• Name: Chris Murphy
• Location: Austin, Texas
• Profession: Co-Owner/Salon Director
• Company: MFX SalonSpa
• Website: www.maximumfx.com

Bio

Chris Murphy is the co-owner and salon director of MFX SalonSpa in Austin, Texas. Chris works with salon and spa owners throughout the U.S. and relies on Evernote to not only manage his business and various speaking opportunities, but to remember people and improve his company’s recruiting and HR processes.

I use Evernote, Everywhere

• iPad
• iPhone
• Mac

Favorite Evernote Products

• Evernote Hello for capturing potential salon candidates

I use Evernote for…managing my salon business

I had downloaded Evernote a while ago but couldn’t really wrap my head around how I could incorporate it into my business until I had lunch with Real Estate Ambassador Krisstina Wise. Once she filled me in on the ways she was using Evernote for her business, I thought that I should really have another look. And suddenly, all of the different ways I could be using it just hit me. Now, I don’t know how I could live without it.

I own an Aveda Lifestyle Salon and Spa with multiple physical locations, so one of the most important things to me about Evernote is that it syncs and information I capture is available anywhere. The salon industry is a labor intensive industry so there are always lots of schedules to stay on top of, reviews to keep track of, etc. Being able to manage this type of information in Evernote and be able to access it from anywhere is so helpful.

In addition to the day-to-day management of information, one of the key areas of business that Evernote has majorly impacted is our recruiting process.

Evernote and Evernote Hello for recruiting

Aveda has institutes across the U.S. and because we have relationships with many of them, we tend to do on-site recruiting at different locations. We recruit most heavily from institutes in Austin, San Antonio and Houston. During our visits we usually give a presentation, after which we get approached by 50-60 people who want to learn more about our company and submit their resumes. Prior to Evernote, we didn’t have an efficient system for gathering contact information on site and staying connected with potential candidates.

Having recently downloaded Evernote Hello, I realized that we could be using it to take pictures of candidates who stopped by our table and capture all of their information right then and there. Because Evernote Hello syncs with Evernote, we could even pre-select a specific notebook (in our case, ‘Job Fairs’) to send all of these notes to. Now, instead of collecting business cards or writing down information on scraps of paper, we capture everything using Evernote Hello. I love that Evernote Hello also uses my phone’s GPS to capture the location where the note was taken — this makes it easy for me to connect certain faces with specific institute visits.

Our company has a 6 step recruiting process, and when you have a large volume of applicants rolling in, you can imagine it’s easy to get tripped up over where they are in the process. Between Evernote and Evernote Hello, we’ve been able to essentially streamline our system.

Creating a recruiting system inside of Evernote

We have several notebooks in a Notebook Stack that we use to manage the recruiting process. All of the applicants we capture using Evernote Hello get automatically saved to the ‘Job Fairs’ notebook. We have a separate notebook that includes all scanned resumes that we receive. We have another notebook that includes all applicants who we are interested in; we automatically send all of these applicants a list of questions as a first step. As candidates move through the process, we take notes along the way and funnel them on to the next step. If we decide not to move forward with a candidate, we add them to a separate notebook that we use as a reminder to notify these people.

Using Evernote as the central hub for our recruiting has allowed us to be a lot more efficient and provided more clarity around the recruitment process. I’m able to share recruiting notebooks with all of my managers, who can see applicants coming in, in real time. Plus, they can add their comments to all of the notes, so the interview and hiring process is really collaborative. Ultimately, we can process a larger volume of information and yet stay organized. We’re not a huge company with big management systems and using Evernote has really helped us! Evernote has completely changed how we do business; we end up hiring more quality people.

Evernote for performance reviews

In addition to being instrumental in our recruiting process, Evernote has also played an important role in the way that we handle performance reviews. We create a note for each team member in Evernote and then refer to the individual’s note during our monthly meeting, adding notes each time. Because everything is in Evernote, multiple people (including myself and a team leader) can edit the note simultaneously; I can have my iPad in the meeting, while the team lead can be taking notes on his/her device at the same time, throughout the conversation. Later, we can share the note with the team member we reviewed so they can have access to all of our feedback.