Paris-based leading developer of cloud-based talent-management software Talentsoft has released the new interface of their free Hello Talent product, which aims to make talent sourcing easy and more collaborative. Last week Hello Talent already presented the new interface to a French audience at a pre-launch event in Paris. In a previous blog post I wrote about the main features of the product, that currently has over 3,000 users.
User feedback
Over the passed months a number of Hello Talent’s power users have had the opportunity to already work with the new interface, as a new skin over the existing data, to provide feedback on the new design. Since their start in 2014, Hello Talent has repeatedly demonstrated to be extremely receptive to the feedback given by the global recruiting and sourcing community, and for the new release the team again has invested a significant amount of their time connecting with their core user groups. Being present at (un)conferences such as the Sourcing Summit Europe, TRU conferences, GlobalHRU and HR Tech events has definitely contributed to making Hello Talent a better product.
It has been a pretty good half year for the Hello Talent team, with the big news at HR Tech World in Paris of Talentsoft closing a 25 million Euro investment round led by Goldman Sachs and winning the 2015 iTalent Competition at HRO Today Forum in Amsterdam. By the end of 2015 the company announced the Hello Talent business unit, allowing a dedicated budget for further developing the product.
Back to the drawing board
Based on the feedback received, the team has taken Hello Talent back to the drawing board. The good news is that most of the functionality has remained, helping recruiters and talent sourcers to do their jobs more efficiently. In the new version the interface has been simplified and it has become much more clean and intuitive to use. The profile timeline has become more visible, making it a lot easier to track the comments and activity for a single profile, and statuses have moved right next to the profile name. Adding files now includes a more easy drag and drop function, with documents opening up in a full page viewer, allowing the clipper to immediately add parts of the document as a tag or email in the profile details.
New features and premium version
The redesign is only the start of what will become an even more powerful product. According to Jim Klug, Product Manager at Talensoft and responsible for defining the Hello Talent product strategy and road map, many new features such as advanced search, applicant management and other tooling will be added in the coming months. The finding similar profiles feature will be further enhanced to remain one of the core elements of the product.
The new design also serves as a foundation for a premium and enterprise license, to be introduced at a later stage, with additional features not being available in the free version. It seems very likely, for example, to see integration with email clients or messaging being added in the premium version, allowing customers to send messages from Hello Talent and to keep track of communication with candidates within the product, very much like a CRM for recruiting.
Data privacy
Apart from keeping Hello Talent accessible and easy to use, whilst making it technically advanced, making Hello Talent a bigger product automatically means the team also faces the legal challenges of becoming a bigger product. This requires obtaining accreditation from the data privacy authorities and security certifications to store private data. Data protection and privacy regulations in Europe – although in a transition to become more unified – are still being dealt with differently in European countries. This is not taken lightly by Hello Talent and it will obviously impact how the product will be further developed in the next months, in order to keep it a safe and secure product to use from a data privacy perspective globally.
Anything left for improvement in the new design? Well, with the activity timeline – originally designed to support collaboration and see comments of community members – now becoming a more prominent element in the profile pages, this section can be interpreted differently by different users. Some may put address details in there, whilst others will find it perfect to store interview notes. To avoid this section to be misused and becoming messy, it would make sense to have a dedicated place in Hello Talent for details other than just comments. Furthermore, I personally would have preferred a mobile friendly or responsive website design, or an alternative to use Hello Talent on a mobile device, to be able to add or browse contacts on the go. This would specifically be very useful for events.
Other than that, I love the new look and feel and I can’t wait for new features to be added. The new Hello Talent interface is available here. Please leave any feedback on the reloaded version in the comments below. Happy to hear your thoughts!
Oscar
This post was originally published on the Recruiting Essentials website.