How a Simple Slackbot Can Help Your Grow Your Employees’ Sense of Career Potential

Here in HR world 2019, we have a buzzword: Internal Mobility. This is a reference to one’s ability to find and rotate to other jobs within the same organization. It’s buzzy because, in theory, this should be one of the easier ways to build love and loyalty at a company. People quit when they feel their growth potential has hit a ceiling, but the opportunity to try new things in the same building (and as my friends at big tech company’s have explained, “without losing your stock options”), is a saving grace.

On the employer side, internal mobility should also be a blessing: jobs filled internally have lower cost-to-hire and, no matter what every recruiter ever who has made fun of my eclectic resume will tell you, “Organizational Misfits” who move in non-linear paths create more opportunities at an organization. The tough part is connecting people to those opportunities. To quote this SHRM article, it’s a matter of building it “into the culture.”

Cool. Splashy intro out of the way, let’s talk about this very practical 10-minute Slackbot we are testing at BuzzFeed that turns Greenhouse recruiting data into a culture of mobility.

STEP 1: Get that Greenhouse Data into Google Sheets

This application could be a great way for one to learn how to use webhooks — which here means a real time trigger from Greenhouse that fires the very second a new job is posted internally.

Good job Greenhouse, this is actually quite user friendly for a noob like me to set up!

Unfortunately, we have a problem here. In practice, recruiters have told me that posting and editing a job takes some iterating, and the webhook is both IMMEDIATE and only available for when you “post” the job. This means the risk of alerting the masses to a mistaken job post is too great.

So alternatively, I’m gonna make life easy for myself and just pull open jobs into Sheets — you can also do this with their report connector. My scripts are something like this (not going to share every bit of code):

function greenhouse() {
  var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
  var sheets = ss.getSheets();
  var sheet = ss.getSheetByName('greenhouse');
  var page = 1;
  var stagesUrl = 'https://harvest.greenhouse.io/v1/jobs?';
  var b64 =…