Founded in 2015 in the United States, Wade & Wendy uniquely offers enterprise-level organizations support for those on both sides of the talent acquisition journey. Prospective candidates (through the job discovery, application and interview process) and hiring teams both benefit, with technology that enhances recruiting experiences and improves collaboration for all. At the software’s centre are two AI personalities, Wade and Wendy.

Wendy automates key recruiting functions – such as sourcing, screening, and scheduling qualified and interested candidates – thus enabling recruiters to better focus their time on optimizing the candidate experience.

Wade is a personal career advisor, connecting candidates to personalized job opportunities and professional insights intended to help optimize their job search, set and attain career goals. By harnessing the power of AI, Wade & Wendy provide an end-to-end solution for recruitment processes. It’s a more humanized talent experience, and scalable, knowledgeable and insight-driven processes.

Wade & Wendy’s users are recruiters and TA teams – a group who have historically been overloaded with a lots of repetitive, administrative, time-consuming tasks. The 2020 unemployment crisis in the US hasn’t helped. Many now lower headcount TA teams are under more pressure than ever to adapt. Often fielding the same number of applications just with a smaller team, and expected to deliver the necessary great experience to candidates to boot.

Wade & Wendy have also been observing record shifts in the workforce. Application numbers are fluctuating depending on the industry and between job functions. Employees and teams that used to be office-based are now remote and hiring professionals must manage all of this digitally.

These rapid changes are the reason why some TA teams are struggling. Many organizations aren’t structured to handle rapid fluctuations in hiring demands and now have to manage a talent pool that keeps increasing rapidly. The consequence is that it becomes virtually impossible for understaffed Talent Acquisition teams to manually find the right talent for the right roles. Especially as they also have to deliver a personalized and engaging candidate experience while often operating at a lower capacity.

Even before the pressures 2020 has brought, recruiters were faced with having to handle more vacancies and more work in general. This has a direct impact on their ability to engage and create positive relationships with candidates.

Wade & Wendy’s AI platform relieves this manual burden on recruiters by automating three of their core functions: sourcing, screening, and coordination. Crucially these are all aspects of recruitment which benefit from computer intervention – either through acceleration or by removing unconscious bias. Wendy finds and engages candidates for open roles, uses conversational AI to screen inbound applicants, and nurtures and guides candidates throughout the hiring process.

The Challenge

It’s with their commitment to automation and understanding how they could improve the day-to-day working lives of recruiters that Wade & Wendy truly excel. It was through their quest to find and relieve them of the bigger administrative burdens – and free up time for focusing on what really matters – that they identified and set out to solve one of the great administrative headaches of the industry.

Scheduling is one of the biggest time sinks for overstretched recruiting teams – and for recruiting teams in general – and one of the biggest hurdles when trying to coordinate with candidates. Recruiters have to communicate in real time – disrupting their day – to catch candidates when they’re available, before engaging in an unpleasant back-and-forth to find the right time. All this is happening while they could be working on higher value tasks, like preparing for the interview itself.

This is often occurring right at the moment when the candidate should be most excited about the process: they’ve discovered the role, engaged with it, and now they’re stuck trading messages. As a result, in the time that it takes to coordinate an interview time, candidates can often lose interest, and some end up getting lost in the sea of applicants.

To solve this, Wade & Wendy needed a flexible automated scheduling solution, designed so that qualified and engaged candidates could move frictionlessly through the stages of the hiring process on their own time.

The Solution

Wendy’s Scheduling & Coordinating

After researching the solutions available on the market to integrate real-time scheduling into their applications, the team at Wade & Wendy was looking for a scalable and secure scheduling platform and that’s why they decided to partner with Cronofy.

Wendy eliminates any friction of interview scheduling altogether through the automation of this step, which is powered by Cronofy’s scheduling technology. Wendy is able to generate links for candidates to schedule their one-on-one, panel, & group interviews, offering times that reflect each interviewers’ real-time availability. This eliminates scheduling back-and-forth, provides flexible scheduling windows and – last but not least – is safe and secure.

When a candidate is a fit for the role, they are fast-tracked and streamlined into the hiring process; creating a fully-automated experience for both candidate and recruiter.
After being qualified by Wendy, the candidate is notified about next steps in the hiring process and is tasked with booking time with the corresponding recruiter.

For recruiters, Wendy acts as a team member that completes all top-of-funnel tasks, delivering nothing but engaged qualified candidates, scheduled right into their calendars. The calendar is updated in real-time, so there are never scheduling inconsistencies on either end. This helps prevent double-bookings and reduces no-shows.

The Cronofy Calendar API is designed to be extremely secure. When a recruiter logs into their Wade & Wendy platform, they can be assured of the security and privacy of their calendar.

Lastly, to make the process even more seamless, the scheduling and coordination functions are entirely customizable. Recruiters have the flexibility to connect any video conferencing service or vendor to the API to conduct remote interviews. These conferencing details are shared with the candidates when they book an interview time.

Impact of Embedded Scheduling on hiring

Without the friction caused by manual and often tedious interview scheduling, recruiting can ‘just happen’. When qualified and interested candidates are identified by Wade & Wendy’s software they show up on a recruiter’s calendar. Recruiters and candidates alike experience something special: an automated recruiting process where and when it matters.

Wade & Wendy’s platform automates the parts of the recruitment process that benefit from being automated. Integrating with Cronofy’s scheduling technology is a huge part of that, enabling recruiting teams to reduce time & effort on lengthy top-of-funnel tasks. They have observed on average an 82% reduction in cost per hire for their customers, through using their software.

Successes don’t stop there. Recruiters who use Wade & Wendy see a 59% faster speed to higher rate. This shows that through re-engagement, scheduling automation, & data-driven processes, Wendy can reduce the number of human interactions required to identify top candidates and get the right talent to interview – filling roles faster. Scheduling is an integral part of that. It is what enables recruiters to offer a fully automated process without the bottle neck of interview scheduling.

Organizations that added Wendy to their recruitment tech stacks have seen an average of 284 hours saved per recruiter per month by automating these top-of-funnel tasks. Once more, scheduling has been identified as a key contributor to this time saving. Just think what else these hours can be spent on: those tasks lower down the hiring funnel which demand more human interactions. Focus is shifted, dedicating this time to only the best candidates and ensuring their experience is first-class. There’s also more time to work on the key challenges in the industry, diversifying their portfolios, specializing in new roles and working to find the right talent for more vacancies.

Cronofy’s technology also democratizes scheduling for candidates, regardless of their current employment situation. Empowering them to go through the job search process and to schedule on their own time, without having to worry about coordinating or waiting on recruiters to email them. The dreaded interview scheduling dance is no more!

By providing candidates an engaging, personalized, and seamless scheduling process with Wendy, recruiters are actually able to offer a better candidate experience to their talent pool. This is something computers can do better. Coordinating multiple calendar availabilities and presenting these to the candidate to select a time slot that suits them. And the entire end-to-end process can happen in under a minute, at the convenience of the candidate. This contributes to candidates being more engaged throughout the recruitment process and reduces the risks of companies missing out on talent because a candidate has dropped off.

The future of Scheduling in Recruitment

The results that Wade & Wendy achieved by integrating automated, real-time and secure scheduling to their product show that there are plenty of opportunities to streamline the recruitment process and save recruiters’ time. The changes we are observing because of the dramatic increase of remote teams is going to require organizations to invest into recruiting tools that put the candidates first.

That’s why the Cronofy team is constantly developing the scheduling features that TA teams require to adapt to this changing world. From personalized scheduling tools to better video conferencing integration.

If you want to learn more about how you can deliver better scheduling to your users and clients, get in touch today.