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Profile Field Types & Best Practices
Profile Field Types & Best Practices
Updated over a month ago

Introduction

Chronus provides a variety of field types for building your user forms and profile questions. This article provides a guidance and best practices for using the following field types:

  • Text Entry

  • Multiple Text Entry

  • Multi line

  • Pick Multiple Answers*

  • Pick One Answer*

  • Ordered Options*

  • Education

  • Experience

  • Publication

  • Manager

  • Location

  • Upload file

  • Date (not detailed in this article)

Only dropdown selection fields can be used in the matching algorithm: Pick Multiple Answers, Pick One Answer and Ordered Options.

Text Entry

This is a simple single line text input. You can also allow users to enter multiple responses, each of which will appear as a separate field. Ideal for responses which do not exceed 60 characters, to collect information like Department, Phone Number, etc.

Example of a text field with only one response allowed:

Multiple Text Entry

This field type allows the user to enter several separate lines of text with the option to add more or delete lines. This is helpful for providing a list such as training modules completed or top mentorship priorities, etc.

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Multi line

This is a multiple line text input for users to enter longer entries that span multiple lines. Ideal for responses that exceed 60 characters, to collect information like About Me, Career Bio, etc.

Example:

We recommend providing additional guidance for users in the field description text box for fields such as "About Me", for example:

"Share some things about your personal and professional self such as your hobbies, passions and career goals. Limit your response to approximately 300 characters."

Pick Multiple Answers

This field type allows you to create a predefined list of choices for users to select. There are two different ways to include the choices, individually or in bulk.

Individually:

Enter your first choice and click on the '+' icon to add the second choice. To insert an item in a specific location in the list, select the '+' icon next to the choice that you want your new item to appear underneath. You can also drag your fields into the desired location in the list by clicking and holding on the left bar of the field.

In bulk: Click on "Bulk add" to add your choices with commas separating each choice.

Optionally, you can also allow users to select "Other" and type in a different answer. To allow this option, include "Allow user to specify a different answer" at the end of your list of choices. You can also add a description of the question in "Field description."

Below is an example of what the end user experience will look like for a "Pick Multiple Answers" type of field:

Tip: Provide the list of choices in alphabetical order for users to easily identify the choices.

Pick One Answer

You can restrict end users to selecting just one choice from a multiple choice list. Use the field type "Pick One Answer". Below is an example of the end user experience for this field type.

Only multiple choice questions can be used in the matching algorithm.

Ordered Options

This field type allows you to create a list of predefined choices for users to rank their choices in order of preference. You will need to specify the number of choices the user can select. For example, you may want the users to rank their top 3 preferences from a list of 15 options.

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This view of the editor may help you visualize how to formulate this field:

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Education, Experience, Publication

These field types provide a pre-formatted set of fields to capture the user's work, academic experience, or works they have published.

  • Experience - Work data includes organization name, job title and time period.

  • Education - Academic data includes school name, degree, major, graduation year.

  • Publications - Data includes title, publisher, publication date, publication url, author, and description.

Each one is an individual field type so you need to set up education, experience and publication fields individually. It’s not required to use all three of them; most programs use only Experience and Education. Certain academic programs may wish to utilize the Publications field type.

Additional Details:

  • You can allow users to provide either only the most recent job or school, or to provide all the jobs and schools.

  • If you choose to use these fields, note that you cannot modify their design. For example, you can't remove Degree or Major from the education field—the format is fixed.

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Manager

The "Manager" field will ask the end user (OR imported via data feed) to enter the following details about their manager: first name, last name and email address. You can edit the field name such as "Direct manager", "Supervisor" or whatever aligns to your organization and program.

Field Advantages:

  1. Use it to prevent manager matching: A setting can be enabled by your CSM that will employ this field in the matching process to keep mentee's from requesting their direct manager as their mentor, or block the mentee-manager match in admin bulk matching.

  2. Optional automatic email to the user's manager when they apply to join the program: This will alert the manager that their direct report has applied to join. Some programs use this to instate an "opt out" policy where a manager can intervene if program participation is not ideal. Other programs use it simply as a way to provide more support and acknowledgement of the mentee's participation.

**This field can only be created once at the global level and added to each program as needed. This means that the field name and description will be the same for all programs and cannot be altered.

Location

This field type provides an auto-format location field for identifying user location (City, State, Country). As the user starts typing their city, the system will automatically display matches for the user to select from.

Note that this field can fill in full addresses. We highly recommend that you provide context to users using the Field description to ensure that your participant provide only the information needed in a particular format.

An example for the United States could be: Seattle, WA, United States

Tip: Using this field type maps out a demographic report of users which can be found under Reports.

This field can only be created once at the global level and added to each program as needed. This means that the field title and description will be the same for all programs and cannot be altered.

Upload File

This field type allows users to upload a file such as a resume, essay or form. The user will simply see a "Choose File" button instead of an answer field.

Upload Rules:

  • Allowed file types are pdf, doc, xls, ppt, docx, pptx, xlsx

  • Maximum file size allowed is 2 MB.

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