[Music] welcome welcome welcome thank you everybody for joining us for our very first what would glide fast do my name is aaron johnson i'm the chief technology officer here at glide fast consulting and a source now certified technical architect you'll have to excuse me just getting over a cold um during this series we're going to dig into some solutions that we have built both in for ourselves internally we run a lot of our business on servicenow as well as our customers excuse me today i'm gonna be solo um but in future episodes we'll bring in some of my co-workers and talk about solutions that they have built uh for the platform uh today specifically we're gonna be talking about fast track recruiting which was an application that we developed internally to help our recruiters and hr professionals manage the workload of incoming candidates of the entire life cycle right from the interview process all the way through onboarding as well as screening and so forth at the beginning as well i'm happy to answer questions as we go through this i'd like to keep it lively and let's dig right into it so i mentioned earlier that you know this is a solution that we developed for our hr professionals it's really meant for them to be able to maintain the system without a lot of without a lot of development support there are certain things that developers would still need to do but for the most part it's meant for our hr professionals to actually manage so let me go ahead and share fast track so you can get an idea and so what we're looking at here is kind of our main record within fast track the job application record this is where pretty much the entire life cycle happens right you can see all the way at the left we have uh where they apply it all the way at the end where it's either closed out where they were onboarded or rejected where they didn't quite meet our our needs um this entire life cycle is easily changeable by our hr folks which we'll get into in just a minute uh so these are our steps but if you were to use this as a customer or even if we needed to change them within glide fast that's easily doable without me or another developer actually uh changing it for them so i'm just gonna make this real easy for us to get started here i'm just going to select an existing job requisition and we'll talk about what all the different tables are shortly i'm going to select an existing applicant so we'll select abe lincoln and i'm going to go ahead and save this and this is you know just a typical task record within servicenow uh you know pretty familiar to anybody i guess it's ever used service now and worked on tasks uh this is primarily meant to be assigned to a recruiter or another hr professional and then they would work the entire likes life cycle of this um if we scroll down a little bit we've got these activities which i'm going to talk about in a second these are really the bread and butter of fast track right these are the the lego blocks that really make it work uh they're dynamically created within the flow everything behind the scenes is is running uh using flow designer and you can again as an hr professional decide what activities you want to happen within this job application and when so you see here we have three different activities that are going to fire different pieces at different points of the life cycle starting with this just a sample task in the applied stage where we are currently so if i come back here to the fast track tasks tab try saying that five times fast and i'll refresh it you can see that the task automatically uh opens in this particular case i'll go ahead and open up this task not much to it right but we can put any information that we needed to in here let's say uh this was you know a task to maybe collect some additional information from uh from the applicant or something to that effect uh we can uh we could create that task and assign it to the recruiter or whoever we needed to within the application um so that's the main that's the main table right job applications so now let's start digging into this a little bit we talked a little bit about the activities let's take a look at what those actually are in the background so if we come over here to fast track activities i'll go and select that again i can come in here i'm the recruiter i can say or i'm a recruiting manager i can say i need a new task and i'll just create a new one i'll just uh we'll do it uh wwgfd oops keyboards not working there there we go and we'll give it a type so this is just going to be a task um we have four different things that we can do here right we can create the tasks which i just showed you we can create an interview which will uh show in a little bit we're gonna do an approval or we can execute a separate flow if we need to in this case we'll just choose task and i can choose which stage is going to happen in so let's say it's going to happen in the interviewing stage and i can choose the order so the order for those of you that are familiar with servicenow pretty standard across the board right this is just the order in which this thing is going to fire um anything that has the same order number will fire in parallel anything that has a higher lower order number will fire in sequence um i'll go ahead and save that and we also have a couple other options right we can choose a group if we want to assign this to a group automatically we can also default this on new job descriptions which we'll we'll see in a second all right just checking the comments see if anybody's got any questions so far so please do put them in there if you do have questions okay so um like i said these are kind of the activities within the system are really the meat and potatoes of why this system is pretty flexible but that's not the only thing that's flexible so i mentioned the uh the life cycle stages we can change those as well so if we go into stages you can see we have a number of different stages that are in here these basically line up with you know the states of a task but you can change them and add your own stages without actually affecting the states of the task directly um these just will map uh to and from those different states uh so if we let's just select the job application table for a second you can see those are all the stages that i previously showed in the chevrons at the top of the job application we can change these right we can reorder them if we need to we can add an additional stage so why don't we do that just to show you an order i'm just going to set this real high so it shows up at the end and we'll choose what state this actually maps to so we'll just say this is a closed complete stage we can also set a couple options here right is this the initial stage obviously not in this case or is this the default closed stage so i'll go ahead and submit this you'll notice that we have two stages that are lining up with a closed date right closed and rejected uh closed obviously as our default state so if we just close the thing out it's going to go to a clause complete state so i went ahead and added that and gave it a real high order number let's go back to the job application for just a second and you can see right there at the end that added on that additional stage and obviously it'll show up in our reference field here as well excuse me um so the recruiters can change these however they need right it no developer needed there not to put any of us out of work just makes our job a little bit simpler so prior to uh fast track we actually did have a different application that we built on the platform many many years ago and it was completely based on workflow it worked but it was extremely difficult to actually change right so if the recruiters want any kind of change any new tasks or reorder things or add in a different approval we had to go and modify that workflow and then then they could have their change whereas now they can just do that on the fly all right so let's go ahead and talk about some of the other stuff that we've got in the background uh within tasks we have the ability to create pdfs if we need them primarily we use these things internally for things like the offer letter or confidentiality agreement any type of paperwork that we need to send to the applicant that can be you know something we generate directly in the system as the offer letter is if we scroll down here just a little bit you can see that we're pulling in a lot of information dynamically right we're pulling in the applicant's name we're pulling in their address you know the amount that we're offering them their job title etc this works pretty much identically to how emails are set up and there are pdf scripts which function the same way as email scripts as well so you can pull in information um you know straight from the record as most you know some of these fields are or you can do more complicated scripts if you needed to generate a table or if you had to pull several pieces of information together etc all right so those are mainly our back end tables uh the the pieces that you'd set up you know initially uh contact supports not an actual table that's if this was a you know someone purchased the application they click on that link and they can raise the sport ticket with us so let's go back to the actual uh pieces that are used more often and we'll start with the job descriptions so here you know we can kind of define a high level job description that we're going to use over and over again right we've got an example here is a golf caddy we can put in a description that maybe we show on our website our responsibilities qualifications etc um obviously this is if you wanted to you could customize this as well um these are again just fields that we use but customers can change if if needed we can define a job code if that's something that a company uses if there's an approval group for new requisitions which we'll talk about in a second you can define that here you can define you know if there's a salary range you know just common things that you might find at a high level uh for job description we can we can build there all right um now if we scroll down a little bit we have the ability you notice that box previously when i was on the activities to default on new job descriptions so actually let's go ahead and go back to the activities real quick and we'll choose our demo task here and i'm just going to say i want to default that on your job descriptions and we'll just create a brand new one we'll get real fancy there and we'll go ahead and submit that at the bottom we get all the i all the activities that were marked as default so we got those same sample ones that i showed previously our new one and some other ones that i've previously marked as uh as defaults uh over on the right you know we again we can see the order in which these tasks are gonna fire now i can adjust this per job description so if i wanted this demo task for this particular job description to fire a little later i'll set it to a thousand or better yet we'll set it to 200 and again we can define the phase well actually let me take that back so the the stage is actually kind of predefined for that particular type of task so if you needed to you would actually create a separate copy of it if you needed to fire on a different stage but you can adjust the order you know like any related list in servicenow you can easily edit what's on there so if we just wanted let's just take our offer letter or demo task in that interview we can edit that specifically for this job description so any time that we open a new requisition against this job description these are the tasks that will uh get created so let's see if we've got any questions here i don't see any i do see my son has joined me thank you ari um so let's go ahead and um create a requisition from here so i'm going to go ahead and create a new requisition so a requisition is basically i need a particular you know job right uh i need to hire one of these what would go past two positions um or you know in our case technical architect or caddy or whatever the position actually is right we need to hire a specific one of those we'll go ahead and this description or title rather save it and again just like the job applications at the job requisition level we can define the life cycle of the requisition right again these are just the steps that we use it doesn't necessarily mean that a customer or anybody else would need to use the same steps they can adjust these things again using that stages table the same way i just showed and at the bottom just like on the job description we can customize this again so if we wanted to change the activities specifically for this requisition we could we have a couple other of options on here right we can define what company we're hiring for so internally we have a couple different companies so we specify that we use the hiring manager again you know who's the recruiter assigned to this pretty standard stuff there we can close the requisitions as soon as we hire a job application or an applicant on one of the job applications underneath this requisition and we can also send out a generic uh email to anybody that didn't actually get the job just thanking for their time and letting them know the job's been been filled obviously completely customizable uh if you need to all right let's go ahead and do the last step of this well the main step we'll say so we'll create a new java application right so we'll choose david pumpkin and one of our our extremely talented developers uh i started using this as a demo person and if you don't know it's from a saturday night live skit we'll go ahead and save that yeah it'll take a little bit so i mentioned earlier and i'll show it in a second that behind the scenes everything is happening through uh workflow um excuse me not workflow flow designer well designer uh and that's a little bit slow to first start off but let me make sure i actually have something that's going to fire in the stage and i don't so that would explain why i don't have any tasks so what we'll do is we'll go ahead and move this directly to the interviewing stage and now give it a second and actually it's probably gonna be an interview that pops up first there we go uh we get uh an interview and an interview is basically just a task right it's just a specialized type of task i'll go into that interview most of the time here you can just assume that i'm the recruiter stepping through this process i'll go in here as the recruiter and i wanted to find what this interview looks like right when is it so let's go ahead and schedule it schedule for tomorrow i'll do one o'clock sounds good [Music] and we'll do it for tomorrow at two and then [Music] 221 not close enough go ahead and save it again we can assign it that's not necessarily it's not necessary here but typically again that would be the recruiter what's more important are the interviewers so we can define who those people are we can do this um individually like we're going to do now or we can do this ahead of time i should have shown that but i'll go back we can define you know who exactly is going to be doing the interview right so i'm just going to add myself and we'll add david arbor and we'll save this and i'm going to go ahead and advance this so we've got the time we've got our interviewers let's go ahead and move this to the next stage here's interviewing we'll save it and then what will happen is anybody that's an interviewer will get a survey so if i refresh this i get a survey basically to fill out information about the interview right and the applicant themselves so we just have some you know silly little questions here relatable experience servicenow experience and some general comments but these are just interviews excuse me these are just surveys within the platform so if you're familiar with surveys already these are no different these are just automatically tied to the interview record based on some business rules that are running uh within the interview so you can customize these as needed anytime you add a comments field it's going to move that information back to the interview itself once it's closed out so let me just put in some comments here go ahead and submit it now they can save this and you know work it as a draft if they're not ready to submit yet um until you actually submit it won't send those comments back to the to the interview so if we come back over here you can see that the comments are loaded in and it will do that for any comments fields right there any string fields that are in the survey so you can add as many different ones as you need and it will bring up the heading as well as the comments themselves let's go ahead and see if i can impersonate david i didn't really fully think this through so we'll impersonate david and see if i can fill out the survey that he got no that's my survey that's why he's not seeing that so there's david's survey same one as me but his own copy of it and there's the comments from david now both of the surveys have been complete and so it already goes ahead and marks this interview survey is complete and it closes out the survey excuse me it closes out the interview record itself as well all right so let's go back to our job application excuse me for just a second all right so um now that uh interview is complete and you can see that as soon as that completed it opened up the next task in sequence or demo tasks that we had created again the tasks themselves fairly fairly generic it's just meant to do some kind of activity and we can assign it as as we need internally we use these for things like provisioning equipment once they were onboarding or maybe reaching out for some additional information things like that i'm just going to go ahead and manually close this thing out and you can see it's going ahead and advanced to the next stage although the chevrons don't update you can see the field has so we'll just reload the form and i forget okay so our sample offer letter is in salary negotiation which is our next stage so let's assume that we've gone ahead and decided this is someone we're going to hire we'll go ahead and just put in some offer information we're going to put it in offered states they're gonna be a full-time employee based on salary and we're gonna say they're gonna start on 28th we'll give them a salary and save that and then we're going to go ahead and manually advance this so since there are no no tasks that need to be completed the way it's set up currently is you you would manually advance it to the next stage i'll go ahead and save that and again what should happen here there we go is we get our sample offer letter task go ahead and open that and like i was showing you earlier we get a pdf that's automatically created which should have david's information in it about his offer so some of these things aren't filled in so you can see there's some blanks here but uh obviously it's copying over david's information um and i have some undefined so clearly i have something wrong in the pdf itself but we can dynamically create these as necessary um pretty easily thanks top i appreciate that and aaron for president thank you very much all right um actually i i'm just gonna have to uh you know why not we'll do that there we go um let's see that is really i think kind of kind of yeah let's go back to the job application for just a second make sure there wasn't anything else that i wanted to show you i mean the rest of the steps again um you know we'll when we walk through these as uh as we need to um internally we have a bunch of onboarding tasks you know if we reject somebody it's going to go the rejected state obviously i'd have to manually move it to our demo state but you're going to get the idea right it's again it's meant to be a very flexible uh system without a lot of uh you know work on the development side after the fact there was obviously quite a lot going into it but now that it's built most of it's maintainable by uh recruiters and hr professionals without having to bring in developers i'm just going to quickly show you the flow that's behind the scenes [Music] this is our main flow this job apple cache job application task flow now let's clear uh sorry queer tops comment there and so what this basically is doing is looking at all the records that are in our activities for this specific job application i didn't mention it but you can customize them customize the activities for a specific application if you wanted to that doesn't happen all that frequently but you can customize them at any level of the process um so anyway what this flow mainly does is it loops through all those different activities that are listed on the job application and triggers them using a different custom actions that are part of you know flow designer as well as some subflows here and there uh for instance uh you know one of the custom things that we're doing is checking to see if it meets uh specific conditions actually i didn't talk about that so let's just go back real quick and we'll take a look at the activities again helpful if i could get to the right application so if we open up this um now i'm gonna make an idiot of myself where did i set that up i have a feeling it's not displaying so uh what's supposed to happen is is within the activities there's a conditions builder um if you you know ever built a query in service now before it's the same thing right you can build a specific set of conditions as to when that task is going to fire i'm not quite sure why they're not showing up at the moment but this step right here step 7 in our flow is actually checking to see do we meet the conditions so as an example maybe we have a task that only fires if the salary is greater than a certain amount of money so that task can be normally included in whatever you know position that we're talking about but if we want to get very granular as to when that task does and doesn't fire we can set conditions on there after it meets those conditions again this custom act activity but most of this is pretty standard uh we check to see you know what type of activity we're talking about is it just a regular task is it an interview is an approval or is it a sub flow so in our case i'd mentioned earlier that you know we use this internally and and run the majority of our business on service now uh once the person that goes into the onboarding state we automatically create a user record for them so we have a subflow uh that launches as part of our internal process to actually create that user record but you could do literally anything right you can write your own flow to do virtually whatever you want um then after it you know fires that first task it says okay do i have any other tasks that are in that same order uh number uh you know parallel tasks and it goes ahead and creates uh creates them if it does and if it doesn't it basically just waits for all the tasks in a certain order number to complete and then moves on right it checks for the next highest sequence it doesn't find any that of a particular part of the life cycle applied interviewing the different life cycles that we talked about right here or different stages of the life cycle excuse me um if it uh doesn't locate any of uh any more tasks or interviews or whatever in that particular um stage it goes ahead and just moves the uh the flow to the next stage excuse me that's what it is at a high level obviously there's more to it than that but at a very high level that's that's what this main flow is doing there's a couple other flows that also are firing as part of this and we won't necessarily talk about all of them but for instance when a task closes we are checking to see if there are any other tasks that are still open if there are then we don't do anything if they're not then we're advancing we're basically telling the main flow to continue uh you know you can have approval flows and interview closures right i showed you the uh when those interview surveys closed out that was closing out the interview itself so we have a flow for that etcetera obviously uh flow designer is super easy to use as again especially for for non-technical people but typically um you know we would develop that if uh if a recruiter needed some changes to changes to the flow but that should be relatively rare almost everything that you need to do within fast track you can do without ever touching the flow um and that it really is about it unless there are any any questions that i can answer see if we've got anybody that's i don't recognize all these names but it looks like we have them most folks are from glidefast but i'm happy to answer any questions if folks have them all right well i want to thank you so much for joining us on our very first episode of what would glidefast do like i said earlier the next time that we meet uh we'll we have a guest or two that can talk about applications that they've built on the platform and really give you a sense as to how those work and really looking forward to uh continuing this series uh and uh answering questions and hopefully uh helping some folks out don't forget to like and subscribe but other than that have a great day