The purpose of this article is to give a quick overview of Eightfold scheduling. The target audiences for this guide are Eightfold client recruiters and recruitment coordinators.

The basics

Eightfold Scheduling is aimed at providing two personas, recruiters and coordinators, everything they need to schedule interviews quickly and effortlessly between two more personas, candidates, and interviewers, while ensuring all four personas have a great experience interacting with the product.

Workflows

Broadly, there are three workflows that Eightfold Scheduling supports when the customer allows Eightfold to its organization’s calendar.

Open Scheduling

All users with access to the Scheduling action in Eightfold (perm_schedule_events permission) can connect their calendar to Eightfold & access a link. The link can be shared with the candidates, or anyone concerned with the recruitment.

Once users click the link, they can access available time slots in the calendar(s) attached to the link to schedule for their preferred time. This is primarily targeted at the sourcing use cases where sourcers / recruiters want to share their availability with prospects. The sourcers/recruiters can ask the prospects to find appropriate time on the calendar.

Request to Schedule

As a common practice, coordinators schedule interviews, but the Eightfold Request to Schedule action allows Recruiters to select the candidate(s) to schedule & share the appropriate time with a coordinator along with a scheduling note & other scheduling related detail. The scheduler then picks the request and completes the scheduling process for the interview.

Sending "Requests to Schedule" to a common (org-wide) Google group

When a recruiter "Requests to Schedule" on a pipeline page, they can send it to an individual scheduler or a common (org-wide) Google group. When sent to the Google group, every member of that group gets an email and any scheduler can grab it from the queue and schedule the interview.

Users can follow the steps below to send Gmail messages using a group address:

1. Provision the Distribution List (DL) / Google group as a user with Coordinator role in Eightfold.
2. Everyone in the group receives the email.
3. The recruitment coordinators team must have access to all positions (since they'll be shared resources).
4. The recruitment coordinator who wants to pick, simply assigns it to him/herself and processes.

Wizard based scheduling

This is a core scheduling function which allows users to schedule interviews between candidates & interviewers by accessing their calendars connected with Eightfold.

Scheduling Types

There are two ways in which interviews can be scheduled across all the three workflows listed above.

• Scheduler led, meaning the interview scheduling is as per the scheduler (the coordinator or the recruiter).
• Candidate led, meaning the interview scheduling is dependent on the candidate.

Both these types are discussed in detail below.

Scheduler led

This is also known as the Suggested time & Specific time method of Scheduling method. Here, the recruiter/coordinator identifies the interview slots which work for interviewers & simply shares one with the candidate(s) to confirm. Interviews can be held in two forms:

• Single round with one or multiple interviewers (Panel of interviewers)
• Multi round with each round having one or multiple interviewers (Panel of interviewers).

Eightfold offers two options to the recruiter when scheduling interviews:

Suggested times

Based on the interviewers' availability and the interview availability preferences set under Account > My Calendar, Eightfold automatically identifies interview slots & presents the options to the recruiter to pick one & share with the candidate.

Specific time

This option is for the scenario where the recruiter likely did all the coordination outside of Eightfold and is simply blocking specific time blocks using Eightfold.

Candidate led

This can also be called the Let the candidate choose method. In candidate-led scheduling the recruiter shares the interviewers' availability with the candidate and (s)he simply picks a time slot which works for him/her. This approach has the limitation that Eightfold only offers this scheduling option to recruiters if there is only one round of interview with one or multiple interviewers (Panel of interviewers).

After scheduling an interview meeting, candidates can confirm availability, reschedule, or decline. Recruiters on their part can also reschedule and cancel interviews while there is no support for interviewer driven reschedules or cancellations.

To know more about scheduling interviews, read this article - Scheduling interviews.

Scheduling User permissions

The following are the permissions relevant for Scheduling:

• perm_schedule_events - Permission to access the Open scheduling link, request to schedule or schedule an interview from the Pipeline, Profile or Events.
  
• perm_view_my_pipelines and perm_manage_my_pipelines - Permission to view and manage the interviews in Scheduling dashboard for the positions that the user is a Recruiter, hiring manager or a follower of. perm_schedule_events access will also be needed by the user.
  
• perm_view_all_pipelines and perm_manage_all_pipelines - Permission to view and manage the interviews in Scheduling dashboard for all positions. perm_schedule_events access will also be needed by the user.

Calendar connection for Scheduling

A scheduler will require Schedule action permission and an access grant from their organization to connect their calendar to Eightfold prior to scheduling. This means that only a scheduler needs to connect their calendar (to be able to schedule interviews for HMs/interviewers) and not the hiring managers or interviewers. In doing so, they will have delegated permissions to check internal (hiring manager/interviewer) calendar data and book time.

Calendar sync is what allows Eightfold to access the availability of the interviewers using delegated access and place interview invites on their calendars. Delegated access uses the scheduler’s calendar to access the calendars of interviewers, without them having to connect their calendars to Eightfold.

Schedulers can connect their calendars to Eightfold from Account > My Calendar. They will also be nudged to do it from the Scheduling wizard if they try scheduling for the first time.

Eightfold scheduling supports two calendar providers - Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook 365 Calendar. Admin can configure the calendar provider preference on Admin Console so that users can select between Google Calendar and Outlook.

When a user connects their Google Calendar to Eightfold, they are presented with two options.

• Add all the interviews being scheduled to their regular calendar.
• Create a new Scheduler calendar and add the interviews being scheduled to the Scheduler calendar. This is of particular significance to schedulers who wouldn’t want their regular work calendars to be crowded with the interviews they are only organizing and won’t be attending.

Important things to be noted about the scheduler calendar are mentioned below:

• Whenever an interview is scheduled, two calendar invites are created - One for the candidate and one for each of the interviewer(s). For both the invites, the scheduler is the organizer.
• Using the Scheduler calendar allows schedulers to keep their calendar availability intact and not be impacted by interviews they are organizing.
• The Scheduler calendar feature is not offered by Microsoft Outlook 365 Calendar.

Eightfold can only update events which Eightfold has created, let's see how this is enforced/restricted.

1. Eightfold gets delegated permissions to read.write events on the scheduler's calendar. This implies that Eightfold only acts on behalf of the scheduler and not on its own.
2. The Eightfold UI only allows users to manage events (delete, reschedule, update) created via Eightfold.
3. Permissions of graph (read.write) do not enforce any restrictions but Eightfold restricts updates to only created events at a code level.

Reading interviewer availability

The open slots shown to the candidate are fetched on a real-time basis based on the interviewers’ calendar availability and the interview availability preferences set under Account > My Calendar.

Reading calendar availability

• If a slot is booked as Free instead of Busy or if a slot is booked as Busy (Regular calendar block) but the interviewer declined the meeting i.e responded No, EF reads this as Available.
• If the slot is booked as Busy (Regular calendar block) but the interviewer has responded to the meeting as Tentative i.e responded Maybe, the availability is calculated based on the preferences set for calendarBusyStatuses property in scheduling_config.

In cases where the organization hasn’t authorized schedulers to connect their calendar with Eightfold, Eightfold offers Scheduling without calendar integration. However, this set-up only allows for slot booking & the overall experience is clunky for all users - Scheduler, Interviewer & Candidate.