When it comes to scheduling an interview, the step that requires the most back-and-forth with a candidate is often asking them for what times they’re available. Gem Scheduling’s Request availability functionality, however, allows you to automate this process, helping to reduce the number of times you have to go back to the candidate.
Prior setup
Before requesting availability for a candidate, we recommend completing the following steps:
- Configuring your company branding so that the page that the candidates will see have your company’s logo and colors.
- Configuring default settings on a stage for availability requests. 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.
Getting to the request availability workflow
You can request availability for any candidate in a schedulable stage, and from either the Scheduling Queue or the candidate record. For candidates that are in stages with Request availability as the default workflow, and who have not been sent availability requests yet, the scheduling button will default to Request availability as the suggested action.
Otherwise, you can select the dropdown and choose Request availability from the list of options. However you do it, this will take you into the Request availability workflow.
For a video walkthrough of the Request availability workflow, watch Gem Scheduling How-to: Availability Requests.
Request availability workflow
Preferences
By default, the Request availability workflow will be populated with the preferences you chose when initially setting up Scheduling. You can modify any of these settings for a specific candidate - this will only affect that particular candidate, and won’t change any of the default settings
Selection window
The selection window dictates the date range that the candidate will be asked to provide availability within. The default is 14 days, but you can also select 7 days, 21 days, or 30 days.
Minimum duration
This setting determines the minimum duration for every time slot that the candidate submits - ensuring, for example, that the candidate doesn’t provide a 1-hour block for a 5-hour interview. They can submit longer than this time, but the candidate will see a warning if one of their time slots is too short, and won’t be able to submit.
Total availability
Similar to the minimum duration, this setting is to enforce a minimum on the total duration submitted by the candidate. The purpose of this is to provide you with more possible time slots for redundancy, so if the candidate’s earliest available time doesn’t work out for your team (e.g., all the available interviewers have conflicts), you’ll have more times to work with without having to go back to the candidate to ask for more time. If the candidate doesn’t provide at least this much time, they will see an error and won’t be able to submit.
Use stage scheduling windows for allowed times
By default, the availability request will use the windows you have set during the stage creation when you were creating the interview plan itself, so that the candidate can’t suggest availability outside of when the interview team is available. You can, however, toggle this slider to Off if you want to set custom scheduling windows for this candidate. This will not impact the default settings for this interview stage.
Message to candidate
The next step is to select an email template that you would like to use. Again, this will default to the template you selected when setting up the interview stage, however you can choose an alternative template and/or amend any of the details to tailor the email to this specific candidate.
You do not have to send an email to the candidate in this workflow. If you want, you can select Save & generate link and send it to the candidate via another method - for example if you already have an email thread going with the candidate, and would prefer to keep everything in that one place.
If you’re not familiar with email templates, you can learn more about them in our Gem Scheduling: Email templates article.
Review
Once you’ve set up all of the preferences to your liking for this candidate, the final step is to review all of the information to make sure it looks good. This is also another opportunity for you to preview exactly what the candidate will be seeing.
If everything checks out, you have two options to choose from:
- Send request via email: Select this to send the availability request to the candidate - this generates an automated email in a new email thread.
- Save & generate link: This will copy a link to your clipboard that you can then send out manually to the candidate instead of generating an email.
With the availability request sent (using either method), the candidate’s Status (everywhere it displays, such within the candidate’s record) will now show that availability has been requested.
What happens next?
Once an availability request has been sent, the candidate can go ahead and provide their availability when they’re ready - and you can use that information when you’re scheduling them.
When a candidate submits their availability, the following things will happen:
- The user who sent the availability request will receive an email notifying them that the candidate has submitted their availability.
- If any other members of the hiring team have opted into notifications (in Profile settings, under Notifications) for when candidates submit availability, they will also receive emails.
- The candidate’s Status will change from Availability requested to Ready to schedule.
- Prior setup
- Getting to the request availability workflow
- Request availability workflow
- Preferences
- Selection window
- Minimum duration
- Total availability
- Use stage scheduling windows for allowed times
- Message to candidate
- Review
- What happens next?