Recruiting Automation will be a topic we explore in a lot of detail over this coming year. The key to any automation strategy is removing friction in a way that saves time and resource but at the same time enhances the experience for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. I wanted to bring this to life by looking at a very specific recruiting process area, interview scheduling.
As we all know, talent acquisition has many nuances, and generic scheduling automation tools can often create more work than they save and damage the candidate experience. So how should we automate and what are the real benefits of doing it properly
To help answer this question my guests this week are Adam Bird CEO and Co-Founder of scheduling platform Cronofy and Jon Eyers founder of tech recruitment company Harvey Thomas.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Automating interview scheduling in a smart way
▪ Improving the candidate, recruiters and hiring manager experience
▪ Factoring recruiting nuances into automation
▪ Reducing friction to save time and increase value
▪ Remembering what humans are good at and recognising what computers are good at
▪ The future of recruiting automation
▪
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Cronofy, the scheduling platform for business and HR professionals. Don’t let impersonal and slow interview scheduling stop you from acquiring top talent. Interview scheduling is one of the biggest pain points in recruiting. All that back and forth makes for a poor candidate experience, and finding a time is simple. When you offer slots based on real time availability, it’s totally secure and you stay in complete control of who can book times in your calendar and when. Start the new year right and transform your interview scheduling with Chronofi Scheduler. To find out more, go to www.chronify.com recruitingfuture. That’s www.chronify.com recruitingFuture and Chronofi is spelt C R O N N O F Y.
Matt Alder [00:01:18]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 326 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Recruiting automation is going to be a topic we explore in a lot of detail over this coming year. The key to any automation strategy is removing friction in a way that saves time and resource, but at the same time enhances the experience for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. I wanted to bring this to life by looking at a very specific area of the recruiting process. Interview scheduling. As we know, talent acquisition has many nuances and generic scheduling automation tools can often create more work than they remove and also damage the candidate experience. So how should we automate and what are the real benefits of doing it properly? To help answer this question, my guests this week are Adam Bird, CEO and co founder of scheduling platform Chronofi, and Jon Eyers, founder of tech recruitment company Hydro. Harvey Thomas. Hi Adam. Hi Jon. And welcome to the podcast. Could you just both introduce yourself and tell us what you do? Adam, do you want to go first?
Adam Bird [00:02:36]:
Sure. Thanks Matt. My name’s Adam Bird. I’m CEO and co founder of Cronofy. So Chronofi’s scheduling infrastructure. It’s a platform upon which various applications connect to people’s schedules to drive scheduling operations and a series of end user tools that allow people to book interviews in real time, offer kind of self serve links to candidates, or drive online booking from their websites.
Matt Alder [00:03:01]:
And Jon, could you introduce yourself as well?
Jon Eyers [00:03:02]:
Certainly. Hi Matt, My name’s Jon Eyers. I’ve been a recruiter in the tech space for just over 20 years now. I founded Harvey Thomas back in 2008 as a niche recruiter supporting early stage and scaled up software businesses. And yeah, so, yeah, I’ve been recruiting for quite a while and working predominantly in the kind of software, the SaaS space for the last 12 years.
Matt Alder [00:03:24]:
Fantastic stuff. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. I suppose probably the best first question to ask is to actually ask Adam, could you sort of give us a few more details and tell us what actually is a scheduling platform?
Adam Bird [00:03:39]:
Certainly, Matt. So a scheduling platform is really the kind of layer that sits under scheduling apps. So a scheduling app would be, say, something like Calendly, where we’re all aware of the links that people can share. Or a scheduling app would be trying to book an interview from within an ats. Or a scheduling app would be sharing an online booking link on a website, if you want to, say, book a coach or a massage or similar. Where the platform comes in is it’s that underlying technology that allows that to happen everywhere. And so Cronofy is this kind of underlying provider that connects all of these applications and all of these services together to people’s calendars. And I guess one of the key problems that we’re solving by being this sort of this common layer is that we can deal with all this kind of security and privacy implications of essentially connecting to people’s incredibly private data and commercially sensitive data, and do that in such a way as they can be in complete control over what they’re sharing with these applications, whilst essentially allowing, say, a candidate to book in for an interview without the candidate knowing anything about necessarily the details of the interviewer or what’s in their calendar.
Matt Alder [00:04:52]:
And without sort of getting too technical. But I’m kind of desperate to ask this reasonably geeky question. Is there sort of a common language, a common forum, some kind of collaboration between the different calendar softwares?
Adam Bird [00:05:04]:
Well, there is. There’s a forum called CalConnect. And so we’re a member. It’s about 20 companies alongside. We sit alongside Google and Apple and define the future of calendars and the way they should be interoperating. Unfortunately, not all vendors are represented, the notable exception being Microsoft. And there’s a kind of long history to that, really. So the opportunity for, and the reason why, I guess, someone like chronofi exists is because there are lots of differences and lots of different ways of implementing these problems and different ways of implementing availability across different services and you get into the realms of people running calendars on site, running calendars in the cloud, and then you start to sort of add on things like conferencing services and the different ways, say Google Meet works very differently to teams, to zoom, to GoToMeeting. And all of these things are intrinsic to the way people are scheduling meetings, especially these days. And so having a kind of a common layer that kind of essentially hides all that complexity from people allows far more use cases to be unlocked and far more value to be added to people’s lives. Essentially they just saving time not having to go through the admin, the admin of setting these things up and they can focus on what they do best.
Matt Alder [00:06:25]:
So every time we talk about automation on the show, the thing that always comes up first is people automating interview scheduling. But I really get the impression that companies aren’t doing that in a particularly smart way. So, Jon, can you tell us a bit more about how using a platform like Quantify works from a recruitment perspective?
Jon Eyers [00:06:48]:
Yeah, sure, absolutely. Well, as you can appreciate, as a recruiter, I spend most of my life speaking to IT and dealing with people, whether that be kind of candidates and clients, arranging interviews, scheduling for new jobs, speaking to clients about new opportunities, speaking to new candidates and prospecting. So most of the time is spent speaking to those people on a daily basis. But also scheduling those calls can be very time consuming, as Adam just mentioned. So what I use Cronofy for is actually gives people I want to speak to to my calendar so they can book some time in with me so that I don’t have to keep going back and forth over email, over voicemails and things, trying to get some availability and get a time that we can, we can both chat into the diary. So it saves a lot of time and effort from that perspective. What I do like about the Chronofi application is that I’m also able to organize interviews on behalf of my clients. Now the biggest, I suppose, time consuming event within recruitment is trying to arrange interviews because you’re actually a third party. So you’re trying to arrange an interview for a candidate to meet a client who are trying to get time in the diary when both of those people can actually have that interview. So with the Quantify application, I’m actually able to have access to my client’s calendar, obviously without seeing what’s in there, but be able to actually provide that link to the candidates and get them to book some time directly with the client, which saves huge amounts of time and effort and it’s a real game changer for us, I’ll be honest with you, being able to do that because the amount of time we spend, as I say, going back and forth over Email over voicemail, Speaking to people, trying to get availability is incredible. And when you’re dealing with, you know, anything up to maybe 10 people a day that you’re trying to get calls scheduled with, it can be very time consuming and takes you away from doing what you really want to do. And that is, that is recruitment.
Matt Alder [00:08:35]:
So I think one of the really interesting things with this is the quality of experience working with a platform like this when it comes to scheduling provides talk us through the biggest sort of advantages of it. I mean, how can this type of automation really improve the experience for candidates, for recruiters and hiring managers?
Jon Eyers [00:08:55]:
Well, I think the biggest advantages for me is obviously, as we mentioned, is time saving and being able to spend more time away from the admin side and focusing on the recruitment, getting under the skin of the clients and the candidates and what they’re really looking for. We’re able to engage talent much quicker as well, which is quite key. So particularly in a competitive market. When I first started in recruitment, we used to ring someone up, they used to answer the phone. It doesn’t really happen anymore. People haven’t got time necessarily to speak to you as a recruiter, so you’re constantly having to try and arrange times which is convenient for the candidates. People are very much more busier now and you do need to schedule. But with the scheduling application like this, you’re able to engage that talent much quicker. It’s also less disruptive for the hiring managers as well, because getting constant calls from me trying to arrange an interview and trying to get time isn’t productive for them. So if you can actually arrange those interviews without the hiring managers having to get too involved with it saves them a lot of. A lot of time and effort, particularly obviously around scheduling. And it eliminates any kind of scheduling issues or errors that might ever occur by going through a third party as well. So I think in terms of the advantages, they are huge for all candidates, recruiters and hiring managers, really. But I think that the time saving and the effort saving and the increased productivity as a result of it is quite key.
Matt Alder [00:10:14]:
Now, Adam, could you sort of talk us through the. Obviously, I think a lot of people listening will be familiar with more generic tools like calendly. And I know that you’ve done a lot of work to. To really make the tool that you have work really effectively in a recruitment setting. Could you talk us through what the differences are between what you do and between what something like Calendarly does?
Adam Bird [00:10:39]:
Yeah, I think the number one difference is around this notion of a kind of one time use link with tools like calendly or you can book me and those kind of services, the user is sharing, making essentially a permanent share. They’re making their calendar open all the time. And in a recruitment situation, the hiring manager doesn’t want to do that. They don’t want to have their calendar open all the time. They actually want to only allow a candidate to book in to their calendar according to their working hours and their rules. If that candidate has passed the screening process has been essentially approved by the recruiter and it’s kind of decided to go through that next phase of the process. So by making this a kind of one time share that the candidate can only use once, they can’t go back in. That unlocks this self serve opportunity for all recruitment, not just those people who are perhaps you can see a situation where perhaps recruiters would share their calendar open all the time because that’s their job is to just make themselves available for candidates. But it’s that next level when you want to people within the organization whose job it is to really understand whether that account is right for their organization, they’re only going to want to share their calendar at the point that that calendar is deemed appropriate. Now what that unlocks is another really important aspect of interviews, and certainly something we’ve seen from our own research is the majority of interviews are not one on one. There is more than one person involved in interview two, three, four people on a panel. So by making that a one time link, we can then make it super easy for the recruiter to craft a link that actually reflects on the availability of all of the panelists. So the candidate can then just pick a time that works for everyone and there’s no extra work involved in doing that for anyone. Everyone’s time is respected. So the candidate experience remains the same. They just get a set of links that they know will work. It’s there, it’s encoded with their details that they have to fit in their name every time or anything like that. But importantly, it’s then gone into every member of the hiring panels calendar without the chance of double booking. So it’s really those two areas I think on recruitment are where we see the most benefit. It’s this kind of one time use link so people aren’t sharing their calendars permanently and having to worry that people can book in whenever they feel like it. But secondly, from a recruiter perspective, you can start to do the more complex interview flows where you’re saying, well actually there’s a panel here and even We’ve started work with some organizations around sequences of interviews. So certainly if you get involved in say development interviews, interviewing software engineers, often you’ll have a sort of culture interview, a technical interview and maybe a coding challenge. And those things need to happen in a certain sequence. Now from a candidate experience point of view, they just want to be interviewing for say three hours. Internally there are three different people that could serve those interviews and actually they can be drawn from a pool of say 10 or 20 that could serve each different type of interview. And so what we’ve seen previously is our clients are or recruiters are saying right candidate, tell me when you’re available that I’ll go through all the legwork internally of trying to find people that can kind of do that sequence of interviews at the right time. Whereas with unlocking the kind of this is where the platform that the quantified built gets come in. We have all this capability within our kind of underlying layer. We can surface that to the recruiter to set up the rules to say, Well I need one of these 10 people, one of these 10 people and one of these 10 people to do these three interviews in any order, in a fixed order and then present that to the candidate as just a one choice and the whole lot becomes automated. And so you get massive, massive time savings again with one time use link and you’re preserving the privacy of all of the hiring managers involved.
Matt Alder [00:14:38]:
I think what I really like about this approach is for me it really encapsulates what automation should look like in recruitment. It’s very, very user experienced, focused, frictionless and provides real value for everyone in terms of making something easy but also saving a lot of time. If we’re sort of looking at broader recruiting automation, what do you think are the key factors that organizations should be thinking about? Lots of talent acquisition leaders out there. So we’re currently looking at their strategy for automation. What is it that they should be considering?
Adam Bird [00:15:15]:
I personally been building software for a long time, Matt, and I’ve kind of been through the various cycles and hype cycles of automation and this kind of thing. And I think what it comes down to is remembering what humans are good at and recognizing what computers are good at. And recruitment is a completely human centered process. What you’re looking for as a recruiter is to match the culture and principles of the candidate with the culture and principles of the company and or the team you’re hiring for. And so to do that it’s incredible. You have to really get under the skin of both, both parties in order to do that. And then so really then it’s like, well, that’s it. That’s if you like the magic that recruiters deliver, anything that stands in the way of that should be a candidate for automation. If that’s setting up assessments, is that asking screening questions, is that scheduling interviews, is that doing background checking, is that doing kind of CV parsing, All of those things that just get in the way of the recruiter getting under the skin of the candidate in the organization? I would say it should be fair game.
Jon Eyers [00:16:29]:
I think from certainly from a looking at it from a recruiter’s perspective, I think sometimes, particularly when you’re dealing with companies, they do tend to occasionally move away from that candidate experience. And don’t really underestimate the importance of candidate experience in the recruitment journey. And I think that when a company is looking at an automation strategy, they’ve got to make sure that strategy incorporates, as Adam pointed out, the correct element of human interaction. Because it’s very important, particularly with the candidate experience, that that candidate experience starts at the very beginning and they don’t feel just like a number. It’s very important that they’re supported through the journey. I think if you can create a strategy where you can automate those processes that don’t necessarily need that human interaction, as Adam pointed out, I think that’s quite key. But putting the candidate first is vital, I think, in any automation strategy moving forward.
Adam Bird [00:17:24]:
I think you make a really good point, Bon. And I think there’s a really simple way you can put the candidate first in say from a scheduling perspective is you give them a link that’s personalized to them rather than these anonymous booking links where the candidates having to fill out their details every time they want to book in. Nothing says I don’t care about you when I send you an anonymous link where you’ve got to fill in your details each time. And so looking at ways you can give this tailored experience, members who the candidate and demonstrates to the candidate the organization remembers who they are. It’s a really simple way of doing that, but really speaks volumes to the impression that you’re giving the candidate and their importance to you.
Matt Alder [00:18:03]:
Final question. We’ve really seen automation move up the agenda in 2020 with everything that’s been happening. From your perspective, how has the pandemic changed things and what’s the likely future now for recruitment automation?
Adam Bird [00:18:16]:
From my perspective, from talking to our clients, I think the most important thing that’s changed is location and the importance of location in every aspect of our lives and this kind of blurring of our personal lives and our working lives and this idea, to give you a really concrete example, so we have a customer who runs a recruitment. They can provide the recruitment software for an organization that had say, 10 recruitment centers. And each of those 10 recruitment centers had six recruiters. So if you were a candidate for that center, you would choose your local center and find a time where, among, where three of those six people were available and that was your opportunity. Now, with the switch to remote first, as we’ve had to go through this year, suddenly rather than being restricted to three people from six, location doesn’t matter. So you can do three from 60, which means you’ve got far more chance of getting a possible interview with someone far more quickly and getting a candidate through that process and that crucial time to hire and maintaining the momentum is maintained. Plus you can better spread out the load across your recruiting function. And so that dramatically increases the efficiency of recruiting in that kind of remote context. And now when we’re talking to organizations, they’re saying, well, actually we should take advantage of that and there may be aspects of the recruiting process which should happen locally, but actually what can happen remotely and can we get candidates through that process as quickly as possible? So maybe the last stage is a face to face is on site once we’re allowed to start moving again. So I think people are really starting to think quite carefully about the meaning of location when it comes to the opportunity that comes to unlocking automation gains.
Jon Eyers [00:20:14]:
Yeah, I think obviously it’s been a terrible year really. And particularly across recruitment, you know, we’re very, sadly, we’re seeing a lot more applications now in the recruitment industry as a result of the pandemic. And it’s really important going back to that customer first that we mentioned earlier on, you know, that it’s really important that, you know, each of these candidates is responded to and they’re managed because, you know, we’re dealing with people’s lives. So I think, you know, as much as automation is important, I still think, I still think there’s a human element there, but recruit and automation will really play a vital role in that. As we move forward, I think that we’ll start seeing, sadly, I think there’s going to be a look as companies look at cost reduction, I think that perhaps recruitment automation is inevitable there. I think people will certainly start looking at that moving forward from a business perspective. As Adam said, it’s all online now. I’ve never had it before where at the very beginning of the pandemic, that, you know, companies were very nervous about putting people through an online recruitment process. You know, it really was unheard of and they didn’t really want to make a decision without meeting someone. But now we know nine months down the line, we’re seeing companies now who are doing the whole process online, quite happy to take them through the whole interview process and onboarding without ever meeting them. So I think that as a result of that, recruiting automation can play a vital role in managing that effectively moving forward.
Matt Alder [00:21:34]:
Adam, Jon, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jon Eyers [00:21:37]:
Thank you.
Adam Bird [00:21:37]:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:21:39]:
My thanks to Adam Bird and Jon Eyers. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through 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.
