We’ve been doing a lot of hiring lately. It’s exciting, but also a total time suck. I’m a big fan of automation, and have been using 3 tools to make the hiring process be less time-intensive. You’ll find them useful too, even if you are hiring through a site like Odesk. GOOGLE FORMS The first is Google Forms – all applicants fill out a questionnaire with Google Forms. We don’t accept applicants any other way. We ask some very specific questions about availability and salary that help us eliminate candidates quickly. The questionnaire is, frankly, very long. It’s done that way to eliminate people who don’t take the time to fill it out – if they aren’t willing to spend some time applying for the job, they probably aren’t great at the kind of self-directed, work at home virtual environment our team has to thrive in. What makes Google Forms particularly beneficial is that everyone’s answers to the questionnaire are automatically added as a new line to a Google Spreadsheet. Our Team Manager can review and compare all the new applicants very quickly within one file and eliminate as needed. It’s a huge timesaver. We used to have the questionnaire results emailed to us, but using the Google Spreadsheet is far superior. SCHEDULEONCE Once a candidate passes through to the interview stage, we’ll schedule that interview using ScheduleOnce. With a global team and a global hiring pool, going back and forth about availability while also converting for different time zones often leads to a lot of mistakes and confusion. Instead, we send the candidate a ScheduleOnce booking link. All the timezones are converted for automatically, and the interviewee chooses the best time for them based of the times the interviewer is available. It takes about 30 minutes to get set up properly, as there are a lot of options to choose from. But the time saved, like with Google Forms, is enormous. HELLOSIGN Finally, once we’ve hired a candidate, we use HelloSign for NDA’s and work agreements. It ties in with Google Drive, so we can take our company docs and click a link within Google Drive to send them to HelloSign automatically. They then go out for signature to the new hires. I’ve used other, similar tools in the past, but HelloSign really nails the combination of being simple and intuitive enough to get running quickly and also powerful enough to meet a variety of needs.