Firstbird Product News

In our mission to continuously improve our experience for all our users, we are pleased to announce a significant new update to our job pages designed to improve your company’s branding experience for candidates.

This update will allow candidates to see the full impact of your corporate identity when visiting a job page, thanks to a number of new branding capabilities. We have introduced a sticky header to the top of the page, which not only gives your company logo priority placement but can also be colour adjusted. Additionally, you can now nominate a background colour for your job description section, and this can be different from your header background colour.

These newly introduced customization options are available to company administrators in their job branding configuration. Furthermore, there’s also a new cloning functionality that makes it easy to create multiple similar job brandings from an original.

As for Talent Scouts, the main contact person will now be clearly visible under the job details section on the job page. These details will also now include the company name, location, and department to provide a more comprehensive overview for Talent Scouts.

This new feature will be released on April 20th, 2022. For more information on showcasing your brand on our job pages, visit our Help Center.

To further facilitate the unique identification of your employees in Firstbird, we are offering you the option to make the employee ID entry mandatory from 25th January 2022.

If you choose to make the employee ID entry mandatory, new users will then have to add their employee ID during their registration process, while existing users will be prompted to do so the next time they log in. If employees have already added their ID, or if the employee ID is provisioned, these steps will be skipped.

Additionally, the employee ID will now also be displayed next to the names of your employees in user management, on reward cards, on the detail page of referrals, and the user search function will also be extended to include employee IDs as well.

You can find more information on how to make these changes in our Help Center.

As of the 25th January 2022, we will extend the amount of information that can be added by your identity provider when using Single Sign-On (SSO). In addition to the name and email address of a user, the employee ID, user role, location and department will also be able to be synchronized.

Thanks to this extension, company administrators will no longer need to assign roles to users manually after registration. With Just-In-Time (JIT) Provisioning for Single Sign-On the appropriate role can be assigned automatically when a user registers with Firstbird.

Recruiters will also receive all information needed for reward management and can identify Talent Scouts more easily (for example, based on employee-ID).

And now, registration for Talent Scouts will be even easier as they can skip registration steps if the required information was already provisioned by your identity provider.

Additionally, all changes of user data in your system will be automatically adopted and applied to users the next time they log into Firstbird. This assures your user data is always up-to-date.

Here’s an overview of all attributes that can be provisioned with JIT Provisioning for SSO:

• First name
• Last name
• Email address
• Employee ID
• Location
• Department
• User role

Once attributes are provisioned via your identity provider, this information will overwrite the user-added information and no longer will be able to be changed by the user. Any changes will need to be made through your system.

To find out more on how to configure these attributes check out this article in our Help Center.

Some customers with job import integrations have reported that the editor made unwanted changes to their preformatted job descriptions when they were trying to make changes to other parts of the job ad.

Now when you edit a job, you can still change or add details just like before, but editing the job description will require an additional step: specifically enabling the editing mode of the job description section. This will ensure recruiters can easily make smaller changes to other parts of the job ad (such as changing the location or reward) without it affecting the layout of the job description.

To specifically edit the job description, firstly click on the “Edit” button above the job description box. A warning message will then appear, informing you that unwanted changes may occur to the layout during editing. By clicking “Continue Editing” you will be able to resume editing the job description as usual.

Customers who did not experience issues with their job formatting previously should continue to have no issues.

We informed you about changes to our support process in order to provide you with even better and faster technical support in one of our previous newsletters.

As of 1st of March 2022, you will only be able to submit technical problems or questions via our support form. You will find the support form on the front page of our Help Centre.

Feel free to bookmark the direct link to the support form in your browser.

For more information, we explain the most important fields of the support form in this Help Center Article.

You can always check our latest updates on our Product News Page, view the status of our updates at our open community product board or contact your Customer Engagement Manager if you have any further questions about our releases.

Under “My Referrals” in the menu bar, Talent Scouts will soon find the tabs "Hired" and "Closed" will be merged into "Completed".

Additionally, the tab "In Progress" will be split into "Accepted" and "In Progress".

Your employees will be able to find candidates that have accepted the referral but not yet completed their application under the "Accepted" tab. Once the candidate completes their application and it goes through to recruiters, the referral will be moved to the "In Progress" tab.

On mobile, we position referrals that are yet to receive feedback from Talent Scouts above all others. Furthermore, each referral will now receive an indicator that shows the progress of the referral in the recruiting process to make it easier for employees to understand the progress and current status. This indicator is based on Firstbird's own statuses (Pending, Accepted, In Progress, and Completed).

The reason for this change is because Talent Scouts don’t receive points for a referral unless the candidate has completed the application in its entirety. This way Talent Scouts can easily see which referrals they have already received points for, and which they have not.

In order to give both existing as well as new users a better understanding of the steps involved in the referral process, we have created a help page that can be accessed by clicking on the .

This new feature will be released on December 14th.

View the status of our updates at our open community product board or contact your Customer Engagement Manager if you have any further questions about our releases.

This month, we’ve changed the registration process slightly by asking Talent Scouts for their email address and password first when creating an account. Only in the next step users are asked to enter their profile data with first and last name as well as location and department.

This is mainly a maintenance change that will make Firstbird’s registration and authentication process more stable and secure for the future, but it also means things will be easier for those that use the Single Sign-On registration process (meaning there will be no second login needed). It also means things will be easier for those that use the Single Sign-On registration process (meaning there will be no second login needed).
While it might seem that not that much changes for your Talent Scouts, if you have any internal materials that show the registration screens in sequence you might have to update them. You can also check out our videos that we’ve created for your users!

• Registration on PC or Mac in English or German
• Registration with the Firstbird2Go app in English or German

This change will take place in August 2021.

Recruiters now have an additional option called "do not provide reason" when it comes to giving Talent Scouts a reason for closing their referral. This means that the responsible Talent Scout is informed that his recommendation has been closed, but he is not given a reason for this. This means that the responsible Talent Scout is informed that his recommendation has been closed, but he is not given a reason for this.

This change will take place in August 2021. For more information about closing recommendations, see the Help Center.

In order to provide you with even better and faster technical support, we would like to introduce the new support form.

From now on you can submit technical problems or questions directly via our support form. Your request will be automatically converted into a support ticket. This allows us to react even faster with the information you send us via the form, as our support staff already get a better overview by creating the ticket. Your request will be automatically converted into a support ticket.
For more information about closing recommendations, see the Help Center.

Curious yet? In this Help Center article you will find a description of the most important fields of the new support form. Your request will be automatically converted into a support ticket.

Firstbird by default signs all requests sent to your identity provider with our private key. The certificate we provide can be used by your identity provider to validate the requests received for increased security.

If you are using our certificate to validate our requests or to encrypt your responses, you must make sure that the certificate is updated with your identity provider.

The new certificate has already been made available via the metadata url which will allow your IT department to prepare for an automatic rollover.

If your identity provider supports the automatic rollover of certificates, your IT department will be able to maintain the old certificate as well as the new one. Your identity provider will then automatically switch to the new certificate on the expiration date with no service interruptions.

If your identity provider doesn't support an automatic rollover, you will need to change your configuration at the same time as Firstbird starts to sign requests using the new certificate!

This will be on

22.03.2021 8AM CET

If you fail to update the configuration on your end at this time, your users might not be able to login via SSO anymore!

The metadata url can be found under Account Preferences → Authentication → SSO → Single Sign-On → Single Sign-On Configuration. Click on “Expand” to open up the details of the SSO configuration. Here you will find the METADATA URL.

The url contains the current and new certificate. Please copy the URL and forward it to the person or department responsible for managing your identity provider. You can find the instructions also in our Help Center.

For further questions or troubleshooting, you can contact support@firstbird.com.

We are excited to announce starting July 6th 2021, we will add WeChat as an additional social media sharing option for all devices. This update will allow users to share their company’s open jobs easily and seamlessly over WeChat, one of the most popular mobile messaging apps in the world with over 1 billion users. If you would like to allow your Talent Scouts to share jobs via WeChat, simply checkmark the box “WeChat” in the social network sharing options under the Settings menu of your Account Preferences (Account Preferences → Settings).

This feature will be released on July 6th, 2021. More information on how to enable the WeChat sharing option can be found in our Help Center.

As you are aware, Talent Scouts are rewarded points for providing feedback on their accepted referrals. Talent Scouts were previously awarded points immediately following the submission of their feedback even if the application was still in progress. In a small number of cases, this process resulted in Talent Scouts receiving points for applications that were never completed. To prevent this from happening, Talent Scouts will still be awarded points for providing feedback, but they will receive points and Firstbird Coins after the application has been completed.

As announced in May, we will be removing the “follow”-function and menu item for Talent Scouts on July 6th, 2021. That means that Talent Scouts will not be able to follow other Talent Scouts anymore, and will no longer be informed of any of their activities. You can read more about what that means on our Product News page.

Keep an eye out as we will be updating you on our progress via these newsletters. In addition to that, you can always check our latest updates on our Product News Page, view the status of our updates at our open community product board or contact your Customer Engagement Manager if you have any further questions about our releases.