Adventures in Time - The Cronofy Blog

We reflect on the changes we’ve seen within the recruitment industry in 2023 and predict what’s to come in 2024.

The recruitment process is spiraling out, and it’s worse with virtual recruiting. Cronofy’s Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, shares his nuggets on how remote-first and hybrid companies can gain back control of their process.

You've heard of time-to-hire as one of the most widely used metrics in the recruitment industry. But do you measure your time-to-schedule? It could be having a detrimental effect on your hiring.

In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. But are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Talent Acquisition experts Stephanie Baysinger, Mary-Kay Baldino, and José Manuel Delgado Garcia share their thoughts.

BambooHR have recently gone live as the first partner of our new Embedded Scheduler. Their customers can now install Cronofy into their BambooHR instance and get full access to multi-person scheduling linked in real-time to their and their colleagues’ calendars.

Is your calendar messier than a teenager’s bedroom? Time for a spring clean – read on for our top calendar hygiene tips.

Cronofy partners with BambooHR!

Every six months Cronofy organises a companywide meet up. This May, we met in Amsterdam to give our teams the chance to see our recently opened office and the sights this wonderful European capital has to offer.

Developing how your company describes and represents itself is a challenging and enlightening journey. You have to revisit long held assumptions and confront the reality of what your customers and the market value. I absolutely believe that you can only do this effectively with outside help.

Founder of QuickMail.io, Jeremy Chatelaine, shares his actionable recruitment outreach strategy to help recruiters have more conversations with qualified candidates.

We've partnered up with another leading ATS, Lever, and have launched our integration for their users!

How does your company measure your team's individual performance? Our Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, explains how he built a competency framework that's used across all departments at Cronofy.

SmartRecruiters users can now use Cronofy’s automated interview scheduling, integrated straight into their existing platform!

Find out what the Cronofy team got up to on our bi-annual company meet up. This time, we hit the beautiful Spanish coastal city of Valencia!

Not sure which recruitment tech to choose? We round up the five best bits of digital kit for external recruiters to start using today.

As an external recruiter, competition for the best talent is fierce. Writer and recruitment expert, Nicola Wright, shares her five top ways to attract and secure the top candidates for your clients.

Building an effective sales process is crucial to your business’s success. Bar Zaig, Head of Product at sales prospecting platform Datanyze, shares how automated scheduling for sales calls and other top tips can help create your most efficient sales process yet.

We spoke to Matt Such, Vice President of Operational Excellence at coaching business MDA Leadership, to find out more about the role of digital transformation projects and how to effectively manage them.

The Scheduler is now a certified integration for the recruiting platform, SAP SuccessFactors, and Cronofy is an official SAP partner!

We partnered with Opinium and surveyed 6,500 candidates around the world to determine what candidates really want from the recruitment process, with the aim to help recruiters get ahead and win the war for talent.

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, we've completed our ISO27001:2013, ISO270018:2019, and SOC2 security audits and added a brand new ISO27701:2019 certification to our list!

We've created a value-driven payment plan for the Scheduler – only pay for it when you use it

Every day we work with top Product Managers at Rightmove, JobAdder, GoDaddy, and Infor, who use our APIs to add scheduling to their platforms. They want to improve their products and hit their goals. We've gathered the best ways to measure and increase user engagement in your SaaS product.

Scheduling software is growing in popularity, but is complex to build in-house. In this guest post Iliya Valchanov, Co-Founder and CTO of fast-growing remote-work platform 3veta, broaches the question: should you build or buy scheduling automation software?

We recently spoke to Hung Lee, the Curator of one of the world's most influential HR and recruitment communities, Recruiting Brainfood. He discusses COVID-19, candidate expectations, and automation's impact on the ever-changing recruitment industry.

Our fourth instalment of our Inside Cronofy series! We sat down with Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, to learn more about his role at Cronofy.

Eli Franklin, Recruitment Specialist at Recruit CRM, looks at how automation continues to change the recruiting and staffing landscape and how recruiters can reap the benefits of automation throughout the hiring process.

So what are the top workplace automation trends to look out for in 2022? We asked the experts to share their thoughts with us.

The G2 Winter 2022 Report is live, and Cronofy has been awarded with five badges!

Our third instalment of our Inside Cronofy series! We sat down with Technical Account Manager, David Jiang, to learn more about his role at Cronofy.

The COVID crisis has shifted the hiring power. With competition at an all-time high, we discuss how recruiters can get ahead with the right technology.

HR tech and automation is growing in popularity among time-strapped recruitment firms. Our CEO, discusses how the right tech can speed up time-to-hire.

Data privacy and security are on the top of our list of priorities. Learn about our ongoing commitment to data protection.

No, it’s not a new diet craze - ‘Eating your own dog food’ is one of the best product testing practices for a business to implement. We explain how and why we use it within Cronofy.

Our second instalment in our Inside Cronofy. Today we speak with Chris, a Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering team!

We sat down with James Ellis an ‘employer brand’ expert, to discuss why it is an essential part of the hiring process.

We're constantly looking for ways to protect our customers’ data and their users data. The next step in our compliance program is ISO27701.

Dr. Jolly is a Chief Medical Officer, and was previously at the Department of Homeland Security. We spoke to discuss the findings of our new Healthcare Report.

Our latest instalment of interview series Inside Cronofy: with Shannon Walker, a Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering team!

We are pleased to announce that we have completed our yearly ISO27001 surveillance audit, whilst successfully adding ISO27018 to the scope of our ISMS.

Dr. Koonin worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before founding her consultancy. We spoke with her about our Healthcare Convenience Report.

Ben Branson-Gateley is CEO and Co-Founder of HR software focused 'Charlie'. We spoke with him about our recent research into candidate expectations.

Bill Boorman advises on the integration of social recruiting for corporate companies. We spoke with him about our recent research into candidate expectations.

Last year we achieved SOC 2 Type II attestation and ISO27001 compliance. We're pleased to announce that we've successfully renewed our SOC 2 Type II attestation.

David is the UK’s top speaker on People Engagement and business performance. We spoke with him about our recent survey of 6,500 candidates.

Jessica is founder of Workology and a thought leader in human resources. We spoke with her about our recent research on candidate's expectations.

Hung is Curator of Recruiting Brainfood, one of the most powerful HR and recruiting communities. We spoke with him about the findings of our recent survey.

We’ve always believed scheduling should be seamless, secure and efficient. It’s why we exist. And it’s why we partnered with OnePoll to survey 6,500 candidates.

We caught up with Alex Patriquin, the CEO of virtual and in-person event marketing platform, and Cronofy partner, Circa.

Barry is CEO of Paradigm Norton, a leading financial planning firm, which featured in our recent report. We sat with him to discuss the results.

Mark recently joined Cronofy as Head of Talent. With the mission to help us nurture and grow the team and reach our goal of providing excellent scheduling.

Sara is a freelance financial journalist who has written about financial advice. We spoke to her about our recent First Impressions report.

Every service business relies on the charm of its people – but how good are financial advisors at making things easy for potential clients before meeting?

Jonathan is a Client Services Associate at independent financial advisory firm Asset Planning Corp. We interviewed him about the findings of our new report.

Recruitment tech is becoming an increasingly important part of every business. The right tech stack can be the difference between a great candidate experience or a poor one. A poor experience means candidates are less likely to accept an offer. They may even drop out. This prolongs the hiring process and makes it more expensive. It costs an average of $4,000 to replace an employee, but the more senior the role and the longer it takes, the more expensive this becomes.

Wade & Wendy is a recruitment platform that helps recruiters and their candidates. We spent a little time speaking with their Chief of Staff.

The new Cronofy Scheduler is an end user application built on top of our API and the next step on our mission of scheduling everything for everyone.

We were delighted to be a part of the first ever Recruitment Automation Conference, a free fully-virtual conference that brought together the global recruitment, to learn, grow, and connect.

We are pleased to announce that Cronofy is now certified to the ISO27001 information security standard. We were delighted to complete the audit with zero major or minor non-conformities.

Digital Transformation is a huge focus in the world of business. With the current situation many organizations are taking stock of their digital offering.

We caught up with Chris, Founder of Sightlines Group. Learning all about his latest project, how it was impacted by COVID-19 and how they've used Cronofy's API.

Our new tool, the Scheduler is live! It allows you to create invitation links that display your real-time availability to people you want to meet with.

Business leaders across the world are currently looking after their teams from afar. Many are now in a position they haven’t found themselves in before.

Video interviews are key to most modern hiring processes, they are taking over from phone interviews in many cases. They allow recruiters to filter candidates better and establish more personal relationships while saving time and stress for everyone involved.

We're excited to introduce the latest feature of the Cronofy API, Conferencing Services! This core feature, available on all plans, is live from today.

The first interaction many customers have with a business is with their support team. According to Forbes, businesses lose $75B a year due to poor customer service. It's therefore important to make sure that the first impression you make on your customers is a positive one. In this post you’ll find some of the things you can do to deliver a positive, lasting impression on your customers via your support team.

A lot can happen in a year. A lot of products can be updated and released in a year, too. In 2019, we released some of our most exciting products yet.

In 2020, HR tech tools are going to become even more embedded into the lives of employers and employees alike. Their mission will continue to be providing the best possible talent experience.

As a SaaS company, it should come as no surprise that we use a range of SaaS tools to help us achieve our goals. From sales to marketing to software development, we all rely on tools to make our lives easier. Finding the right tool is a process of trial and error – we've experimented with many over the years. Some of those we found less effective as teams scaled while others we still use now. But we wouldn't have found tools that we love and use daily without this process.

When you’re part of a remote team, the collaboration tools you use can make your work life easier or more difficult. They can reduce stress or they can add to it. They can help you better connect with your other team members, or they can be the wedge that drives you apart.

Coaching in the workplace is something that more and more companies are investing in. This may involve connecting employees to other colleagues within the company, or with external coaches or mentors who can help them develop their skills. Previously, coaching was only offered to executive-level employees. Now, businesses are increasingly investing in coaching for employees at every stage of their career. There are lots of benefits of coaching and mentorship for mentors and mentees, but what are the benefits to the company that they work for? How does it help them in the short and long-term?

Technology in the workplace is the new normal. Thanks to greater integrations in our personal lives, employees and employers alike are acquainted with the many benefits technology offers and are looking to see these benefits translate into their work lives as well. Using the best tools and software on the market is not only beneficial for business leadership, but it can also contribute to a happier, more engaged workforce.

An important mechanism for maximizing your own impact is getting feedback from your peers. Many heads are better than one, but soliciting feedback can be a drain on everyone’s time if not done effectively. We cover two key tenants for effective feedback.

Managers are busy people. Not only do they have to organize their own time, but they’re responsible for much of their employees’ time, too. The bigger the team, the more difficult it is for them to juggle everything. Coordinating their team’s schedules is a time-consuming administration task that doesn’t need to take as long as it often does. When the HR software that managers use has integrated scheduling, they have more time to spend improving their employees’ work lives and developing their own careers.

At Cronofy, we endeavour to spend our time well. Time is the lifeblood of any company: capital either buys you more time or allows you to bring on more people to increase your bandwidth. Time will always move forward and you want your product to at the same pace. A lot of time can be wasted doing the wrong thing and that's why we aim to commit as little as needed to test an idea at each stage along its journey to being a feature. It doesn’t matter how many X your engineers are if they’re implementing the wrong thing.

Business communications are vital for companies to talk to their employees and customers. The more effective the communication method, the more time it saves. Business communication can take many forms: emails, text messages, even chatbots. As technology progresses, businesses are looking for more and more ways to keep in touch with their customers and employees. This helps to keep them engaged, make them feel like they’re a part of something, and boosts the company’s brand.

We want to give you more time to work on what's really important. That’s why we created our original calendar API, and that’s why we’re always developing new features for you to use. This guide will explain a bit more about how our products work together to help you build the best scheduling software for your users. That way, you can develop new features, attract new customers, and grow your business...all faster than if you'd built the integration yourself. Here's a quick look at the structure of our products and how they work.

Software providers are always competing to deliver the best possible experience to their users. In an industry that’s worth trillions of dollars, a seamless user experience is imperative at every step of the buying or renting process. A slow process can lead to frustration for everyone involved, causing a loss of custom for realtors and software companies alike. Integrating a realtor’s schedule with the software that they use provides a better experience for them and their customers.

This is a guest post by Dave Foxall. Just to establish the obvious: you didn’t buy your new HRMS as a pleasing ornament, nor as a way of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ – you bought a new HRMS as a business investment and as such, you hope for (need!) to see a return on that investment. Maybe that return is purely financial, including reduced HR costs and overheads, or perhaps you’re looking for greater efficiency – the most popular reason for implementing HR tech cited in a recent survey from Software Path. But if you want to prove that return – to a doubtful C-suite, perhaps – you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and measure it.

At Cronofy, we aim to help companies simplify the hiring process for everyone. We wanted a way to understand the pain points companies deal with when hiring so that we can better help them now and in the future. That's why we chose to work with JobAdder – one of the first customers to use our calendar sync API – by surveying 272 of their external recruiters about their experiences. JobAdder is a software company with the goal of making recruitment more accessible and intuitive. They seemed like the perfect partner for what we planned to do.

84% of law firms want to increase their revenue during the next year. They also want to decrease their costs. How can these two factors work together? Employees lose an average of 520 hours a year to tasks that could be automated. These wasted hours are the perfect place for law firms to increase their revenue by working smarter, not harder. The more administrative tasks you automate, the more time you have to spend on billable hours and the more money you have the potential to make.

Here at Cronofy we’re acutely aware that things are not always 200 OK, and Monday was one such day as Google Calendar was largely down for 3 hours. Our platform was built from day one to account for such periods. It is one of the reasons that we hold a copy of calendar data that we continuously keep up-to-date.

Recent years have seen the rise of coworking spaces for individuals and businesses. For freelancers, coworking spaces offer them a reprieve from the loneliness that can come from working at home all the time. For startups and small businesses, it gives them somewhere to work from without paying expensive city rents or needing to find an office the right size for their team – the space can scale as their team does.

Online marketplaces are the perfect way for potential customers to find everything from a plumber to a new pair of shoes. And it looks like consumers agree – ecommerce sales for products and services are set to reach $4 trillion globally by 2020.

There have been several updates to our API this month, mostly focused around our scheduling capabilities. Here's a roundup of them.

Legal professionals spend up to 48% of their time doing administrative tasks. That’s time they aren’t working on cases and helping their clients. It also impacts their business as it these their billable hours. Instead, they spend their time on tasks that have nothing to do with their area of expertise, such as booking meeting rooms or finding time slots to schedule calls.

When companies are diverse, their employees are happier and more engaged. This means they save money on hiring, giving them more money to invest elsewhere. Diverse companies not only save money, but they earn more, too. Businesses that hire more women make, on average, 15% more than companies with fewer or no women. Businesses that are culturally diverse earn 35% more than companies that aren’t. And yet the lack of diversity in business is still an issue.

Global retail e-commerce sales for products and services will reach $4000 billion by 2020. Online marketplaces are the main reason for this figure. They’re a way for vendors to meet customers in a trusted environment. Customers can also find out more about vendors before making a decision. User experience plays a huge role in the success of any product, and online marketplaces are no different.

Regular one-on-one meetings are an important way to keep employees engaged. They can raise any issues before they develop into something more serious as well as receive feedback on their performance. Here’s how calendar sync can help you to better organize and track your one-on-one meetings.

77% of teachers feel they can’t do their best work because of a lack of time and resources. That means millions of students aren’t getting all they should be able to from their lessons. Tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer new resources to teachers and can help them save time. Teachers with more time and resources can focus more on the individual needs of their students. AI doesn’t just have the potential to benefit teachers, though. Students and admin staff can also use it to be more efficient.

Our Calendar and Scheduling APIs are helping hundreds of companies deliver better scheduling to hundreds of thousands of users. But not every product integrated with Cronofy has an existing calendar interface. We see a lot of our customers build user interface elements on top of the Cronofy APIs. These can take further hours of development time, increasing how long it takes before your customers can benefit from two-way calendar sync. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the first three Cronofy UI Elements.

From scheduling interviews to booking a taxi, automation is everywhere. While some are afraid that AI, automation, and robots are coming for their jobs, results show otherwise: it’s helping us to do our jobs. Not just faster, but better, too. Productivity is increasing because we’re not spending as much time on tedious tasks. We have more time to spend working toward key objectives and helping the business to grow instead of on necessary but time-consuming tasks that eat up our time. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the benefits of automation in the workplace.

The holiday season is well and truly here. Cue the never-ending stream of Christmas songs, gingerbread lattes, and questions about whom you’re spending the holidays with. While all of these things are inevitable, this time of year can lead to a drop in productivity, too. Employees are preoccupied with secret Santas and trying to decide what to have for their Christmas meal. The last thing on their minds is work. That’s why it’s important to create an atmosphere that both welcomes the festive period but also encourages employees to engage with their everyday tasks. As the year winds down it’s a time to reflect on what happened – good and bad – and what can be improved for the year ahead. It’s also a good time to wrap things up ready for a fresh start in the new year. So how do you keep your employees engaged over the holidays? Here are a few ideas.

Employees are increasingly demanding cultural fit over remuneration when it comes to the roles they choose. Businesses therefore need to find ways to demonstrate the kinds of businesses they are – whom they employee, what they value, and what their plans are for the future. One of the ways they can do this is by giving employees more control over their schedules. Doing so shows employees that they’re trusted to manage their time and commitments. It also means that businesses can hire from a wider pool of talent because the flexibility and independence that comes from this control will inevitably attract more candidates. The more candidates a company attracts to a role, the more likely they are to hire the right person for the role and retain them, too. All these things are great, of course, but how do you give your employees more control over their schedules? Let’s take a look.

Communicating your company culture is imperative to hiring the right person first time. The more clearly you get your company culture across to prospective candidates, the more likely you are to attract applicants with not only the right skills but the mindset you are looking for, too. According to the Harvard Business Review, people and cultural fit is the most important part of a job for candidates. It even comes above opportunities for career progression. Should you hire a candidate with a poor cultural fit, you're likely to find yourself re-hiring for the same position pretty quickly .But getting your company culture across to people outside of your organization isn’t always easy. Especially if you're a startup. To effectively share your company culture with candidates, you need to be open and honest with them from the start. That way, they know exactly what to expect as soon as they walk through the door.

You could save your customers up to 95% of their interview scheduling time by adding automated interview scheduling to your software. That means they have more time to spend shortlisting, conducting interviews, and offering feedback to candidates. It also means they can hire much, much faster. Even if their hiring process involves complicated multi-part interviews. Your team, meanwhile, spend less time building and maintaining complicated scheduling features and calendar connections. Discover how adding automated interview scheduling to your software could benefit you and your customers. Download our interview scheduling report today!

Networks like Handshake have helped to revolutionize the campus recruitment scene. They make it easier for students and businesses to connect, which helps students to get more real-world experience and businesses to find more top talent straight out of university or college. These connections are invaluable for everyone involved. Students can go on to form long-term relationships with businesses, which helps with their future career prospects. Businesses reduce their time and cost to hire while also improving their brand image among younger audiences. An employer’s brand image plays a huge role in campus recruitment.

According to the Financial Times: Three-quarters of the world’s workers are temporary, casual or self-employed and this sort of employment is likely to become more prevalent. This means businesses that require temporary, casual, or contract employees need to do more to keep attracting the best talent. The more temporary and contract employees there are, the more businesses will offer these kinds of roles. It's therefore important for businesses that need temporary and contract workers to stay ahead of the competition by offering better employee experiences – no matter how long someone works for them.

Our Slack Calendar Connector is used by companies big and small to track their upcoming meetings. With our new Slack Meet command, it makes organizing your meetings even easier. Using it, you can schedule meetings from directly in Slack. You can easily schedule meetings in Slack in a matter of minutes.

This is a guest post by Maddie Davis from Enlightened Digital. Today’s job market pushes professionals to market themselves in the best possible light to demonstrate their most valuable assets to employers. Because workforce demands constantly evolve across every industry, it can be difficult to know which skills you should focus on developing and highlighting for potential employers. Nevertheless, there are a few tried and true skills that have always proven beneficial, particularly in the technology industry. Let’s see what some of the world’s top tech executives have had to say about four critical skills, so that we can better understand why they’re so highly valued.

Multi-part interviews are an effective way for companies to get to know different sides of a candidate. For instance, they can assess their technical skills in one part of the interview, their soft skills and previous experience in another, then share details about the company culture in another. All of these help both companies and candidates find out who is the best fit for the role so that they can make the right hiring decision.

What goes into creating the best API documentation is a contentious subject. Most developers have their own opinions on what should and shouldn’t go in to API documentation. It’s rare for everyone to agree. Everything from what you put in it to how things are laid out will affect the experience for your customers. That’s why getting it right is so crucial.

Access to healthcare for patients that have mobility issues, cognitive issues, or that aren’t available during traditional working hours can be tough. This means patients often miss out on vital care. But they shouldn’t have to.

Your users can now schedule a sequence of events in minutes. It doesn't matter how many calendars or how many steps are involved. It's a simple, more user-friendly way to organize multi-part interviews, delivery schedules, and more.

Text message reminders are a common way for companies to remind customers of appointments. It’s no wonder when 95% of the US owns some sort of cell phone. They’re a cheap and effective way for businesses to remind customers of upcoming appointments. The cost of missed appointments adds up fast, costing the US healthcare industry $150 billion every year. One study found that sending text message reminders resulted in patient no-shows being reduced by 5%.

Scheduling platforms are great for organizing appointments. But unless your users block out time before or after appointments, they risk back-to-back meetings with no time to prepare or travel between locations.

Campus visits are a huge part of the college application process. They help students to experience college life for the first time and make more informed decisions about where they want to study.

Everyone always talks about the benefits of mentorship for mentees. And there are a lot of benefits – the most obvious one being that they get to learn from someone who’s doing what they one day want to do. But what’s in it for mentors? Why should they spend their time helping someone else to expand their skills? Turns out, there are just as many benefits of mentorship for mentors as there are for mentees…

I’m probably in the minority when I say that I love a good training session. Not the boring kind where the person sat next to you is falling asleep because they missed out on their morning coffee, but the interesting, engaging kind where you learn something new and leave feeling empowered.

Really useful software unobtrusively blends into the lives of its users and makes their lives easier without needing them to drastically change what it is they do day to day, so if you’re in the business of building really useful software, at some point you’re going to need to interact with a calendar.