Interestingly, fundamental part of Unrabble's philosophy is getting rid of the resume – an integral part of the hiring process for decades – altogether. Let's see, how it all works.
Once we registered to the service, we were asked to fill in some basic information about our company and position we'd like to find a candidate for. From this information Unrabble creates a job posting to be copied and pasted to various pages such as our homepage, LinkedIn, job boards, and other meaningful places. It is neat that we could create a special URL to every place where we posted the job opening and thus the system could track what was working and what was not.
Now, at this time an applicant normally sends a resume, but in the case of Unrabble (s)he is asked to create own profile that examines her or his life in detail.
Candidate's View
There are many services where we can present our professional self to others – biggest one of them all might be LinkedIn. However, vast majority of them builds in one way or another on the logic of resumes, on a structured document that can hardly show a complete picture of its creator (if it is to be of a reasonable length).
Candidate is to fill in all sorts of information in Unrabble's profile such as personal information, career preferences and experience, and information about education or skills. Creating this profile can take around 20 minutes (and can be used repetitively), but it can be shortened by importing the information from LinkedIn or Facebook. During the whole process an applicant is answering a lot of questions that help to make the profile more complete. The point of all this is to get structured data that can be used for fast identification of top prospects. For instance, at one place applicants are asked to identify their skills. These skills have to be ordered by how good at them an applicant is (nobody is good at everything at once, right?). Of course, there are more ways how Unrabble can save a lot of time.
Benefits for a Hiring Manager
First of all, as we understand the approach, it can dramatically reduce the time used for hiring. Also, since candidates have to spend some time working on their profiles, the final number of applications is reduced. This, however, doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing – we assume that applicants that we can acquire with Unrabble are going to be more serious about the job they are applying for. We can effectively filter applicants that are trying to get a job by "brute force" – applying for a great number of positions. In the end, hiring manager can spend less time going through resumes and on interviews.
Second way how to spend less time on hiring is that the system enables us to promptly identify candidates we want to spend our time with. In our test case, we used the functionality to sort applicants by skills they posses to identify limited number of top candidates. Then we went on to their profiles and consulted the timeline (shows past or current jobs, etc.), looked for (un)explained gaps, checked their references (called "brags" here; quite similar to references on LinkedIn, but not public in this case), did a web research, commented on them, and asked colleagues for their opinion.
Unrabble integrates messaging system through which we can ask candidates a question and find out who is on the same page with us and who is not. This system allows hiring managers to communicate privately with job applicants without having to disclose their e-mail address or phone number. In the spirit of the saying that one picture is worth a thousand words, you can check attached screenshots as well. All in all, Unrabble gave us a solid tool to evaluate our applicants.
There's also a job distribution functionality that helps with publishing of newly created jobs to external job boards and social networks. So far, job boards and job search engines like Indeed, SimplyHired.com and StartUpHire are included. Hiring managers can also instantly broadcast jobs to all of the leading social networks. Importnantly, in Unrabble we were able to create branded landing page for candidates and a branded careers page for multiple job openings.
Pricing
Unrabble's pricing page is quite simple. First option is to try the system for free with a 30-day trial version that include only one job opening but apart from that includes all functionality of paid counterparts. First paid option (for $29/month) is called Basic and is most likely intended to be used by a department manager who wants to find a candidate for one job. Therefore, this version can have only one active job opening and collaboration functionality is not included. However, for $49 a month with the Pro version there are up to 10 job openings to be used among 10 colleagues.
Summary
From our experience Unrabble can be a life saving solution for busy managers without dedicated HR backing. Unrabble helps to quickly identify candidates a manager would like to spend time with and reduce costs on the hiring process. We can, however, imagine that Unrabble can find a use in many other places (even hiring/personal agencies). It's innovative, fresh, easy to use, and cleverly designed. At least totally worth giving a try.
What we liked:
- Innovative approach that can make hiring process faster, easier, and cheaper especially for companies and managers without HR department.
- Structured data in candidate's profile make the process of focusing on great candidates easy and thus reducing the time wasted on unpromising ones.
- Unrabble effectively decreases the number of applicants, so hiring manager can focus only on these that are really worth the time.
What we didn't like:
- At the time being there's no mass import or similar functionality that would ease transition for organizations that already have a database of candidates and would like to use it with Unrabble.