Using 37 Signals' Backpack for Recruiting Project Management

I've always been of the opinion that grabbing numerous small advantages to the recruiting process yields large benefits over time. This is something of a double-edged sword for me, unfortunately, because, as a result, I end up sinking a pretty fair amount of time into checking out the latest new web widgets that haunt the pages of sites like Lifehacker.

But what keeps me returning is when I find gems like one of 37 Signals' premiere web applications, Backpack. In their site's own words, Backpack is an information organizer, a place to collect to-do lists, pictures, files, notes, and links in one place. In short, I have found Backpack to be an excellent and affordable way to organize my job searches. You can get a tour of what the Backpack pages look like here.

When it comes to keeping all information together for a job search, Backpack is the best thing I've found. There are plenty of sites that can fire off Reminders to your e-mail and cellular phone. But Backpack is a tidy place to organize all of it. I generally set up one Backpack page per client I work with and include notes about that client's process, interviewing preferences, and stuff that I need to do next in my own recruiting processes. If my client has provided me with a written description as a Microsoft Word document, I upload it here. If I have pictures of the work site, I upload them. In short, that page becomes a clearing house of information relevant to my search and helps me to be efficient in tracking my communications and efforts.

The site gets really cool when you start looking at some of its additional functionality. For instance, I can e-mail Notes, To Do items, and Files directly to the page. Backpack automatically generates a random e-mail for each new page you create. By sending an e-mail to that address with To Do: or Note: in the subject line, it organizes up the data appropriately. Once it's on the page, you can click and drag that content anywhere on the page.

The solution is particularly elegant for independent recruiters with a limited budget. It becomes a CRM that is more flexible and easier to use (and certainly cheaper) than commercial 3rd party solutions like SalesForce.

Got a partner you'd like to share the information with? Easy, at the bottom of the page, a Share option lets you send invitations via e-mail. New users you send an invitation to will, of course, need to set up their own account ID and password, but that takes about a minute of time and energy to do.

Accounts range from free to $14/month. For a really long time, I used the very respectable basic membership level at $5 per month, giving me 25 Backpack pages and 500 MB of upload storage. Oh yeah, and did I mention Backpack includes (for its paid subscriptions) a very nifty and easy-to-use Web Calendar that exports in iCal format and pings your cell phone with reminders? Also, you get the ability to create an unlimited number of Writeboards, a collaborative space where you can invite multiple people to work on a document that can be exported as an HTML file or a Microsoft Word document? Oh yes, it's a sweet deal.

Backpack uses a very simple formatting scheme that it shares with wikis to let you bold, italicize, bullet, and otherwise format your text that goes on to the pages. It takes about five minutes to get the hang of it. And for you more code-savvy types, the company includes an API so that you can hack the appearance and functionality of the site even further.

As far as security goes, your pages are private so long as you don't check the public sharing boxes on individual pages. For the security conscious, the $9 and above subscription levels get you SSL encryption.

There's lots more that's cool about this 37signals, but I'll leave you to discover it on your own. Build your own small advantages, right?