What can Google Hire do for you?

Using the demo of the product and all information available on this support site, we will give you the complete view of all key features of the product, and would also focus on some unique and interesting features. 

Google Hire's USP

Google Hire is part of the GSuite app environment and hence its key USP is its seamless integration with other popular GSuite apps like Gmail and Calendar. This integration is clearly a winner if you already use these apps for enterprise purpose, now you don’t have to leave the highly intuitive Google interface. You don’t have to leave your Gmail window to complete some basic tasks like adding a new candidate profile or checking comments of others about profiles under discussion in Hire. Comments you add with @Name will be visible to people in their Gmail as well as Hire. Integration with calendar gives you ease of scheduling as you see hiring manager/s calendars right inside Hire. The ease of use & interoperability is clearly the key USP for the application.  

Integration with your website & its career page is another feature with a easy, do it yourself approach Hire simplifies publishing and removing jobs on your website. If you are looking to integrate multiple job boards you can currently do that with Google Search, Glassdoor and Indeed while for all others you can use a traceable link, thus giving you visibility which source is working for what type of job roles. 

Create hiring processes that suit your need

Unlike most other ATS, Google Hire helps you create multiple hiring processes that suit your needs. So theoretically you can have different hiring process based on the job role and yet assign a default process to every hiring process. This is great configuration flexibility and this is clearly at the heart of this application. Being able to configure my workflow into an application easily has been a big driver for many software applications and this is clearly a sign of times to come, where we increasingly move away from customization to configuration. 

If it’s Google, we expect the search to work like a charm and it does in Hire too. One of the simplest and coolest features is where all you type is a search string like “software developer javascript bay area”, the application automatically understands that software developer is a job title, javascript is a keyword and bay area is a location.  The results it will hence show will match not only these parameters but will also highlight the keyword in the search results. It will also automatically understand other relevant keywords commonly associated with javascript to make the search result closer to what you are looking for. Here Google Hire definitely is putting their search muscle in the application. 

You also have an option where you can configure to search commonly used social sites like LinkedIn, Behance and Github and add links to these public profiles under candidate background in Hire.

Other aspects that one can search & save about the candidate include patents and conferences. This allows the hiring manager/s to have a comprehensive view of the candidate. 

The feedback section is highly configurable and you can define a rating scale on which each hiring manager rates the candidate under consideration. Once all hiring managers have put their ratings, the application gives you an overview of what everyone is saying thus facilitating quick decision making. The feature where one hiring manager can view feedback of others only when he/she has given their feedback is a smart lock to avoid confirmation bias between hiring managers. 

Throughout the hiring process design, Google Hire is focused on keeping the process simple and intuitive to use.  The process also gives options to the recruiter to define multiple templates of messages that they can use to let the candidate know about the process. However, this particular aspect looks underdeveloped. While Google talked about solving the recruitment problem even from the candidate experience point of view currently they seem to be more focused on the enterprise side of the problem. I guess over time they can add some simple features and locks that ensure some minimum level of candidate experience for everyone who uses Google Hire. 

When one compares the current form of Google Hire with existing ATS players like Lever and iCIMS it appears that Google Hire has a long way to go.

Hire is clearly operating within a specific niche of GSuite clients for now and looking to extend its share of wallet from existing customers by building a simple workflow solution to their recruitment challenges.

Certain other aspects, like integration with collaboration tools like Slack, Integration with any assessment product, comparing of candidates for the same role on various parameters and improving employee referrals are just some aspects that more matured enterprise customers would demand from any recruitment solution.  So it will be interesting to see how Google unfolds this application over next 3-5 years and would they really target customers outside the GSuite realm. 

The future of HR tech

The battle for HR tech seems to be taking two paths currently – one is of building enterprise solutions like GSuite and then addressing specific and simple HR needs within the overall application suite while the other is to build highly specialized tools for a specific point application. Products like the stand-alone HRMS which aim to handle multiple HR processes will find their turf attacked by these players and they would have to anchor themselves on some axis of leverage within the market. 

For Indian SMB’s this is good news as more & more companies will look to address their business challenges and offer them either point solutions or an integrated suite. The war for a share of SMB’s IT spends has just intensified and it’s only going to get exciting from here.