Advice for a beginner on what Airtable apps to use for a sales/recruitment agency business

[tomas_owens]

Hi there,

Firstly many thanks in advance for taking the time to read my post :slightly_smiling_face:

I run my own (very small) recruitment agency business and I’m looking to find out how to get started on navigating airtable as a solution.

At the moment I am using a number of different applications from disparate sources and it would be fantastic if I could start integrating everything in Airtable instead!

My current “Application Eco-System” looks like this…

• I use Dropbox for storing all of my files in a kind of “data lake” so to speak
• I use Zoho CRM for the sales pipeline and contact management side of my business (the key benefit being I can set reminders for myself to contact people at certain times and it syncs with my outlook email account)
• I use zoho Recruit to manage my cv’s and schedule interviews for candidates (The key benefit this offers me is the ability to boolean search the text within 10-20’000 or so cv’s/resumes to find suitable candidates
• I have a number of VERY basic excel spreadsheets (So no formulas etc.) that I use as manual dashboards to see where I am with everything (e.g. vacancies I am working on, what stage I am at etc.)
• I use Microsoft TODO for my day to day task management
• I use Microsoft Planner for managing change projects
• I use MailChimp for email marketing campaigns

As you can probably tell my data is all over the places, disorganised and I frequently find myself having to manually parse data from one place to the which is taking up time I should be spending on revenue generation.

I can appreciate this is a very broad/expanisve question but could anybody suggest how I could get started on having all my data organsied into airtable in a way that would fit my needs?

Many thanks and warmest regards

Tom

[kuovonne]

Congrats on recognizing that your data could be improved by giving it more structure and consolidating it.

What you do depends highly on how much you want to do yourself versus hiring someone to do it for you. Hiring someone to set things up for you will be a lot faster, but could end up being beyond your budget.

If you want to do it all yourself, I suggest that you take a phased process as you learn how to use Airtable. Start with the simplest system and convert it to Airtable. Work with it for a while until you are comfortable with it. Then find the next simplest part to convert and get it setup. Eventually you will probably want to circle back to earlier setups and tweak them as you learn more about Airtable–that is totally fine and part of the fun.

I suggest that you start with your excel spreadsheets. Then move on to your daily task management. Then your project management and CRM.

You may decide that some of the parts are best left in their current apps. For example, if Zoho Recruit can search text in 20000 attachments, you might want to stay with that. Airtable cannot search inside attachments by itself. You may also want to keep your files in Dropbox and store only the urls in Airtable, especially if your data lake might push the limits of Airtable’s attachment space.

[tomas_owens]

Hi there,

Many thanks for taking the time to reply to my question!

This is all very useful information (especially the URL’s for Dropbox files!)

Thanks again