If you were to ask a recruiter to share the biggest frustration of their role as a recruiter, 4 out of 5 recruiters would have a common response: scheduling interviews. And that's the reason we started FreeBusy, to help you streamline the workflow and automatically get interviews scheduled.
But if you are not so sure how scheduling with an appointment booking page can help you, let us first take a look at some of the top reasons shared by recruiters that make scheduling 1:1 interviews with candidates so frustrating:
- It takes up a lot of time and needs several email exchanges:
As a recruiter you would often end up spending ~1-2 hours everyday in going back-and-forth on emails, trying to find the best time for a pool of candidates. It accounts for nearly 20-25% of your work hours spent just scheduling 1:1 interviews. - It requires constant efforts to avoid double bookings:
Your availability as a recruiter is constantly changing since when a candidate agrees on one of the shared time slots, it is no longer available for the rest of the candidates. So you have to keep informing candidates of your changing availability to avoid getting double booked. - It is a manual process prone to mistakes:
When you are communicating with several potential candidates during the recruitment cycle, you often have to engage in many repetitive tasks such as: sending details and instructions, sharing some time options, summarize and take notes after the interview etc. Such manual tasks with every candidate can often result into mistakes and wasted efforts.
I am sure you would have some other reasons to add to it as well, but these certainly make scheduling 1:1 interviews a big challenge you face everyday.
So how does a tool like FreeBusy help recruiters in this scheduling challenge?
FreeBusy helps you build an appointment booking page that checks your availability in real time across all your connected calendars and only shows times when you are free. It automates scheduling to free you up from all the back and forth required for scheduling interviews.
Here is how recruiters using FreeBusy have streamlined their scheduling process based on their preferences:
- Create an interview specific booking page for the job opening:
FreeBusy allows to create any number of appointment booking pages you need. So recruiters often setup a new appointment type with a title that can help identify interviews easily on their calendar. For example: [Job Opening]-[Interview Type] - Restrict availability to certain hours of the day for the interview:
It is often a good practice to plan your day in certain blocks of time to maximize your efficiency. So FreeBusy helps you set blocks of time as availability during the day when you would prefer to have interviews scheduled. - Add instructions and collect information you need before interview:
You can add certain instructions that are visible on the booking page itself and some that make its way into the confirmation emails and calendar invite. You can even add some questions that the candidate has to fill before they can book a time with you. - Connect your preferred web-conferencing tool:
FreeBusy integrates with several web conferencing tools (check full list) such that when candidates book a slot, FreeBusy would talk to the web conferencing tool on your behalf and generate a link that gets automatically added to location in the calendar invite. - Configure multiple reminders to avoid no-shows:
FreeBusy allows you to send multiple additional reminders which can be 24 hours in advance to even 1 hour in advance. You can even let candidates opt-in for an SMS reminder that can ensure a drastic reduction in no-shows.
Once you have setup the appointment booking page, you can share the link to the page with all the potential candidates and sit back while candidates self-schedule meetings with you in under 60 seconds.