Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience.

The problem:

Time-consuming manual scheduling holding recruiters back at a critical hiring peak

Wise, the global technology company, has been building the best way to move and manage the world’s money since 2011. With Wise Account and Wise Business, people and businesses can hold over 40 currencies, move money between countries, and spend money abroad. Large companies and banks use Wise technology too, building an entirely new network for money globally. The team now sits at 5,500 people spread across offices globally. Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation at Wise, tells us the story of how the company has transformed in the past five and a half years.

The scale of the opportunity puts the company’s exponential growth into perspective – the market size of money moved across borders sits at $1 trillion for personal customers, with the figures rising to $10 trillion for SMBs. “Banks charge quite a large amount in hidden fees, and we’re trying to get rid of that,” explains Mark.

Having the growth that we’ve had, and the markets that we’re looking to go after, we need to make sure we’ve got the right people in the right roles, at the right time. The recruitment team has always been central to that, and their goal is to attract and hire talented people around the world to achieve our vision, which is money without borders.

With the size of the challenge on their hands, it was paramount for Wise to scale their team – this meant pursuing the right candidates by giving them the exceptional experience they deserved. Streamlining the traditionally time-consuming interview scheduling process sat at the heart of this goal.

The solution:

Delivering irresistible experiences to every candidate with seamless scheduling

“We approach our recruitment mission through three key pillars,” contextualizes Mark. “First, to create an irresistible recruitment experience not just for candidates, but for hiring managers too. Second, building skills for the future, and third, to optimize our ways of working.” With this in mind, Wise chose Cronofy to power their interview scheduling capabilities, enabling Wise to recruit exceptional talent to build the future of their company.

To Wise, providing an outstanding experience is an actuality embedded throughout both the business and the product. “One of our greatest growth levers is word of mouth”, explains Mark. “Our customers are truly advocates of Wise, and we want our candidates to feel the same about our recruitment process.” This is essential for both user and employee advocacy, explains Mark, and it starts at the interview process. “We don’t want to just give a good experience. It needs to be an irresistible one.”

Interview processes begin by aligning the hiring team on expectations, as well as “setting the criteria we’re going to be looking for in these interviews, and how these attributes fit into our bigger cultural piece at Wise.” With a mixture of both online and in-person processes, scheduling these meetings as seamlessly as possible is a key priority. Recruiters now use Cronofy to schedule within SmartRecruiters, generating self-scheduling links for candidates. This empowers candidates to book any type of interview directly instead of first needing to request anyone’s availability, regardless if the interviewer comes from an interviewer pool. Once the candidates choose their interview slot, this will be reflected back in their profile on SmartRecruiters.

Initially, when we first looked for a vendor, it was because volumes were growing, the administrative burden started to become a bit too much for recruiters. We want them to focus on recruiting, not doing the administrative part of scheduling interviews. We then started to scale a small coordination team to do this. But again, the burden just grew too big. When hiring large volumes, it's just not a good use of people's time when there's tools and technology out there that can do that hard work for you.

The decision to automate interview scheduling came instinctively after manual scheduling began to impede the company’s desire to scale.

The result:

Hiring exceptional candidates before competitors thanks to well-placed automation

Wise was able to bring the vision they wanted to life knowing they had Cronofy’s support team to lean on. “From day one, what stood out after we selected Cronofy was the strong support. It has been some of the best we've experienced in terms of understanding our challenges and the kinds of requests we were making, all the way to slight adjustments in the product or how things worked,” shared Mark.

The impact of implementing automated scheduling embedded within the company’s applicant tracking system has meant booking interviews is now seamless and streamlined, allowing recruiters to move with greater velocity than ever before.

Within just a few months, we’ve gone from taking around 6 days to schedule an interview, to now having a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes.

This unparalleled acceleration was possible thanks to the eradication of time-consuming manual scheduling tasks.

Wise are able to move quality candidates through the process much faster than before, reducing the risk of dropouts. “Interviews are now happening within 5-6 days of the interview request being sent. That used to be how long it took us to schedule, so we're moving much quicker – we're shaving a week off of the processes that we're running.”

In a hiring world where delays and email back-and-forth are the unfortunate norm, candidates are sharing their excitement over the newly streamlined process too.

Since implementing Cronofy, we've actually had candidates give unprompted feedback to us on how easy and smooth the scheduling of interviews was. We’ve never had that before.

Team expansion is a “constant evolution” for Wise; the company is continuing its focus on making irresistible experience a reality by “creating exceptional moments throughout the hiring process that the candidates will remember, and feel that they've been treated really well.” Honing in on moving candidates through the process with efficiency and personal touch, Wise aims to create memorable moments that outshine the unavoidable minutiae of hiring – the inevitable rejections, and the times where candidates may have to wait longer for a decision.

For Wise, using the right tools to augment their talent teams to do what they love has proved a winning formula. “You’re not going to create irresistible experiences purely through technology and automation,” explains Mark. “You’re going to need those personal elements.” By removing the administrative burden of scheduling, Wise is now empowering their talent team to focus on delivering human touch and personalization at the moments candidates want them most.