If you’re an in-demand professional these days, chances are you receive a lot of job offers. Some may pique your interest and some may not be super relevant. But they almost always require your time and add to your list of things to do to (e.g. research the company). Fielding job proposals over email (or LinkedIn) may be tenable for you if you have a good system for managing your inbox.

However, if you’re like me, the process of managing job proposals over email is less than ideal. For one, job proposals get drowned out amongst the many other emails you receive. Often times if I’m busy I’ll forget about a job proposal until I’ve received a follow up, and the process starts over. There’s no great way to view a list of all the companies I’ve received a job proposal for over the past few years. It’s all unorganized free form text sitting in my inbox. Despite the candidate experience being more important than ever, this is how outbound recruiting is done in 2019 and from the candidate’s perspective it still feels pretty…antiquated.

On the flip side, outbound recruiting tools are actually quite complex. Recruiting software takes information about the job/candidate, and plugs it into a template to form a “personalized” message. Drip campaigns automatically follow up with a candidate if they have not yet responded. It’s impressive complexity for a process that feels fairly antiquated on the receiving end. How can we close this gap between the recruiter and candidate experience?

At the end of the day, job proposals are not all that different from one another. They have the same sort of information — a company, position, location, description of the team, etc. We should be able to organize and present this information to candidates better. Free form messages are not the best way to field job proposals — the lede is buried by taking the structured pieces of data about a job and dispersing it in free text. In the process it loses information, makes it more difficult to compare or track status, and results in a poor candidate experience.

100 years from now it would be unfortunate if outbound recruiting was still done by mass-messaging job proposals to candidates over messaging platforms. So I built CandidateOne to explore a solution to make this better.

CandidateOne is recruiting software, built not just for recruiters but also for candidates. The basic idea is that CandidateOne is the canonical platform for recruiters to submit job proposals to candidates.

This gives candidates a proper tool to manage their job proposals by making it easy to compare or categorize jobs and know which recruiters they need to follow up with. Recruiters send the job proposal once and then the candidate has an easy way to come back to it whenever they’re ready. The data is normalized so that the candidate receives the same type of information for all job proposals. With CandidateOne, you no longer have to think to yourself if you’ve followed up with a recruiter, or wonder if a company you’re hearing about has reached out to you before, because you have a dedicated platform managing this all for you. Instead of relying on email, CandidateOne is your dedicated inbox for the job proposals you receive.

By building a platform that puts the candidate experience first, we can reverse the spammy nature of modern outbound recruiting and improve the ecosystem for recruiters and candidates alike. If you’d like to see a better outbound recruiting experience and help regain control of your inbox, I encourage you to check out CandidateOne here.

Originally published on medium: