Gem Scheduling: Manage interviewers

There may be times when you need to make changes to individual interviewers’ accounts and preferences - for example if you need to modify an interviewer’s working hours or interview limits, or set specific conflict keywords over and above the system defaults. This article takes you through how to navigate the Interviewers page, and how to manage your interviewers from there.

For a video walkthrough of how to manage interviewers on the Interviewers page, watch Gem Scheduling How-to: Configuring Interviewer Settings.

The Interviewers page

The Interviewers page in Gem Scheduling provides a list of every potential interviewer in your organization, and shows details of their training eligibilities and tags.

From here you can manage all of your interviewers’ accounts and preferences, view and edit interview eligibilities and tags to customize interviewer pools, and view the details of all past and scheduled interviews that each interviewer is associated with.

You can narrow down the interviewer selection on this page by either:

• Quickly searching for an interviewer by name or email using the Search bar.
• Using the Filter by training or Filter by tag drop-downs to only show interviewers with certain eligibilities or tags.

When you select an interviewer, the Interviewer details pop-up is split into three tabs:

• Account settings
• Scheduling preferences
• Interview history

The following sections will take you through each tab and the actions you can perform in them.

Account settings

The Interviewer details pop-up defaults to the Account settings tab, where you can see and adjust various details of the interviewer’s profile.

From this tab you can add or adjust tags and interviewer eligibilities:

• Tags help make it easier to build interviewer pools. Think of tags as attributes of the interviewer, such as:
• Their office/location, e.g. ‘San Francisco’.
• Their department, e.g. ‘Engineering’.
• Their job level, e.g. ‘L5’.
• Use interview eligibilities to add interviewers to training programs, either as trainees graduates. Think of eligibilities as types of interviews that would typically require interviewers to train in some capacity in order to give.

You can also populate or update the interviewer’s job title, LinkedIn URL and phone number. This information can then be pulled into email templates and calendar events via tokens, to help with the overall candidate experience

Scheduling preferences

The Scheduling preferences tab allows you to adjust various interviewer settings and preferences, including timezone, working hours, and calendar conflict settings.

Timezone

The timezone setting is automatically drawn from the interviewer’s own calendar (either Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, depending on how your system is set up), and if the interviewer changes their timezone then the change will be reflected here too.

We generally recommend not changing interviewers’ timezones, but there may be instances where it’s useful to adjust this setting. For example, if an interviewer regularly travels or keeps unusual working hours, it might be useful to change their timezone so that their calendar is matched to the rest of their team’s calendars.

If you do need to change an interviewer’s timezone, you can select an alternative timezone option from the drop-down list.

Working hours

All interviewers’ working hours default to 9am - 5pm Monday to Friday as standard, but you can change them for individual interviewers if required.

When making changes here, you can adjust individual days or use the Copy window to all other windows option to speed the process up. Make a change to the Monday hours, then select this option - the system will then apply the same working hours to all other selected days.

Calendar conflict settings

Here you can set rules to help determine how the system should handle scheduling certain events.

Calendar conflict settings exist at the team level, as set in the Scheduling tab of Admin settings, under Interviewer settings. You can use this section, however, to create specific settings that only apply to an individual interviewer.

Keywords

Here you can set ignore and override keywords which denote whether calendar events containing those words should be considered as available for scheduling or not.

• Ignore keywords denote that calendar events containing those words should be considered as available for scheduling.
• Override keywords denote that events containing those words should be considered as conflicts, even if they also contain ignore keywords.

For example, a particular interviewer might be happy to schedule interviews over their lunch break, even though the default for the organization as a whole is to keep lunch breaks free. However, an exception to that rule is for ‘lunch and learn’ sessions, which the interviewer considers important to attend.

Here’s how you could set that up:

1. Add the word “lunch” as an ignore keyword.
2. Add the phrase “lunch and learn” as an override keyword.
3. Also add the phrase “lunch & learn” (i.e. containing an ampersand rather than the word “and”) as an alternative spelling

For more information about ‘ignore’ keywords, see Gem Scheduling: Add ignore keywords.

Free events

Sometimes calendar events are set as Free rather than Busy - for example if a member of the team adds an ‘out of office’ event into everyone else’s calendar as a reminder that they’re not around.

• By default the system considers Free events to be Available for scheduling.
• To change this, select the Free events drop-down and choose Conflicts.

Interview load limits and meeting buffers

To avoid over-taxing interviewers, you can limit how many interviews each interviewer can be scheduled for, on a single day and over the course of a week. You can also set a buffer to create some time before and after interviews when the system won’t schedule additional interviews.

Interview load limits and meeting buffers exist at the team level, as set in the Scheduling tab of Admin settings, under Interviewer settings. You can use this section, however, to create specific settings that only apply to an individual interviewer.

• Interview load limits: It’s generally best practice to keep this fairly conservative and not allow too many interviews. Some interviewers might be more heavily involved in recruiting, however - dedicated recruiters, for example - so these limits can be adjusted individually.
• Meeting buffers: Setting a small buffer is recommended, to allow interviewers to prepare for their interviewers or fill out scorecards after interviews.

Interview history

This tab provides an overview of all the interviews that the interviewer has participated in.

If you want to narrow down the list of interviews here you can use the Filter by training drop-down to only show interviews assigned to particular training programs. This is useful if, for example, you want to see which interviews an interviewer completed as part of their training in a particular area.

• The Interviewers page
• Account settings
• Scheduling preferences
• Timezone
• Working hours
• Calendar conflict settings
• Interview history