Transforming the Scheduling Experience with Real-Time Scheduling

Scheduling meetings is a hassle, especially when multiple attendees are involved.

“When are you free?” is such a difficult question to answer when you don’t have real-time visibility on schedules. It covers nothing of when you’d prefer to meet, nor where you’re going to meet, and how close it is to where you’ll be at any given time. You’re either in for a long email chain or you’re just going to have to pick up the phone – assuming you’re all available for a call, that is.

What about when four, five or six people need to get together? The complexity of co-ordinating a gathering multiplies with each additional participant.

The more important the meeting is the higher the chances are that these are busy people and you also need to find a room that can accommodate all these people.

Now imagine you need to arrange this kind of meeting twenty times over. That’s the level of complexity you often deal with when arranging the job interviews for just one position. It’s can often take up someone’s whole week.

The same goes for when you’re trying to organize yearly appraisals, training sessions, or meetings with providers. It just takes time and distracts from other tasks.

Enter Real-Time Scheduling by Cronofy

At Cronofy we knew this was an area that we could help transform. We’re able to connect software providers to anyone’s calendar so that they can see their real-time availability. That means we can give a single view of all potential attendees’ schedules and highlight the time slots when everyone is free to meet.

We want people to retain the power to decide when to meet, but at the same time we want to simplify the work involved in finding the perfect time.

This is why we are excited to announce the release of our new scheduling plugin, Real-Time Scheduling.

How Real-Time Scheduling works

Let’s take a common example for our clients and their users: interview scheduling for a position with multiple candidates and interviewers.

Hiring managers often spend days arranging interviews, finding times when both candidates and members of the interview panel are available.

Connecting their recruiting systems to users’ calendars with our Calendar API – becoming Cronofy-enabled – grant HR teams major upgrades, transforming the way they schedule events.

Using the Cronofy Availability API, the recruiting system can show the hiring manager in real-time the interview slots that work for everyone. The moment a slot is chosen the interview is booked and the events are immediately created in everyone’s calendars. No more double booking.

However, this may not be best for the candidate. Trying to contact candidates by phone at work will be awkward for them. Contacting them via email means the time delay between them seeing the email and responding may result in an interview slot that was available being over booked. That translates into a poor customer experience and can mean losing qualified candidates.

This is where Cronofy’s new Real-Time Scheduling plugin makes a huge difference.

The same rules for choosing which slots work for the interview panel can be used to generate a scheduling link that can be sent to the candidate or candidates. This link takes them to a fully branded booking micro site that is linked, in real-time, to the availability of the interview panel.

No more slots getting double-booked. If any of the interviewers have another appointment booked in, that slot is removed automatically. It doesn’t matter how long until the candidate chooses their interview slot, it’s always kept up to date.

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The moment they choose the slot that works for them, every interviewer gets an event in their calendar. There’s also a real-time notification back to the recruiting system so that is kept in sync as well.

You only need one scheduling link for each interview, no matter how many candidates you need to schedule interviews with.

That’s it. Organizing dozens or hundreds of interviews now take minutes, not days!
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See it in action

We’ve put together a demo of how HR solutions can integrate Real-Time Scheduling to streamline interview organization. This is based on Globex, a fictional company using a fictional Applicant Tracking System. They need to find the right time to hold interviews to fill a position, and use Real-Time Scheduling to make it happen.

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If you want to discuss how your software can benefit from Real-Time Scheduling you can request a demo now!

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