Changelog

New in-tool color scheme

‍PontaHR got a fresh coat of paint! As a part of our recent rebranding, we’ve updated the platform itself to fit our new vibe. This includes updated colors, icons, labels, and even a brand new sign-up and sign-in experience. Why not go for a stroll around the platform and check it our yourself? 👀

Sign Up for Yourself

Additionally, we’ve launched self-signup, a way for anyone to create an account on PontaHR and try out the tool for themselves. 

To help our users get the full experience, we’re implementing a free tier as well. In our new freemium model, new users can try out the platform have one active listing, utilize the candidate database, customize their hiring process, add up to three users, and create a branded careers page.

Setting email visibility

A few months back, we launched our own emailing system inside of PontaHR that is in perfect sync with your own Gmail inbox. Now we're back with some improvements to the way permissions and email visibility work.

Starting from today, members with the permission to send emails to candidates will also be able to specify who exactly can see that specific email thread. There are two options.

• HR Team – This email and the corresponding thread will be visible only to the HR team and administators.
• Everyone – This email thread will be visible to everyone who is assigned to this listing. So technical recruiters, hiring managers, the HR team and all administrators.

Now you can discuss sensitive topics without worrying who will have access to that information.

More candidate database filters

We're constantly adding improvements to our candidate database. With this release, you can now filter your candidates by:

• Rejection Reasons – Easily resurface candidates that might have been dismissed as overqualified a few years back.
• Date Applied – "Give me just the people that applied more than 3 years back" works great!

We'll be adding more filters over the summer!

Improvements and Fixes

• 🐞 Previously, you could assign or mention members that were no longer inactive. We fixed this and will no longer constantly remind you about people that no longer work at your company. Sorry about that!
• 🐞 Fixed an issue where viewing the application page as a non-HR person could sometimes break the page if an interview kit was assigned to that application.
• 🐞 Our file previewer would sometimes break when trying to load certain types of PDFs. This is now fixed!
• 🐞 You were able to create a listing with no name. That's bad because how would people know what position they are applying for?!
• 🐞 If you left a reaction to a comment, it would glow a very bright white in dark mode. We no longer punish you for reacting to a comment by burning your retinas.

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Database of all candidates

Today, we're rolling out a way for you to see anyone and everyone that applied to work at your company. With the new "All Candidates" page, you get a clear view of all your applicants, including their labels, status, rejection reasons, and scorecards.

You can also easily filter the list and add candidates to one of your active listings. We'll be rolling out more ways for you to filter candidates over the coming weeks.

Sent offers in the pipeline

Introducing a dedicated “Offer Sent” stage in your hiring pipeline. Previously, you could track offers as part of the “In Progress” category. This new stage distinctly separates candidates who have received offers, providing clear visual tracking and management of the offer process. It ensures better organization and follow-up for candidates at this crucial stage.

Track candidate sources

Starting from now, we are tracking the origin and source of your candidates. When people apply through your website or the public careers page, their origin will be set to "Applied". When you add them manually, you can set the origin option to "Sourced".

Alongside that, we are tracking the UTM source and referrers so that you can see from which campaign or website a candidate applied from. This feature gives you deeper insights into your recruitment channels and helps optimize your sourcing strategies.

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It's been a productive few months here at the PontaHR offices and today we're launching a couple of pretty big updates. Buckle up, folks! 🥰

Send and receive emails

As of today, you can connect your Google account in PontaHR. Once you do that, you'll be able to send emails to candidates straight from inside of PontaHR. And their replies will live in the same place. Now, all of the communication between you and the candidates will be part of our Timeline view.

We have been working on this for quite some time. As always, we weren't satisfied with a barebones implementation. The emailing system inside of PontaHR is perfectly synced with your own Gmail inbox. It doesn't matter whether you send emails from inside of PontaHR, reply to emails from your Gmail inbox, or any other email client. Communicate with the candidates from wherever, and PontaHR will pick up the conversation.

We know that keeping on top of all these emails can be daunting, which is why we built an Inbox view inside of PontaHR. It's one place to see all of the emails from candidates, reply back to them, archive the conversations, and more. And all of it is immediately synced with your Gmail inbox.

As part of this work, PontaHR went through the full process of CASA certification, so you can be sure that all of your data is processed and stored safely and with the highest security standards.

To summarize, you can now:

• send emails to candidates;
• receive replies from candidates;
• create email templates with variables;
• attach files to emails;
• schedule emails to be sent at a later time;
• bulk email candidates;
• manage your correspondence through a unified Inbox view.

Interview kits

Structured interviews are really important when hiring. That's why we hope our release today will make your life a little bit easier. You can now create structured interview kits and assign them to different stages in the hiring pipeline.

Under your organization settings, you can create interview kit templates. Each template has a name, description, and one or more sections. Each section can have one or more questions and you can mark each question as mandatory.

Once all of your templates are set up, you can update your default hiring workflow and assign the interview kits to a stage in the pipeline. Now, each of your hiring stages can be set up so that the hiring team can:

• leave a simple score and comment;
• fill out a full interview kit;
• skip the score for that stage.

Of course, you can also set up each of your listings with a unique hiring workflow and interview kits.

Better scorecards

As part of the interview kit feature, we've also used this opportunity to spruce up the scorecards you leave for a specific candidate. Now, the scorecards are much more immersive, nicer-looking, and stand out on the candidate Timeline.

You're also able to react and comment on a scorecard from someone.

Improvements and Fixes

• ✨ We've added tooltips to the items in our navigation bar.
• ✨ We pride ourselves on PontaHR being fast. Well, we're making it faster every day. You should see some improvements when navigating around the platform.
• 🐞 Your team administrators were able to see the option to delete the organization, even though they couldn't actually delete it. Now, they can't even see the option (only owners can)!
• 🐞 We fixed some alignment issues in our rich-text formatting toolbar.
• 🐞 Previously, you had to add the network protocol to the links in rich-text fields. Now you can add links as you see fit, and we'll handle the rest.
• 🐞 Our emoji picker was acting a bit off in some cases and we can't have that, emojis are too important to have that kind of issue.

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Edit application form details

With this release, you can now edit any information attached to a candidate's application form. This includes all of the fields submitted by the candidate or even adding your own information during the selection process.

If you edit the email attached to the application, we will automatically detect if there are matching applications and merge them together into one candidate profile.

Reorder listings

You can now reorder listings straight from the Listings page, just tap on the little ↕ Reorder button. This will affect how your listings are ordered on the public page of your organization. Additionally, if you are connecting to PontaHR using our API, it will also affect the order there.

Improvements and Fixes

• ✨ We hope you never get to see them, but our error pages are now nicer. 🫠
• 🐞 There was an edge case with wrong redirection on the single application page. That routing has now been fixed.
• 🐞 We all love emojis, don't we? That's why we fixed a bug where the emoji picker would sit below some other content.
• 🐞 Fixed a few small issues with our rich-text editor.

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Add and Move Candidates Between Listings

We added two key features that will help you manage your candidate database even easier!

You might stumble upon a candidate that you really like while going through some old applications, but perhaps not have added them to your Saved Candidates list. Now, you can easily tap on the ••• dots and add that candidate to any active listing.

On the other hand, a candidate might apply to a job listing, but it seems like they're a better fit for a different position. With this update, you can easily move them over to another active listing. This will copy over all of the existing feedback and comments from your team so you don't lose any valuable information.

Improvements and Fixes

• ✨ When you're writing something and try to navigate away from a modal or page, we'll now warn you that you have unsaved changes. Hopefully, this way you'll never lose important data.
• 🐞 We squashed some bugs around custom fields that have rich text editing.
• 🐞 Some improvements to navigating around the Single Application page with your keyboard.

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Deleting listings and candidates – made better

When deleting a candidate, you now have two options. You can either delete it permanently or move it to a Deleted stage in your hiring cycle. This way, you can delete a candidate from your system fully or keep them for any future reference and reporting.

We've also tidied up the user experience around deleting applications, candidates, and listings.

Improvements and Fixes

• ✨ If someone (or yourself) left a reaction to a comment, we've now made it extremely easy to add more reactions! Just tap the button next to the existing reaction and add a new one.
• ✨ We've made some UX updates to the flow when leaving a scorecard for a candidate.
• 💅 Editing long pieces of content should be easier now that we've made the rich text editing toolbar sticky on your screen.
• 🐞 We use the ••• indicator a lot to let you know that there are more actions you can do in places. Well, that little button was misaligned just a tiny, tiny bit.

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Standalone application form page

After you publish a listing, there's a few ways you can get that listing in front of potential employees. You can use our API, embed the application form, or just link to your public careers page on PontaHR.With this latest update, you can also link to a special link that will show potential employees just your application form. If you want to use this, just append /form to the URL of your job listing.

User experience improvements to scorecards

Leaving scorecards is something you do on a daily basis. Bearing that in mind, we've made some nice updates so that it's much smoother.

• The formatting toolbar actions have been expanded so you can format your text in more ways. Also, that toolbar is now visible by default.
• The height of the scorecard field has been expanded.
• After you leave a scorecard and move a candidate to the next phase, we will no longer auto-collapse the previously opened sections.
• Fixed a bug where leaving a scorecard for the first time would flash and say that you are changing your scorecards.

Improvements and Fixes

• ✨ We improved the colors of comment reactions in dark mode so they're easier to read.
• ✨ The wording on sections in the Timeline that have no content has been updated.
• ✨ Last month, we launched a way for you to chat with us about anything through Intercom and without leaving PontaHR. Now, just type in "help" in Search and we'll prompt you to reach out to us.
• ✨ In order to improve the user experience, all actions on the comments toolbar now have tooltips that clearly indicate their purpose.
• ✨ When typing large amounts of text, the formatting toolbar will stay pinned to the top of the screen when scrolling.
• 🐞 When you're submitting an application, the application form fields are now disabled while submitting.

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We're working hard on bringing you a way to email candidates directly from PontaHR and get their replies also inside of PontaHR! In the meantime, you can now...

Duplicate listings and drafts

You don't always have to start from scratch! With our latest update, you can now duplicate your existing listings or any drafts you have. Just tap on the ••• for a listing or draft and select "Duplicate".

This will pop open the "New Listing" flow with all relevant fields copied and pre-filled from the listing, so you can edit it before publishing.

Hopefully, this will speed up your editing process.

Support inside of PontaHR

We love any piece of feedback you have and it's hugely important to us. Previously, you could email us and we'd get back to you. You can still do that, but now you can also tap the 💬 help button in the main navigation and have a chat with us through Intercom. We'll get back to you as soon as possible!

Improvements & Fixes

• ✨ A bunch of small improvements to our saved candidates feature. We changed the color of the "Saved" indicator, added helpful tooltips to let you know when someone was saved, and made some improvements surrounding the permissions for saving candidates.
• 💅 We've gotten a lot of feedback on the way we sort our scorecards. So we listened. The scores for candidates are now sorted from Strong No to Strong Yes. We've also added a few nice tooltips to improve your experience when scoring.
• 💅 While we were adding Intercom, we also cleaned up the main navigation. Now, pressing your company logo will take you back to the homepage of your organization.
• ✨ You can now open up your public careers page straight from our search popup.
• 🐞 Your public listings content can include links. Now, those links inherit the main color of your organization.
• 🐞 File uploading can now support files larger than 10 MB.

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Saved Candidates

Ever come across a candidate who's a great fit but not for the current position you're looking to fill? Or perhaps you see future potential in that person? Say hello to "Saved Candidates", a feature designed to make talent retention easier for you.

Now, when reviewing applications for any job listing, you can save candidates to a dedicated 'Saved' list. This allows you to easily reference and reach out to them for future opportunities, ensuring you never lose track of standout applicants. Find this new feature under each candidate's profile and start building your talent pool today!

Improvements and Fixes

• ⚡ We reimplemented our menu dropdowns. They look the same, but are more keyboard-friendly and allow us to add multi-level menus.
• 🐞 We fixed a little bug where we wouldn't properly refresh your access token. This just means that you'll be logged out less often now.
• 🐞 If you gave someone permissions to manage the public page of your organization, we wouldn't allow them to change the logo. Which is obviously a bug that has been fixed.

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Before diving head-first into a big new feature (✉️ 📥 📫 👀), we spent a week or so just going through PontaHR and fixing small bugs, tightening a few things here and there, dusting off dropdowns and fields.

Drop them like they’re hot

Comments are the backbone of any discussion inside of PontaHR, so we spent some time polishing and improving your commenting experience, specifically how you attach files. You can now drag-and-drop multiple documents into any comment field inside of PontaHR.

Additionally, we’ve polished up the UI for the commenting experience, added better indicators while you’re dragging files into PontaHR, and fixed some small issues when editing comments.

Improvements and Fixes

• ✨ When creating a listing, we now disable all of the fields while your listing is being saved and published. It’s pretty fast, but we wanted to make sure there are no accidental edits that go through (or don’t) unintended.
• ⚡ Custom fields on listing now have improved visual interactions when hovering or interacting with them. We hope this will improve clarity and usability.
• 🐞 While you’re editing a comment, you can now also edit the attachments associated to that comment. We asked around the shop and we’re not quite sure why that wasn’t the case initially.
• 🐞 Checkboxes on your application forms now respect the brand color for your company. While we love our PontaHR Orange, it might not fit your style!
• 🐞 You can now zoom in and out of PDFs when on mobile phones or tablets.
• 🐞 We improved how we render PDFs inside of PontaHR so now you shouldn’t see any weird flashes of white when zooming in and out of content.
• 🐞 You’ll probably realize that we no longer log you out so easily.
• 🐞 If for some reason the logo of your company is a completely white rectangle, PontaHR would throw an error. We fixed that, but if the logo of your company is a completely white rectangle, you should probably reconsider that!

Improved file viewer

As an applicant tracking system, it's a given you'll spend a lot of your time reviewing CV's, portfolios, cover letters, etc. Those have previously opened in a new tab, but today we're launching an update for a better file viewing experience. View PDFs, spreadsheets, slides, and more!

And this is just the beginning, as we're constantly working on improving and streamlining your workflow inside of PontaHR.

Editing published workflows

At launch, we decided that the user experience we had when editing workflows for published listings was... *meh*. We made a promise to ourselves to fix that as soon as possible. As it turns out, that "as soon as possible" is today. Four months later. 🙈

As of today, you can edit the workflow for a listing even after it has been published.

Improvements & Fixes

• ✨ You can now add applications manually without having any required parameters.
• ✨ Use the left and right arrows on your keyboard to navigate through all the applications in a listing.
• ⚡ When saving a draft, we now keep you on the listing page but let you know your draft has been saved.
• ⚡ You could always select all the applications in a stage by clicking on the name of the stage. We felt that was a bit undiscoverable, so we now show you a checkbox when hovering over the stage name so it's clear you can use it to select all the applications.
• ⚡ Based on some feedback, we've improved how you manage permissions for members. It's now clearer which permissions people have.
• 🐞 When people uploaded transparent avatars, it didn't really look good. 😬 It does now!
• 🐞 If you updated the application form for a listing, and someone was just in the middle of applying, it broke. 😢 That has now been fixed.

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Candidate Labels

We know how important it is to organize and segment your candidates effectively. To help you out, we’re introducing a new feature: labels for candidates. Whether it's by skill, experience, or any other criteria that matter to you, you can now leave customized labels on candidates.

You can manage these labels under Settings → Careers → Labels.

Rejection Reasons for Candidates

It's crucial to remember why a candidate wasn't the right fit for your team. Now, you can record specific reasons when rejecting candidates. It brings clarity between your team members during a selection and helps out when someone applies to a different job listing in the future.

You can manage the rejection reasons for your company under Settings → Careers → Rejection Reasons. In addition, you can choose whether leaving a reason is mandatory when rejecting a candidate.

Tailored Email Notifications

You now have the power to specify which email notifications you want to receive, so you only receive updates that matter to you. Whether it's about new job listings, comments, or daily and weekly summaries, you're in control!

Improvements & Fixes

• ✨ When searching for anything, we’ve made our search more fuzzy, meaning that you don’t have to worry about typos or if you’re unsure on the exact name of that candidate you were looking for!
• ⚡ An improved experience when you hit a page you don’t have access to. We made it clearer so you know when to ask your colleagues for access to something you need.
• ⚡ We’re continually working on improving the OpenGraph images when you share your listings.
• 🐞 Fixed some small layout issues when looking at deleted job applications.
• 🐞 Made some small tweaks and bug fixes to mentioning people in comments.

Better sharing of listings

We’ve previously worked on generating images for your job listings on the public careers page. We have now improved upon that with better layouts and speedier generation of these images.

You don’t need to do anything, just share your job listings around and they’ll be displayed with beautiful cover art reflecting who you’re looking for.

Improvements & fixes

• ✨ Deleted applications are still visible under a collapsed “Deleted” section for that listing.
• ✨ Under “Settings → Members” you can now immediately see who has which permissions instead of having to look through the person’s profile.
• ⚡ Our color palette has been slightly tweaked to provide better contrast!
• 🐞 Sometimes, you would trigger the submission of a form (e.g. save listing) when you were editing a field tied to that listing. That has now been fixed.
• 🐞 We have updated the empty state on the public careers page to make it more obvious that it’s not a loading state!
• 🐞 The company logo on the public careers page would have the cover bleed through the edges of the logo. We have prevented that bleeding.
• 🐞 You couldn’t tap on the little badge in the tabs on the search results page to go that tab, only on the text. There’s obviously no reason for that!

Search for anything and everything

Browse and move through PontaHR easier and faster than ever! Just tap on the "Search for anything..." box in the navigation bar (or press `Ctrl + K` / `⌘ + K` on your keyboard) and type away.

Easily find candidates, listings, and people from your company, and jump straight to that page. Also, navigate to any of the other pages inside of PontaHR or toggle commands, like switching on dark mode instantly.

We'll be expanding the things you can search for and navigate to as we build in more things into PontaHR.

Candidate pages

Every person who applies to one of your job listings now has a dedicated candidate page of their own. On this page, you can see all of their job applications and more details about them.

Additionally, if a person applied one or more times, that is now visible on all of their applications.

We'll be building more functionality on top of the candidate page in the future, so stay tuned! We hope this makes it easier to manage your candidate database.

Improvements & fixes

• ⚡ The comments tab on the listing pages now remembers how you left it. So if you open it up on one listing, it will stay that way until you close it.
• ✨ Wherever you're adding a person, we now show their avatar so you can recognize people at a glance.
• 🐞 We tightened up some layout issues with our menus and dropdowns that caused items without icons to be misaligned with the ones that do have icons.
• 🐞 When linked to a comment, we would scroll you just a bit too much down the page. We now make sure that the comment you're being linked to is shown fully on your screen.

Easier navigation between applications

With this new update, it’s easier to navigate between applications via the persistent floating bar at the bottom of the screen when reviewing candidates. With the floating bar, you can easily see the names of the previous and next candidate, and navigate between them. See whether you left a score, and if you didn’t – you can!

Your organization administrators, and/or the HR department, can see the current stage of that candidate, and can easily move the candidate between stages.

Better social share images

You can now automatically (or even automagically) create beautiful images for your organization and your listings when someone shares them to social networks or to a friend. The images include the name of your organization, the cover photo, your branding colors, and details on the listing.

Improvements & fixes

• ✨ The invite flow was slightly redesigned to make it a more enjoyable experience for people joining organizations for the first time.
• ✨ Email fields can be copied from the public job listing page.
• ⚡️ Navigate more easily between a published job listing and the main careers page of a company.
• 🐞 The workflow bar at the top of each listing is fixed. It would sometimes indicate that there is more content to scroll to when in fact there wasn’t.
• 🐞 When adding an applicant manually to a listing, it would not update the number of applications in the workflow bar.
• 🐞 When leaving a comment, the comment box did not have any interaction states.

Better publishing of listings

We’ve gotten some feedback that the publishing flow for a listing was a tad too complicated. And we felt that! So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a new way to publish listings that we hope is much, much nicer. It’s now extremely clear what each publishing option means and where your listing will end up.

Redesigned drafts page

You can now delete drafts! Alongside that, the drafts page is spruced up a bit and you can now continue more easily where you left off, preview a draft, or delete it if you’re not happy with it.

Improvements & fixes

• ⚡️ Regular members assigned to a listing can now easily see which stage an application is in, even though they can’t move the candidate between stages.
• ⚡️ Previously, when a stage in the workflow bar was tapped on and it didn’t have any applications, it would just... sit there. Now it jiggles to indicate its emptiness.
• ⚡️ When a new field is added to a listing, you’re immediately focused into that field so you can start typing right away.
• 🐞 Fixed a bug when the section in which a comment you were linked to wouldn’t expand. Now we scroll you to that section, open it up if it’s collapsed by default, and highlight the linked comment.
• 🐞 A bunch of small micro-improvements on comment replying.
• 🐞 You can now post comments using Ctrl+Enter or ⌘+Enter.
• 🐞 When leaving a reaction to something, the pop-up with the reactions closed as soon as the mouse was moved outside of it. It now stays fixed in place until you decide which reaction you want to leave (if any).

Privacy policy for candidates

Apart from just linking to a privacy policy on your website, you can now generate a privacy policy using our template. Under “Settings → Careers → Privacy” simply fill out basic legal information about your company and PontaHR will generate a privacy policy that is automatically shared with candidates when they apply to one of your job listings.

Improvements & fixes

• ✨ The scores on candidates are ordered from best to worst.
• ✨ Popover menus are slightly more condensed to make them easier to navigate.
• ⚡ After you apply for a listing, we now make sure to hide all the “Apply Now” buttons.
• 🐞 Your status bar is now color matched on Safari browsers.
• 🐞 Improvements to moving multiple candidates between stages.
• 🐞 We realized that we triggered the tablet layouts a bit too early, so we fixed that and we’ll no longer collapse information on smaller laptops.