Keeping your calendar up to date is more than just keeping track of events that you have going on. It’s the critical first step for booking interviews with candidates.
No matter what tools your recruiting team adopts to maximize their time and make their interviews effective, it’s a moot point if you, an interviewer, aren’t practicing good calendar hygiene.
But first…
What’s Calendar Hygiene?
Practicing good calendar hygiene involves keeping your calendar organized and accurate. This ensures it accurately reflects your true availability. Not doing so means other people or software reading your calendar won’t have a good idea of your availability. This results in interviews needing to be rescheduled, further increasing your company’s time-to-hire.
So, how can you make sure you’re not the bottleneck in your company’s hiring process? Here are four tips and tricks to maintain calendar hygiene so you can maximize your time.
1. Keep Your Calendar up to Date
First and foremost, make sure your calendar is up to date. This includes adding travel buffers for customer visits (or if you’re going out for a bite to eat), removing cancelled meetings from your calendar, and ensuring that all meetings with coworkers are reflected on your calendar.
Additionally, make sure you RSVP to your invites right away so other people know if you are attending. In fact, making it a habit to reply to all meeting invites as soon as you receive them will ensure you don’t miss important meetings.
2. Set Company Keywords
If your company uses GoodTime Hire, you have the added benefit of leveraging company keywords. This means that the recruiting coordinator (or whoever is scheduling the interview) doesn’t have to guess if a calendar event is a hard or soft conflict.
Soft conflicts are events such as happy hours, office hours, calendar “holds” that you’ve set, and more. Hard conflicts are anything that can’t be scheduled over, such as PTO or travel buffers.
By setting up company keywords in Hire, the system will automatically recognize these events and either offer them as potential interview times or not schedule over them. This greatly increases potential interview slots, which helps get top talent in the door faster. That’s a win-win.
3. Make PTO/OOO Events Clear
Every company and team seems to handle PTO/OOO differently, which can make it confusing. This confusion can make scheduling interviews difficult.
This is especially true when many people, usually managers, are invited to the PTO/OOO event, making it hard to tell who’s actually out of the office.
As a general rule of thumb, your team should have a separate PTO calendar so everyone can see who’s out of the office. In the title of the event, you should write your name. This decreases the possibility of confusion, even if you (or others) invite individuals to the PTO event.
4. All-day Events
All-day events are tricky simply for the fact that there are many different kinds of them.
An all-day event can just be an event title, like “John’s Work Anniversary,” or it could be an actual conflict, like “John in Mexico.” Because of this, it’s important to make sure that you and the other interviewers on your team follow the same naming protocols when it comes to all-day events.
When using Hire, the software will try its best to understand if you’re available for the interview based on the words used in the event title, but it’s always just better to follow company keywords and mark yourself free or busy.
If you really want to make an impact on your recruitment efforts, leveraging a tool like Hire maximizes your team’s interview availability so you can interview the best candidate before your competition.
Ready to Level up Your Candidate Experience?
Time’s up for interviews full of scheduling headaches. It’s time for candidate-centered, connection-driven interviews instead.
To read more about how to make that happen for your team, download 5 Steps to Hiring Top Talent at Scale.
