627 min read

Beginner | Flow of the week: Automating Follow-up to Recruiting Calls

By Jonathon Levesque

October 12, 2017

Categories
Walkthroughs

What is up, Flow Fans!?

This week I am pretty excited about the Flow of the Week. I recently had a friend challenge me about Flow! She asked me what kind of value Flow could provide if she didn’t have an O365 or D365 Subscription and didn’t want to pay for Flow or any of its premium services. Luckily for her, you don’t have to pay for Flow, D365, O365 or any other platform to get value out of the service. I told her that i could create a system that would automatically help her with recruiting and retention at work, that i could do it in under 4 hours, and that i could do it for 0 Cost. She bet me dinner that i couldn’t, and suffice it to say… she owes me some food, and I’m not a cheap date!

After proving it to her that this was not only possible, but also easy to accomplish. I decided that this would make an awesome Flow of the Week for those of you who may be wondering.. “What value could i get with Flow Free?”

Well, Lets jump in and see how i made this happen for her.

First, You’re going to need an outlook.com or Gmail account. I’ll assume that you have one of those, or can figure out how to get one.
Next, You will need a free OneDrive account. I am going to assume you have this, or can also get it with the help of a Bing search or two.

Now that you have those accounts set up and ready to go lets make some magic!

Open up your OneDrive and click New+ and choose Excel workbook

Now we need to build out the columns of the data we want to use

And then we need to Format as a table, check the box that your table has headers, and click OK

Ok, our Database is now created.

Head over to https://flow.microsoft.com and register with your Gmail or outlook account. Once that’s done, click My Flows in the navigation menu then click + Create from blank and then Search hundreds of connectors and triggers – from the bottom of the page

Where it says Add a trigger, lets search for Schedule and choose the Recurrence trigger.

We use Recurrence here for two reasons. 1. Because i want this flow to run only twice per day to save your Flow runs. and 2. Because the Excel connector doesn’t actually have native triggers, so this is a way for us to work around that and use Excel on OneDrive as our database effectively still.

Lets now set our Recurrence trigger to an interval of every 12 Hours to take whatever actions we set up next.

Click on +New Step and then Add an action. Search for Excel and choose Get Rows. Next it will ask you to create a new connection to a file storage cloud service. For this demo I am using OneDrive and ill navigate to my RecruitingDatabase.xlsx and then select my table i made a few minutes ago.

Click + New Step and then Add a Condition – for the value of the condition, lets click on Add dynamic content+ then use the column i made called Email Sent – (This is going to drop the condition into an Apply to Each)

I set is equal to for the statement of my condition, and now i will write the word Yes into the right side value of the condition, like below: This ensures that if an email has already been sent to someone, they wont be sent another inadvertently. If you didn’t set up this step, every person on the list would get an email every 12 hours.. Not Awesome!

From here, I am going to now build out my next step in the IF NO column where i will choose …More and Add a Condition

another condition you ask? Indeed! This one will check to see if You, as the recruiter had a phone call with the potential candidate, since the last time the Flow checked for that same thing… Make sense? Hope so.. Moving on..

For the left side value of the condition, i will use the Add dynamic content picker and select the column Contact Made. I will then set the middle of the condition to is equal to and in the right side value i will write the word Yes so it looks like this:

In the IF YES column of the condition click on Add an action and type Compose – In the compose box, we need to write “@utcnow()”

Click Add an action and search for Convert time zone. for the base time, use the dynamic content from the Compose card called output. From here customize the source time zone as (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time and the rest to whatever works for you.

Click Add an action and type Send Email. For the purpose of this demo, and to complete her challenge of no money spent i will select Gmail – Send email and then customize the fields using Dynamic content and some of my own fancy language.

Next, lets build in a step that updates the database with a few things! But first, we need to get a little bit fancy and build an expression that will get us a date 30 days from now, automatically. This way we can use it to build some additional Flow actions to help us follow up on these conversations we are having with candidates.

Let’s click on Add an action and then lets add another Data Operations – Compose. Now lets click open the Add dynamic content selector and click Expression on the top right and scroll down to Date and Time functions. From here click on addDays(timestamp, days, format?) this will add the first piece of the expression which will be addDays()

From here, click back over to dynamic content and click on the output from the first Compose action which will drop that info into your expression. Now click back on Expression and type “,30” after the Compose parenthesis and then click on OK to insert the expression into the compose action

Now lets build the step to update our database for us! Still working under the same IF YES column, click on Add an action – Search for Excel and choose the action Update Row. Point the action to the same database we have been using.

Lets have this step update a couple of things for us. First, since we now sent an email lets change that to say Yes in the database, we do that by simply typing Yes. Lets also update the Email Sent Date column by using the Output of our Compose action. and finally, Lets update the Follow Up Date column with the Converted time output we created by using the addDays expression.

For the final piece of this Flow, lets build a step that takes that Follow Up Date and automatically sends us an email on that day telling us to follow up with this candidate.

Lets Add an action search for Delay Until and then in the Timestamp field, add the Output from Compose 2

And for our last step in this Flow, lets one more time click on Add an action, search for Notification and choose Send me an email notification. I would assume that by this point in the tutorial you understand how to use Dynamic content, and so go ahead and create a custom email to yourself that will be useful and worthwhile, in the moment. So you don’t have to go look up additional details you could have given yourself. Something like this:

From here go to the top of the screen and write a name for your Flow and then click on Create Flow

Voila! In less than 4 hours i came up with a concept and put it all together using Flow. To recap exactly what we accomplished here with this Flow lets break it down in some bullet points!

– We created a database for my friend to store her recruiting leads
- We created a Flow that checks every 12 hours who she has had phone calls with
- When it finds someone she had a phone call with that day, it sends them a follow up email with useful links to documents and information
- It then updates the database with some information, like the fact that it sent an email out, and notes the date that happened.
- After that, it calculates a date 30 days away from when the first follow up email was sent, and it emails my friend, the recruiter a follow up reminder with pertinent details and information about the candidate
- It won ME dinner at a nice steakhouse of my choosing. *Fist pump*

We have gained a huge jump in productivity. We saved time by automating email follow ups, as well as not needing to remind myself of the 30 day mark re-touch.

All of this with ZERO cost in software or services, using only the Flow free plan, as well as free openly available software.

If you enjoyed this post, please let us know in the comments, the community or on Twitter. Same goes for questions!

Until next time!

– Jon