The problem

Manual processes holding small recruitment team from scaling to address climate challenge

As the window narrows to address the climate crisis and meet the targets set by the Paris Agreement, Agreena is one of the few companies in the world that is working to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in agricultural soils. The global soil carbon AgTech platform is on a mission to support more farmers in adopting regenerative farming practices.

As the transition to regenerative agriculture practices is getting the attention of policymakers, supply chains, and farmers alike to help reduce emissions and turn soil into carbon sinks, the company is growing at a robust rate in its work to verify, mint and sell certificates for stored soil carbon. The company recently raised a significant €46-million B Round funding to further grow and expand its platform and reach. With this comes team expansion, going from 100 to 150 employees in the last four months.

To manage this phase of high volume hiring, they brought in Joseph Wilkinson as Talent and Recruitment Leader. One of his main focuses has been to optimise the existing processes to hire more efficiently.

When Joseph joined, he saw that current processes were too manual and time consuming to scale, especially for its then small team of two recruiters. They had a choice: to hire more recruiters, or look into tools that could automate administrative time-draining parts of the recruitment process.

The first thing Agreena did to address this challenge was to implement Lever as their Applicant Tracking System. This was a core fundamental change that transformed their organisation’s hiring efficiency. Joseph quickly identified interview scheduling as taking too much of his and his team’s time. The existing process was regularly causing delays and frustrations for everyone, from candidate to recruiter.

The team soon found there were many interview scheduling use cases that Lever’s native offering couldn’t solve.

Automating scheduling for panel interviews wasn’t possible, and getting hiring managers to confirm times was becoming increasingly difficult, which was causing delays to booking interviews. This was stressful for the recruitment team and created a negative candidate experience. Sometimes, candidates even dropped out of the recruitment process altogether.

Scheduling panel interviews was impossible. In every single hiring process that we have, there's a panel interview involved, so it's a labour intensive process that you have to get right. I don't want our recruiters spending 30 minutes trying to schedule one candidate in a calendar with multiple people across time zones.

The solution

Future-proofing: A scheduling tool seamlessly fitting into Lever that grows with the team’s needs

A big time-wasting activity for the Agreena recruitment team was rescheduling interviews. If either the candidate or hiring manager(s) was unable to make the agreed time, scheduling in for another time meant starting the back-and-forth calendar tetris all over again. It could even sometimes result in a breakdown of communication, where a candidate could still show up to an interview even if the hiring manager had declined.

‍Joseph came to the conclusion they needed a tool that could scale with their changing needs and accommodate times of high-volume hiring. He wanted to empower his team to take control of recruitment from start to finish, reducing the burden on the hiring manager in the process.

The interview scheduling technology had to be integrable with Lever for a streamlined recruitment process. He looked at other scheduling automation solutions including Prelude and GoodTime, but found pricing and the implementation length unsuitable for a scaling startup. They needed a more affordable and flexible solution to accommodate their growth. That’s why Cronofy, which bills for active users rather than empty seats, was the perfect fit.

‍Rescheduling is made easy with Cronofy. Candidates or hiring managers can simply click a link to reschedule and choose another time. This notifies everyone automatically, pulling real-time availability from calendars so there’s no double-booking or back-and-forth.

Because we're such a small team, we can't always be immediately on hand if the candidate is having to reschedule with a short notice period. Having a rescheduling feature that was great from an admin point of view, but also, from an experience point of view, as it gives the candidate ownership to drive their own agenda.

Scheduling complex panel interviews was also a top need. With Cronofy’s scheduling groups and rules, the team can create groups of potential interviewers dependent on the role. The required number of interviewers could then be automatically selected based on their real-time calendar availability and the time slot chosen by the candidate, and users can set available times and limits to ensure a fair burden. Everyone is notified and gets an automated calendar update.

‍Delayed scheduling was solved with Cronofy’s Scheduling On Behalf Of feature. A recruiter can easily pull available times from a manager’s calendar and book an interview on their behalf, without having to include themselves in the event. They can simply create a scheduling link and send it to the candidate for them to choose a time from.

The Results

Hours of time gained back: Recruiters now focusing on finding the best candidates, not email back-and-forth

Since they started using Cronofy, each recruiter at Agreena has saved up to five hours a week, which has made a huge difference to their performance and productivity.

They’ve been able to refocus this time on finding and building relationships with the best candidates. It’s also allowed the hiring managers to focus on interviewing skills and preparation rather than spending hours on scheduling tasks.

This transformation means a considerable return on investment since implementing Cronofy, saving time, speeding up the hiring process, and improving the quality of candidates coming in thanks to the additional capacity given back to the team.

Hiring managers have seen an increase in the volume of interviews that they have in their calendars now. They also have better candidates, because we now have that time back to focus on sourcing.

The candidate experience has been improved as they can enjoy a smoother, streamlined recruitment process. They feel their time has been respected by being able to pick their own time slot depending on their agenda—in fact, the majority of candidates report saying they prefer to pick their own interview times. Communication is straightforward as everything updates automatically if anyone makes a change or if they’re moved through the process.

‍Cronofy’s scheduling has also increased the overall happiness of the Agreena recruitment team, eliminating a great deal of frustrating admin from their day and giving them more time to focus on what they love about their job – finding and attracting the right people to their roles.

Our recruiters can now own the end-to-end hiring journey. They can make sure that candidates are having a great experience, but are able to do it in a much more seamless way. The fact that Cronofy integrates with Lever means they’re spending a lot less time on the admin, everything just works.

Agreena is planning to roll the solution out throughout the company, expanding from just the recruitment team and hiring managers to other parts of the business.

Want to try Cronofy for yourself? Learn more about our Scheduler for recruitment teams here: