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Here’s why BGF’s £15m investment into Cronofy will revolutionise scheduling

Meet the Cronofy team at UNLEASH World 2025, October 20–22. Booth #C201

Cronofy

Mark Ridderhof

What could your team achieve with 300 extra hours a year per recruiter?

Mark Harbottle

Lever Integration

Lever

WEBINAR: Lever + Cronofy: How to schedule interviews faster and supercharge your recruitment team

Mark Ridderhof 0:00
Yeah, I think we can, we can get started making sure we value everyone's time. Thank you all for attending. Thanks for being here, live from the lovely sunny Amsterdam. And I'll be your host today. So my name is Mark Ridderhof I'm the heads head of sales at Cronofy. And I'd love to welcome you to our webinar today, how to schedule interviews faster and supercharge your recruitment team. We'll be having a discussion around how important it is to, you know, make sure you have an efficient process when it comes to interview scheduling. And I'll also be giving you a demo on what our new integration with Lever looks like. I'm joined today with with Amy who's our content marketer will be handling the chat. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. And I'm also here with our own head of talent, Mark H, as we like to refer to, we get two Mark's today. And he'll be introducing himself shortly and go into the depths of you know how to create a very efficient process and how he's done it at Cronofy. As mentioned before, my name is Mark Rudolph, I'm the head of sales at Cronofy. I've been working for different SaaS companies, but mainly around, you know, process improvements and process enhancements. And this is definitely a topic that has been coming up a lot with our customers. And also people are trying to solve interview scheduling and create an efficient process within the recruitment industry. So I'll hand it over to Mark H right now. So he can introduce himself, and then I'll take it over from there. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Harbottle 1:47
Yep, my name is Mark and I need a new profile picture. I'm our head of talent at Cronofy and responsible for the attraction retention and development of people in the business. I've been here two and a half years before that, I spent about 12 years working in recruitment agencies. And I ran my own agency for a while as well. So I'm really hoping today I can shed some light on the value of scheduling, and give you some real examples of the impact it's made not just on our hiring, but also my role in the business as well.

Thanks for the introduction Mark, to give you a little bit of background info on who we are, and why we think we are the interview scheduling experts and why we claim to be we have been around for almost a decade right now, what we've been doing in the past 10 years is powering the scheduling of different SaaS applications, mainly in HR and TA. So some of our customers are indeed, iCIMS, UKG. And what we've been able to do is schedule millions of interviews through, you know, 1000s and 1000s of recruiters and TA teams who've been relying on our technology to schedule their own interviews with candidates, as you know, it's been perceived as a low-value task, which is very time-consuming. What we've done is we've built our own off the shelf onto on top of sorry, our own off-the-shelf tool on top of our technology stack, which allow us to basically fill the gap of, you know, scheduling because, as you all know, scheduling can get quite messy. Most applicant tracking systems do have native scheduling. But you know, when it gets to panel interviews, or you know, when hiring manager blocked out of their calendar, then usually teams have to go back to the manual ways of working, which is counterproductive when you are looking to build an efficient process and gain advantage in a competitive market. So some of the numbers of our customers who have been utilized at Cronofy, as you know, they've experienced the 95% Faster scheduling 59% times, percent faster time to hire and you know, for recruiter looking to save almost 300 to 400 hours per year, which sometimes is equivalent to working day, a week, which can be quite a lot. You know, the current situation, as I've mentioned before, you know, there's a lot of scheduling that still being done manually, even though the integration is pretty new. We already have dozens of lever customers who are utilizing our, you know, our scheduling capabilities to solve the last mile basically the final gap of scheduling and I'll be showing you during the demo what that will look like. I'll be I'll be handing it over to Mark H right now. And we dive a little bit deeper into the benefits of of scheduling. As you can see, here are some of the benefits that we'll touch upon during the demo. Mark H over to you.

Mark Ridderhof 4:55
Cool, thank you. Yeah, so first of all, I thought it would be worthwhile having a bit of a recap on the recruitment industry today, I guess with the combination of skills gaps that recruiters are trying to fill, changing candidate expectations and the rise of recruitment tech as well, the industry is just super competitive right now. And although a lot of people probably seen a wave of redundancies in the tech sector, there's still a huge amount of competition for the very best talent. So kind of where does interview scheduling fit in? And kind of why is it so important as well, for me, it's all about the candidate experience, if I can ensure that candidates feel appreciated, their time is respected, and they enjoy interviewing with us well when it's only going to increase the chance of the best candidates accepting roles with us. Scheduling really is the first touch point when dealing with a company and for me, first impressions really, really count. I don't think there's been more important on the speed of recruitment processes as well. It's so competitive right now, long gaps between interviews mean that our competition are getting to offer stage before us candidates are getting disillusioned, and they have a less-than-perfect impression of us, particularly if they've had to fight their way through a recruitment process. I bet there's a lot of people in this room who can relate to an email from a candidate asking them for an update. As we can see on the slide, it takes recruiters, it takes 60% rather, of recruiters two days or more to schedule an interview. But for me with Cronofy it takes minutes, literally just minutes. I also get quite a lot of feedback from candidates, those who have been both successful and unsuccessful in recruitment processes who have commented on how positive and experience they've had interviewing with us. And I know that that comes from being able to choose a time that works for them, feeling that they've got complete control over how quickly they want to move through our processes too. And I really feel that automated interview scheduling, just can't be overlooked for speed up process and candidate experience as well. And that's kind of the next point that I wanted to focus on as well prioritising the candidate experience for me is essential to keeping the best talent in your recruitment process. Every year, we produce a survey of 6500 candidates across the globe to find out their preferences, expectations and frustrations with recruitment processes. And every single year, the data reinforces the importance of scheduling, both for candidates and employees as well. If you want to hire the best talent, and the best candidates, then interview scheduling needs to be fast and slick. And we found that a huge percentage, so more than a third of candidates leave a process because of scheduling delays. The manager is busy. There's no response after to and fro suggesting times and dates to each other. It's just really frustrating. Nearly three-quarters of applicants are influenced by the scheduling process as well, especially senior candidates, too. So the reason I put so much importance on the candidate experience is because I know that if someone has a positive experience, when they're offered a role, they'll view the offer with a more positive mindset. And nearly two-thirds of applicants just expect more from employers tech, particularly post-pandemic, there's a huge demand for talent. Now coming from all over the world with more remote working, it all adds up to employees needing to do the legwork it and scheduling is allowing me to automate something that for the candidate just feels so so easy. So all of these things really delays scheduling, the use of tech have a huge impact on the employer brand. And the interview process really is a reflection on the company as a whole candidates need to be fully bought in with no concerns to really commit to the interview process. And for me, I think scheduling plays a huge part in really building and developing a very, very strong employer brand. So before we kind of jump into the demo, I also wanted to mention the ways that Cronofy has helped me in my role. There's a few stats that I was putting out there on the screen, we've we've got a pretty low application-to-interview ratio, the industry average has dropped recently from 12 to 8.4%. Give you an idea. Ours was 7% last year and it's 4% so far this year. So the importance of managing a really small or even smaller talent pool is massive for me, but also making sure that we really get to know those applicants to make really good decisions. And this is even more important with senior candidates who are just so hard to attract. But also keep in the process as well because they're in such high demand. They're always getting approached by other businesses or there's always other opportunities out there. So knowing that I don't have to worry about giving them a great experience. It's really important to me, top-notch scheduling gives me that time. I can send 10 scheduled links out in less than 10 minutes. And I don't need to worry about the interview until the day it's happening. We also have a schedule on behalf of service. So I know that our hiring managers don't need to think about the interview either. The only time they're giving to interviewing is literally meeting and assessing candidates in the industry as well. The offer-to-acceptance ratio is nearly 50%. But it was 80%. To give you an idea this year, ours is 100%. So everyone who's been offered a role by Cronofy this year has accepted last year across all our roles. It was 77%. So, so we're doing better than the market. And again, I attribute that to giving great and giving a great impression. And a really, really good experience, I'm not wasting time repeating recruitment processes, because someone's accepted an offer from someone who moved quicker or sold themselves better than we did. And finally, the average time it takes us to move an applicant through the process is 21 working days. So again, we're nearly twice as quick as the market. We interviewed a senior engineer last year and took them through four interviews, and they accepted a job in 16 days. So we're not wasting time arranging interviews, everyone was myself, hiring managers, panel interviewers, and especially, arguably, most importantly, the candidate are only thinking about the interview themselves. And I feel really, really strongly about how our brand is perceived. So we've all heard the statistic that if you have one bad experience, you'll tell seven other people, I really don't want to miss out on the perfect candidate because of something that was said on Glassdoor that we could have resolved. A positive experience means a positive impression on our entire brand. You know, if this is what it's like interviewing here, imagine what it's like working here. That's that's what we're trying to create. And our scheduling tool has a lot of extra capabilities around the panel on complex interviewing. So things like sequencing and supporting really, really high volume recruitment is a godsend because it means I've got more time to do high-value jobs in the business, like working on coaching got our employer brand or diversity and inclusion as well, for example. So I've kind of touched on a few things, but speed is everything. For me in recruitment, it's all about being as efficient as possible. But there are a few headline things that I think are important to building a high-performing an efficient recruitment team. I think having a good relationship with the hiring managers first stuff is really important. They can trust me to put high-quality interviews in front of them. And I can trust them to make really good judgments, implementing new tech. So products like smart recruiters, we've utilized AI, for example, to transcribe some of the interviews to improve our quality. We've looked at new recruitment platforms to source candidates, we've been able to basically automate as much as we can, so we can spend more time doing proactive work that makes a difference. And of course, scheduling. Right? It's complex. It's messy. It's complicated. It's time-consuming, it's tedious. And that's kind of where Cronofy comes in. So yeah, kind of with that in mind, and getting off my soapbox a little bit. Mark R, the more good-looking Mark is going to give a demo of quantified, highlighting the additional capabilities our integration can provide to lever users. So Mark back to you

Thanks, Mark. And thanks for sharing those insightful governments and statistics. Yeah, obviously, we've covered a lot. Now it's time to give you a brief overview of what you know what Cronofy offers, in combination to lever, we've been speaking to a lot of Lever customers. And you know, it's great for native scheduling one to one when you get but when you get to blog calendars, you know, and panel interviews, that's when it becomes kind of messy, and people have to do load balancing using spreadsheets, or you know, when there's a lot of high volume, you still have to go back and forth here with your hiring managers to find suitable times. As you can see here, there's an overview of some of the features that we can we can cover for the demo, I'll be showcasing scheduling on behalf and the panel interviews also with low balancing into consideration. So here's an overview of some of the differences. We have this available online as well, if you want to take a look at it if you have more time. All right. Let me just jump straight into it. And share my screen. Okay, see, there we go. Yes. All right. So as you can see, I'm right now I'm in lever, what we've done. So most of our integrations are working quite similar. And what we've done is we've tried to stay with a close to the existing process as possible, because we've learned that, you know, a lot of recruitment teams, they don't want to leave their actual platform, so they want to stay within their ATS. And from there on, do whatever they need to do with scheduling interviews, send emails, because that's the source of truth, right? So they want to stick within the platform. So what I'm going to do is schedule an interview on behalf of my colleague. So I'll be using an existing template that I've built. So let's say the second interview in this case, and to now is scheduled on behalf of my colleague, which in this case, functioning as the head of sales. So what I can do now is I can choose when I'm booking for myself, someone else, or a group, which is, you know, equal to a panel or a group interview that's combined with different panelists and different groups you're pulling from. So in this case, working on behalf of my colleague, so let's take my colleague, Deniz, I can already see there's 117 slots available. So I mean, we know there's a lot of slots available to put this in, it's automatically capturing data from the actual candidate. So name and email address already been captured. conferencing in this case is Google meet. And I have to add a on interview. So this will trigger the feedback forms and lever. So all the existing workflows will just work as you're used to, when using this type of scheduling. I can offer the next 14 days. But let's imagine, Deniz is a very busy hiring manager, who only wants to do interviews on let's say, Tuesday afternoon, for instance. So what I can do now is I can say, I want to see the available time slots of only when he's free, or whether he's busy or not, Mark H already mentioned, you know, the relationship between the hiring manager is allows you to, let's say, you know, have a common understanding what sort of hiring manager of, you know, please block out your calendar every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoon. So I'll be using those time slots to offer to candidates to do any type of interviews. So as you can see, now the grey blocks disappear. And now I can offer these time slots. So even though they're blocked in their calendar, I can still use that time to offer to candidates create the invite link, copy, paste to the email, and I can send off the email. This is what a candidates would get to see. So the timezone is automatically captured based on your browser settings. And this will translate into 17 different languages. Now use the branding you've set up. So it's basically the look and feel of your company. Candidates pick the time, confirm? There we go. So what happens now the event is being created in Deniz' calendar, as a coordinator or recruiter, I get a notification. So I always know what's going on. So when someone is scheduled in, as Mark he mentioned, you know exactly when it's scheduled them, and you can check it off on the box. Regardless, so if I go back into Lever, as you can see, see this full screen interview. As you can see, it automatically triggers a feedback forms and it's displaying into lever, it's using Deniz is conferencing. And as I mentioned before, as a coordinator, I know exactly what's going on, because I will see a notification. That's the first use case. So the second one is a panel interview, which is a little bit more complex. So I'm using a group of four and I'm, I want to use two panellists to do that interview. And I can reuse the same link over and over again. So I can just distribute the link amongst different candidates. So let's advance this person to the on site interview. And I'm going to send another email. So it's basically the same process you're utilising is the final interview. So basically, I have two options, right? Now I can build an ad hoc panel. So you know, if this is an ever-changing panel, and you, you know, is doing an interview, I can then you know, add Deniz, and I can add another colleague of mine, let's say, Adam, so what what this does, it combines the availability. And as you can see, the slot counterar is already, you know, down to 51. So this is, you know, common availability amongst Deniz and Adam. But if I'm reusing the same people for a certain panel interview, I've built a group. So this is the panel interview I'm referring to already has a title, I can add description, which will be added to the event and using this tag. So this tag is also connected to constraints. So that means these people can only do you know, three interviews of these a week and max one per day, so we can do load balancing as well. Create the invite link, copy paste to the email. And we'll do the calendar comparisons in the back end. So the candidate just can just pick a time based on the availability There we go. Monday the eighth as you can see, they don't have to enter the details because I've already captured it and they can reuse the same link to reschedule. Right because you know scheduling a panel interview can be pay. But then when people are, you know, coming back to you and say they want to reschedule, they can just reuse the same link without you having to do anything. Again, go back into Lever. As you can see, this is a panel interview, me and my colleagues are a part of this triggering the feedback forms. And I'll receive a notification that it's been scheduled in, I'm part of this panel interview. So this looks a little bit different. But you know, when a candidate wants to reschedule, you will receive notifications, as well. That's it. So as you can see, you can stay within Lever and basically schedule any type of interview. Just a quick summary of what I've done in the last stage. As you can see, I can change this to require 1, 2, 3 for all of them. And I can add and delete people from a certain group. So if you need to update certain panelists, you can, you know, update the groups, and I can even pull from different groups. So maybe you want one from support, one from sales. And I can then combine all of those groups together that will do the calendar comparisons. Let me stop right there for a second because I've seen there's some questions in the chat as well.

So Theodora? What are the options to customize email and calendar invite templates, autofill tokens. So right now you can customize the events, details, we just send out a calendar invite. So regardless of whether you're using Google or Outlook, they the candidate will receive an Outlook or Gmail, invitation, the templates is something you would need to manage in Lever. So you do send out an email using Lever templates. Cronofy just enables you to inject a scheduling link. And that just you know, sends out emails or invites to candidates and then the description. As you can see, here, this is something you can manage in, you know, group rules, where you can add like specific descriptions. So this is something a lot of our customers are doing, please use this Google midlength and maybe get familiarised, I can add files if I want to. But my advice is to, you know, use the template, you have in Lever, because from an administrative standpoint, it's easier to manage and just rely on Cronofy to do scheduling instead. How to Fill tokens, that's something Yeah, I use Lever for so utilising lever or any other type of ATS. Usually they have an email client that they can use, where you have like autofill tokens, if that makes sense. Does this answer your question? Happy to take it offline as well, if you wish. Great. Any other questions? Thanks that we need to cover.

All right. And that case, we see a lot of questions that case thank you all for for taking the time to attend this webinar. We'll be sending out the recording as well. If you wish to schedule a more personalized demo, Amy has provided a link in order to do so. And we've also put in a link to the integrations page if I'm not sure we'll still waiting for that one. Okay, thank you all. We'll be sending out the recording again if you do wish to have a personalized demo use the link and we'll be reaching out with the recording as well and following up accordingly. We show a very good day and see you on the next one.

In recruitment, speed means everything. Recruiters can't afford to waste time on scheduling for complex, multi-person interviews.

Our Head of Talent Mark Harbottle shares his tips on how to make the process faster for high-performance recruitment teams, saving recruiters one day a week.


Plus, see our new Lever integration in action, demonstrated by our Head of Sales!

How to schedule interviews faster and supercharge your recruitment team’s performance

In recruitment, speed means everything. Recruiters can't afford to waste time on scheduling for complex, multi-person interviews.

Our Head of Talent Mark Harbottle shares his tips on how to make the process faster for high-performance recruitment teams, saving recruiters one day a week.


Plus, see our new Lever integration in action, demonstrated by our Head of Sales!