New Features Added To Giig Hire Recruitment ATS/CRM in Q1–2025

Feels mental to say we’re already staring at Q1 in the rearview mirror and steaming ahead into Q2 of 2025.

What I find scary is that before we know it, we will be 50% through this year, wondering where the first half of 25 has gone and starting to panic about the end of the summer and the early nights closing in.

Anyway, enough of that, let’s dive into it so that we don’t waste any more time!

As you are probably well aware, we’re in the early stages of building a Free Recruitment ATS/CRM (that comes with paid plans) to support early-stage Recruitment agency Founders.

Here’s the link to our free platform — https://giighire.com/

We want to help you get your business off the ground without having to sign up for recruitment software that’s going to lock you in for 12 months and charge you crazy fees.

As part of this mission, I’m keen to share everything we build and launch with you for 3 main reasons:

1. To bring you along for the ride and show you we’re trying our best to catch up to the other players in the market.
2. So that you’re aware of everything we’ve built, in the hope you might discover some features you’re unaware of.
3. So that you have full transparency on what we are building and where we’re taking the platform.

As you’ve been so kind in supporting us so far, I want to repay the favour by saying, here’s what we’re building for you.

So you know what is going on and can also reach out to us if there are any changes/additions that you want to see implemented in Giig.

For those of you who’d rather watch me talk about the features, I’ve attached the link to the Vlog I made to run alongside this article.

Below, I’ve broken down all of the feature updates that we’ve added to the system over the last 3 months, but for anyone who wants the highlights, the big updates from Q1 were:

1. The ability to set tasks and reminders on your candidates and contacts so you never miss another follow-up.
2. A new workflow that allows you to track short-term Temp candidates as ‘Bookings’.
3. The ability to add a full customisable HTML email signature to match the email signature you use outside of the platform.
4. A new global search that allows you to quickly find candidates, contacts, companies & jobs from any screen that you’re looking at.

For those of you who want the finer details, here’s the full breakdown of everything that was added to Giig Hire in Q1 of 2025:

• Ability to import summaries with candidate records when adding via the CSV importer.
• Ability to import candidate records via a CSV.
• Ability to tag candidates, companies and contacts on mass when importing via the CSV upload.
• Changes to the database tables to improve the speed and usability of the quick search function.
• Ability to add and edit the owner of a candidate, company and contact record.
• Ability to filter data by the user who owns that data.
• Track Temp candidates by adding a ‘Booking’ rather than going through the standard job process.
• New Embed HTML block for the website builder that allows you to embed other platforms like ‘Calendly’ into your website.
• Adding a custom HTML email signature to Giig so your email signature matches the tool you use outside of the platform.
• The ability to edit a candidate’s start dates from the ‘Hired’ table
• Improvements to candidate and contact lists. Allowing you to stop the ‘automatic reload’ and manually create bespoke lists.
• The ability to add and track ‘Call Notes’
• Changed the quick filter to a ‘Global Search’ that allows you to pull up candidate and contact records from anywhere.
• The ability to create tasks and reminders, so that you never miss a follow-up.
• Re-designed the dashboard to remove unused widgets and add in tasks and reminders.
• Added everything above to the mobile version.
• Fixed a shit load of bugs that cropped up along the way.

Now, what I am going to do for the rest of this blog is break down the 4 main new features from Q1:

• Tasks & Reminders
• Booking Workflow
• Email Signature
• Global Search.

Hopefully, you will find this breakdown useful, but if you would like more info on any of the features mentioned in this blog, feel free to drop me a message.

🙂

Tasks & Reminders

As a small business owner, moving as quickly as possible is a high priority. When you’re out there competing against the big boys in the recruitment agency space.

You have to do as much as you can with a fraction of the resources and funding.

One of the downsides to moving quickly is that you can easily forget what you did yesterday.

When you’re running your own business, you need to stay on top of everything, and the new ‘Tasks & Reminders’ feature has been added to the platform to help you achieve just that.

You can now set manual or automatic tasks to ensure you never miss out on another follow-up again.

You can set a task manually in two ways:

1. Head to the ‘Create Button’ at the top of the screen and click Create Task. That will take you to the task creation screen where you can leave a reminder to follow up with a candidate, contact or job.
2. From the actions centre: At the bottom of the screen, you have the ‘Actions Centre’ that allows you to fire off an email or set a task. From here, you can also set a manual task to follow up with a prospect in the future.

As well as setting tasks manually, we have added triggers through the recruitment process for you to click a check box and set follow-up tasks for a later date.

As you send a candidate to your client, book an interview or send out an email, the system will automatically prompt you to ask if you would like to set a follow-up task.

This is a quick function for you to set a reminder to make sure that you don’t miss out on another follow-up again.

The YouTube link is below, so you can see me run through how this feature works in detail.

Bookings Workflow

To be honest with you, the Giig platform is currently better suited to recruiters who work in permanent recruitment rather than contract/temp recruitment.

I think it’s because I was initially a perm recruiter back in my agency days.

As I was a perm recruiter, the platform naturally started in that direction.

As we’re starting to grow, a lot of you are starting to request that we improve our ability to manage temp/contract recruitment.

Our first move into getting this done is by creating a ‘Bookings’ workflow.

Put simply:

Bookings is a way for you to quickly add a candidate to a shift/assignment without the need to add a job and walk them through the interview process.

Adding someone to a booking has fewer steps and is significantly faster than adding someone to a perm role.

When creating this process, we also added a temp/bookings management board where you can see any temp candidates working on a project and get an overview of all the temp candidates placed in the past.

It’s important to mention that this is still a work in progress. Some of our current users have identified areas for improvement that we’re implementing in Q2 of this year.

Again, I have made another YouTube video to showcase the feature.

Global Search

Global search is another feature that we chucked in last quarter to improve the usability of the platform and make it that bit quicker for you to get to your candidate, contact, company and job records.

The mental thing about this feature is that it’s something that you would have expected us to have since the day we launched.

Put simply:

The global search is a quick filter search bar that you will find at the top of the platform. As you start to type out the name of the contact, candidate or job into the search bar, the system will run through your database to locate the correct record for you.

This is something that most CRM systems have, but until recently, it’s something that we’ve been missing!

What I love about this feature is that we have added a selection of ‘Quick Links’ that allow you to quickly trigger a selection of actions, again, so you can quickly move people through the platform.

This is also a super handy feature on the mobile version of Giig. If you’re a recruiter who’s constantly on the move, you might find yourself in a situation where you need to quickly call or fire off an email to a candidate.

The quick search allows you to do exactly that.

Wack open your phone, start searching for the record you need and bang, you can access your data on the move.

Here’s the YouTube video for that one:

Customisable Email Signature

The final big improvement added to the Giig Hire ATS/CRM last quarter was the ability to add a custom email signature to the platform.

Again, it might not sound like a massive improvement, but I think this small change makes a huge difference to your experience of the platform, making sure that your brand is consistent for the clients and candidates that you’re emailing.

Originally, we had the ability for you to add an email signature to Giig, but you had to go with the template that we had generated for you.

There was no custom option.

Very quickly, we realised that a lot of you didn’t like the template that we created and wanted us to match the email signature that you were using via Gmail or Outlook.

So, that’s what we can now do.

You can add an HTML version of your email signature into the system, and that means that any emails sent from Giig will have a matching email signature for the emails that you’re sending from outside of Giig.

The YouTube video that I created for this feature runs you through how you can generate a free email signature using a tool from Hubspot (link below)

Final Thoughts

After taking the time to look at what we have built for you in Q1, I’m pleased with the progress made.

Like with most things, there’s always room for improvement, but I feel like the features we’ve added are all things that improve your experience and what you can do with the system.

I plan to keep posting these updates because it’s also useful for me to look back and review what we’ve done. As a small business owner, it can be so easy to get stuck in the daily grind and forget to take a step back and review what you have achieved and plan for how you can improve moving forward.

Talking about a plan to move forward…

Let’s talk about what’s coming in Q2

As I’m writing this, we are already 1 month into Q2, and our focus so far has been on customisation to the platform.

Things that will be coming in the next couple of weeks are:

• The ability to change, date, time and location settings for the platform.
• Ability to customise your team settings, so that as the recruitment agency owner, you can decide what your team can access and what they are restricted to.
• The ability to customise the interview and business development pipelines

A large number of you have been screaming at us for the ability to customise the platform.

When it comes to customising Giig, there are so many areas we can do this, so we have decided to break it into smaller chunks, initially starting with the ability to customise the pipelines.

Very quickly after, we will give you the ability to customise Industries, the data points you collect on Candidates, Companies, and contact records.

The final thing we will do with customisation this quarter is give you the ability to create custom forms that can be attached to your website for candidate applications.

After we’ve ticked that off, we will then be racing to build:

• A CV formatting tool, so you can instantly format any profiles that you add to the platform.
• Integration capabilities, so you can connect and integrate Giig with some of the other recruitment tools that you use.
• Reporting — So you can track your performance and the performance of the recruitment consultants who work for you.

I know I have dragged these final thoughts on, but one final time, I wanted to say a massive thanks to all of you who have supported us so far. We know that we still have a way to go in terms of improving the product, and we couldn’t do it without the support and patience that you have shown us.

We will keep pushing our hardest to give you the best recruitment ATS/CRM that’s going to help you become a successful recruitment agency owner.