As a recruiter, I am sure you would agree that phone screens are extremely helpful as they give you a much better perspective about the candidate than the resume itself. But since it can be frustrating and time consuming to schedule these phone screens with everyone, many recruiters end up narrowing down the pool of candidates a lot more purely on the basis of resume. Just so that they don't have to schedule as many phone screen calls.
Most recruiters that I have interacted with, believe that they may be missing out on some very good candidates because they are on a tight deadline and want to have a narrow pool of candidates for phone screening. If only it was possible to spend less time scheduling the calls and collaborate with other recruiters to get through the candidates faster.
Workflow in absence of an automated scheduling tool like FreeBusy:
Let's say if you have a team of 2-3 recruiters working with you, and you have completed the resume screening. The workflow would be to:
- Divide the list of candidates that need to go through phone screening between the three of you.
- Each recruiter starts the email back and forth to schedule phone screening with their own list of candidates.
- Each recruiter completes the phone screening calls with all the candidates from their own list.
Problems with this workflow:
While the above strategy gives you the benefit of being able to divide and conquer, it does not truly allow you to collaborate and work together through the process. It does not allow you to maximize the availability by pooling all your availabilities together and letting candidates pick a time when any one of you is available.
A 10x better workflow with FreeBusy
FreeBusy allows you to collaborate in true sense with its team scheduling capabilities. Here is how the workflow would change to reduce the recruitment cycle drastically:
- Setup a round-robin appointment type for phone screening call with all the three recruiters as hosts.
- Share the appointment booking page with all the candidates in the list (no need to divide the list)
- Candidates open the link to find all the times when either one of the recruiter is available for a phone screening call and pick the time that works for them
Advantages of the workflow with FreeBusy:
- FreeBusy shares a combined availability to offer candidates several more time slots in a given period of time to complete the phone screening calls as quickly as possible.
- It takes care of distributing the workload using a sophisticated round-robin strategy so you do not have to worry about load balancing.
- The automated scheduling eliminates all the email back and forth
FreeBusy further integrates with several web conferencing tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Meet, GoToMeeting, RingCentral, Webex etc. So, when the phone screening call is scheduled, it can talk to your preferred conferencing tool on your behalf and automatically generate a call link for the phone screen and add it to the Location of the calendar invite.
It thus saves you a ton of time so that you and your team can spend more time talking to several more candidates and find the best fit for your team.