Implementing the Mass Update Status Button

The Candidate Map feature we just added is both useful and flashy. It'll help recruiters do their jobs more efficiently while adding an eye-catching graphic to an otherwise plain collection of data. The next feature we're going to implement is not as aesthetically appealing, but is much more useful and likely to save your users an incredible amount of time.

Picture yourself as a recruiter at Universal Containers. You're working on filling a highly-coveted position that's garnered hundreds of job applications and you've finally zeroed in on the three top candidates. However, before you can go further you need to reject the job applications submitted by all of the other candidates for the position—a task that could take hours if you have to open every one of those job application records and set the Status to rejected. What can you do?

Fortunately, creating tools that perform mass actions on data is yet another of the innumerable ways you can build upon the platform's functionality. With a few lines of Visualforce and the platform's point-and-click tools, we can enhance the Recruiting app in a way that will dramatically increase our users' productivity. When we're done, the daunting task of updating the Status field on multiple job applications will be reduced from hours of tedium to a few seconds of easy mouse clicking.