Update: 2024 Candidate Expectations Report is now live!

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Cronofy

Mark Harbottle

How would your hiring process change if you could save 300 hours a year by automating interview scheduling?

Deniz Erduran

WEBINAR: Transform interview scheduling and save each recruiter 5 hours a week

Okay. Hi, everyone. Welcome to our webinar on transforming interview scheduling, and saving recruiters five hours per week. A quick introduction for me, my name is Mark, I'm the head of talent at Cronofy. I've been here for two and a half years now. But before that I spent just over 10 years in recruitment, both agency and in-house. I also ran my own agency for a while as well. We've also got Deniz joining us. Deniz, do you want to introduce yourself?


Yes, thank you, Mark. I'm Deniz I've worked at Cronofy for about a year now. I started as an SDR now, an account executive and soon to be fully fledged account executive. And I've been speaking to a lot of recruiters on a daily basis now. And I've been hearing a lot of their insights and what they need to improve mostly around the admin work. So yeah, happy to be here. Thanks so much.


Great. And finally, we've got Kat who's our head of marketing, who is our technical support today as well. So this webinar is all about saving recruiters time we're going to be talking about and demonstrating a few topics, including rescheduling panel interviews, candidate experience reporting, and integrations and implementations. Now, they might sound like pretty dry topics. But I promise that when you've seen what Deniz has to show you, you'll be as excited about these things as we are. We also want this to be an interactive webinar, we've got some polls, because we really want to hear from you all and make the conversation more relevant. So if you have any questions along the way, please pop them into the chat, or send a direct message over to Kat she'll be answering them live. And I'll be sweeping up anything else along the way. So let's dive right into it. On the subject of rescheduling, the first poll is how do you deal with rescheduling? Just give it a minute for the answers to come through.


Or is either e mails back and forth. That's one that has been coming up a lot in my conversation with prospects. So yeah, the tried and true the classic method. Right? Emails bounce back and forth.


Cool. A lot of coordinators. It's interesting.


Points, emails back and forth the popular option there. Thank you everyone for contributing to that. So I guess I've got a bit of a story really to share on that. Back from my recruitment days, I always used to struggle with rescheduling. Particularly for very senior positions, people are busy. I can certainly recall a candidate needing to reschedule a final interview twice before the hiring manager just decided to cancel the interview altogether just completely withdraw the application. He said at the time it gave a negative impression that someone wanted to reschedule now, I was pretty confident or as confident as I could be that rescheduling was for a justified reason. But because it took so long to book an interview, it felt like it was never going to happen. So at the time, the complication of rescheduling cost us the opportunity to hire that person. So my question, Deniz, for you is How could someone in my role solve this problem with Cronofy?


Thanks, Mark for that question. It's a really interesting and important topic. rescheduling course, when you're scheduling manual interviews can take up a lot of time, let me just start sharing my screen so I can show you how we solve that at Cronofy hope everyone can see that. So Cronofy works with a lot of different ATS applicant tracking systems. And even if you don't have an ATS, you can still use Cronofy on top of Outlook and Gmail. But for this example, I wanted to show you how it looks like inside greenhouse. We also have full integration with SmartRecruiters, Lever Workday, BambooHR, just give you a clear image how it looks like. So to reschedule an interview, we first have to schedule an interview. So let's move candidate to different stages. With Cronofy, you can even automate the steps within the stages. 

So if I move it through phone screen, it will automatically fire off an email with a self scheduling link. So that's a really good way to optimise it. But sometimes you need to go a little bit off books because not all your hiring managers are always available. So lets me move it to the different stage. And if I wanted to do an ad hoc scheduling link with multiple hiring managers, I would just create a self schedule link through the extension. So up here I have the option to schedule something for myself someone else or a group. In this case I want to choose for someone else. And I want to add in Elizabeth as well. I'm gonna ignore availability for a second, I'm doing that because a lot of times hiring managers, like I mentioned are blocked out of their calendars.


And this is a very common problem. How we solve that is basically having a common understanding between recruiters and hiring managers really helps in this case, because if you say your hiring manager needs to be available for one or two afternoons in a week for interviews, they can block it off into calendars. And we have the unique capability to override those block times in your calendars. So if I scroll down, I can send the availability for the next seven days, but also choose Custom hours whether Mark is free, and also when he's busy. 

So as you can see, the grey squares are all the busy ones, I can choose whether Mark is busy or not, and they will open up. Still, some of them are grey. That's because they're already booked interviews. So in a row of double booked interviews, I copy the link and I paste it into the email. And this is what candidate will see. So I'm just going to choose the first option. Everintron is a made up company can be any company with your own branding, your own colours, timezones automatically recognised and the language of this page can be translated in 70 different languages depending on the project settings, so now it's been scheduled in, you talked about rescheduling. 

Now it's very easy for the candidates is to go go ahead and back to the same link and click on reschedule or in a calendar event, there's also a link to the rescheduling. And they can just click reschedule. And the timeslot that we've picked before is now gone, because this is real time availability. If the hiring manager decides to reschedule, we can go into the scheduling dashboards, usually what happens is that the hiring manager reaches out to the candidate to then give the option to the candidate to reschedule. That's of course, the best candidate experience because then you're taking their time and consideration. But what you can also do is you can cancel the request here. And because it's a custom hour slot, there's no option for cancel and reschedule. That's only when you're sending out availability for the next 7 to 14 days. 

I will explain that a little bit later on when I'm showing independent interview scheduling. So because this is a full integration, it will also reflect back into Greenhouse interview data I need. So as you can see, the interview is at 12pm with Mark and Elizabeth, and it will also trigger any existing workflows. So if you have setup scorecards, feedback forms, however, as the ATS calls it, it will be automatically triggered with. So far, so good. I know this has been a lot of information. But over to you, Mark.
That's amazing. Thank you very much really helpful that Deniz. So I'm just gonna see really quickly if you've got any questions before we move on. I don't think so. Amazing. And it's probably worth mentioning, Deniz, that it talks about respecting the availability before or overriding calendar availability, but it's still respects Cronofy interviews. Is that right? Or would it override those as well?


Yeah, that's a great question. We're kids. We still respect the Cronofy booked interviews. Otherwise, you're going to have double booked interviews. And it's no, that's not a great candidate experience, of course.
Cool. So you know that if an interview is booked through Cronofy there's no way that it'll be double booked through Cronofy. Exactly. Amazing. Okay. Great. Thank you. Okay, so next up, we wanted to talk about panel interviews. Our next poll on my next question to you all is how do you manage your panel interviews?


Mine was, again, the trial tried and tested back in the day, it was always to and fro for me.


Yeah, I can imagine a lot of back and forth.


And particularly when you work in agency, you're not just asking for a hiring manager's time. But you're also asking for a candidate's time as well, which kind of makes it double complicated.


Yeah. Yeah, that's what I get it a lot as well in the conversation I'm having with your peers. Yeah. See that the most of them get availability from hiring managers individually. Let's see if there are more answers coming in.
Seems to be that the popular choice? Yeah, get availability from hiring managers individually. Amazing. Thank you everyone for your responses. So I can definitely recall a time I was hiring for it was an IT director position for SME a small to medium business, about 100 people big. 

And my main stakeholders at that time were the CEO CFO and the CTO, which were impossible diaries to coordinate so even though I had like a really really really good relationship with those people, we knew each other really well. You know, loads and loads of trust. It was just getting availability. It just wasn't something that a please or thank you could fix. So my question to you, Deniz is tell me how is Cronofy going to make my life easier when I'm trying to arrange panel interviews with stakeholders who are incredibly busy?


That's a great question. I think we've touched upon the going off books a little bit in the last bit of the demo I just showed you. What we do a lot as well as we try to educate hiring managers on their calendar hygiene, we now have a dedicated customer success person on board as well, Ilja, and she's fully focused on helping our clients achieve a better candidate experience by also having hiring managers a better calendar hygiene. 

So we've made a lot of documentation on it. So if you're listening right now, and you want more information about that, just shoot me a message on LinkedIn, my LinkedIn and marketing team will be at the end of the webinar, as well. So don't hesitate to reach out. If you've done all that work and your hiring managers do have their calendars up to date, they can also use group scheduling your recruiters to coordinate these interviews. How you can do that is basically I'll choose my template, within Greenhouse for the panel interview. 

And what you can do with Cronofy can use group functionality. And it's kind of like a template for groups. And for this interview, you set it up once it takes 5-10 minutes to set it up. And once you've set up all the parameters in the title and description, you can just reuse that every time. So it just takes you two clicks, to create an invite link. And you send it out to the candidate. And this is what they will see. Again, availability this time, it's availability for next 14 days want to give at least enough options to you candidate, of course, I'm just going to pick the first option that's out there.


And that's Deniz just sorry to interrupt quickly. That's that's the availability of all those people who are going to be involved in that panel interview,
right? That's a great question. So the panel interview, how I have set it up this time is I required three people from this group. So I can change that as well. I can say I require all these people to be available, I can add more names could be a bigger pool of people of 10 people, you need three, two or three people to be available. Usually it's three people. 

But yeah, it's kind of different role, of course. And then in a group rules, I set the parameters. So I just could be an on site or virtual interview. And duration of can be different. You can enable disable rescheduling for me or for the candidate as well. It's very helpful because a lot of roles, you just need to reuse each time for a bunch of candidates. 

So if you have a high volume of candidates can just reuse this group rule each and every time. And if you don't want to use the personalised link, you need to use the public link. So you can send that link out to multiple candidates all once. And they just pick a time slot that works for them. But like I said, it's still respecting the Cronofy booked in interviews and as real time availability, so you can never have double booked interviews. Perfect. 

And one other thing I wanted to mention, a lot of companies choose to regulate also how many interviews hiring managers do on a weekly or daily basis. So even out the workload little bit and your hiring managers are not overloaded with interviews, especially in high volume recruitment. And that's something you can also already build in for each group role. So let's say your hiring managers are only allowed to do three interviews a week, that's something you can build in as well. We can help out with that.


Okay, Deniz, we've had two questions. One is, how can I change group rules? And how much time does it take? And another question is, how many groups can be created?


That's a good question. So how long it takes to let me just address the first question, how long does it take to create or change the group rules? It's fairly straightforward. I think it takes you one or two minutes. If you're handy with it. You can just go through all the options here and click Save, then you've done it. I think it takes you about one or two minutes. But oftentimes what we do to get clients started with this because now the first time doing it, it takes you maybe half an hour is we help out with setting up the group. 

So Ilja, like I mentioned before, she's dedicated to set up our customers for success. And she will help out with the first dozen group rules. And the second question, how many groups can you have? This is just an example of our test environment as much as you want basically so you could envisage a, even a large business with lots of different roles that they recruit for with lots of different groups of people involved in that interviews, and lots of different stages of interviews where there's different types and lengths and people and sequences. There's a rule for every single one, right?


Exactly. Yeah. For each, that's usually what happens. They separate each group rule in different roles that they're hiring for. And sometimes you also need for for a one interview, and each panellist from different departments. That's something you can also set up with group rules, you can combine different departments within within one interview, that's also a unique feature that we have at Cronofy.


Right. Okay. Thank you. I'm just near the question. Sorry to interrupt you, then.


So thank you for that. So the next poll, and the next question that I want to ask everyone, we're talking a little bit about candidate experience now. So how do you ensure a great candidate experience?


Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to this.


Curious all of the above for everything.


You get much on versus right. Where we're going to every time people speak about candidate experience a lot since last year. So
yeah, I was just about to ask if you get a lot of people talking about it in demo calls and things like that. Do you find it's of interest to people at the moment?


Yeah, I think if I asked for requirements, it's definitely in the top three.
Okay. Yeah, great. Right, so the popular choice, it seems just wait for it to come in is a swift, quick hiring process as well. In my it absolutely. does. I mean, in my humble opinion, opinion, opinion. Sorry. In my humble opinion, candidate experience is the number one most important aspect of recruitment for me, I get unprompted feedback on how much people enjoy interviewing with us at Cronofy, even even candidates who were unsuccessful those who we rejected for whatever reason who answered class will still say to us how much they've enjoyed the experience of interviewing with us. 

For me, a positive experience increases the likelihood of someone accepting an offer. But a less than perfect experience means they're more likely to consider other offers in a very, very competitive industry. I've always thought I don't want to lose out on someone because of something that I have control over. My, my vision, what I'm always aiming for is, well, if this is what it's like working here, if this is what it's like interviewing here, imagine what it's like working here. That's that's what I'm always aiming for. So my question for you, Deniz, is how can I improve the candidate experience with Cronofy?


That's a great question. I think you can do it in multiple ways. I think most importantly, is keeping track of all the candidates that you have, of course, with the reporting, but also, what are they seeing when they receive a invite from you. So I think I briefly showed you guys already before, but let me just go in there. I've invited myself for an interview. So this is what an interview invite could look like. On the candidate side, this is what they receive. There's a description that you can change and also the title of the interview. So this is the panel interview, you can change that for a draw, for example, you can say for each roll radius. So that's one part of it. It's very consistent, you always get the same invites and recognisable. 

And also, if they open up your link, it will also have your personalised branding in there so they know, exactly. It's coming from you from your company. And uniquely to Cronofy, it's always a personalised link. So it's good if not include their name, interview title. And what else is important is also keeping track of your candidates. Which ones are you interviewing at the moment? But before I jump into reporting, I think you had another poll question. Right?


That's right. Yeah. A little bit of a sidestep but still definitely on the topic of candidate experience as well. That's right. We seem to know from everyone. How do you keep track of your candidates and interviews as well? Yeah. scheduling tools ATS Google Sheets spreadsheets is a common one. Yep.


Because we have had a question, Deniz that came through by the way, which is reporting can reporting results be downloaded? That's something that will be interesting to cover. but we'll cover that in a second. Yeah, yeah.


So how do you keep traffic candidates and interviews?


And the results are, ATS spreadsheets? Yeah, 50/50, ATS and spreadsheets. Good to hear that no one said I don't. which is positive. So amazing. Thank you. Okay. So my question to you, then Deniz is, is on the reporting side? How, how does it work? How do you have more visibility on candidates that are progressing or moving through similar processes? And a question that came from from the group is, Can reports be downloaded as well?


Yes, that's a great question. I would love to show you the request page. So let me just go in here, this is an overview of all your requests. And it could be your requests or all within your organisation. A lot of times, definitely, in local governments, they have different departments. And as you can see, on the left hand side, we have different organisational units, we call them internally, but basically departments or teams within your company. And you can also filter on them separately. 

Oh, that's a really good way to separate the different departments within or other companies within your company, and filter on the amount of interviews you're doing. So. This is a great way also to see how many requests that are still pending. You don't want to miss out on candidates, of course, because sometimes, if you're using Google spreadsheets or your ATS, they're not made to keep a really good overview of your all your candidates, at least from my experience. 

And this is a great way to see all your candidates you're currently interviewing, and that you've sent out a scheduling link to, but they haven't picked the time yet. So based on this information, you can decide actually, this person, I've sent the scheduling link on the Fourth of July, that's already pretty while ago. Maybe I should follow up with this person, because I wouldn't really want to have this person in front of my hiring manager. And we can also filter on tags and tags is very interesting one. 

For example, if you're scheduling for specific role, you want to know exactly how many of those you've done in the last 30 days. That's something you can do with Cronofy as well you can filter on the on the role if you added that to each interview, or added to the group rule. It has it standardised for this group. You can have a standardised stack, and then you can export this. 

So there was also the Question from the audience. Can I export this data? Yes, you can. Only 30 days back back in Back to the Future, I want to say - on brand. And so you need to basically if you want to do it consecutively every 30 days or every month, you can put a date in your in your calendar to export this data every month. So you have a clear overview of it. Any any questions on this?


Double checking in for any more questions. Don't think so. That's great. Thanks for that. And it's really, really helpful. Okay, and the next thing that we want to talk about today is implementations and integrations as well. So the final poll for us is how important is an integration when it comes to a new tool?


Sure Deniz you talk to a lot of people who use a lot of different tools in their roles.


Definitely, yeah, hiring recruiters nowadays. Either they don't have any tools or they are packed with a lot of tools. There's no kind of like a no in between nowadays.


Yeah, that's fair. And we see the results here. So somewhat important seems to be the most, the most most popular response there. And I guess it does to some respect it is probably depends slightly on kind of the the tech stack or the infrastructure that you might be working with yourself. I know myself, I've struggled with a SaaS overkill or SaaS fatigue almost I'm sure there's a pun in there somewhere. 

But I guess what I'm interested to know from you, Deniz, is how Cronofy integrates and how it's making like recruiters lives easier was perhaps avoiding that. SaaS overkill. 

Yeah, just to give you some background information, and I know you you already know this Mark, but for our audiences that historically we've been powering 75 Different ATS providers with scheduling capabilities And that's on our API side of the business. Today, we're talking about the scheduler, the off the shelf SaaS product. And we see that a lot of ATS providers just use a tiny bit of the capabilities that we have, especially around panel interview scheduling, that's something a lot of ATS providers are lacking. 

And that's basically the gap that we're trying to fill with the scheduler. So if you look at this list, I'm showing you right here, BambooHR Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, Lever, Workday. Those are the ones that have a full integration with Cronofy, or briefly integrated with basically. And that means that you can schedule directly from the ATS, but also it will trigger any existing workflows, feedback forms, scorecards, hiring kits, however you want to call them, every ATS has their own name attached to it. 

But it will work seamlessly together. But then again, if your ATS is not on here, and you want to know if it integrates with yours, well, we do do have an is a Chrome extension or an asset extension that works on top of any application. So you don't have to leave that application in order to create a self scheduling link. That will already save you a tremendous amount of time. So I also encourage people that if you even don't see your SaaS platforms on here today, we can still work together with you.


So it works with a tool, but you don't need a tool to make it work, right. How, how long does it take to setup so for the for the setup usually takes about a month. So we have actually want to show you guys a quick overview how it looks like. So Ilja . I'm going to mention her name again. Sorry Ilja. She made this nice overview of for how how long it takes to implement Cronofy. So usually the planning takes about two weeks, we'll go over the process mapping the onboarding call one of the goals or metrics?


Sorry, I can't see that on my on my screen. It's not sure if you've got it.
I'm just sharing my web browser. Sorry about that. Right. This will help.
There we go. That's it. Got it.


Yeah, this is our one pager on timeline to launch, meaning it takes about one month approximately, to do all the planning and the workshops and the technical setup. And onboarding. This is very, very fast. If I look at other tools out there, competitors, like good time, they take about either three to six months to set up. And with Cronofy, it's much less. That's because it's a very simple tool, it's very easily to transfer the information to another person say, Hey, this is how we work with Cronofy. 

It's not rocket science. We're trying that's also one of our goals to really make it user friendly and simple tool to use. The planning usually takes about two weeks. So we do some process mapping, we start off how does your process look like right now. And what's the ideal situation with Cronofy. And that's also one of the goals and success metrics is aligned with that. So a lot of times companies look at time to hire, time to fill probably very familiar with those terms Mark. 

And, of course, like last time presented Cronofy's metrics, you're very proud of them. So I remember - Absolutely. And now, the second second part of it is the technical setup. So usually with the IT admin, we'll go over the connecting everyone simultaneously to Cronofy platform, we call it an AD Sync Active Directory Sync, everyone within your workspace have has a Cronofy account simultaneously. 

So no one has to go to manual signup flow or the hassle of installing or downloading Cronofy, that's all done automatically. So once we've done that, we'll do a kickoff session with either the hiring managers and recruiters, or both of them usually. And we give enough information so they can get going. But also, after this first month, we keep on educating them with resources and documentation afterwards. Usually what happens is that people start looking for a scheduling tool at the worst time possible. 

And when the volume is very high, and they need to hire a lot of people so they don't have any time to implement something. So I always advise if you're expecting you're having a slow period, then look at the scheduling tool like Cronofy and start talking to us because then we have enough time to implement everything before the storm hits.


So yeah, being prepared ahead of time if, for example, you knew that there was a lot of roles coming up, or as you say there was a downtime downtime in recruitment, it's better to be prepared and do this thing. I do this early,
right. Yep. Exactly. Because nowadays, a lot of recruiters are tasked with the task of scheduling interviews, they don't have the luxury anymore of basically, coordinators scheduling all their interviews, that luxury is gone now. 

Because a lot of those people are laid off. And now, all the heavy lifting is done by recruiters, but they need to do a lot of other things, right? They have to look at resumes, they do need to do sourcing, and also give a great candidate experience and employee relationships. So all of that combined, you want to cut out as much as admin work as possible. And this is, I think, a great way to do it.


Great. And you're right on that subject. It is, you know, it's challenging for recruiters. It's one of the things I find with new SaaS products is there's often quite a heavy, upfront cost. So what are the pricing options for a product like this? 

Yeah, that's a great question Mark. So we like I think I mentioned in the beginning as well, but I'm going to repeat it anyways, that we have an active user base pricing, meaning you only pay for what you use, so everyone within your company can be connected to Cronofy with an account for free, he only started paying for the ones that actually use it. 

Meaning if you have an interview amount of let's say 50 interviews, but only 10 of them. 10 of hiring managers are conducting them, you only pay for 10 people. And they're interchangeable. So each month, you could have five different people conducting interviews, and you don't have to do any user management or seat management, when you call with, for example, Calendly, and let me share a screen of the pricing page real quick. 

Because we have some information on that just very open on our website. Go to cronofy.com/pricing You have to a guy in the scheduler separated, of course, I'm gonna talk about the scheduler today. So these are the scheduler pricing, it starts off with the basic model, it's very low entry. The first users are only $15 per month. So if you have three recruiters and and let's say, three hiring managers in your team, you're only paying for six active users if they all are part of scheduled interview in that month. And then we move on to the annual pricing for Business and Enterprise. It's 599 billed annually per month. 

And yet this is for up to 50 active users, then again, each additional user will become less expensive. So for the business is $10. And surprise, even $5 For any additional active users. Cool, that's amazing. Thank
you. Yeah, really excited for that, then it's really insightful. And I thought it'd be worth opening the questions to the floor. Does anyone have anything that they wanted to ask about anything? Ideally, recruitment and scheduling. But any other questions? 

Interview scheduling automation to streamline recruitment processes to make teams more efficient.

Interview scheduling: streamline hiring processes and make your team more efficient

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