It’s going to happen faster than you think. In fact, it’s already happening.

Most of the innovative HR and recruiting tech companies have Slack apps. If they don’t, they’re most likely designing and building them right now. Including my team at Drafted.

But most of these Slack apps are being designed as a small “value add” to the existing service these tech companies provide. Here’s a thought experiment of how you could actually use Slack to completely change the way recruiting and process happens at your company.

How Slack can evolve as an Applicant Tracking System

If you’re a small company that doesn’t pay for tools, you might already be doing some of these things.

1. Use Slack Notes to keep notes on different candidates for your position
2. Make a Slack channel per job opening to discuss and organize the notes for all the candidates for that job. Link to a Slack note for the Job description in the channel title so that it’s always easy to access.
3. Have a Slack hook that simply sucks in new resumes from your site and posts them into your recruiting channel.
4. Use reactions in a recruiting channel to have your entire team give their opinion about a new resume that comes in.

You can imagine that a slick app that combined a lot of these things would be pretty easy to build. Slack itself might give you tools to help with these workflows instead of relying on outside apps.

How Slack can evolve as an Employer Branding Tool

This one is easy.

1. Start a new Slack group for your company’s community.
2. Invite all your Social media followers and mailing lists to join.
3. Make sub-discussion channels for customers to talk about your product, for prospective applicants to ask questions about what it’s like to work for your company, etc.
4. Make channels for discussing new technologies with the engineering team, design trends with the design team, growth hacks with the marketing team, and sales outreach tools with the sales team, that are open for anyone in the community to join.
5. Announce new job openings at your company in a dedicated channel with an informal note directly from the hiring manager about what that team is up to.
6. Invite your most active channel members to company outings and host weekly or monthly giveaways to keep your community engaged.

How Slack can evolve into a Referral Tool

In your ATS hack ^^ up there, simply allow people to post resumes of referred candidates in your dedicated job channel, and use reactions to quickly make decisions and communicate about them.

No bullet points required.

How Slack can replace Headhunting Agencies

Sooner or later, someone will start a slack community to manage their headhunters over Slack instead of email.

Maybe some headhunters will make a Slack for all their clients, but restrict access to individual channels for individual companies, so that they can manage the entire relationship through Slack, and easily send the same resume to multiple clients.

This would also allow groups of freelance headhunters anywhere to come together to collaborate on clients and large projects. E.g Acme is opening a new office in Dublin and needs 5 sourcers working across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Executive Recruitment, but there’s no single agency that specializes in all 5 in Dublin.

In yesterday’s world, Acme would settle for the generic “we do everything” large staffing agency.

But with Slack, the best-in-class 5 freelancers can create a “spot-team” kind of like the movie-industry, to serve Acme really well. This could evolve into the asymptotic fragmentation of the agency industry, because freelance headhunting is always more profitable than serving through an agency if you’re the best in your industry.

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How else do you think Slack is changing recruiting? Post it in the comments!

About the author — Vinayak Ranade is the CEO at Drafted. Drafted makes referral based hiring fast, easy, and fun for everyone.