After our recruitment manager departed on bereavement leave, the task of bringing candidates through the recruiting pipeline fell on the shoulders of the team. One of the developers who has taken up the recruitment mantle came up with the idea of using Jira as a way to track candidates through the interview process, and I have to say that it’s working pretty well.

A candidate’s application is treated as an issue in Jira, and the pipeline is loosely modeled as a workflow. We track phone screens and interview notes as comments against the candidate/issue. The issue can be assigned to whoever is responsible for interviewing or following up with the candidate. We receive emails about the status of the candidate through Jira’s notification scheme. The main debate was whether to treat candidates as “Bugs”, “Tasks”, “Improvements” or “New Features”. We settled on “New Features” :).

Using Jira certainly beats managing this information through Word docs, spreadsheets or closed HR systems. The main weakness is that scheduling is not that well supported – you can kind of give a candidate a due date, but it’s not that natural. But for now, it is just light enough for our needs.