Overview
Gem Scheduling integrates directly into Gem ATS, allowing you to schedule interviews within the same platform that you use to source talent, review applicants, and manage candidates. Syncing directly with Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, you can effortlessly check availability, create interview slots, and send invitations - all from one interface. This article covers how to schedule an interview.
For details of how to allow candidates to self-schedule, see Gem Scheduling: The self-scheduling workflow.
Requirements
- Your team must use Gem Scheduling.
Prior setup
Before scheduling an interview, we recommend completing the following steps (you must be a Gem admin to complete both steps):
- Configuring your company branding so that the page that candidates see will have your company's logo and colors.
- Configuring default scheduling settings for the job. This is a quick step that will help save time in the long run, because it sets up defaults for all availability requests you send out for that stage.
Assuming you have a candidate’s availability, either because they completed an availability request or because you entered it manually into Gem, you can then proceed to schedule an interview.
When a candidate submits availability via an availability request, you will receive an email to let you know.
For a video walkthrough of how to schedule an interview, watch Gem Scheduling How-to: Primary Scheduling Workflow (7 min). This covers generating schedules, editing interviews, and reviewing and confirming schedules.
Schedule an interview
Follow these steps to schedule an interview:
- In the Application section of the candidate record, check that the candidate’s availability is showing against their current interview stage.
- Select the Schedule button, which takes you to the Scheduling setup page showing the candidate’s name, their availability, and the relevant interview stage.
- Update the Room and/or Video conferencing fields in the Stage settings section if necessary (the defaults for these fields are set when configuring a job - see Gem Scheduling: Configure a job for scheduling for more details).
- Note that with the Room field you can either select a specific room, or a room tag - in which case, when you come to schedule an interview, the system will choose from the pool of rooms which have the chosen tag.
- Choose which interview(s) to schedule. If there are multiple interviews within the stage, you can select one, several or all of the available interviews (by default, interviews with the status of Not scheduled or Canceled will be automatically selected, while interviews with the status of Scheduled will not be selected). You can also select the padlock icon to lock interviews into specific positions in the order of interviews.
- If you need to, you can select each interview to amend it at this point. This will open a pop-up where you can edit interview and interviewer details - for example, if you want to change the order in which they’re scheduled, or amend the interviewer pool.
If you haven’t already configured the default scheduling settings for the job, select the Save as default for this job option at the bottom of the pop-up before you save and close. This will apply the settings you’ve chosen for that particular candidate to the job as a whole.
- With at least one interview selected, select the Generate schedule button at the top-right of the screen. This opens the Scheduling calendar page showing the calendars for the candidate and a selection of interviewers, along with a room if appropriate.
- If you want to change to a different room, select the down arrow next to the selected room then choose a room from the dropdown. The system will show you all of the available rooms in the selected pool, along with their availability, followed by a list of all rooms.
- The default schedule option is what Gem considers the best option - see the How Gem generates scheduling options section below for more details. You now have a choice:
- Accept the default schedule option.
- Use the Options drop-down or the arrow buttons at the top-right of the screen to look through other options.
- Drag and drop interviews on the calendar to manually move them around.
- Select an interview to edit its details (e.g. changing interviewers, moving to a different day).
- If you have multiple interviews and are happy for interviews to take place over multiple days, use the Select an optimized schedule for drop-down in the top-left corner to switch to either 2- or 3-block splits.
- Choose an option that best suits everyone involved, then select the Select schedule & continue → button. This will take you to a new page with details of all of the candidate-facing and interviewer-facing events to be scheduled.
Note that if the selected room has a conflict, it will appear in the Room field with a line through it to denote the conflict. You can select a different room from the dropdown at this point, either from the selected pool or the list of all rooms.
- From here, either go ahead and schedule the interview(s), or put them on hold if you need to check anything with any of the interviewers.
- If you choose Put schedule on hold, all interviewers will be notified of the schedule, but the candidate will not be notified until the hold is confirmed. See Gem Scheduling: Place holds on interviewers’ calendars for more information about putting schedules on hold.
- If you choose Schedule interviews, the candidate and all the interviewers will be notified of the schedule.
Once scheduled, the candidate’s status will display as Scheduled.
How Gem generates scheduling options
On the Scheduling calendar page, Gem presents you with a series of scheduling options to choose from, with each option showing you the candidate’s availability alongside the availability of a selection of interviewers from the pool(s). You can then either select one of these options or manually adjust the selections to suit your requirements.
The system will find the best possible scheduling options to suit the candidate’s availability, the availability of the possible interviewers, and various other factors (such as interviewers’ load balance, time zones and working hours, and prioritizing the earliest available slots).
The first option will always be what the system considers the best option, but there are various ways to see other available options. You can:
- Scroll through the generated options using the controls at the top-right of the screen, above the calendar view.
- Use the calendar drop-down and/or arrows at the top-left of the screen to change the calendar to specific days.
- Manually adjust the timings by dragging and dropping or clicking into each interview.
- Use the Select an optimized schedule for drop-down to switch from the default Back-to-back interviews option to either 2-block split or 3-block split, in which case the system will generate a new set of options across either two or three days.
Changing to 2- or 3-block splits is a good choice if you’re looking to decrease the time-to-interview for a schedule.
Additional resources
See the links below for details of how to cancel or reschedule interviews:
Have any issues or questions on this topic? Please feel free to contact your dedicated Gem Customer Success Manager directly or our Support team at support@gem.com.