into a separate system. We’ve also integrated Google Drive for streamlined file sharing and editing, as well as Giphy to add some animation to our chats in the form of Gifs.
At Recruitics, we’re working to simplify and organize something as complicated as recruitment marketing with our analytics and automation platform and services. We’ve been able to accomplish that, and provide top quality customer service and support, thanks in part to Slack helping us simplify and organize our internal communications.
