FogBugz can be used for just about any process oriented
activity.  Lots of our customers use it
not just to track bugs, but also to do all of their customer support as
well.  Problems or questions come in to
your Inbox, and your sales or technical support team take care of them.  In conjunction with areas and due dates you
get a really effective system with minimal setup effort.  That's one of the many ways we use FogBugz here
at Fog Creek.

FogBugz is also used here to handle all of our job applications.  We get hundreds of them, especially during our
recruiting for summer interns.  I can't
even imagine trying to keep track of all of this in Outlook or something–it
just sounds like a total nightmare.

What we do is simple, and it works extremely well.  Applications go to jobs@fogcreek.com, which feeds into the Inbox in a FogBugz install devoted specifically to recruiting.  If you already use FogBugz for project
management or customer service, you could just make another mailbox for job
applications. 

Our hiring process has been written about before and consists of the following steps: A resume review, a phone interview, a screen sharing interview, and several in-person interviews.  We use these steps to narrow the pool down to the best candidates, hopefully resulting in an offer from us to some scary good programmers.

Every application that comes into the jobs@fogcreek.com email gets an auto-reply, which is at least a little funny, and assures them that a real person will look at the email, asks them to make sure they have provided us with some important information, and also asks them to keep replying using this same email thread.  The last request is because the subject line number tells FogBugz to append any new emails to the existing case, and all of the relevant information is kept in one place.  This works without a hitch.

We take each phase of the interview outlined above and make a fixfor that maps onto it.  We've made, for example, Needs First Review, Needs Phone Interview, Needs Copilot Interview, Needs In Person Interview, and so on.

The case comes into jobs@ and we clean up the title so the case is easy to read (usually, position: person's name, in the case title), and then we move it through the process. The case is then passed off to developers to review.  Candidates who get high ratings are assigned to the Needs Phone Interview fixfor and we arrange a time to talk on the phone.

We even use the free-text fields in FogBugz to keep track of the resume ranking that we give, and we use the remaining field to keep track of the questions that developers have asked the candidates; this keeps us from asking a candidate the same questions in different interviews.

This describes the process for developer and intern candidates, but we hire other kinds of people here too, believe it or not. To keep all of these positions separate we've created Areas like QA, developer, intern (by year), sys admin, and so on.

Using the list view allows us to easily sort by area, or due date, or fixfor so it's easy to see if something is overdue, or if we got a new email from a candidate already in the system, or whether a developer is slacking on resume reviews because they've been too busy eating Fun Dip

Once we decide to bring someone in for a visit to our New York offices we assign the case over to our people who handle the travel arrangements and they pick up the thread.  We follow this all the way through to making offers, and helping with travel and moving arrangements.

We could collect resumes with a web form, but we like the low-barrier nature of just emailing to our jobs address.  Everyone has a resume, and they usually take the time to write a cover letter, so why make them paste all of that stuff into whatever form we'd come up with, which is different from whatever form everyone else comes up with?  It's just more overhead.

That's it.  Collect the resumes, and shepherd them through the process.  A case for each candidate, all the information you'll need right there in the case, and easy to sort and organize.  If you're using some other system for collecting and responding to resumes, give FogBugz a try for this purpose.  I predict you won't go back.

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