As the adoption and sophistication of recruiting automation gather pace, it’s essential to understand its constituent parts and the advantages and disadvantages of automating specific recruiting processes.
One area of the recruiting experience that doesn’t get much attention is interview scheduling. A recently published research report from Cronofy has shed new light on the impact interview scheduling has on the candidate experience. I wanted to explore this in more detail.
With that in mind, this episode has a bit of a different format. My first guest is Adam Bird, CEO Cronofy, to talk us through the report’s findings. I then expand out the conversation and bring in talent acquisition leaders Izzy Hung, Global Executive Hiring Lead at Forgerock and Ben Gledhill, Head of Resourcing at Thames Water, to get their thoughts on interview scheduling and recruiting automation in general.
In the conversation, we discuss:
▪ The report’s methodology and key findings
▪ The impact of a poor interview scheduling experience on candidate decision making
▪ Does automation work for all levels of recruiting?
▪ The impact of the pandemic
▪ Candidate feedback
▪ Using technology to facilitate workflows
▪ Technical integration
▪ Driving differentiation through tech stacks
▪ The future for recruiting automation
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Globally, 43% of candidates drop out of an interview process due to scheduling frustrations. Interview scheduling is one of the biggest pain points in recruiting, with all that back and forth creating the potential for a very poor candidate experience. This episode of the Recruiting Future podcast is sponsored by Chronofy, the scheduling platform for business, HR and recruiting professionals. The Chronofi Scheduler makes scheduling interviews easy. It saves you time, allowing you to stay in complete control of your schedule while offering personalized interview slots. Don’t let impersonal and lengthy interview scheduling stop you from acquiring top talent. Visit Chronofy.com to find out more. And Chronofy is spelt C R O N O F Y.
Matt Alder [00:01:11]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 349 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As the adoption and sophistication of recruiting automation gathers pace, it’s essential to understand its constituent parts and the advantages and disadvantages of automating specific recruiting processes. One area of the recruiting experience that doesn’t get much attention is interview scheduling. A recently published research report from Chronofi has shed new light on the impact interview scheduling has on the candidate experience. I wanted to explore this in more detail. So, with that in mind, this episode has a bit of a different format. My first guest is Adam Bird, CEO of Chronify, to talk us through the report’s findings. I then expand out the conversation and bring in talent acquisition leaders Izzy Hung, global Executive hiring lead at Forge Rock, and Ben Gledhill, head of Resourcing at Thames Water, to get their thoughts on interview scheduling and recruitment automation in general.
Matt Alder [00:02:19]:
Hi Adam, and welcome back to the pod.
Adam Bird [00:02:21]:
Hi Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:22]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show again. Could you just introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:02:28]:
Us what you do?
Adam Bird [00:02:28]:
Thanks, Matt. Yes, I’m CEO and co founder of Chronofy. We’re a scheduling technology company, so we power scheduling in all sorts of software for all sorts of business. We do an awful lot of work with interview scheduling, as I’m sure you can imagine. So working with some of the top vendors in the space, helping them deliver interview scheduling as part of their recruitment software workf.
Matt Alder [00:02:53]:
Fantastic stuff. Now, you’ve just done a really interesting piece of research and I think it’s particularly interesting because I’ve not seen anyone do research into the effect on the candidate experience of how companies go about scheduling interviews. Tell us a little bit about the Report what it, what it covers and how you produced it.
Adam Bird [00:03:12]:
Yeah. So as you say, there’s been a lot of focus on the recruiter or the hiring manager and the kind of impact on technology and supporting, supporting their role. And I guess this kind of makes sense because they’re ultimately the buyer of these tools. But when we started to try and understand, okay, how does the digital automation, the kind of recruiting workflows, the technology, how do they help the candidate, we couldn’t find any research at all, frankly. So we thought, well, let’s find out. And so what we did is we worked with a research firm and we questioned six and a half thousand people who’d had job interviews over the last 12 months. Definitely an interesting 12 months to do the survey over. But what was important to us as well, though, because we’re an international company, so we have customers across the us, Europe, Australia, Far East. And it’s really trying to get a feel, certainly for US Western Europe and America, how different candidates experience interviewing in different territories. So those six and a half thousand candidates were across the U.S. germany, France and the U.K. but also importantly, trying to get a feel for the different seniority and how the different levels of job roles would perhaps impact the way people think about their interviewing experience. So the team worked long and hard to craft a set of questions and find a set of people, and we put it out there. And some interesting results, perhaps more impactful than we probably imagined.
Matt Alder [00:04:52]:
Talk us through those results. What were the key findings from the research?
Adam Bird [00:04:56]:
Well, I guess there was the specifics around interview scheduling. So, for example, 51% of US candidates had dropped out of a hiring process due to frustrations with scheduling an interview. And that skewed more to senior roles. Absolutely. And actually there was more of a gender difference as well, so skewed more female, where time is important. And if you as a prospective employer are going to essentially waste my time, why should I proceed with you? Interesting enough. And I guess what came out of it kind of beyond what we were expecting is 77% of candidates globally said that the recruitment process affected their perception of the employer and the interview sketching being a key part of that. And this kind of linking, not just saving time on both sides, but this kind of holistic view of actually what you’re doing is you’re presenting your company to a candidate and if you’re putting friction in the way of doing that, you’re giving them a. It may be an accurate impression, but it may not be the impression that you want to give them of your organization. And so, for example, in the US, 40% of candidates wanted to see more automation interview scheduling. So I think we live in a world where. And accelerated over the last 12 months, certainly where services like calendly people are becoming more comfortable with the idea that I can expose some of my calendar to someone to book in. Calendar are good for certain situations, but it’s not necessarily a good service for interview scheduling because it loses a load of context. You can’t do so complicated, complicated things like panel interviews. You can’t do complicated things like having people in a sequence of interviews. So we see customers who are doing three part interviews with candidates. Maybe they’re a technical role, they’ll do a sort of coding exercise, a work history exercise and a culture fit exercise and they need to schedule that for the candidate. So I think for us, this. How interconnected interview scheduling was with the entire hiring experience was we could anecdotally talk about it and we believed it, but actually now we have the evidence from the market that this is a fundamental part of the employer proposition. When you’re talking with a candidate and the cost of that are in the highs you’re going to make. And frankly, as employers, it’s especially tough hiring at the minute. Whilst the number of roles have gone up, the number of candidates I don’t think necessarily have. And so as an employer, you want to hire the best people. And because those best people are the next level of best people, to join them, you need to make sure that you’re giving those people the best possible experience.
Matt Alder [00:08:00]:
And that sort of brings me on to my next question, which is, were these results what you expected to see from the experience that you have of working in this space? Or were they a surprise or were they kind of in line with. They’re kind of in line with your expectations.
Adam Bird [00:08:15]:
We’re in the business of scheduling because we believe it’s a big problem. And so my whole motivation for starting the business and doing this is I believed it was a problem, but what we’re seeing now is we really have the evidence to back that up. So if you’re saying 54% of senior UK candidates are frustrated by scheduling delays, that impacts a lot of roles and a lot of organizations. And if there are interview scheduling delays, 64% of candidates were saying they were less likely to engage or recommend you in the future, that’s super important for employers. So really it adds. We had the belief, now we have the evidence. Absolutely. And whilst there are some regional differences, and I think the Europeans are more comfortable with delays than their US counterparts. Fundamentally, everyone expects these things to be done efficiently, quickly, because when you’re interviewing for a role, you generally have another job at the same time and you’ve got to fit around your life. And I think in many ways people’s lives have become more complicated. So with the idea that we’re now working, we may be moving to a more kind of hybrid working environment. Actually, our personal scale schedules are going to have far more impact on our work lives than they had before. We’re going to move away from this delineation of right from nine to five, nine to six, Monday to Friday. I’m just working and therefore my personal life doesn’t impact me. Actually, I’m going to be doing school pickup, doing the football run, doing the cello practice, doing the family things. I’ll be fitting around my work because the very nature of working remotely and working in a hybrid organization forces management to become a kind of more outcome driven approach and therefore everything should be more flexible and more asynchronous. So this is, for me, this is a real bellwether of where work is going and the kind of approach we have to take to work in general.
Matt Alder [00:10:31]:
I’m going to expand the conversation out and bring in two talent acquisition leaders to kind of give us their view on the report, on shed sheets and on automation in general. So delighted to welcome Ben and Izzy back to the, back to the show and I’ll just ask them to introduce themselves. So Izzy, you can go first. Introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
Izzy Hung [00:10:53]:
Hi, I am Izzy. I have been in Tel acquisition for God knows how long. I don’t want to say, but seen many different ways of scheduling, both using people and processes as well as automation and a combination of the two. I’m currently in. I’ve been in the exact space probably for the last three or four years, so interested to see how this might fit and I think it’s an interesting argument in terms of what levels do you apply this to, if any or all. So yes, been in this space a long time. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:11:28]:
Fantastic stuff. Ben, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Ben Gledhill [00:11:31]:
Yeah.
Ben Gledhill [00:11:31]:
Morning everyone.
Ben Gledhill [00:11:32]:
My name is Ben Gledhill, I’m currently head of Resourcing at Thames Water. 16 years and counting. Years of experience in TA, man and boy and obviously, you know, kind of. I’ve always been a little bit of a, kind of a tech fan. So, you know, things like kind of automation and using technology experience. It’s really interesting for me. So, yeah, great to be here today.
Matt Alder [00:11:59]:
So, Ben, I’ll ask you this question first because you both had a chance to read the report. Did the findings surprise you or did they sort of confirm what you already new or were already experiencing?
Ben Gledhill [00:12:13]:
Yeah, I think, I think they, it definitely confirmed what I was thinking but not as. Without being negative bad as it. As bad as I thought it would be now. I mean just looking at some of the, you know, the key things around the damage on employer branding, you know, the actual financial implications of not using things like automation, especially in the kind of interview scheduling space and just the whole kind of impact of organizations not really reading the room in terms of making life easier for a candidate, whatever level it is, whatever role it is. And just the kind of probably a bit of naivety from organizations where obviously we have these massive ats, CRM programs, employee branding programs, evp, the list goes on. But something that, you know, people might think is quite small and admin based, such as assessment scheduling actually is having a massive detrimental impact. So yeah, it was quite, it’s quite startling and eye opening really to have a look at it.
Matt Alder [00:13:19]:
And Izzy, what did you think? Was there anything that sort of stood out or surprised you?
Izzy Hung [00:13:25]:
I don’t think it surprised me. I think because if you think about your life generally, you know, you can book appointments with your dentist, with your doctor, with everything online. So I think that that’s no surprise yet because we want stuff at our fingertips for sure. I think the surprise comes in the exact space. For me it would be great, right, to be able to schedule stuff at the drop of a hat and be able to see everyone’s diaries. And I think having worked now in the kind of Google Docs space, I can see the value of being able to see all of my company’s diaries openly. But I think the challenge definitely comes for me sitting in the exact space is when you’ve got diaries moving all the, particularly with kind of SVPs and the C suite and above, making time for those interviews isn’t as easy to schedule in an online environment unless they dedicate time to that. I mean, for example, I’m trying to schedule stuff today and the PA is moving stuff around hour by hour. So I think that’s where the challenge is. But I don’t think it definitely doesn’t surprise me and I think it can only be beneficial for things like assessment centres like volume recruitment, where there is no reason why that scheduling can’t be done in the same way as we book in a car or a theater ticket or anything else. So yes, I think it’s great to see it down on paper.
Matt Alder [00:14:46]:
So, I mean you’ve, you’ve worked obviously across lots of different levels in terms of the recruiting that you’ve done. Is, is there a huge difference between the challenges that you have in scheduling different types of recruiting?
Izzy Hung [00:14:59]:
Yes, I think so, definitely. I think there becomes, as it becomes more senior, it becomes more difficult to schedule and maybe it’s also functionally aligned. You know, when you think of, of salespeople’s diaries that move around, as I said, very, very frequently, I think that’s harder. But I think from a functional perspective, people who are more what would have been classed as office bound, that may be more easy to do than it is for someone that’s diary is shifting all the time.
Matt Alder [00:15:28]:
Ben, your organization has done a huge amount of recruiting over the last 12 months. How challenging is interview scheduling for you?
Ben Gledhill [00:15:41]:
Is that pre op during COVID I think, yeah. I mean, going back to kind of Izzy’s point, you know, the, the kind of. I’d say the challenges for us have been the volume space, obviously, you know, at Thames Water we’ve been still hiring, I’d say probably 8 to 100, what I would call volume hires a month, where that’s in the technician, our customer service space, obviously further up the ladder, obviously kind of senior hires. You know, it’s been really difficult, kind of get commitment from candidates. Not from a. Not from, oh, I can’t get out of this work meeting, but just from a pure humanistic life, you know, element. Because obviously now there’s been a lot of homeworking. People have been looking after loved ones and children and other bits and pieces like that. So we’ve had to be a little bit more, and I will use the term humanistic in our approach. So one thing that we’ve done, we’ve actually changed our application process now to actually include, you know, very, very simply, what are the best times if you, you know, that we can contact you rssu and obviously when we’re, you know, kind of at vacancy briefing stage, you know, constantly working with hiring leads and hiring managers to recommend confirm. Okay, so you can do XYZ 1, 2, 3. So I think the basics of technology are there, I. E. The process. So it’s good to see that potentially there’s finally a good technology solution that we can use.
Matt Alder [00:17:17]:
And that does nicely bring me to my next question, which was about the implications of this is one part of the recruitment process that we’re seeing automation finally, finally happening, which seems to be kind of an overwhelmingly positive thing. And we’re seeing automation in other parts of the recruitment process as well. Izzy, I know that you’ve done automation projects in the past. What do you think the implications of automation are on for candidates and recruiters and hiring managers?
Izzy Hung [00:17:49]:
So I can, you know, as far back as I think of the Harrods days, so that was back in 2006, 2007, there was schedul available. I remember having a system, I think it was Igrasp actually. And they had the ability to put in dates and times and stuff, even back that’s, you know, over, you know, 15, 20, you know, 15 years ago kind of thing. And it is exceptionally beneficial for busy recruiters. If you know that you’ve got particular times in the day that you’re going to interview, I think it’s incredibly helpful. Right. We spend hours going backwards and forwards. Like I think you’ve got in the David Smith speaking, you know, speaking on people engagement, business and forum. And there’s lots of information in this report that you think, oh my God, how many emails do I send back and forward? So I think from where I sit, it couldn’t have come sooner. I think that it’s not so much about, is it the right thing to use. I think it’s more about, it’s the integration people worry about. It’s actually, can I get it through the IT department, where does it sit? And I think that sounds like it’s getting easier to do now with solutions such as this. But I think that for me it’s always been the challenge of how do you get the systems to work effectively and that I think people are nervous of doing that. So I’d be interested to hear more about how that works in today’s world because I haven’t implemented anything for about 18 months.
Matt Alder [00:19:16]:
We’ll come back and get Adam to comment on all of this in a second. But before we do, Ben, your thoughts around recruiting automation, is it something that you’re doing a lot of or that you’re planning to do within the recruitment processes that you run?
Ben Gledhill [00:19:32]:
Yeah, definitely. So I was going to say I knew there’s a reason why what I mean, as I get on. So I totally echo what Izzy said in terms of, you know, good, good. TA. Leaders now need to be, in my opinion, very knowledgeable about tech and also very knowledgeable about automation. Not just in terms of how does it impact our tech stack, but how to impact wider organizational architecture as well. So we, we, in our first 12 months, we went through a huge kind of transformation program that’ll edit 10. So now we have an onboarding platform. So the whole kind of contract, signature, pre boarding, lots of content, all that is there now. But we’ve automated our FAQ process using a chatbot. But we’ve also, because we want to ensure that that kind of, you know, onboarding obviously doesn’t end at day one. Onboard is a continuous process. So, so when people start, we actually have a temp check chatbot as well. So every at a predefined date we drop candidates a text message on new starters rather just to ask how they’re feeling. Because then what we can do, then we can get a real life temp check of how they’re embedded in the organization. I guess we can kind of kill problems at source. So for me, I’ve always been a big, big fan of ultimate because I think automation as in the consumer world, and that’s what we’re always base ourselves on, rightly or wrongly, is automation can turn process into an experience. So yeah, I think it’s really important to understand why you’re wanting to do it, but understand the full kind of technical implications, if that makes sense.
Matt Alder [00:21:14]:
Absolutely. No, that makes perfect sense. Before I kind of come back to Adam to follow up on your points and make some final points, I always ask people questions about the future. So I kind. I can’t finish talking to you without asking a future based question. So where do you think this is all taking us? What would you like to see in terms of automation in the talent acquisition process in a few years time? Izzy, where do you think we might get to?
Izzy Hung [00:21:48]:
Oh my God, that’s a big question. I think it’s got to become a part of the everyday here and now, especially for, you know, let’s take exec out of the mix, right? Because I think that that’s a slightly different approach because it’s kind of a bit more high touch and bit more complicated to do. But there is, I cannot see why this wouldn’t be fully integrated within five years time because everybody else is going to be going that way. I would like to think that the way that you schedule stuff in your own diaries, when you go and look at each other’s diaries internally, you just go and book a meeting, you don’t even speak to that person or you text them and you find it that way. So I can’t see any reason why this wouldn’t be in the mainstream within five years from now and we’d be going, why did we do it any differently? Quite frankly, I do think exec is a bit more challenging because it is high touch. But for me it depends on how technology evolves and not only that, how behaviors of human beings evolve. The younger generation, dare I say it or not necessarily younger generation, generations that are comfortable with tech, whether that be any age, will be asking why can’t I just do that? I can do that with my friends, I can text people. But I do think that we hopefully will be in a place where it will be the norm would be my thought.
Matt Alder [00:23:11]:
And Ben, what’s your vision for the future of recruiting? What’s it going to look like? Are the machines taken over?
Ben Gledhill [00:23:19]:
Probably. Without being too negative, I think, I think technology will continue to drive the agenda and I think that you’re probably going to get a lot more collaboration between don’t know what we call ourselves these days ta resourcing people talent. I always get confused. Probably going to get a lot more collaboration between ourselves and digital and the technical elements of an organization. So I think a chief people officer and a chief technical officer, if they’re not already, will probably be one of the bigger partnerships because clearly, you know, people experience is driven by technology. So I think, I think it’s here to stay. I think it will, I think it will be refined. I think again it will follow more kind of E commerce principles. But I think it will also probably start to become the norm. I think you probably see a lot of senses of excellence as well as having a team looks after employee branding. You probably will have a team that looks after maybe automation or technology. So I think as I said, you can’t really hide from it. And I think the canny organizations that really know what they’re doing that already probably two to three to five years down the line in terms of. Right. Where’s the ATS going? Where’s the CRM going? Where’s an assessment platform going? So yeah, I think you’ll see, I think you see a mixture of, of your big kind of enterprise solutions with a continual use of kind of point solutions like Kronify.
Matt Alder [00:24:52]:
Adam, I’m going to bring you back in for some closing thoughts. First of all, give us your reaction to what you just heard. There were some sort of interesting comments and questions about levels at which this automation could be used and things like technical integration.
Adam Bird [00:25:09]:
I think it’s certainly that kind of levels of automation. I’m a big advocate that technology should facilitate these workflows, not necessarily completely automate them. And so there are times recruiting is a person business. Absolutely. And if you’re having your recruiters spending time Doing admin, that’s not high value time, but if you can kind of streamline that flow so they can focus on doing what they do best, which is identical, which is representing the employer and understanding whether the candidates they’re talking to are going to be the right fit for the role for the organization, that’s far more valuable on both sides and saves everyone time. So I think that’s a key thing here. I think people kind of get the idea that technology is replacing what people are doing. And I’m absolutely an advocate, despite being a dyed in the wall technologist, that it should be augmenting what people are doing and augmenting their ability to do the human part of their role, which frankly machines can’t do and won’t be able to do for a long time, if ever. I think Izzy made a really good point around IT getting it involved and how do I kind of make this happen. And I think what’s happened over the last few years, five or so years, is programs like gdpr, so actually having legislation around protecting people’s private data, while on one side people, it’s just more stuff I have to do. But I think what’s important, it’s given a framework around how people should look after and protect employers data, candidate data especially. And so therefore, if, if as a provider of technology you can assert that you’re asserted ISO 27001 and SOC2 and all those kind of standards that you are actually protecting that data, then that makes the conversation far easier with the IT team because they can say, right, okay, I can now have confidence that this technical solution is not going to leak data. And so therefore, actually we can start to take advantage of the benefits that this software solution gives us. And one of the benefits of being as we were till recently in the EU is that we’ve been at the vanguard of that legislation. If you look at what’s happening in the US now, so the California have started with the ccpa, but really they’re looking to do a federal equivalent of GDPR because they recognize that actually you can’t play fast and loose with candidate data. That’s just not how it works. And so I think those conversations are becoming easier because of that framework. It’s very easy to go to IT and say, right, we have this vendor, this vendor has these assertions and these accreditations. Now can we take advantage of this, please? And I think kind of the last point I made, so Ben was talking about the kind of ATS and the investments in technology. I think the Last sort of 10, 15 years, the world of SaaS, software as a service. The first phase of that was essentially replacing systems that you had on premises in your company’s IT room with systems that are available on public cloud infrastructure. But really these were kind of islands and you kind of bought this solution and you were only capable of delivering what this solution did. That was it. Where that becomes challenging for organizations is if they’re all using the same software that does all the same thing, how do they differentiate? And this pervades the entire stack of the organization in terms of not just across hiring, but service delivery, product delivery, learning development, kind of every aspect of the organization. If everyone’s doing the same thing, there’s no opportunity for differentiation. So the trend we’re seeing now from a technology perspective is actually organizations where they would buy rather than build software. Organizations are starting to kind of build again, but really build in a way that they come of using Lego kits to build and support workflows that work for them and the way their organization works. And so these larger vendors of technology, and certainly the more agile up and coming vendors are designed to work with multiple systems. And so therefore, to Ben’s point about kind of recruitment ops being a function, this idea that you have people who are kind of managing the technology stack upon, upon which recruitment and talent acquisition happens is going to be a really important role because you can start to orchestrate those flows even between different departments and make sure that the hiring managers and the recruiters have a flow that attracts the right type of candidate for them. So for me, we’re kind of, we’re moving into a new phase supported by both the privacy piece and the legislation. Bizarrely, I think it’s driven more innovation and more comfort for people. But also people are saying, well, we’ve got this software in the cloud now. What happens if we start to connect it all together?
Matt Alder [00:30:27]:
And that makes absolute sense. As a final question, what would your advice be to employers in terms of how they should move forward, how they should be thinking about automation and technology and using that to have happy candidates.
Adam Bird [00:30:42]:
Frankly, learn from candidates how they felt your hiring process went and getting that kind of memory around that feedback loop with the people that have been through your hiring process, I think is super, super important. And probably the other side of things is probably not be too ambitious. Try and find low hanging fruit, easy bits of optimization. Maybe it’s kind of background check automation, maybe it’s CV parsing, maybe it’s scheduling for assessment days. Wherever you feel that the kind of lowest cost highest impact can be in your recruiting organization to start building that kind of iterative approach to improving your workflow and seeing what works for you and your organization and the way your candidates react to you and measure that so that feedback with the candidates but also looking for ways for measuring the impact on your employer brand. So, so keep it simple and see what impact you can have that way and then your entire organization starts to learn that. Okay, well, the way we work is to constantly iterate on the technology stack that we have and the way we can improve this flow for our candidates and recruiters.
Matt Alder [00:31:59]:
Adam, Ben and Izzy, thank you very much for joining me.
Adam Bird [00:32:03]:
Thanks, Matt.
Ben Gledhill [00:32:03]:
You’re welcome.
Izzy Hung [00:32:04]:
You’re welcome.
Matt Alder [00:32:06]:
My thanks to Adam Bird, Izzy Hung and Ben Gledhill. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com and on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
