Airtable Automations | AATT #15

all right testing testing let me know in the chat if you can see this this is aaron just gonna you know make sure everything is working i've had some trouble in the past all right seems like chat is up right shouldn't have any delay today testing what all right seems to be working hey jonathan hey ethan good to see y'all all right we have colleen wow folks are in the house really excited to uh uh bring this 15th live stream uh uh i didn't think starting we'd have 15. but yeah really excited to jump into automations i'm just gonna make sure everything seems to be working everything seems to be okay here um yeah really excited really excited to kick this off um hello max support store good to see you welcome welcome uh and yeah let's let's jump in this should be a fun one so let's just let's just do the intro and yeah let's jump in [Applause] [Music] all right welcome uh uh so actually i think i need to do one more thing here i need to refresh the chat so you everyone could see the chat okay all right hey brad welcome all right so welcome to live stream number 15. uh this should be our first time being multi-platform hey tom good timing there uh really excited to bring you uh this live stream talking about airtable automations so uh uh yeah airtable automations is is the heart the the the secret i've had most trouble uh keeping from everyone and really excited to bring you this kind of beta and really showing you what's possible today with airtable automations uh um so you know our our playbook our kind of outline for today uh just gonna talk a little bit about the use case then we're gonna jump into a broad overview of automation then just talking a little bit about you know what are those big unlocks that we can use airtable automations for today and then you know some geeky stuff at the end around uh maybe some things that aren't obvious that you can do with airtable automations and and really that's where i think we'll have a lot of fun for folks who maybe are a little more proficient in airtable but do want to make sure that everyone gets value out of today's live stream hey connor good to see you uh hopefully you'll get some value out of today's session as well okay so uh uh yeah without further ado let me just talk about the use case here so i i really think airtable is underused from a recruitment standpoint uh so i did want to bring a very simple recruitment pipeline now it's it's totally fine if you're not a recruiter or or workflow today should be good no matter what your use case is i'm just going to bring i see that the the chat is covering this so just going to bring that up if you want to look at the agenda for today um and so very simply we have a pipeline where folks go from new to interview to reviewing to hired into rejected very simply and each one of those steps we have different tasks that need to happen so i'm actually going to close this out come back to it in a moment uh in you know these types of recurring tasks so uh they're not mundane they're just the same no matter what the candidate who the candidate is so we have first reviewing the package so you need to do that for every person that comes into our new status and then once you've reviewed the package you need to then send the invite for the interview assign an interviewer once they've gone to that interview there's additional steps you know get that yes no from interviewer so i'm just going quickly here because i made this up but really think of those what are those tasks that need to happen for each one of your steps and frankly it doesn't really matter if it's tasks or not just think of it as linked records if you're more on the proficient type then when you're hired you need to prep for onboarding and at any moment if you're rejected we need to send you that rejection letter so really kind of a broad use case uh think of this not as a recruiting pipeline but whatever you know kind of funneling through whatever your status is as jobs move through your pipeline so you know what are those things that we could automate uh uh what head honcho is a job it's a very serious job ethan you gotta you gotta hire for a good head honcho uh um and so you know automations will kind of let us we'll automate a lot of the kind of manual steps and there are kind of two broad automations that i do want to kind of bring to your attention around notifications and managing recurring tasks right so those are the two big kind of unlocks that we are going to talk about so we did the base overview let me know in the chat if you have any questions around the base overview so very simple recruiting candidates and then we have tasks associated to each one of those candidates that's grouped by candidate now there's actually this is like a bad base so let me know if you if you can tell why this base structure isn't that great uh uh but you know for for today's that's totally fine um you know i'll i'll say at the end why why this is actually bad base structure uh okay so we've done the base overview let's actually talk about what is automation so we're gonna jump into this little actually let me let me reduce the size of this i shouldn't do this live but this should help give us a little more real estate there okay so the chat should now be to the right of me and that way that'll give us a little more space here i'll make this larger let me know if anything is missed i should have thought of that before okay so essentially automations is trigger and actions so something happens in your base that is specific to your workflow maybe someone is at the interview stage maybe someone entered your pipeline and you want something else to happen right so very simply let's create an automation uh let's just talk about this so our first is going to be notifying the submitter so this is just letting that person that is entering our pipeline know that we've received their submission right so we have all of that information if i go back to my base if i go back to my candidates here i have their name and i have their email and then i have a bunch of information right what job they applied for so it'd be great to let them know like hey we've received your application i feel like that's a that's a level of decency that as a recruiter you should have or in your recruitment process uh so essentially we need to choose a trigger so triggers are when that workflow is going to start so choose a trigger and we are going to select when a record enters a view right so before we do that let's actually kind of talk about how folks submit so let's actually create a form view of uh you know our job submission so job submission form apply to automate all the things now of course my own process is going to be on air table so what is your name status let's move that out here notes let's move that out that's for us cv is good you know what job are you applying for and then they can select submitter that's actually just email right and little tip here so you know let's say i have a status and i want to force folks to put it in new right so this is actually part of my workflow but i want for folks to always submit new that way we can go through the form but we can also have folks submit internally and just as long as we put them in new they'll have that same bucket so i want one process whether your form submission or coming into my base generically and so let's limit the selection to specific options and force it to new and require it and i'll show you what that is uh yes ethan i'll show you in a minute how this looks on the front end for a candidate so cv what job are you applying for your email tasks is something we do internally interviewer we manage internally interview date so now let's open the form let's actually set a few more things as required here so let's say name that sounds like something you should require cv also required what job are you applying for required email all required right now note you can probably style this a little better so let's say i am mo you know just rng and then as you see i'm forcing it as required and then i'm forcing it as new and this will kind of work well for my process right so i'm forcing it a status uh let me see if i have kind of something i could put as a cv i'm not very good at many things so my cv is just blank there we go i'm only good at air table it's just a big air table that's what's in that cv um what job are you applying for head honcho email okay i submit that if i come back here and i go into my all candidates you know i now have that candidate who's applied as head honcho so now let's create a view that is specific to new candidates so actually i already did this i'll just walk through it again so i have a new submission right so this is just saying you know only show me candidates where status is new and now every time someone submits that form uh uh um we are going to add it to our new submission uh um okay and that's going to be the view that triggers our workflow right so when we choose a trigger when a record enters a view let's submit take our table and let's go into new submission right so i'm just making sure that you guys can see should i move myself can i move myself out of the way like that is this better can you guys now still see the right this feels better right okay um okay so now we're saying start this automation when a new candidate enters our new submission view let's run the test this is going to bring up that first record let's see what that record is so it's pulled up myla may so this record right here and what we see is that this record has the same information as this record so it's saying okay now i have that data i have access to that information right so i have the record id i have the name i have the submitter and that information becomes available in future steps now if you're familiar with zapier this is nothing new to you this will be very similar right and let's then add an action so a few things actually happen at this point right we need to send an email to that person to say hey we've received your submission but there are other steps we could do as well and i'll get to that in a moment i'm getting ahead of myself i'm pretty excited here let's send so add an action there are a few actions here mainly around notifications today uh so let's send an email and then you can kind of specify this however you want so you can actually pull information from that previous step so when a record enters a view that's step one let's go and get that person's email and that is in submitter really bad at naming that should be email it should be called email i'm also going to send it to myself uh primarily so i can show you what that looks like then we've received your submission or your candidature your cv whatever right so this is saying when you when this happens take that information from step one put it into the two email put a subject and then suggest you know so we hi let's get that name from that person field values name we've received your submission and then really you can kind of uh let's just say four let's give it a roll here status whereas jobs that should be so product manager note that you also have like metadata right so if the color is important to you so this is a little more advanced jobs right so you have the color as well so if if the color is actually something you want to communicate that's available jonathan asks great questions no you can't use attachments in this step to kind of see what has been submitted or use attachment from previous steps um okay you should hear from a suit okay there we go let's run a test and that should send an email both to oh it failed oh it's probably because milo at gmail is not a real email address so let's do this again so let's call this let's just give it to myself let's just say i'm the submitter like that let's go and get that field again so now we should have test again all right always good when you catch that error on the stream right uh and so now if i go into my email i'm actually going to give it a second here to uh you know receive that email should have sent it to myself let me refresh this give it a second here we go you gotta trust right trust but verify as they say uh so we've received your candidature uh we've got you know hi mal may we receive your submission for product manager you should hear from us soon so this was automated so now when someone submits a form you can receive that email right so if we were to kind of re-fill out the form as aaron g i should have done this at this point but that's fine uh i would receive an email uh and then uh that's kind of that first step right so essentially uh notifying the submitter that we've received their candidature now you know kind of thinking through our process here if i go back to all candidates every single candidate when they enter uh this pipeline this new pipeline um we do an action right so we do something we create a task that is specific to this new status so it's review package so that's saying someone needs to review what we've received to be able to say whether we want to hire this person and that again can be specific to whatever process you're doing if you have tasks or things that need to happen in your base when something is updated or changes you can specify additional steps so jonathan asked a great question can you you know change the email footer or remove error table branding today the answer is no it is sent from no reply plus automations at airtable.com and all of that is kind of custom you can control some of what's in the email around with markdown so the the body does support markdown but uh you cannot change the branding okay so uh next step here actually when we think of the first thing that happens when someone comes into our pipeline it's not only that we want to notify them but we also want to create that task right so we want to automatically create that first task that's related to someone coming into our pipeline so instead of calling this notifying the submitter let's say you know a new step so that's essentially when you're in the new status that's a new submission let's call this actually new workflow submission new submission workflow there we go okay so we want to send that email but then we want to create that task right so let me actually for myla remove this task so we can see in action what happens let me get that first submission so now if we go into this record and go into tasks where is it okay should be good now let's you know create an additional step here which is creating a task so create record what we want to go do is go into the task table right and create for myla a task that says review package and this will be uh always the case when we're crea having folks come into our submission pipeline so go into candidates so actually no we want to go into tasks and then we can choose the fields right so we have three fields here name that's the name of the task whether it's done the candidate and that's a lookup field so that's a computed field so it won't do anything so let's choose a field first our name this is going to be review package that's always the case for new then in candidate well we want that name we want to create a linked record from step one so coming from this step hopefully you can see there in the bottom field values we want the name and that's going to create a new linked record let's run a test so it has run so if i go to myla here right here we have that task that says you know review package for myla we go into candidates and myla has a review package okay so now we have kind of our new submission workflow let me turn this on and let's actually kind of test this out make sure that it works properly cool so it's on new submission workflow what happens is when a record enters a view that new view we send an email we create a record okay let's go ahead and do that so let's go to our form now i would i would let you submit this form but i don't necessarily trust all of you uh to not to say stupid things in the forum so uh let's say you know uh jeff k is in the new status attaching their cv let's upload that applying for product manager and email again i'm just going to put myself just so we can see the email let's submit that and coming here going into runs we see that it's just run successfully right so that means two things i mean three things broadly uh first jeff k is status new that's from the form submission but if all went well here on the right we have that review package task right so that was automatically created using automations and you have that the notification here and if i come back here to my emails you'll notice that we've received your candidature was sent to me hi jeff we've received your submission for product manager so with that coming back to gonna kind of like pause if there are any questions around that uh uh we covered actually a lot of ground there does this make sense does it not make sense okay seems like this was relatively so we talked about what is automations we went through notifications went through form response and then we went through recurring tasks all in one so note that just quickly here actually speak about this i want to show you do an automation you have it um you can trigger uh um internal and external notifications right so so far i've been kind of assuming that the submitter their email is inputted right but at the interview stage let's say i would assign myself as the interviewer and let's say you know just quickly here we wanted to go back into automations and say you know when someone is at the interview stage we want to send an email to you know this specific person that interviewer that metadata is available as well so just quickly here let's say i have a new new view interview stage filter add filter where status is interview right choose trigger enters a view so enters this new selective view interview stage let's get that value and i'll just do this step and you can kind of imagine what the rest is as i come into the field values and i have the interviewer you have their email where you even have their name and their kind of all that metadata around that specific interviewers so leo asks you know can you use this in a script action to fetch i guess you could right there's nothing actually stopping you uh for using the script block and i'll talk about that in a moment to like actually send web hooks to different services i thought that was a little out of scope frankly for this uh automations primarily because if you send i just don't see the value as much to send a web hook to a third-party service such as zapier to then run an automation in that case just build it in zapier right it just kind of makes sense to do that unless you want to give folks visibility in your base that you have an automation that then senses a peer but you don't have that much visibility you're just saying like send a web hook right through a script so in that case i would just do in that third party if you already have that set up but theoretically you could and i feel like sometimes theoretically is enough for folks to go out and do it so i do encourage you to check that out so let's delete this automation let's come back to our workflow and then there's a question around you know can we batch run automations on existing data and the answer is sorta so uh let's talk a little bit about this so this is the part where you know this might work it might not i'm excited to try it out um so first uh um let's think about okay let's actually do this a little opposite let's do the scripting action first right so so far we have kind of been viewing the world as like okay something enters a view that can be extremely specific but we're only kind of working on that specific record right so we don't have access to all the other records right and that kind of becomes annoying right so imagine i wanted in the morning when i wake up to get an email that says hey you have these eight tasks that need to be done or you need to have kind of like these people need to be scheduled and so we want a way to first kind of when something enters a view to go back on existing records and then second maybe we want to kind of schedule that in a way now both of those quite require a little bit of elbow grease if we can call working on a computer elbow grease uh maybe finger grease whatever you want to call it right so essentially we need to do a little bit of work to do that so let's imagine i want when someone enters the uh let's say interview stage that's actually i already had that view set up so someone answers the interview stage i want an email that's sent to myself that says here are every single uh every single person that's in that stage so let's go back and kind of think through this so our trigger is relatively simple right it's uh um you know go and get this information from this view uh so uh not the script too early too early let's go to automations okay so our goal here is that when someone enters the interview stage we want to then send an email that says here's everyone in the interview stage not only hey you just have a new person in your interview stage but also here's everyone that's in there okay so let's say interview workflow so when a record enters a view candidates table interview let's run a test great it probably pulls up maha there we go it does and so now let's actually run a script instead of because we only we don't want we want all of these records right so we're going to run a simple script that actually fetches all of the values all of the records and some values from our interview and then just sends an email so with the scripting block so i'm actually go back i'm gonna you know i'm never ever gonna code on a live stream so let me just come here copy i paste this mean i am copy-pasting that's almost like coding i've heard uh uh i've heard that's 80 of coding but uh um so maybe i am coding live i don't know uh so when a record enters a view we want to you know run a script and that script is going to right so just a few things we i think i need to change so get view should not be upcoming it should be interview right and so essentially this gets the submitter the status and the jobs that they've applied for and just runs this little for each record right just outputs name their email between parentheses is in status for this role so let's actually test this and see what the output is no pressure it's a good time to get some water okay so it seems to have outputted a what it it seems to be outputting something right i can't necessarily see what it is because it's a little long string here uh but let's actually so name that all seems fine okay so let's see what the output is can we see it a little more here okay we can't okay can't see much here okay so let's just run it let's actually just you know then send an email this could be a slack message send an email to myself that says hey new candidate in the interview stage plus everyone so here's everyone in your interview stage let's take that from run a script let's put that in let's run a test this should uh uh send me an email now there might be an error in it note that i'm going to share this whole base so you can actually look at the script after and look at all of the different automations so if i go to automations it seems like i've received so i'm getting unnamed records so that seems like something but i do have the email is interview for product you know is interview for product so uh i am kind of pulling that information so imagine you have a workflow that requires you to get information and it could do whatever you wanted to do so that script can actually run you know a third-party api to update information and a bunch of other things really i wanted to keep this simple in that notification stage but there's really nothing stopping you from doing whatever it is that you need to do using the scripting you know action uh what's funny is do whatever you need to do this it's not very useful i gotta say uh um but i think i think you understand the point uh uh cool okay so now we've run that script so every time someone enters the interview stage let's turn this on uh um i would edit that record but i do feel like we have one last thing i do want to get not edit that script for it to work properly uh uh but do want to kind of flow through this and show you uh this last thing this cool thing of okay so we've moved this into interview this just ran right so it said it run a script it output it and then it sent me that we have a new candidate in the pipeline and you should give it a second here um i should receive an email that says hey you're a new candidate in the pipeline so that there we go and then we can fix that unnamed record in the in the base i'll send you it'll have it fixed uh or or the one i'll have under the description will have that fixed okay so uh last thing i do want to show you this might be a little more theoretical let's say in the morning you wanted to let's say at 8am either see all tasks that are incomplete or in our case let's say just to reuse something already done you wake up 8am or somewhere near that and you want to see all interviews you have to schedule right so we're just going to review reuse that script but we want it to be on a schedule now there is no kind of a way today to say okay new automation you know choose a trigger when 8 am you know happens but uh because you can tie a trigger to a view and you could tie the inclusion of a record into a time frame to say like hey is it 8 am if so enter a view then you could trigger your workflow based off of that record entering a view a few trade-offs here so let's create a new table that is just called you know trigger it's a bad table name but it's okay that essentially just says okay we only need one record and let's call this a formula that is just says now what time is it now right so this is now right and this is saying 10 33 so let's say we wanted to get uh you know what time is it so i might actually need to let's go into formula field and then so maybe i just want the date time format right and so i want date time format of now and let's just go into date time format airtable and let's just see what the can i get the the hour of the day in military time all right so they have something like that mid hour using 12 24 hour clock hh okay hh let's save that so this is telling me 22. so now i can say you know i can have a field that says uh uh you know is it x time so i'm gonna i'm gonna put 22 uh because you know i want this to run now uh so is it 6 p.m so it's going to check you know is there any formula field and just says equal if time equal 22 note that this is gmt that's 6 pm here uh or uct uct i'm gmt uh if time equal 22 run workflow you know else just just give empty right so now it's saying run workflow so let's actually now create a view that is run workflow and it just checks you know is it 6pm contains run workflow right so this is saying um now imagine you know uh i don't want to edit this but imagine it wasn't you know 22 let's say time and then you want to run this at 11 pm you can just put this to 23 right and it's going to exit the view let's undo that it's going to enter the view so this could be the fact that this record this only record we have in our trigger table enters the run workflow view we can then trigger automations based off of that so choose a trigger when a record enters a view let's go into trigger run workflow run test it doesn't really matter because we're not going to use this information from this step but at least it's found that record and we know that it's going to trigger add action and then we're going to run a script let me actually go back so we're going to call this you know uh all interviews on you know on on time i guess at a certain time at 6 00 p.m now you know if you want to get these in the mornings you can update the script uh you can update this workflow to whatever time you want so let's go back into the script let's actually copy paste this whole tank this whole thing save that go back and then run that script so the output should be the same right so it should just give us those in progress jobs and now let's add an email very similar to that previous step send an email you know all interviews currently well all candidates in interview so we're actually just using the fact that we can be very very precise in how we define a record entering a view to be able to uh trigger this workflow so let's take that step i could try to fix the unnamed i'm really worried that it's it's gonna be like a huge time suck here uh record.name constant name status submitter jobs oh i think could that be it uh um i'll i'll fix it in the script after and then once i add the base uh under under the record uh in youtube there's like a recording i'll fix this it was working before so uh um obviously it was working before and obviously it doesn't work live um so we can we can trigger here are today's here are all interviews right so if we test that now note that we're not using from step one so it doesn't really matter you know what your your view is and what's great about this is because error table automations runs every time a record enters a view you know in an hour this record is going to leave the view and then tomorrow at 10 pm or 6 10 p.m uh utc time or 6 p.m my time is going to enter that view again it's going to trigger this workflow it's going to send the email so maybe you want to look at what are today's interviews so very simply you can just kind of run this script on today's interview so just instead of a running it on i have it kind of as our interview table or interview view i can just say you know a view where is the interview today and i can send it i can even send that automation to you know whoever i want to uh yeah so essentially we did just build a kind of cron job table uh and that's exactly it so it's a very simple kind of crown job there's a lot of kind of things you can't do because you uh but you'll have to code them through the scripting block so personally stupidly i use this to uh notify me what day of the week it is in slack just just for fun so nine am monday you know i could use it for things that are a little more useful and i should uh uh but that was one thing i i needed maybe i could tweet the day of the week every morning at 9 00 a.m i could do that using the scripting block um all right so back to uh our little so we did scripting action we did triggering recurring workflows on a schedule that was what i wanted to show you today happy to spend a few minutes here you know either answering questions or anything like that uh and yeah really really appreciate everyone joining hopefully this was useful to you we're about 40 minutes in all right so i'm gonna assume no questions oh that's great leo really happy to hear that this is useful and and yeah this is only going to keep growing a lot of options here and really excited to bring more automation it's kind of meta that there's now uh you know air table automations and i always automate all the things um you know ethan asks you know what are my thoughts around replacing other automation tools i don't i don't think the objective is really to replace uh other automation tools it's really around enabling folks to do their work right so what that means is integrations with important tools and just acknowledging the fact that you know your workflow doesn't start and necessarily end or happen exclusively in airtable it happens in email it happens in slack it happens in all different systems and so you know the goal is not necessarily to you know have 400 integrations here but it's really just enabling you to do your workflow so can use the scripting block to take a record such as record a item count 10 and create 10 new records in another table but frankly you could use just automations to do that right uh oh unless your automation is dependent on the that 10 right if that's the case you need to use the scripting block yes because the number of items so this if i go back to automations and i go back to the number of actions right um your number of actions is defined ahead of time so if that's variable based on that number in that record uh you will not update so that would be a good scripting scripting block i don't necessarily call it scripting blog it's using scripting and scripting output within uh um you know airtable automation so yes that would be i think a good scripting if you do build it would love to see it yeah yeah create a loop based on that input i'd love i'd love to see it definitely let me know definitely not the head honcho of of scripting i am uh i am but uh a copy paster of scripting block and shout out to those who write scripts because without you a lot of my workflows whatever it wouldn't work so appreciate that um awesome well hopefully this got you a little more little ways ahead in that um cool any other questions before i jump off here i really appreciate you can always you know tweet at me aaron core kor a-r-o-n-k-r and uh yeah really appreciate everyone joining so you know thanks to ethan who who helped me out getting you know this whole thing set up uh um and yeah really excited hopefully we're gonna bring this every week with different sometimes features sometimes air table sometimes not but really excited to be back on the live stream actually stable live stream which is fun cool all right all right bye everyone have a good one really appreciate everyone joining and have a great week

Channel: Automate All the Things

Views: 3,127

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Id: -_MQSd8LwUE

Length: 46min 56sec (2816 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020