Overview
Sometimes when you’re scheduling an interview, you might want to just place holds on the interviewers’ calendars without sending any confirmation to the candidate yet. Gem Scheduling gives you the tools to do this. This article covers how to place schedules on hold, how to edit holds, and how to confirm holds.
Requirements
- Your team uses Gem Scheduling.
Common workflows
The two most common use cases we see for using holds are:
- Your interviewers have very busy schedules. Instead of asking the candidate for availability first and then finding a time for the interviewers that work within those times, you find blocks of times that work for your interviewers, and then you ask candidates which of the blocks they prefer.
- You’ve found a schedule that works for almost all interviewers, but there’s one conflict that you’re not sure if you can book over. However, while you’re checking on this conflict, if you don’t block off this time for your other interviewers, they will probably schedule other meetings during this time, so you want to create temporary events to indicate that an interview will eventually happen at that time.
How it works
When putting a schedule on hold instead of scheduling it normally, the Gem Scheduling system will:
- For interviewer calendar events, add “[HOLD]” to the event titles.
- Make a note in your ATS that schedules were put on hold.
And will not:
- Send out the candidate calendar event.
- Send out the confirmation email, even if you enabled it.
- Report the interview times to your ATS.
- Create the video conferencing link yet.
- Note that if you have video conferencing enabled and use Zoom, the system will create the link so that it can hold the Zoom host as well.
Once you’re ready to confirm a hold, the system will create the calendar events, send the confirmation email, update your ATS, and create the video conferencing link (if enabled
Note that you can put multiple schedules on hold for a single candidate, if needed. When you subsequently confirm one of the holds, the system will automatically delete any other holds for that candidate.
Place a schedule on hold
To get started, you don’t need to configure anything special for the stage or candidate. Follow these steps to create a hold for a candidate:
- Go through the scheduling process as normal (see Gem Scheduling: Schedule an interview).
- Once you get to the Schedule step, you’ll see the usual confirmation screen with all of the details of the interview(s) being scheduled.
- Select the Put schedule on hold button.
- On the following pop-up, select the Send notification email to interviewers option if you want to email the interviewers with details of the hold. Note that the system will only email the interviewers, and will not create a candidate invite until you confirm the hold.
- Select the Schedule hold button to confirm the hold.
Confirm a hold
Once you have a hold that you’re ready to confirm and send out details to the candidate, you can confirm the hold from either the Scheduling Queue or the candidate’s record. At this point you can also edit any of the schedule’s details (e.g. swap out interviewers, change times, enable/disable video conferencing, etc.) along with the calendar events and the confirmation email.
- In the candidate record, you will see a Confirm hold button against any schedule that’s currently on hold.
- In the Scheduling Queue, the scheduling button will default to Confirm hold (or if not, you can select the arrow next to it and choose Confirm hold from the dropdown).
- Selecting Confirm hold from either location will jump you to the Review step of the scheduling process, with everything already filled in using the hold’s details.
- If needed, edit the details of the schedule and/or the calendar events and confirmation email.
- Once everything looks good you can confirm the schedule, and the system will start making the changes to finalize it, including sending communication to the candidate. It will also automatically delete any other held schedules you may have had for this candidate as well.
Cancel a hold
If you need to cancel a hold rather than confirm it, you can do so from the candidate record. Follow these steps to cancel a hold:
- Go to the candidate record.
- Select the three dots next to the Confirm hold button.
- Select Cancel hold.
- Choose whether you want to Send an email notification to candidate and/or Send an email notification to interviewers.
- Select the Yes, cancel hold button. This will cancel any calendar invites and, if you checked either of the email notification options, send notification emails confirming the cancellation
Additional resources
To learn more about Gem Scheduling, check out the following resources:
- Gem Scheduling: Manage interviewers
- Gem Scheduling: Interviewer seats and interviewer pools
- Gem Scheduling: Schedule an interview
- Gem Scheduling: Cancel an interview
- Gem Scheduling: Reschedule an interview
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.