Month: August 2020

Hiring a new employee is a significant investment for a company. The hope is they’ll be with the organization for a long time and continuously deliver great work that positively impacts the business.

Unfortunately, there are times when you hire someone and they turn out not to be a good fit for your organization. In the best-case scenario, you would quickly realize the situation for what it is, let the person go, and they could move on to a role that is better suited for them. In the worst case scenario, they could struggle for a long while to do the job, causing both you and them frustration. This lowers workplace morale and hinders your company’s productivity. In the end, you’re still left having to let a person go and find another candidate for the role.

You can lower the chances of making a bad hire by conducting background checks before you make employment offers to candidates. It will reveal any details the person may have hid or been dishonest about during the interview process.

It’s essential to hire honest people, but why else are pre-employment background checks necessary? Let’s explore the advantages:

• Verify the candidate is qualified – Some people, unfortunately, embellish their work history or education when job searching. You could end up hiring someone unqualified if you fail to check their background.

• Perform a character check – Even if someone only slightly exaggerates their experience, it’s a sign of dishonesty. Ensure your company only hires moral people by verifying an applicant’s resume is 100% accurate.

• Keep your workplace safe – The importance of protecting your employees, customers, and company goes without saying. Background checks save you from hiring dangerous individuals.

• Reduce your company’s liability – Your company can decrease insurance costs and avoid needless lawsuits by only hiring people who clear your pre-employment screenings.

• Avoid bad hires – Hiring the wrong person is costly and frustrating. Making the small effort to conduct a background check before you hire someone could prevent major problems from occurring later.

Work with a background check provider like HireRight.  

Partnering with a background check provider is the key to successfully and efficiently conducting pre-employment screenings. It’s difficult for employers to collect information from all the essential sources, but numerous federal and state laws must be followed. 

HireRight is a background check provider that integrates with Zoho Recruit. They provide more than 100 background screening services across more than 200 countries and territories. Additionally, HireRight offers other advantages, such as:

• • Data with integrity – HireRight’s background screening proficiency and extensive verification processes mean customers can feel comfortable working with accurate, meaningful results.

  • Accuracy – Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies ensure accurate information on candidates. HireRight’s dispute rates are lower than the industry average.

  • Fast turnaround times – To help customers make decisions even faster, HireRight delivers quality-checked, real-time results, accelerates communications between third parties, and leverages mobile-first technology to speed up the time to hire.

“HireRight’s integration with Zoho provides another option for recruiters who are looking for solutions that will help manage the recruiting and hiring process from beginning to end,” said Jim Daxner, Chief Product Officer at HireRight. “We believe both Zoho and HireRight’s customers will truly benefit from this new partnership and look forward to continuing to work together to offer a streamlined and efficient process for finding qualified candidates.”

The Zoho Recruit integration with HireRight allows users to order background screening services from HireRight directly from within their Zoho Recruit account.

As we continue to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, organizations are looking to reopen their workplaces and prepare for returning employees. But with no long-term solution to the coronavirus in sight, businesses across the globe are struggling.

 To get back on track, organizations will be forced to spend a lot of time and effort on ensuring compliance and safety, instead of on their core business strengths. True to our vision at Zoho, we’ve created a comprehensive application to help businesses make this transition. Zoho BackToWork enables organizations to return to the workplace safely and securely.

 What should organizations ensure before getting back to office?

For many organizations, getting back to normal operations means going back to a physical office or site—whether with all employees or a small percentage of their workforce. However, doing this without a system in place to ensure the safety of employees, customers, and other stakeholders can turn into a disaster. There are four important aspects to successfully going back to the office:

• ‌Ensuring employee safety

• Publishing compliance guidelines

• Effectively communicating

• Managing assets and facilities

Major challenges to reopening 

• Employee safety: To ensure regular self assessments, contact tracing, touchless entry, and availability of necessary equipment and safety gear

• Compliance: Adhering to government guidelines and drafting company policies accordingly

• Responsiveness: A detailed plan of action, to respond to new cases if/when they occur—like sanitizing floors and quarantining employees who came in contact with infected individuals

A framework for safe operations

 Digital transformation is needed to ensure safe, sustained business operations. BackToWork comes with six prebuilt modules that cover all aspects of concern an organization will have when returning to the workplace:

BackToWork is a ready-to-use app that focuses on workforce readiness:

• Admin control center module – Welcome your staff back to a safer office space. This dashboard empowers top-level management to assess the preparedness of facilities better, and view individual employee health statuses.

• Wellness module – Provide industry-approved surveys. This dashboard lets you circulate and collect self-assessment and contact-tracing forms, and oversee organization-wide health information.

• Safe entry module – Determine which employees are ready to work from the office. With this module, perform employee self-assessments, segregate high-risk groups, and evaluate entry requests from employees and visitors.

• Employee self-service module – On this dashboard, you can manage asset requests, ranging from office supplies to sanitizer to office space maintenance.

• Communications module – Correspond with staff over the phone and the web, and share guidelines, best practices, frameworks, and announcements in a coordinated manner.

• Volunteer module – Give back to the community. This module allows organizations to recruit employees, and organize and execute volunteer drives.

Ease of use is a core element of BackToWork

Organizations can deploy with a one-step onboarding process after signing up. Post-deployment, the admin can add employees by importing or uploading from an existing employee list, or by pulling data via easy integrations with Zoho People, Active Directory, Zoho Directory, and BambooHR.

After completion, employees can access the application on the web, and from iPhone and Android devices. The application is practical and feature-rich, to tackle the situation at hand. To ensure a seamless transition, BackToWork allows you to:

• Dynamically control the number of employees and visitors that a building can accommodate

• Decide how frequently self-assessment needs to be done, regardless of whether employees are visiting the workplace or not

• Mandate employees to fill in self-assessments every day they visit the office

• Restrict the number of employees who commute to the office via public transportation and/or carpooling, or who have a recent travel history

• Customize the cool-off period for an employee who’s recently recovered from COVID-19

• Control the approval process for asset and maintenance requests

 Overall, there’s little to no learning curve, and we provide detailed step-by-step documentation from both the employer and employee perspective to make adoption seamless.

 Furthermore, Zoho BackToWork is available in multiple languages. The app is scalable and modular, so it can be customized based on business needs, as the underlying low-code platform, Zoho Creator, supports app localization in 62 languages, custom workflows, AI, third-party integrations, portals, and much more.

 Pricing and availability

As part of Zoho’s ongoing effort to support businesses during these uncertain times, BackToWork will be offered free of charge until the end of 2020. After that period, it will cost $2 USD/user/month for all regions.

 The journey so far has been no small feat, and returning to work won’t be, either. It’s time to future-proof your workplace. To learn more, reach out to us at [email protected].

If you’re an admin or even a user, you’ve probably had to perform lookup operations at some point. These might range from DNS lookup operations to simple IP lookups or port checks. Wouldn’t it be nice to find all these options in one place instead of having to switch between multiple services? Good news: we at Zoho Mail built the Toolkit to help you with just that.

Toolkit is a completely free, comprehensive service that can be used to troubleshoot or solve email-related issues, such as retrieving domain information, looking up registry details, performing port and IP checks, and running DNS record checks. Better still, Toolkit can be used by anybody on the internet, not just Zoho account holders.

How can I use Toolkit?

Toolkit has something for everyone! Here’s how you can make the most of it for your organization or even for yourself.

Look up domain details
Toolkit offers several domain-related lookup options. Just by entering the name of any domain, you can view all DNS records associated with it. You can even check whether the basic domain configurations that ensure security and email deliverability—such as MX, SPF, and DKIM—have been done.
You can also view registry details and other information like renewal date using Toolkit.

Analyze message headers
While some email solutions like Zoho Mail provide built-in header analyzers, some do not. But if you get an email that you think is suspicious, don’t worry. Once you provide the header details of an email, Toolkit can give you the exact information you need to verify its authenticity.

Perform IP-based lookups
If you want to find out if there is a domain hosted from a specific IP address, Toolkit’s reverse lookup tool can help. Enter the relevant IP address and Toolkit will find any associated domains.

Check for open ports and encode/decode URLs
Look for any open ports for a specific host using the Port Check option.
You can encode or decode URLs or text to ensure it’s encrypted before sending it out. Pick from the available encode or decode options, and you’re all set to go!

These are just some of the options Toolkit provides to simplify email-related troubleshooting.

While we keep working to enrich Toolkit with more features, start using Toolkit from here and find all the necessary instructions on the Toolkit help page. Do leave your feedback and suggestions as comments below!

Hi everyone,

We’re back with more Notebook updates. From our most requested feature to exciting bug fixes, we’re excited to tell you about what’s been implemented and updated.

Create tables

One of the most requested functionalities for Notebook is the ability to create tables in Text Cards, and we’re happy to say you can now find the option to create a table in the editor toolbar across all platforms. While creating a table in a text card is currently only possible in the Notebook mobile app, you can perform these actions on the desktop and web apps: 

Remove formatting

We don’t always want to import formatting to our Text Cards. Different websites have different styles, so when we copy and paste content into Notebook, we often end up pasting the formatting. You can now remove previous formatting from any copied content before you paste into a Text Card. Your preference will be stored in the app settings and you can change it anytime. You can also entirely remove a Text Card’s formatting to make it plain text.

Merge note cards

Have you ever had related notes spread across multiple note cards? Have you ever pasted the content of a note into another to make it a single note card? Notebook now makes it easier to merge note cards into one. Please note, only similar note cards can be merged at this time. For example, you can only merge a Text Card with other Text Cards.

Export data

Your data is always yours. You can now export your Notebook data at any time and back it up in any place of your choice. Users who use Notebook without a Zoho account can multi-select note cards and notebooks and export all as a ZIP file. Zoho users can request to download the entirety of their Notebook data, either in HTML or ZNote format. You will receive an email with a download link once the export is completed. You can import these files again using the Notebook app.

Reset passcode

Notebook is where many of us write important notes as well, and Notebook allows us to lock certain notes to secure them. Until now, only Zoho account users could reset their passcode if forgotten. Now, users without a Zoho account can also reset their passcode. Going forward, the Notebook app will ask you to set up a few security questions when you first set a passcode. You can answer those questions any time to reset your passcode.

Sort and filter

In addition to setting your preference to sort your note cards and notebooks, you can now set this preference at the individual view level. This means you can now have different sort preferences for your notebooks and note cards. Search and other views will still have your note cards sorted based on your last modification.

You can now apply filters to all note cards and notebooks to find the required note card or notebook easily. You can also apply filters additionally to the search term to narrow down your search results.

Sign in using WeChat

For all users in China, creating an account in Zoho is much easier now. Notebook now supports the option to sign in using WeChat. You can use this option on mobile apps to create a confirmed account with Zoho with a click.

Platform Updates:

Notebook for iOS

For all Apple users, Notebook is now compatible with the new iPad Pro. You can use the trackpad to navigate in the app and use keyboard shortcuts to work on the app. You can refer this help guide to learn more in detail about the trackpad features and keyboard shortcuts.

Apple users can use the “Sign In With Apple” option to create an account and sync notes across devices. You can either choose to share your email or not using this option.

The Undo and Re-do tools are now placed in the Text Card editor toolbar for easy access. You can use these tools with Apple’s accessibility technology, “Shake to Undo.”

Notebook for Android

We’ve added a new shortcut, “Add Note to Notification tray.” You can use this shortcut to pin a note to the notification bar to quickly access it again. We’ve also redesigned the push notification view. Now, you’ll never miss reminders and important announcements from the product.

Notebook for Mac

Notebook for Mac added window support in recent updates. Now, you can open a note card in a separate window and write without distractions.

Share files to Notebook Mac app from anywhere on your Mac. Right-click on the file you would like to share, click ‘Share’ action to see Notebook listed as an option.

Choose from a variety of fonts installed on your device to use it in Notebook. If you’d like to use a font in Notebook, download and install that font on your device and set it as the “Editor Font” in your Notebook preferences.

Bookmark Cards now open inside the app. You can tap the Safari icon any time to open a Bookmark Card in the browser. Copy and pasting a multi-line checklist will create individual items in Notebook for Mac.

We hope you find these features and enhancements in Notebook helpful in increasing your productivity! Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments below or write to us at [email protected].