Release notes: 2017-06-21

Introducing tasks

See everything you need to do all in one place.

When it comes to planning your work day, week, or month, we know it can sometimes be overwhelming to sort through and prioritize everything on your agenda. We wanted to make it easier for users like you to see your tasks, and organize them according to your preferences. That’s why we’re excited to announce a new My Tasks page with the CompetencyCore 7.3 launch! Now you’ll be able to access your tasks from the header menu, and you have the option to turn tasks on or off in Application Settings. With this feature we’re also updating three modules: Assessments, Surveys, and Plans.

How do the tasks work?

Under the My Tasks page you can filter your tasks by status, i.e. open or incomplete, or by module.  You can order tasks by title, due date, or by completed date. To view each task in more detail, click on each task title to open the task. Due date fonts are also colour coded – red for past due and yellow if the task is due in three days or less.

What’s new with the modules?

The survey module is now its own module instead of being within jobs. This means that you don’t have to be able to view jobs in order to manage or create surveys. The name of the survey is also now automatically included in the subject line of email notifications.

The assessments module has been improved to include due date, meaning participants now have time-bound goals to complete their assessments. We’ve also made several name changes; the term “subordinate” is now “report”, and “reports” are now “data exports”.

Stay tuned for more product update posts about several other exciting features! These changes are being introduced in the CompetencyCore 7.3 update being released this month. Please reach out to our team if you have any questions about these updates or would like to sign up for our product release webinar on May 23rd!

We’re spring cleaning CompetencyCore!

Say goodbye to ‘Security Groups’, and ‘Accounts’! Don’t worry, these features aren’t going anywhere, but evolving into something better.

Why the change?

We’ve added a lot of new features and functionality to CompetencyCore, and we constantly need to upgrade our software to meet the needs of our expanding client base. Our goal is to make sure CompetencyCore continues to be an intuitive and innovative product for all who use it, and to ensure organizations are leveraging competencies to their best potential. The following are just some of the features designed to improve the functionality of CompetencyCore:

The new organization section

The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s a new menu option called Organization, which is where you can manage Users, Positions, Departments, Teams, and Security Profiles. We’ve moved Positions from their former spot in the Jobs module to make it easier to link them with Users. This will also allow us to focus our Jobs module purely on job content. The new Organization page supports bulk actions, meaning you can delete groups of users, positions, departments, teams, and security profiles at once. You can even change the parent position of multiple positions at once, cutting down on time consuming tasks.

Say hello to departments and teams

We’ve removed Contact and Account Groups and replaced them with Departments and Teams. These are improved containers for Positions and Users, respectively. Now, instead of looking through one long list of positions you can filter by department when searching for a specific position. It will also be easier to set security permissions, as you can assign a department to a security profile. The same benefits apply to Teams; during assessment dispatches you can filter by teams and departments when searching for specific users, as well as assign a team to a security profile.

Redesigned users and positions

You will notice that Accounts are now called Users. It’s now much easier to manage positions and assign users to them. It is also easier to set up your organization’s reporting hierarchy by assigning parent positions and reports (formerly called subordinates). We have also added the option to search by employee ID field under the User tab. We’ve replaced the Send notifications checkbox with a button so you can control what changes a user is notified about. This will ensure that our new live save feature isn’t sending continuous emails every time a change is made (unless this is what you want!). This is replacing the old send notifications checkbox and will let you control what changes each user is notified about.

Expanded security profiles

We made the switch from Security Groups to Security Profiles. All the security groups you had prior to the 7.3 release will be listed under security profiles with the same permission settings. Security profiles are much easier to use; you can assign positions, departments, and teams to security profiles rather than only to users. This means that a user who is a member of a team, associated to a position, or attached to a position that’s in a department will inherit the corresponding security permissions.

The new Organization section is one of the biggest changes coming to CompetencyCore, but that’s not all we’re doing to improve our software. Stay tuned for an introduction to Tasks, Report Templates, and more! These changes are being introduced in the CompetencyCore 7.3 update being released this month! Please reach out to our team if you have any questions about these updates.

We’re rolling out a new type of job board

Experience a new way to job search with our enterprise job boards, a service that any Canadian organization can leverage to create custom job boards. We’ve made posting internal jobs possible and managing jobs easier so you can save time and effort.

How does it work?

Create your own custom job board where you can manage all your job posts in one spot. You can decide what jobs appear, who can view them, and who can post. This gives you the ability to restrict jobs to an internal audience before posting publicly. Employees will now have a designated location to search for other job opportunities within their current organization, reducing turnover and encouraging career development.

If you do want to make an internal job posting public, it’s easy to make the switch. By using Enterprise Job Board all it takes is one click to send the posting to the external CareerAim job site, no reposting necessary! This will reduce time spent advertising vacant positions, and allow you to engage employees by leveraging a job board that connects them to Canadian employers.  Finally, you can even customize your job board to match the look and feel of your association’s brand.

Looking ahead

In the future our goal is to allow you to build job descriptions with competency profiles within CompetencyCore and post directly to the job board. We would also like to build in a functionality that scrapes resume applications and matches them to these job description competency profiles.

We can’t wait to release this product, along with several other updates, as part of our CompetencyCore 7.3 launch! For more information about what else you can expect from 7.3, take a look at our other product blog posts. If you have any questions or want to know more, please reach out to our team. For an in-depth sneak peak, sign up for our product release webinar!

More ways to report, more ways to succeed

Every job is different, so why should organizations be expected to create cookie cutter reports? With CompetencyCore 7.3 we’re providing the infrastructure for your CompetencyCore site to have multiple report templates.  This means we’ll be able to work with you to provide reports that are supported for both the Interview and Assessment modules; this includes grouped/ungrouped assessments, whole competency assessments, interview guides, and candidate guides. Our goal is to have at least two report templates available for each module.

What functionality will be available with the release?

For now our clients will have to work with us to build custom templates. The current templates still exist, but now there's more to choose from, and the assessment report templates have been restyled. They're organized by service in separate tables, and for each service, you can specify the default template. You can also click the magnifying glass icon to download a PDF preview of a template.

We've also added the ability to import your own template. You can upload an XSL or XML file, and the meta-data in the template automatically assigns it to the correct service.

How are we going to develop this product?

We want to turn this power over to you, the client, and give you a mechanism for building your own custom templates. Our goal is to give you the ability to upload your own custom templates to the store and sell them to other clients. Stay tuned for future CompetencyCore updates!

We can’t wait to release this product, along with several other updates, as part of our CompetencyCore 7.3 launch! For more information about what else you can expect from 7.3, take a look at our other product blog posts. If you have any questions or want to know more, please reach out to our team. For an in-depth sneak peak, sign up for our product release webinar!