Background

As the window narrows to address the climate crisis and meet the targets set by the Paris Agreement, Agreena is one of the few companies in the world that is working to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in agricultural soils. The global soil carbon AgTech platform founded by tech specialist Julie Koch Fahler and agricultural professional Ida Boesen, and CEO Simon Haldrup, is on a mission to support more farmers in adopting regenerative farming practices.

As the transition to regenerative agriculture practices is getting the attention of policymakers, supply chains, and farmers alike to help reduce emissions and turn soil into carbon sinks, the company is growing at a robust rate in its work to verify, mint and sell certificates for stored soil carbon. The company recently raised a significant €46-million B Round funding to further grow and expand its platform and reach.

Headquartered in Copenhagen, Agreena has professionals across the world working with them to provide a scalable impact for farmers and the climate.

The Challenge

Agreena has been going through a stage of high growth, expanding from 100 to 150 employees within the last four months. To manage this phase of high volume hiring, they brought in Joseph Wilkinson as Talent and Recruitment Leader. One of his main focuses has been to optimise the existing processes to hire more efficiently. When Joseph joined, he saw that current processes were too manual and time consuming to scale, especially for its then small team of two recruiters. They had a choice: to hire more recruiters, or look into tools that could automate administrative time-draining parts of the recruitment process.

The first thing Agreena did to address this challenge was to implement Lever as their Applicant Tracking System. This was a core fundamental change that transformed their organisation’s hiring efficiency. Joseph quickly identified interview scheduling as taking too much of his and his team’s time. The existing process was very time-consuming and inefficient, regularly causing delays and frustrations for everyone, from candidate to recruiter. Lever has in-built basic interview scheduling capabilities, which worked fine for one-to-one interviews. But the team soon found there were many other interview scheduling use cases that Lever’s native offering couldn’t solve.

Automating scheduling for panel interviews wasn’t possible, and getting hiring managers to confirm times was becoming increasingly difficult, which was causing delays to booking interviews. This was stressful for the recruitment team and created a negative candidate experience. Sometimes candidates even dropped out of the recruitment process altogether.

A big time-wasting activity for the Agreena recruitment team was rescheduling interviews. If either the candidate or hiring manager(s) was unable to make the agreed time, scheduling in for another time meant starting the back and forth process all over again. It could even sometimes result in a breakdown of communication, where a candidate could still show up to an interview even if the hiring manager had declined.

‍Joseph came to the conclusion they needed a tool that could scale with their changing needs and accommodate times of high-volume hiring. He wanted to empower his team to take control of recruitment from start to finish, reducing the burden on the hiring manager in the process.

The Solution

The interview scheduling technology had to be integrable with Lever for a streamlined recruitment process. He looked at other scheduling automation solutions including Prelude and GoodTime, but following demo calls with their sales team and describing their needs, the pricing was too high and the implementation too long for a scaling startup. They needed a more affordable and flexible solution to accommodate their growth. That’s when they looked into Cronofy, which was within their budget and still delivered all the features they were looking for.

‍Rescheduling capabilities was a priority for Agreena. With Cronofy, candidates or hiring managers can simply click a link to reschedule and choose another time. This notifies everyone automatically, pulling real-time availability from calendars so there’s no double-booking or back-and-forth.

Scheduling complex panel interviews was also a regular occurrence for the team. With Cronofy’s scheduling groups and rules, the team can create groups of potential interviewers dependent on the role. The required number of interviewers could then be automatically selected based on their real-time calendar availability and the time slot chosen by the candidate. Everyone is notified and gets an automated calendar update.

‍Delayed scheduling was solved with Cronofy’s Scheduling On Behalf Of feature. The recruitment team can easily pull available times from a manager’s calendar and book an interview on their behalf, without having to include themselves in the event. They can simply create a scheduling link and send it to the candidate for them to choose a time from.

The Results

Since they started using Cronofy, each recruiter at Agreena has saved up to five hours a week, which has made a huge difference to their performance and productivity. They’ve been able to refocus this time on finding and building relationships with the best candidates. It’s also allowed the hiring managers to focus on interviewing skills and preparation rather than spending hours on scheduling tasks.

‍There has been a considerable return on investment since implementing Cronofy, saving time, speeding up the hiring process, and improving the quality of candidates coming in.

The candidate experience has been improved as they can enjoy a smooth streamlined recruitment process. They feel their time has been respected by being able to pick their own time slot depending on their agenda. Communication is straightforward as everything updates automatically if anyone makes a change or if they’re moved through the process.

‍Cronofy’s scheduling has also increased the overall happiness of the Agreena recruitment team, eliminating a great deal of frustrating admin from their day and giving them more time to focus on what they’re good at; finding and attracting the right people to their roles.

Agreena is planning to roll the solution out throughout the company, expanding from just the recruitment team and hiring managers to other parts of the business.