ScheduWiz

Product Experience

Problem Space 

Problem Statement  

How can we make it easier for recruiters to find an earliest overlapping time slot within a person/group, matched with that of the candidate's availability, so that it reduces time spent on coordination and speeds up the overall recruitment process ?

Problem Background  

Recruiting is a critical function in any organization and one of the most important KRA for the HR teams. Often recruiters are involved in the end-to-end recruitment life cycle. That means they are involved in tasks like sourcing candidates, screening, continuously optimizing the selection process, candidate engagement, negotiating offers, on-boarding and employer branding. These are all critical events in a recruitment life cycle that ultimately defines how soon and better recruiters bring the top talent to build out teams for the success of the organization.  

A significant part of the recruiting process involves scheduling interviews with candidates. Coordinating interview times that align with panelists and candidate's availability can be a time-consuming and cumbersome task, often resulting in delays and inefficiencies.

In fact, time spent by recruiters on scheduling and coordinating is astonishingly high as compared to its value- add in a given recruitment life-cycle. Yet, it is one such activity which is a ‘NEED’ , and is a MUST to be done to move candidates through the interview rounds to ultimately ‘hire’ them !

Research Insights

Primary research techniques - user interviews and surveys were conducted to understand user experience. Users for this research worked as full-cycle recruiters so were responsible for end-to-end recruitment life-cycle. 

During the interviews, further emphasis was given on finding the pain points, understanding the current tools being used and experience using them. It was also realized that although coordination and scheduling is an operational task, it has a direct impact on overall candidate experience. All of the users mentioned about not having sufficient time to focus on other crucial areas like sourcing, optimizing, candidate relationship management, employer branding etc

User Pain Points 

1. Spending more than 50% of their working hours in scheduling and coordination

2. Dealing with ad hoc situations such as 

• No-shows
• Rescheduling requests
• Cancellation requests

These situations are encountered both from candidate’s and from interviewer’s end, which often leads to spending time again on the same rescheduling and coordination task

3. Calendar Management

• Busy or occupied schedules in calendar leaving no/limited slots for interviews
• Difficulty scheduling when participants are in different time zone
• Availability of senior leaders
• Scheduling one-to-many interviews (multiple panel members) 

4. Tools 

• Most of the scheduling tools available today sync with calendars, so one major drawback is, if slots are busy, there is no way to verify the busy schedules 

Supporting Data 

As per primary research done through survey and user interviews, 

• 86.6% responded that on an average they work on anywhere between 6-20 roles at a time and handle 15 candidates at any day for scheduling purposes. 
• 80% of the total responded stated that they spend more than 50% of their time just on scheduling and coordination related activities
• 60% chose scheduling and coordination tasks at the level > 6 , on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being easiest and 10 being hardest

This clearly shows considerably less time left for the recruiters to focus on other important tasks as well as a painful experience that they had to undergo every single day.

Feedback

Based on the primary research conducted, it can be summarized that the scheduling and coordination is still a manual process which eats up the critical time in a recruiter’s daily schedule. Tools like Calendly, Cronofy, ATS’s easy booking links have helped automate the scheduling workflows bringing smart solutions to some extent, but it still needs recruiters timely attention and intervention. 

Landing on the Solution

Just like when you are discontent and wish for a magic wand or a fairy mother to solve the problem, ‘ScheduWiz’ aims to provide a similar experience to the recruiters. Hence, the name. 

The idea is to build an interface that is powered by conversational AI to chat and make decisions and attach it to a scheduling engine. This will essentially converse with candidates and with interviewers like recruiters, and will handle all the coordination and scheduling activities using automating and scheduling workflows.

Future Steps

I plan on using my experience and knowledge to develop this new product with a team of developers and designers when the right time comes. Till then, I would like to continue my research and gather more data points to further deeply understand the challenges. Being a recruiter myself, I truly believe this is a product that will have a real impact on the lives of the recruiters and will make it better.

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