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Work History on Person Account

  • 11 January 2022
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I am helping a recruiting firm set up their CRM on Copper and one of their requirements is to gather a person’s work history.  Knowing that people can have multiple jobs in their work history, I would like to ask how to easily add a work history without having to create hardcoded fields like “Former Job Title 1”, and “Former Job Title 2”.  There are also other information to collect for each work history such as salary and employer.  In other CRMs, a person’s work history would be connected to a table with dedicated fields for work history and tied to a person/contact record.

https://support.copper.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001900948-Best-Practices-for-Recruiting-Firms -- This article from Copper talks about best practices for recruiting firms, it mentions “Work History” as a field to collect on a Person’s account, I wanted to get more clarity on what that looks like on a person’s account and how to incrementally add work histories as time goes on. 

 

Please advise, thanks!

Lori

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Best answer by Michelle from Copper 11 January 2022, 22:19

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Userlevel 7
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Hi @Lori K, thanks for the question!

 

The first thing you’ll need to consider is whether this information needs to be hosted directly in Copper, or if it makes sense to host it externally and simply link to it.

It might make sense to link out to it if:

  • You want to preserve all formatting on documents, etc
  • You have a legacy system where the information is already being stored
  • You prefer not to do addition data processing work to get that data into Copper

If this is the case then you may want to associate the outside information to a Copper contact by:

  1. Associating files with the work history information to a candidate’s Copper record, or
  2. Creating a custom URL field that gets populated to an outside link containing the candidate’s work history

 

You may want to host the information directly in Copper if:

  • You need the ability to see it from within Copper
  • You need to be able to use Copper’s search function to locate candidates based on keywords in their work history

If this is the case then here are a couple of options:

  1. Create a custom field to house each aspect of someone’s work history information. The example you used was a field for Job Title 1, Job Title 2, etc. The downside here is it’s a lot of fields to manage, and you have less flexibility if someone has a lot of previous jobs. The plus side is that the data would be structured.
  2. Create a custom field to house all information about a previous information. For example, you could have text area for Work History 1 in which you’d list the job title, dates, salary, etc, etc. This is much fewer fields to manage. But the data here would also be unstructured, so you have a risk of missing information, or information in the wrong order, etc.
  3. Logging work history as an activity. This might be a good option if you want to build a chronology of events for each candidate.

I’ll put some screenshots of options 2 and 3 below. You’ll notice I actually tool a hybrid approach, and put some essential info into Copper while adding a link to a more detailed doc.

Option 2 - each pink box circles one field for Work History
Option 3 - each pink box circles an activity I logged to represent a piece of work history. Note that I has created a custom Activity Type called “Work History.” I then applied a filter to the contact’s activity log to look at only those bits of Work History.

 

And here’s an example of how you can use our global search to find candidates with certain key words. In this example I used the structure of Option 3 but it will work whether you choose to store the data in the format of option 1, 2, or 3.

 

I know that was long so let me know if it answers your question!

Userlevel 1

Michelle -

I truly appreciate the in-depth work around options, you’ve given me great examples with screenshots to help visualize the different options.  I will now present these options to the client to make an informed decision.  Your help was much appreciated, thank you!

 

 

Lori

 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

@Lori K, glad I could help! Feel free to let me know if you or your client have any follow up questions.

(Also, I’m going to mark my original response as Best Answer so that others can find it easily)