# Cronofy — full content > Your users' most important workflows start with finding time to meet. Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure behind those workflows, controlling availability, coordinating scheduling, and unlocking what those meetings reveal, so you can power it all inside your product without the complexity of building it yourself. # Interview Scheduling in Paycor Automate interview scheduling in Paycor without switching tools. Cronofy helps recruiters move faster, eliminate manual coordination and free up hours for more important work. ## Stop Wasting Time Scheduling Interviews Offer candidate self-scheduling without ever leaving your usual Paycor recruiter workflows. Schedule candidates in minutes without switching tools, chasing for availability, or manually creating calendar invites. [Speak to a specialist](#form-c69a8400-10ec-4ca4-8da2-fc92eb6f198c) [View in Paycor Marketplace](https://marketplace.paycor.com/en-US/apps/582563/cronofy) ## See what Paycor customers say ### Why candidate self-scheduling inside Paycor is a game-changer for Olympus Insurance Duration: 06:18 ## No Need to Change How You Work **Gets Live Interviewer Availability** **Auto-updates Confirmed Interviews** **Works With Your Existing Configuration** **Dedicated Support Team** **Enterprise-Grade Data Protection** ## Book more interviews daily Unlock more availability from interviewers without time-consuming back-and-forth. Cronofy gives you the tools to schedule interviews faster and more efficiently so you can move candidates forward and reduce time spent in the interview stage. ## See ROI in days, not months Save salary dollars on recruiting admin from day one. With Cronofy, you can instantly solve manual scheduling for any interview use-case and unlock more capabilities as you go. No need to wait six months for a complex rollout. ## Your solution to manual scheduling in Paycor ### Watch Cronofy in action within Paycor Duration: 01:30 ## Intuitive to use, powerful under the hood Any Cronofy product you’ll use is designed to be intuitive, with all the complexity hidden away in our powerful temporal grid. Connect to the calendars and conferencing your organisation use with the right level of access, one by one or at an enterprise level. Check real-time availability no matter the number of participants. Stay secure, compliant and in your data jurisdiction of choice. > We’ve just opened five internships last week, and I sent out nine requests yesterday about thirty minutes before I left work. I’ve already got five of them on my calendar, and they’re recorded in Paycor. — Kaitlin Ford, HR Manager, Olympus Insurance ## Enhance the interviewing experience Impress candidates with a personalized booking experience and give your team a process they can trust. With Cronofy, recruiters no longer need to switch tools, compare calendars or double-check invites, and hiring managers aren't pulled into scheduling admin. ## Built for global hiring Coordinate interviews confidently across time zones and localize the scheduling experience for candidates with support for 17 languages. You no longer need to worry about booking interviewers outside their working hours or dealing with no-shows caused by time zone confusion. ## Keep hiring data in sync Reflect candidate progress instantly in Paycor without double entry or manual status updates. Cronofy delivers reliable, streamlined reporting so your hiring data stays in one place and your team stays aligned. Zero mapping errors. ## Schedule from wherever you work Go beyond your ATS and schedule from where your team works and collaborates already, such as Teams, Office, and Slack. [Discover our Scheduling Agent](/scheduling-agent) ## Turn scheduling into a hiring advantage Keep candidates engaged and give hiring managers confidence in the process. Embrace the scheduling partner that shifts recruiter conversations from chasing calendars to building relationships. --- # What Speaking at the World's Largest TA Event Taught Me About Candidate Experience Cronofy's Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, keeps the pulse on candidate experience at the world's largest TA event, Recfest. Read on to see the top learnings from his presentation, and get insights on how to deliver the experience candidates want and deserve — they're set to make recruiters' workflows smoother, too. Cronofy's Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, keeps the pulse on candidate experience at the world's largest TA event, Recfest. Read on to see the top learnings from his presentation, and get insights on how to deliver the experience candidates want and deserve — they're set to make recruiters' workflows smoother, too. I would say I’m more of a stranger than a friend when it comes to public speaking, but it’s a skill that I’m motivated to develop and practice. Lockdown is well and truly in the past, so gone are the comfortable days of notes and a comfortable seat in front of Zoom. An opportunity to speak in front of a room (tent) full of peers about something I was both passionate about, and I felt was valuable to the TA world, was just too good an opportunity to turn down. There was definitely a weak-knees feeling five minutes before I stood on stage when I realised every seat was taken and there was a crowd standing at the back waiting to hear how to deliver the experience candidates really want in 2024, and how to hire faster. Here’s what I learned about what candidates want out of hiring right now, and what I want to share with you. ## This is one of the toughest periods for candidates in years It’s no secret. Applications are up (at least threefold), there are challenging economic conditions, and TA people are being asked to do more with less – either with resources, or headcount. The impact of this is that candidate experience is at risk of pouring out the leaky bucket. We’ve seen organisations slow down their decision making process, lean into the temptation to wait for the ‘right’ candidate, or even add interview processes to further assess applicants. These factors added up means that the mental health of candidates is at its greatest risk, and we’re seeing slow interview processes and poor communication have a greater impact on stress levels, anxiety and confidence. [38%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#f356bb9d5569) of candidates report feeling worsened stress levels, [34%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#f356bb9d5569) say it makes them anxious, and [29%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#f356bb9d5569) report their self-confidence being significantly affected by long hiring processes. Candidates want to feel respected, and I truly believe TA people want that too.he ability to impact the things we have control over – like quick response times, feedback, personalised scheduling are simple tactics that result in a positive experience and increased likelihood of timely hiring. That’s why [41%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#33c8d4ad7370) of candidates say efficient hiring is a sign of respect to them as a person. ## **The risk of a poor candidate experience is the greatest it’s ever been** When hiring goes wrong, we know that candidates talk. When we asked what candidates do on the back of a poor or faltering interview process, [20%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#6aa99e61720d) said they’d tell colleagues and peers, [12%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#6aa99e61720d) would actively discourage others from applying, and [9%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#6aa99e61720d) would vent their frustrations on social media. These are not insignificant numbers, and in an era of reviews and feedback these reactions can impact recruitment teams for years in the future. The time to focus on a positive experience is now, to save future issues from arising. ## **There are a lot of solutions, but you need to understand the problem you’re trying to solve** Interview scheduling automation is a very simple solution which significantly impacts the candidate experience in a positive way. It’s the [number one area](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#8560eaaa9e8a) candidates voted to see automated, and it immediately buys you time to do the things that are more important, like providing a personalised experience. However, to truly understand the value something like automation provides, you need to fully understand the problem you’re trying to solve. The biggest take away I shared in my presentation was the importance of laying out your entire recruitment workflow and interrogating every step. Look at where the bottlenecks are, what’s slowing you down and where you are losing the most candidates. If you truly know the areas for improvement, you will be better placed to assess the tools that can solve this problem. It might be about improving your time to hire, your Hiring Managers being more responsive, or even providing more information earlier so candidates are better prepared. There is not one tool that solves these problems, but the right blend of automation, human influence and prioritising experience are the key ingredients. ### Is interview scheduling really getting slower? Duration: 01:47 ## **Making sure AI is bringing the appropriate value** My overriding opinion though was the importance of a personalised experience. We know that [81%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ee8a80c782fc) of candidates want an individual to contact during their interview process, and I was fascinated to see just how much organisations were leaning into AI and ML to improve the recruitment and selection process. Our own research shows that candidates are experimenting with AI, too. [56%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ad141e8cfbd7) of candidates have already used generative AI in their application in some form—21% to optimise their CVs, 21% to tailor CVs to job descriptions, 20% for creating supporting content like cover letters, and 15% to mass apply to different roles. ## **Where does this leave candidate experience?** It feels like organisations are favouring speed over service, and when the competition is so high for the best candidates, we know that a personalised approach can be the difference between accepting or rejecting an offer. I came away from RecFest wondering if TA people are truly focussed on *improving* their recruitment flows, or simply *speeding it up. *Striking the balance is critical; by knowing the right stages to implement the automation tools, you can streamline candidates to the stage of human touch. If you’re hungry for more, you can read Cronofy’s Candidate Expectations research that informed my presentation [here](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024). For all those reading, I hope to see you again at the next event! [Meet Cronofy at UNLEASH World](/events/unleash-2024) ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- # How Mortgage Advice Bureau transformed appointment scheduling with Cronofy The Mortgage Advice Bureau is the UK’s leading mortgage intermediary brand. With over 1,600 advisers across the UK, they offer expert mortgage advice on a local, regional and national level to UK consumers. The Mortgage Advice Bureau is the UK’s leading mortgage intermediary brand. With over 1,600 advisers across the UK, they offer expert mortgage advice on a local, regional and national level to UK consumers. The Mortgage Advice Bureau was founded in 2000 by CEO Peter Brodnicki, with a mission to provide a specialist network to intermediaries working with UK independent estate agents. Fast-forward to where they are today; they’ve become the leading mortgage network as well as the UK’s most recognized intermediary consumer brand, winning over 150 national awards for the quality of its advice and service. They have over 1,600 advisers working for them, handling over £16 billion of loans annually. The Mortgage Advice Bureau covers all aspects of property-related lending including schemes such as Help to Buy, Buy-to-Let, and Affordable Housing schemes, and searches thousands of mortgage deals to find the right one for the customers' needs. The ambitious company already has an extensive portfolio of UK-based operations, and has recently opened an office in Australia as part of their expansion plans. ## The Challenge An important part of a mortgage advisers’ role is to optimally manage their calendars, using their time strategically and fitting clients in where they can. The issue was, the Mortgage Advice Bureau had outgrown the processes being used to organize their escalating number of appointments. An adviser would traditionally have to engage in email back-and-forth or pick-up the phone to find a time to meet a client. This process was wasting precious time for both the client and the adviser, creating a poor customer experience and losing business for the Mortgage Advice Bureau. This was something the team wanted to change - buying a house is already stressful enough, and securing a mortgage is very time-sensitive. The Mortgage Advice Bureau’s software development team responded by focusing on building a platform that would improve the customer experience and connect them to advisers faster. This needed to cater to all three of their customer types: the end customer who was looking for advice, the adviser, and the introducer who would usually be an independent estate agent or builder. To complicate matters further, their advisers work over many independent mortgage firms, all needing to keep data and information separate from one another. By nature, the platform had to be multi-tenanted, which makes the task of creating a scheduling solution that was accessible to everyone extremely complex. > We've got quite a complicated use case where we have a lot of tenants, so we have to keep things separate. And because we wanted to have all three of our customer types be able to book appointments, it was ruled out very quickly that we were to do everything ourselves with that system because we were already going to have to bespoke a lot of it. — Richard Betteridge, Solutions Architect, Mortgage Advice Bureau They concluded that they would look for a company that offered booking system technology that could be integrated into their new platform. Now it was just a case of finding the right fit. They shopped around for a scheduling solution company that could provide what they needed, most of which met one or two of their requirements but fell short of the full list. A particular challenge they found was with security and privacy. As the Mortgage Advice Bureau deals with thousands of clients’ sensitive financial data, they’re FCA-regulated and must meet their governing standards. Many of the tools the team looked at didn’t meet the level of security they required. When they found Cronofy it was a different story. ## The Solution Following a discussion and demo, it was clear Cronofy could deliver everything the Mortgage Advice Bureau needed. A crucial deciding factor was the privacy and security certifications Cronofy holds. The team stressed the importance of this; as they deal with thousands of clients’ sensitive financial data, they’re regulated by the FCA and must meet their governing standards. They found that Cronofy’s level of security measures was unmatched by any of the alternatives they had considered. > Compliance for us is a big thing. We have our own compliance department, and because we have to work with the FCA, we have to provide a certain level of security for everybody. Cronofy was able to meet these needs where others couldn’t. — Richard Betteridge, Solutions Architect, Mortgage Advice Bureau After assessing the Mortgage Advice Bureau’s requirements, it was decided Cronofy’s availability API combined with its Enterprise Connect functionality was the perfect fit. This solution puts the scheduling power in the customer’s hands. A client can look into the calendars of not just one but multiple advisers to see who is available at their preferred time. This functionality wasn’t offered by any of the other vendors they looked at, and hugely improved the likelihood of a customer finding an appointment quickly at a time that was convenient for them. The API also integrates seamlessly with all major email providers, for easy appointment scheduling no matter which platform the customer uses. Although most advisers work primarily from one office, many do move around and therefore need to be able to book appointments for other locations. Cronofy was able to set up rules so even if an adviser was working from a different office than they usually did, their calendars would still be blocked out. No danger of double-booking mishaps. The Mortgage Advice Bureau needed a solution that could connect the calendars of their 1,600-strong network of advisers without jeopardising security. Usually this would be a huge task for the IT team to manage, and each adviser would need to authorise access individually. Enterprise Connect solves this problem with ease. This tool just needs authentication from one service account and all the calendars within the business are synced. The IT team only has to manage this one service account rather than that of an entire workforce. Enterprise Connect also makes data security tighter than ever. The permissions can be changed to restrict access as much as a business needs, which was ideal for the Mortgage Advice Bureau. ‍ As with any business dealing with money, there needs to be a level of trust established between customer and provider. The human element of the advice process must be upheld; people don’t want money advice from a robot. The Mortgage Advice Bureau needed automations that would enhance rather than detract from their interactions with customers, allowing the relationship and advice to sit center-stage. Cronofy’s integrations allow the advisers to dedicate more time to the customer and their needs. ## The Results It only took the team three months to launch the initial release of the entire new system with the new Cronofy scheduling capabilities embedded into it. The team rolled out the system in phases, and now over a third of the firms the Mortgage Advice Bureau works with use it. The solution has received a resoundingly positive response; clients are happy as they’re being seen quicker, and advisers save time on tedious admin work while upholding rigorous security standards. ‍ Their Cronofy integrations have been able to scale with the business without any issue. The Mortgage Advice Bureau deals with billions of pounds worth of loans, so their solution needed to handle that amount of data while never compromising on security. > We have had no problems with scaling. Our system is all configured so that if we encounter higher volumes, it automatically scales. And as we've been throwing more traffic at Cronofy, it hasn't had a detrimental impact on anything. So that's good because obviously, we get a lot of traffic; we’ve processed thousands of loans. So that's a lot of information. — Richard Betteridge, Solutions Architect, Mortgage Advice Bureau As the new system has made scheduling simpler than ever and has saved advisers substantial time from their day, the business has grown and taken on more clients. Since June last year, the company has booked over 6,000 appointments, with the frequency of these bookings increasing each month as more people are put into the system. ‍ The company uses an Net Promoter Score to measure the functionality of its entire platform. Due to the improvement in the booking system, with its ease of use and multiple features, their last recorded NPS was 64, which places the platform within the ‘excellent’ category. ‍ At the crux of this project was the thing that everyone wants more of: time. Advisers needed more time to focus on their clients, and their previous processes were detracting from the relationship-building stage between adviser and client. Cronofy aims to save substantial time on admin through automation, and the Mortgage Advice Bureau wasn’t disappointed. The average time an adviser spent on finding a customer the right mortgage and protection offerings was previously around 10 hours – after implementing the new system, this has been slashed to under half of that time. Getting appointments booked faster with Cronofy has played a big part in this acceleration. ## What’s Next? The Mortgage Advice Bureau is currently launching their services in Australia. As Cronofy provides a key functionality for Mortage Advice Bureau, they will also need to embed scheduling in the Australian version of their platform. Cronofy has multiple data centers, including one in Australia, meaning the team can launch the platform there without issue. The data is completely secure and hosted in the region, which is important to meet their regulatory requirements. Cronofy will continue supporting the business as it expands, creating a smooth and streamlined scheduling experience for everyone. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # API Pricing API Pricing Plans ## Reliable APIs with no surprising fees. Choose the perfect plan for wherever you are in the product lifecycle. ## API pricing plans See [cronofy.com/pricing](/pricing) for full details. ## Need to record, transcribe, and summarize meetings? You can now use Cronofy Meeting Agents to capture meetings scheduled via your application across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, returning recordings, transcripts and AI-generated summaries. Meeting Agents are priced based on monthly usage, with all costs inclusive of meeting recording, transcription, and data processing. The first 24 hours of usage are free, then pricing scales as follows: - 25–4,000 hours: $0.79/hour - 4,001–8,000 hours: $0.69/hour - 8,001–16,000 hours: $0.59/hour - 16,001+ hours: $0.59/hour Charges are metered per second so you only ever pay for exactly what you use. A minimum monthly commitment of $99 applies for standalone use. [Request access](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing) [Learn more](/developer/meeting-agents) ## Choose the right plan for you ## API pricing plans See [cronofy.com/pricing](/pricing) for full details. ## Startup Pricing We have special pricing for early-stage companies to support you as you grow. Contact our team to learn more. [Book a call with our team](/book-a-demo-api) ## Need a standalone solution? Create personalized booking links with our Scheduler app, with no developer expertise required. Start scheduling today with our app, browser extensions, and supported integrations. [See Scheduler pricing](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing) [Explore features](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) --- # Use cases Leverage Cronofy's APIs and Scheduler for a variety of use cases. From interview scheduling, to Telehealth and E-learning, Cronofy is the flexible solution for your industry. Use Cases Scheduling solutions and calendar integrations for your business, product, or team. Hiring teams use Cronofy to streamline their interview scheduling workflows and processes. --- Prop tech and agents use Cronofy to manage viewing booking times for their clients and potential buyers. --- Healthcare providers use Cronofy to facilitate appointment bookings and consultations with the highest privacy and security. Hiring teams use Cronofy to streamline their interview scheduling workflows and processes. --- Realtor agents use Cronofy to manage viewing booking times for their clients and potential buyers. --- Healthcare providers use Cronofy to facilitate appointment bookings and consultations. > “It was a super fast implementation process with Cronofy, and the support we received was great – the team are friendly and have been flexible to our needs. — Alicia Sapena, Head of People, Voicemod ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Blog Post 2024-06-19T12:00:32.123Z --- ### Cronofy Partners with Whereby for Integrated Video Calls and Streamlined Scheduling Cronofy has partnered with Whereby to further accelerate scheduling and video conferencing capabilities for product builders. Our shared vision of creating secure, scalable and flexible solutions for developers and product teams, is now set in motion. Blog Post 2024-09-24T10:31:00.000Z --- # The post-pandemic war for talent: how your interview scheduling can give you a competitive edge The COVID crisis has shifted the hiring power. With competition at an all-time high, we discuss how recruiters can get ahead with the right technology. The COVID crisis has shifted the hiring power. With competition at an all-time high, we discuss how recruiters can get ahead with the right technology. The COVID crisis has shifted the hiring power dynamic further in the candidate's favor. With competition at an all-time high, we discuss how recruiters can get ahead and win the war for talent with the right technology. The war for talent is nothing new among recruiters and hiring managers. There's been a long ongoing battle to attract and retain the best people, and the COVID pandemic has only exacerbated this. The unavoidable job cuts and business shut-downs during COVID's peak put the power temporarily in the employer's hands. There was a general acceptance that if you had a job, you were one of the lucky ones. A year later, the power dynamic has once again been turned on its head. UK job vacancies have hit a [record high of one million](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/14/uk-payrolls-covid-job-vacancies-hotels-pubs-restaurants-staff), while US jobseekers have [10 million openings ](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/us-10-million-job-openings-explained/)to choose from, leaving employers scrambling to fill the growing skills gap. A [recent KPMG report](https://home.kpmg/uk/en/home/insights/2020/09/uk-ceo-outlook/what-the-new-reality-means-for-talent-management.html) found that global CEOs now regard 'talent risk' — the urgent need to attract and retain employees with the right skills — as the most significant threat to their growth prospects. The hiring landscape is fast-changing, and only the employers that adapt will win the best talent. ## The post-covid hiring landscape The value of having the right people has never been more clear as employers plan their post-pandemic recovery. As businesses have opened back up and job vacancies have soared, the number of employees leaving their current jobs has skyrocketed with it. Lockdown and furlough gave people time to reflect: am I in the right role or industry? Am I valued? Would my talents be best served somewhere else? According to a survey from Workable, 70% of respondents were either actively or passively looking for work, and 54% had started looking just in the last half year. The '[Great Discontent'](https://get.workable.com/the-great-discontent-2021-worker-survey-us) is spreading throughout the working population. However, even with people more willing to leave their roles, there is heavy competition from other companies and recruiters vying for the best talent's attention. To get ahead, organizations need to meet the changing expectations of the post-pandemic candidate in terms of wage, benefits, company culture, and internal processes. They expect to be respected as an individual. Crucially, employers also need to build engaged relationships with prospective and current employees. The technology industry in particular is experiencing a notable skills gap. The rise in remote working has increased the reliance on tech solutions that enable people to do their jobs from home. The mounting pressure on tech employers to hire the right talent fast is acute, in order to enable growth and to help meet this increased demand. ## The age of instant gratification Digital culture has impacted our attention spans. We expect everything to load quickly, deliver immediate answers, and connect us to the things we want. This is true from accessing news to ordering next-day deliveries and has molded the modern job candidate, transferring these expectations to the hiring experience and making the war for talent a race against time. Recruiters have to beat the competition with their speed-to-hire. They need to progress the hiring process from application, to interview, to job offer at a fast enough pace to keep the candidate's interest piqued. With so many businesses looking to hire and job vacancies at a high, they can easily go elsewhere if you don't keep the candidate engaged. First impressions mean everything, and the hiring process is the first point of contact. Poorly done, and it can negatively affect a company’s brand. > “*Hiring is part of your brand.* I think people see branding in terms of marketing, they see it in terms of culture, but they don’t always *align it to how they hire*... Getting people to understand that is key.” **‍****[David Smith](https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-smith-a5aa6a12/?originalSubdomain=uk)**** | Leading Speaker on People Engagement & Business Performance** ‍ ## Common problems with recruitment processes Recruiters are feeling the pressure to find the best people as quickly as possible. Businesses need to fill vacancies fast to boost productivity and recover from the effects of the pandemic. Despite the undeniable pressure, it's important not to let this reduce the standards of the recruitment process. Time and time again, recruiters let the financial targets of the business lead their strategy rather than the people. [A survey](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nearly-three-in-four-employers-affected-by-a-bad-hire-according-to-a-recent-careerbuilder-survey-300567056.html) from CareerBuilder showed 74% of employers say they've hired the wrong person for a position, with 43% saying they made this hire as they had to fill a vacancy quickly. This approach creates company culture and role mismatches, which inevitably leads to a high turnover of staff. Likewise, a slow response will lose the attention of the candidate. Our [candidate expectations report](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download) showed that speed ranked in the top three things candidates expect from the recruitment process, with 62% saying they have dropped out due to delays – particularly with interview scheduling – in the past. The recruiter has to navigate between many stakeholders, organizing meetings, interviews, and email responses. Manually handling this can be a logistical minefield and a time-consuming one at that. It slows the process down and increases drop-out rates, leaving the employer less likely to find the right fit. Although the hiring process needs to be fast-paced to secure the right people, this shouldn't be at the expense of the human touch. Candidates still want to speak to real people and build relationships with their prospective employer rather than be hurried through the motions by a robot. A successful approach to hiring finds the right balance. The recruitment process is an integral part of sourcing and evaluating the right talent, and is where a recruiter can properly gauge how good a fit the candidate is for the role and the company. It's a two way sales process – a chance for a company to put their best foot forward and win talent with their culture. ## What tactics are employers using to win talent? There was naturally a widespread shift to remote work during the pandemic, and now many don't want to return to the office 9 to 5 model. A[ survey by Envoy](http://www.inc.com/mary-yang/envoy-zynga-hybrid-model-remote-work-survey.html) found that nearly half of employees say they will likely look for another job if their current employer does not offer a hybrid workplace. Employee wellbeing is also being prioritised through mental health days and support. Being able to adapt to the new way of working in terms of benefits stands an employer in much better stead with job hunters, but these benefits are becoming commonplace and will soon be matched by the competition. Many businesses have responded to the heightened competition with a higher wage offering. Figures from the Office of National Statistics have shown [pay is rising at 8.3%](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/september2021) as businesses chase skilled staff with pay raises and bonuses. However, this isn't a sustainable option, particularly for smaller companies with less capital. There needs to be internal change to processes, culture, and employer branding to make the business somewhere people want to work. An efficient hiring process is an ideal platform to communicate this and stand out against competition. ## Interview scheduling automation is the answer The interview scheduling process offers the perfect opportunity for recruiters to get ahead from the start. In our [independent research report](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download) on candidate expectations, 65% of respondents agreed that a poor interview scheduling process negatively impacts how they perceive an employer. A smooth, swift transition through the stages of the hiring process through automation allows the business to put its best foot forward and boost its brand. Manually organizing interviews is a drain on everyone's time. The back-and-forth emailing or calls between recruiter and candidate can quickly spiral into an infuriating game, resulting in stressed recruiters and frustrated candidates, waiting for answers. It makes the business appear chaotic and unappealing to the candidate. Automating this process is an easy win over hiring competitors. Recruiters can link products such as [our Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) to their existing calendar and hiring workflows for seamless interview scheduling. They can send an email to the candidate that contains a private link, personalized with all the candidates' details and showing them times based on the availability of the interview panel. It provides them with the instant gratification they have grown accustomed to in the digital age by offering them immediate access to different times and dates to choose from. The power is in their hands to select the one they want, and they automatically have an event added to their calendar. The job applicant feels their time is respected; the modern candidate already has plenty of other priorities that they need to work around. Letting them choose a time slot for the interview is a way of acknowledging their busy schedule. It's essential for automation to enhance rather than detract from relationship building during the recruitment process. Lockdown has made the human-touch element of hiring more important than ever. We're social beings; being forced to isolate has left us craving interaction with others. Time-consuming administrative tasks like interview scheduling don't benefit anyone from being completed manually; often the opposite is true. Automation gives the recruiter more time to focus on what's important: building relationships and matching the right candidate to the right role. The first step is to evaluate the hiring funnel and optimize the areas where automation would add value. [Our report ](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download)revealed that these areas included video interviewing, candidate screening, interview scheduling, and online tests. Automating these processes frees up time for those parts of the hiring process that are better delivered with human touch. > “Candidates like automation, but they also **want a human touch** - which seems like a paradox. But I think candidates don’t really care about what’s actually happening in the background, they just want to **avoid a stressful ambiguous period** of not knowing what’s going on.” **Hung Lee | Curator at ****[Recruiting Brainfood](https://www.recruitingbrainfood.com)** The key takeaway here is that the post-pandemic recruitment sector is fiercely competitive. Recruiters need to adapt to the expectations of the new candidate driven job market if they want to attract and retain the right people. Although an impressive salary and benefits package could win the battle, it's those employers that speed up their processes and project a great impression of their culture that will win the war. The right automation can elevate a company's employer brand to help its open position stand out in the current sea of vacancies. The candidate's first impression of the business as a whole will be the job application and interview scheduling phase. Getting this wrong can make the difference between bringing top talent to an interview or losing out. The war for talent is a race against time: automation is a recruiter's best weapon when it comes to efficiency. Using it to improve the hiring experience, tackle the frustrations associated with interview scheduling, and beat the competition at the first hiring hurdle is a smart approach to standing out in a saturated market. --- # UNLEASH World Paris | October 20-22, 2025 We’re heading to UNLEASH World 2025 to show how smarter scheduling empowers recruiters and HR teams to move faster, hire better, and deliver standout candidate experiences. We’re heading to UNLEASH World 2025 to show how smarter scheduling empowers recruiters and HR teams to move faster, hire better, and deliver standout candidate experiences. ## We're heading to UNLEASH World 2025! From **October 20–22**, Cronofy will be at the **Paris Convention Centre** for **UNLEASH World 2025**, joining thousands of HR and Talent Acquisition professionals who are shaping the future of work. Our team will be on the ground throughout the event — ready to connect, share insights, and demo how we’re transforming scheduling for recruiters, HR teams, and candidates. Come say hi to the Cronofy team and see our solutions in action in Paris. ## Our Solutions At Cronofy, we believe scheduling should never be the bottleneck in hiring. Whether you’re running high-volume recruitment, executive searches, or building HR tech solutions, our products are designed to save you time, reduce drop-off, and create a smooth experience for everyone. ## Explore our ATS Integration Partners Whether you’re using SuccessFactors, Workday, BambooHR, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, or Lever — we’ve got you covered. [ATS Marketplace](/ats-scheduling-integration-partners) ## Cronofy API It’s not just recruiters and HR teams that rely on Cronofy. Our scheduling infrastructure powers some of the world’s leading HR tech platforms like TeamTailor, Indeed, and Personio. By integrating our API, they’re able to accelerate time to market and launch new interview scheduling features faster. With our API, HR Tech platforms can: - Embed scheduling automation directly into their existing product workflows. - Deliver a better candidate experience with self-scheduling capabilities. - Scale with infrastructure proven to support millions of interviews with 99.99% uptime. [Explore](/developer) > Given our growth and market focus, we need the right people in the right roles, at the right time. It’s critical our talent team focuses on recruiting the right people, not doing the administrative part of scheduling interviews. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ![Cronofy Team]() --- # My First 30 days working as Head of Talent at Cronofy Mark recently joined Cronofy as Head of Talent. With the mission to help us nurture and grow the team and reach our goal of providing excellent scheduling. Mark recently joined Cronofy as Head of Talent. With the mission to help us nurture and grow the team and reach our goal of providing excellent scheduling. ***Mark Harbottle,**** recently joined Cronofy as Head of Talent. His mission? To help us nurture and grow the team and reach our goal of providing excellent scheduling for every use case and every user. He tells us about his first month on the job, from remote onboarding to how we live our principles.* ### Who’s your best friend going to be? It was the question running around my head as I opened up my shiny new MacBook Pro on my first day as Head of Talent at Cronofy. Everyone has a ‘work partner’ or a best friend at work, don’t they? The one who **gets** your jokes, the one you can have a moan at, and the one who makes you feel better about a bad day. I was about to start a new journey in my career in a remote role – with office and distributed teams. Who was going to be my best friend? A little context, my background was in agency IT recruitment. This new role was part of a shift towards people, culture and talent. Given it was a new chapter in my career I was naturally nervous to make an impact. During my interview process with Adam (CEO) and Garry (CTO) I was struck by their honest approach. I believe they liked that I was looking for a role in a business that would allow room for growth, utilise my transferrable skills, learn from mistakes and somewhere I could really challenge myself to make an impact. I knew I had a lot to give and I really respected that they could see that too. Onboarding was straight forward enough. Tech delivered early, passwords provided… wait, Airpods Pro? Surely that’s a mistake. It turns out no expenses are spared – our best-in-class team need best-in-class tech to ensure they have all the tools they need to perform. Need anything else? Here’s a Pleo card. I really had no excuses. After an initial induction from Adam I took some time to explore Notion, get my head around the Slack channels, and figure out which profile picture would be best for google mail and Zoom, I felt like I was ready to go. A statement from Adam that I’ll never forget is when he told me ‘**you’ve got a job… go do it’.** How can you say that to a new starter? I could really make this job my own! Looking back, I realise that was a clear indication of how Cronofy operates – we’re guided by our principles every day, we don’t hold hands but we will support you if you ask, we like you to take responsibility and we want you to develop yourself. This was truly liberating, and as someone who was now in a job I had never done before, I needed to understand how the business works, who the teams are, what our Scheduler product looks like – I had to learn **everything**. ‍ ### Time to get stuck into my new role So, off I went. I had a 30 minute call with every single person in the business and asked them about themselves and Cronofy. I sat in Dev meetings desperately trying to keep up with the jargon and the in-jokes, wide-eyed at the innovation our Engineers were dropping into conversation as if it was natural. I soaked up the genius in a Marketing round up meeting as they discussed client engagement, market opportunities, marketing strategies and our approach to educating the world on scheduling. We want to be a leading voice, act with integrity, make a difference. Our principles really were guiding who we are and how we act. I also dropped into our twice-daily scheduled ‘coffee time’ Zoom chats arranged via Slack – a really great opportunity to get to know people and have a non-work chat. Our Head of Operations, Karl, walked out (ended his call?) when someone suggested pineapple on a pizza is OK. I’ve been here 5 minutes, they’re not treating me like a new kid at school. Turns out they’re alright, this lot. I was supported as well – constantly asked by everyone if I needed anything, how things are going. Adam was talking to me every day to see how I was. There were no instructions, no to-do list, no questioning my approach. It was simply ‘how are you’, ‘what have you been up to’, and ‘do you need anything from me’? It was refreshing, but it was a constant reminder that I am responsible for making this a success. Over the first couple of weeks as I learned more about the business my to-do list wrote itself. Departments needed to hire, processes (and systems) need to be put in place, and there was loads that could be done around showcasing the amazing opportunities for development within Cronofy. My days have been spent sourcing innovative new ideas and tools that will improve our processes relating to recruitment, onboarding, interviewing and providing an amazing experience for anyone looking for a role with us. Beyond that, I’m working on how we can maintain that experience long term – supporting and developing the talent that exists internally, and having some fun along the way (ask about the first social I put together!). In our all-hands meeting at the end of my first week, it really hit home. The engagement from everyone was so positive. We had an open discussion about a variety of topics, and if there was ever a need for proof that our[ principles](https://www.cronofy.com/about/) matter – this was it. The interaction was like something I’d never witnessed before, and there was a real sense of a community, or family. ### So, what’s the verdict? I’m totally bought into the Cronofy way of life, and it suits us and our customers so well. We are constantly challenging each other to be better, asking insightful questions and working together. I feel very fortunate to be part of such a wonderful group of people. As the weeks and months go on I will be supporting all departments in their hiring needs, I’ll be the ‘face’ of recruitment internally and externally, and I hope to engage in wider communities to really show off our status as an employer of choice, as well as constantly working to develop our internal talent. My success will be driven by seeing the business and our staff grow every day. But what about my work best friend? Well, if I really think about it, I think the answer is *everyone.* --- # Thanks for contacting Cronofy # Thanks for getting in touch! Schedule a time to talk below. [Schedule your call now](https://app.cronofy.com/pls/Mv8Iy7wp) In the meantime, you might be interested in: ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### Hiring coordinator now schedules interviews in 30 seconds from within BambooHR See how a hiring coordinator from ONWA now schedules interviews in 30 seconds using Cronofy within BambooHR, and learn more about how she was able to upskill thanks to claiming back hours from manual administrative work. Case Study --- # White label Scheduling API Build on Cronofy's White-Label API and power custom meeting scheduling and meeting recording experiences in your SaaS application ## Build custom meeting workflows into your product Use Cronofy’s APIs to manage real-time scheduling and meeting intelligence directly in your product- combining a set of modular endpoints that give you complete control over the user experience. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) Calendar API ## Access and manage calendar data across providers Connect to Google, Microsoft, Apple, and more to read, write, and update events as they change, or use free/busy access only when full calendar sync isn’t required. Cronofy handles authorization and syncing as an intermediary, so you don’t need to build or maintain separate integrations for each provider. [See capabilities](/developer/capability/control-availability) [Read the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/authorization/) Availability API ## Combine availability across calendars Query availability across multiple users and calendars in real time, and use it to coordinate meetings and power automated workflows. Let users apply working hours, buffers, and custom rules, so availability can be used reliably by your product or agents without implementing complex logic yourself. [See capabilities](/developer/capability/control-availability) [Read the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/) Meeting Agent API ## Capture and structure meeting data Capture transcripts and recordings and generate AI summaries from meetings across Teams, Zoom or Google Meet. Give your application access to meeting intelligence to power new product capabilities without building conferencing integrations or transcription pipelines yourself. [See capabilities](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) [Read the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/) UI Elements ## Fast-track development and customization Use pre-built components for availability selection, booking flows, and calendar interaction - including agenda views, date/time pickers, slot selection, availability rules, and availability viewers. Ship custom interfaces faster, while maintaining full control over style and user experience. [Read the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## When to build with the API ### For full control Design fully white-labelled and custom meeting workflows tailored to your product and use cases, without being constrained by pre-built UI. --- ### For complex workflows Handle multi-user coordination, edge cases, and custom business logic with the flexibility needed for real-world meeting workflows. --- ### For native experiences Keep users inside your product with native integrations, consistent UX, and full control over how scheduling and meeting workflows behave. > Cronofy has saved us hundreds of development hours, and our tests have already shown a significant improvement in user experience and time savings. — Tobias Tiedgen, CEO, d.vinci ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ## Built on a single, compliant infrastructure backed by 99.99% uptime Everything runs on Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure, so availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence work together seamlessly through a set of APIs. Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified, with six regional data centers giving you complete control over where your data lives. [See all capabilities](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## Explore other ways to build with Cronofy Built on the same infrastructure, so you can combine approaches for different use cases as your product evolves. ### Want to launch faster? For teams who value speed over customization, drop booking links into your product with a pre-built UI and minimal setup. --- ### Building with Agents? For AI-powered apps. Let agents handle scheduling through our MCP server. Perfect for conversational interfaces and agentic workflows. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) [See pricing](/api-pricing) ## Powering SaaS applications of all sizes ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) --- # Cronofy Recruitment Audit Checklist With this checklist compiled by our team of recruitment experts you can assess your existing processes and take your recruitment strategies to the next level. ## Recruitment Audit Checklist Our team of interview scheduling specialists works with thousands of recruitment teams, supporting them as they transform their processes. They created this checklist to help you assess your existing processes and take your recruitment strategies to the next level. ## Get your free copy of the Cronofy Recruitment Audit Checklist --- # Coordinate meetings inside your product From scheduling and rescheduling to capturing outcomes and triggering actions, power every step of meetings as they happen. ## Coordinate the full meeting lifecycle inside your product Let users schedule meetings, record calls, generate AI summaries, and trigger follow-up actions in your product without needing to build or maintain complex calendar and conferencing integrations yourself. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) ## Scheduling is just the start of what your product needs to manage Attendees change, meetings are rescheduled, and what happens during them needs to be captured and acted on. Without a unified system, scheduling, updates, and outcomes are split across tools, leaving crucial steps and data out of sync. Cronofy manages the full lifecycle, so your product can move from scheduling through to action without the burden of building complex workflows yourself. Calendars and availability ## Connect users' calendars and keep their availability in sync Cronofy handles authorization, permissions, and ongoing updates across providers for you through a managed authorization flow, branded for your application. Whether users connect with full Read-Write access, or choose a Free/Busy only connection, you get reliable, real-time availability in your product without engineering overhead or sync issues. [Read the availability docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/) Integrated conferencing ## Automatically provision conferencing links Let users schedule meetings with conferencing details included automatically, whether using Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or other providers. Ensure every meeting is ready to happen, without manual setup or missing links. [Read the conferencing docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/conferencing-services/) Rescheduling ## Keep track of meetings as they change Handle rescheduling, cancellations, and participant updates automatically. Ensure calendars, conferencing, and attendees stay in sync and significantly reduce no-shows for users. [Read the events docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/calendars-events/) Meeting intelligence ## Capture what happens in every meeting Record meetings, generate transcripts and AI summaries, and capture structured data across platforms. Remove the need for manual note-taking or external tools and enable your product to trigger follow-ups, updates, and workflows based on meeting outcomes. [Learn about Meeting Agents](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/managed-availability/) See how we power the full lifecycle Agentic Workflows ## Let agents coordinate and act across the lifecycle Give AI-agents the context they need to manage meeting workflows on your users behalf. From coordination to follow-up, meetings can be managed end-to-end without human intervention. [See the MCP docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/mcp-server/) ## Choose an integration path With human support and clear developer documentation, get started quickly with the best option for your platform and combine approaches as you scale. ### Need full control? Build custom meeting workflows with our API. --- ### Want to launch fast? Embed scheduling with a pre-built UI. --- ### Building with Agents? Handle agentic workflows with our MCP server. ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) > It was either going to take us stopping everything that we were doing to build a significantly more robust calendar integration, or to find someone that can do this for us. When we came across Cronofy, we realised we’ve been looking for something like this. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer, Heal.me ## Powering time for over 180,000 companies Ship with confidence without increasing operational risk. ### Compliance built-in GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO certified. Unlock regulated markets while building trust. --- ### Regional deployments Data stays in-region with data centres across the US, UK, EU, and APAC. --- ### Reliability at scale High-availability infrastructure with 99.99% uptime, even when providers fail. ## Replace fragmented integrations with one system Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure is the foundation for every meeting workflow, bringing together availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence in one modular system. At the core is the Temporal Grid, built on decades of experience handling the hardest parts of meeting workflows. It unifies calendars, availability, conferencing, meeting data, and compliance, taking away the complexity of building the underlying infrastructure yourself, so every capability you build with feels simple and intuitive from day one. Because everything runs on the same grid, you can power the full meeting lifecycle from day one, or start with the capability you need today and grow into richer workflows and agent-driven automation over time on the same foundation. [See all capabilities](/home) ## Launch faster and build products users stick with From startups to enterprise platforms, teams use Cronofy to launch embedded scheduling experiences faster. ### Ship meeting workflows faster Skip the complexity and launch faster with pre-built capabilities, while your team stays focused on what makes your product different. --- ### Power native experiences Ship experiences that keep users inside your platform, not bouncing between external tools, so workflows stay connected and consistent. --- ### Stay reliable as you scale Handle edge cases and provider downtime automatically, so workflows continue to run smoothly as your product scales. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) ## Powering SaaS applications of all sizes ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) --- # Cronofy confirmed as an SAP SuccessFactors integration partner The Scheduler is now a certified integration for the recruiting platform, SAP SuccessFactors, and Cronofy is an official SAP partner! The Scheduler is now a certified integration for the recruiting platform, SAP SuccessFactors, and Cronofy is an official SAP partner! Leading software provider, SAP has now certified Cronofy’s Scheduler as an integration for their recruiting platform, [SAP SuccessFactors](https://www.sap.com/products/hcm.html), and have officially confirmed our partnership! The Scheduler passed SAP’s tests for its technical compliance with their certification procedures, and is now a certified integration provider for SAP SuccessFactors users. Cronofy will be included on the SAP online directory as an approved integration for their customers to easily find. ‍ The Scheduler is a SaaS tool that can be integrated with various software applications to create public or personalized booking links that can be used to schedule interviews in a few clicks rather than through painful back and forth conversations. Recruiters and Hiring Managers can share their real-time availability with candidates and accelerate the hiring process. ‍ The partnership with SAP means that SuccessFactors users can use the Scheduler with total peace of mind and is a testament to our relentless approach to data security and privacy. ‍ SAP has high standards for their products, providing recruitment solutions for thousands of hiring teams and recruiters and dealing with a large amount of candidate details. The Scheduler needed to meet these standards in order for the partnership to go forward. Our development team consistently makes changes and improves the Scheduler, in response to customer feedback, and we regularly undergo security audits to give our customers full confidence in our products. ‍ ### Interview scheduling stress Interview scheduling is a time-consuming process for recruiters – time they could be spending on higher value tasks like sourcing and building relationships with candidates. Cronofy’s Scheduler can deal with complex interview scheduling use cases such as panel and group scheduling as well as scheduling on behalf of a hiring manager; it is the perfect fit for recruiters dealing with high-volume hiring. This made it the ideal interview scheduling tool to[ integrate with SuccessFactors](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/success-factors/). ‍ Our CEO Adam had the following to say about the partnership: > “It is extremely difficult for recruitment teams that are dealing with high volumes of candidates to balance internal efficiency with giving a first-class candidate experience. Our new SuccessFactors integration solves this problem. Our industry-leading compliance and security, alongside SAP’s certification, ensure that even the most security and privacy-focused organizations can take advantage of our interview scheduling tool and reap the benefits of automation.” ‍ The SAP partnership is the latest to add to a growing list of software providers who trust Cronofy. We’re immensely proud of the fact we’ve been trusted by multiple highly esteemed software companies and look to keep helping recruiters hit their talent acquisition targets by integrating our scheduling technology with the HR platforms they use. ‍ *Want to integrate Cronofy with your SAP SuccessFactors platform? **[Book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo)** and see how it can work for you.* --- # Temporal infrastructure - availability, scheduling and meeting intelligence Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure that controls availability, coordinates scheduling, and unlocks what those meetings reveal, keeping agents, systems, and their users in sync. ## The infrastructure running behind every meeting that matters Every hire, sale, diagnosis, and decision starts with finding time to meet. Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure that controls availability, coordinates scheduling, and unlocks what those meetings reveal, keeping agents, systems, and their users in sync. [I’m building a product](/home) [I'm automating a process](/process-automation) ![Hero image]() ## Temporal Infrastructure connecting agents, systems and teams ## Embed us into your product, or use us to automate your existing processes When availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence are connected, work stops breaking between systems and teams. Cronofy keeps everything aligned in real time, so meetings trigger actions, decisions stay connected to data, and workflows move forward without friction. ### Availability Control Skip the email back-and-forth. Connect calendars, check real-time availability across multiple people, rooms and timezones. --- ### Full Scheduling Lifecycle Auto-provision video conferencing links, let users and agents book or reschedule meetings with ease wherever they work. --- ### Meeting Intelligence Unlock meeting data to power your AI strategy. Generate recordings, transcripts, and AI summaries to power post-meeting action and intelligence. ## The Trinity that works together (text needed) **Agents** Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin fermentum imperdiet sodales **Systems** Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin fermentum imperdiet sodales **Teams** Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin fermentum imperdiet sodales ## We help millions of agents, systems and people to act in concert More than 180,000 companies rely on Cronofy to keep meetings, actions and decision on the same tempo. Systems like Teamtailor, Indeed, and Squarespace embed Cronofy directly in their SaaS products and agents. Teams like Wise, GoCardless and Criteo use Cronofy natively where they already work, from Workday, HubSpot and Zendesk to Slack, Teams and Office. ## Building products From HR platforms, healthcare applications, CRMs to AI apps, Cronofy integrates the way you need it to. Let users find time, book meetings, capture outcomes, and trigger follow-ups. Bring availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence into your application - so workflows stay in one place and meetings drive action. [Integrate into your SaaS platform](#) ## Automating processes Go from meeting chaos to automated processes in days, not months. Use Cronofy with systems like Workday, Paycor, Greenhouse, Hubspot, with collaboration tools like Slack and Teams, or power your AI agents. Remove calendar chaos, automate scheduling, and free your organization to focus on higher value work whilst keeping agents, systems and teams on the same tempo. [See how you can automate](#) ## With and Without Cronofy Text is needed here. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin fermentum imperdiet sodales ### Without Cronofy Skip the email back-and-forth. Connect calendars, check real-time availability across multiple people, rooms and timezones. --- ### With Cronofy Auto-provision video conferencing links, let users and agents book or reschedule meetings with ease wherever they work. ## Why organizations choose Cronofy Speed up delivery ## Go live faster with a partner that eliminates the unknowns The biggest threat to any automation project or roadmap is what you don’t see coming. Timezone issues, compliance blockers, rescheduling links not working across groups. We remove that uncertainty with a Temporal Grid that handles the hidden complexity, a modular set of capabilities you can deploy one at a time, and a team that guides you from planning to rollout so you launch on time without the last minute surprises. Boost adoption ## Deliver reliable experiences your users won't abandon Users stop trying when they have to leave their core tool to schedule, reschedule or get meeting notes elsewhere. 1-1 meetings are easy, but add multiple participants or last-minute changes, and most tools fall apart. The Temporal Grid that all our products leverage was made by spending over a decade solving the hardest edge cases. Bookings stay reliable and inside the tools your users are in, helping you prevent drop-off and creating stickier user behaviour. Build trust ## Security you and your users can depend on Recruitment, healthcare, and enterprise workflows all involve sensitive calendar data that IT teams scrutinise heavily. That’s why Cronofy was built with compliance at the foundation of the Temporal Grid. With GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2 and ISO certifications, you can support regulated industries, satisfy security reviews, and expand up-market. [Learn more](#) Expand over time ## Modular infrastructure that you can adopt at your own pace No vendor lock-in, no need to roll out massive projects and pay for parts you don’t need yet. Cronofy is designed to let you start with the smallest scope you truly need, and operates as independent pieces on top our a unified Temporal Grid so you can easily expand as you go. Let your talent team automate interview scheduling in their ATS, then release the Scheduling Agent to your whole organization in Slack. Integrate our white label API to record meetings in your SaaS product, then add scheduling workflows. Rapid gains, long term impact. The temporal infrastructure powering 180,000+ companies With over one billion events handled, Cronofy supports everything from SaaS products to internal teams and agentic AI automation. ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study ### Agents Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin fermentum imperdiet sodales. --- ### Systems Morbi lorem enim, semper et sollicitudin sit amet, ornare ut felis. Donec cursus porta urna a cursus. --- ### Teams Semper et sollicitudin sit amet, ornare ut felis. Donec cursus porta urna a cursus. --- # Speak to a specialist Book a demo What would you like to talk to us about? **Interview Scheduling** **Scheduling for Teams** **API Integration** --- # Interview Scheduler Now, Paycor customers can book interviews right inside the Paycor ATS. Cronofy helps recruiters move faster, eliminate manual coordination, and free up hours for more important work. ## Streamline Interview Coordination For Your Customers Launching soon: interview scheduling add-on built to run inside Paycor. Eliminate manual scheduling for your customers and extend the power of Paycor across the entire hiring journey. [View in Paycor Marketplace](https://marketplace.paycor.com/en-US/apps/582563/cronofy) [Let's talk at HRTech](#form-3b354d47-2575-4de4-9f52-9132b176f574) Less admin, more hiring ## Recruiters lose hours every week switching away from Paycor to schedule interviews Paycor's partnership with Cronofy gives your customers: - **Time back:** candidates scheduled in minutes, not days - **Recruiting efficiency:** hiring teams stay focused on high-value tasks - **More value from Paycor:** their trusted platform, now stronger with interview scheduling built in > We're able to move candidates through hiring much quicker – we've shaved a week off the processes we were previously running. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise Built-in scheduling ## At HRTech, your customers will be asking about smarter hiring Now you'll have an answer for automated interview scheduling inside Paycor: - Connects to calendars for real-time interviewer availability - Pre-matched availability options for multiple interviewers - Candidates can self-select convenient times, reschedule, or cancel without disrupting recruiters - Support for Outlook, Google, Teams, Zoom and more ## Find us at HRTech Bring a customer or stop by yourself at Booth #**3217** to see how Cronofy simplifies interview scheduling in Paycor --- # Appointment scheduling empowers GoDaddy customers to grow their business If you have a small business, a website is crucial. GoDaddy offers all the tools entrepreneurs and businesses need to build their online presence. If you have a small business, a website is crucial. GoDaddy offers all the tools entrepreneurs and businesses need to build their online presence. Appointments are at the core of many businesses. Allowing clients to book online results in business growth but can be a source of additional stress if you’re not using the right scheduling software. If you have a small business, a website is crucial. [GoDaddy](https://uk.godaddy.com/) offers all the tools entrepreneurs and businesses need to build their online presence. Its drag-and-drop interface makes building a website quick and simple. GoDaddy also takes care of all the ongoing maintenance. GoDaddy supports various integrations that allow its users to create a better experience for their customers. Users can use these integrations to streamline and monetize their offerings. For users wanting to create an online store for example, secure payments can be processed through PayPal, contact forms can be added, and visitors can subscribe to mailing lists. ## The Challenge GoDaddy helps small businesses build their online presence. Many of these businesses offer services that need customers to book a time slot. For a business to be successful and grow it’s important to fill their calendar with appointments and bookings. But for small business owners answering a phone call or spending a few hours replying to emails isn’t always an option. They shouldn’t have to choose between doing their job now and booking more work for the future. Business owners also have to juggle between personal and professional commitments. It can be hard to track which day a client is coming in and which day the kids needs to be driven to soccer after school. But how can users deal with all these commitments when they’re already spending the entire day with clients? And how can they view all their upcoming bookings when they’re always on the go? GoDaddy’s team was keen to offer an easy-to-use scheduling tool that their users could add to their website. It was also key that it was easy-to-use for website visitors. To work, this scheduling tool needed to integrate seamlessly with several calendar services and sync events in real-time across multiple devices. ## The Solution After doing their research the development team at GoDaddy decided to leverage the [Cronofy Unified Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) to build their Appointment Scheduling feature. This feature allows GoDaddy’s users to sync their professional and personal calendars with their website calendar. This means that when a prospective client wants to book an appointment, the only time slots that will appear free are the ones when the business owner is available. Once GoDaddy’s user selects the [Appointment Scheduling module](https://uk.godaddy.com/websites/online-appointment-scheduling) it’s easy to embed a booking form wherever they want on their website. They can then focus on their work and know that all their new bookings will appear automatically on their calendars. What’s event more powerful is that by using real-time scheduling alongside payment modules, it’s easy for clients to book and pay for their next appointments in minutes. There’s no fuss, and no time spent chasing down payments or matching bookings and invoices. ## How it works Appointment Scheduling has been integrated seamlessly to GoDaddy’s GoCentral package which includes several solutions – from marketing tools to payment modules – designed to help businesses grow. The [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api) syncs effortlessly with all major calendar services, meaning this feature works with Google, Apple Calendar, Outlook.com, and Office 365. To benefit from the feature, GoDaddy’s users have to authorize Cronofy to sync with their calendar. They only need to do it once. With two-way calendar sync, users can always access their up-to-date schedule no matter which device they use. If they make a change on their personal calendar using their smartphone, it’s instantly reflected on their GoDaddy Calendar. With useful features such as push notifications, calendar events help users to stay on top of all their commitments. No matter where they are or what they are doing. ### Get calendar sync and simplify your booking process If you want to build smart booking workflows and allow your users to focus on high-value tasks, Cronofy can help. Our Calendar API offers a host of advanced features from availability to real-time scheduling. For more information contact us today. ## Continue Reading ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # Putting employees' schedules at the heart of HR with MHR MHR is a global provider of innovative HCM (Human Capital Management) solutions covering all aspects of human resources management. MHR is a global provider of innovative HCM (Human Capital Management) solutions covering all aspects of human resources management. **[MHR](https://www.mhr.co.uk/)**** is a global provider of innovative HCM (Human Capital Management) solutions covering all aspects of human resources management.** The key to business growth rests around the ability for a company to attract, develop and retain the talent that will separate it from its competition. Employee experience is key to increasing engagement with HR – MHR accomplishes this through its innovative HCM platform – it focuses on putting the employees at the heart of every HR decision to help businesses acquire and manage talent while reducing turnover. ## The Challenge HR software providers are looking for ways to differentiate their product in a fiercely competitive marketplace. ‍ MHR quickly identified that adding calendar sync to their products was the solution to make HR solutions less intrusive in the day-to-day operations of businesses. They recognized that the future of HR tech is fitting in and around peoples’ lives, on the devices and services they use every day. When someone wants to book holidays, why make them login to an external application rather than allowing them to manage all their schedule commitments from where it makes sense? Why not enable all scheduling tasks to be managed directly via calendars? Calendars are popular interfaces that most employees are familiar with. Anton Roe, CTO of MHR explains why this is so important: > HR Systems today need to have the employee front and centre and must require minimal training. Leveraging chat systems and native interfaces like calendars provide people with natural user experiences that just work wherever they are. — Anton Roe, CTO, MHR Despite the appeal of calendar sync – from appraisal bookings to absences and interview scheduling – the technical complexity involved kept it from being developed as a feature. There are several main calendar services, and each is built differently. These require separate integrations and ongoing maintenance to stay connected with People First, which can be a drain on valuable development resources. ## The Solution The team at MHR reached out to Cronofy to assess if our Calendar API could be the way to solve their calendar sync challenges and build smart scheduling features. Our integration consultants regularly meet with MHR’s engineering teams to resolve any roadblock and discuss how MHR can align their roadmap with Cronofy’s upcoming features. This has allowed developers and product managers at MHR are to focus on embedding real-time calendar sync through the Cronofy API into their new HR platform. For their clients, booking meetings, yearly appraisals, and training sessions can represent a big strain on their resources. It involves aligning the schedules of numerous people both inside and outside of the organization. It also means knowing which meeting rooms and parking spaces are free or busy. By integrating the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) in their software MHR now allow their users to access other calendars’ real-time availability. For example, when setting up an interview the system knows who is free and busy and which meeting rooms can be used. It is now possible to schedule one-to-one meetings between managers and team members automatically. If the meetings need to be rescheduled attendees can be notified. This gives the product team at MHR all the flexibility they need to bring value-adding features to their users. And because Cronofy takes care of establishing and maintaining connections with all the calendar services, no user gets left behind and maintenance costs are kept to a minimum. But what really sold the feasibility of adding calendar sync to People First is that each user’s calendar doesn’t need to be authorized individually. That simply wouldn’t be effective for their clients, some of whom have tens of thousands of employees to onboard. Our [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/) feature proved to be incredibly valuable to MHR. With Enterprise Connect, when MHR signs a new client they can authorize the calendars of that entire organization in one go. This helps prevent communication breakdown and means that users can start benefitting from calendar sync straight away! ## Going Forward Another important trend in today’s HR Tech environment is the rise of AI applications. MHR is at the forefront of that innovation and have recently introduced their first [People First Chatbot ](https://www.mhr.co.uk/people-first-chatbot/)which allows employees to discuss absences, ask questions or book meetings. There is a natural fit with the [Cronofy Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) and we’re excited to see what new applications of calendar sync will be possible using AI. > With Cronofy we were able to achieve calendar integration in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to do it in-house, freeing our teams to work on other features for our users. Calendar sync will help us create new revenue streams and accelerate our growth in new markets. — Chris Kerridge, Product Owner, MHR ### Add real-time Calendar Sync to your HR software If you want to create new revenue streams for your HR software by adding great scheduling features all your users will benefit from then give the Cronofy Calendar API a go. You can delve into the API directly and sign-up for a free Account to access your Developer Dashboard and start building straight away. If you’d like more information on our use cases don’t hesitate to fill in your details in the form below and we will be in touch. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # high volume interview scheduling automation high volume interview scheduling automation ## Schedule high-volume interviews within seconds If you’re dealing with scheduling high-volume interviews and need to offer candidates specific slots - read on! 😎 High-volume recruiting can be challenging in many ways, especially managing the volume of scheduling interviews. Imagine you’re planning screening calls, or 1-1s with hiring managers, where you want to send the same (or similar) personal booking link to multiple candidates so they can select the slot that works for them. Creating the request over and over again is exhausting. That’s where our option to ‘copy from recent request’ will simplify the process in one click. **Copy from a recent request** When you create a scheduling request we know it’s not always possible to work from a perfectly kept calendar. We also know that you, or your hiring managers, might want to keep more control in some cases and offer specific slots to candidates for interviews. With Cronofy you can create an interview booking link that includes the specific slots that you want to share with the candidate, and even override calendar availability so you’re not dependent on calendar hygiene. When you want to share the same slots (for the same role) to multiple candidates, you can copy the meeting details from your original request into a new one. Don’t worry about double bookings as the links will update real-time even after they’re shared with your candidates. If you’re looking to find smarter and more efficient ways to schedule within your organisational context and processes get in touch! We will walk you through how simple this task can be using Cronofy. 🖐️ [I'm interested](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) ### Agreena are automating panel interview scheduling and saving 5 hours a week each Recruitment Discover how Agreena has transformed their interview scheduling process in Lever with Cronofy --- ### Recruitment Top Tips Recruitment How can you be a high-performance recruiter in 2023? Watch the top tips from industry thought leaders. --- ### Candidate Expectations Report 2023 --- # Help Articles Learn how to use the Cronofy Scheduler for all your meeting scheduling needs, connect it to various integrations and setup automations. ![Logo help articles]() ![Mural]() **Getting Started** Set up your organization and manage your basic settings **Organizational Unit** Set up your team, branding and more with an Organizational Unit **Scheduling Request** Create and manage Scheduling Requests, for yourself or others **Calendar** Learn about managing calendars in the Cronofy Scheduler **Templates** Create and use Templates for fast and efficient event creation **Users** How to add and manage users to Cronofy, manually or automatically **Events** Creating and managing both single and multiple events with Cronofy **Reports** Learn how to generate reports for your Organizational Unit in Cronofy **Invitees** All about curating and improving the invitee's experience **Notifications** Learn how attendees get notified and reminded about event changes. **Slots** How to offer and manage slots your offer to attendees **Integrations** Customize your experience by embedding your workflows --- # Integrations - Help Articles Learn how to automate scheduling with Cronofy using our wide range of integrations with the platforms you already use. ## Integrations Automate scheduling with our range of **integrations**. From recruiting system integrations like Greenhouse and Success Factors to sales and marketing systems like Hubspot. All of the capabilities like group scheduling and personalization can be driven by the applications you’re already using. **Q: What integrations are supported?** A: You can configure your integrations in your [Organizational Unit Settings > Integrations](https://app.cronofy.com/jump/integrations) in the Cronofy dashboard. **Q: Where can I setup an integration? ** A: Visit our [Integrations Page](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/) to learn more about setting up an integration. --- # Temporal infrastructure - Embed complete meeting workflows into your product Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure that controls availability, coordinates scheduling, and unlocks what those meetings reveal, keeping agents, systems, and their users in sync. ## Let users find time, book meetings, capture outcomes, and trigger follow-ups. Your users' most important workflows start with finding time to meet. Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure behind those workflows, controlling availability, coordinating scheduling, and unlocking what those meetings reveal, so you can power it all inside your product without the complexity of building it yourself. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ![Graphic displaying three of Cronofy's capabilities: Availability, full scheduling lifecycle and meeting intelligence being made possible by Cronofy's temporal infrastructure including Agents, Systems and Teams.]() Powering time for over 180,000 companies ## Make your SaaS product the place meetings, decisions and actions live Meetings are where decisions get made and outcomes are recorded, but building the infrastructure to manage them reliably inside your product is complex. Teams spend months trying to piece it together themselves, only to create fragile integrations that break as platforms change and automation grows. Cronofy provides the infrastructure layer that keeps meeting workflows reliable and embedded in your product. ## Unify and control user availability Get a real-time view of your user’s availability across calendars, with full control over working hours, buffers, and booking rules. Always show the right time to meet, so your users and agents can coordinate time without conflicts or delays. [See how we unify availability](/developer/capability/control-availability) ## Power the full scheduling lifecycle Handle booking, rescheduling, cancellations, conferencing, and meeting capture with one system. Keep meetings accurate as they change, without manual coordination or broken workflows - whether they’re triggered by a person or an agent. [See how we power the full lifecycle](/developer/capability/full-scheduling-lifecycle) ## Capture meeting intelligence Capture what happens in every meeting and turn it into structured data your product can act on. Trigger follow-ups, updates, and agentic workflows automatically, based on real meeting outcomes. [See how we capture meeting intelligence](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## Replace fragmented integrations with one system Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure is the foundation for every meeting workflow, bringing together availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence in one modular system. At the core is the Temporal Grid, built on decades of experience handling the hardest parts of meeting workflows. It unifies calendars, availability, conferencing, meeting data, and compliance, so the complexity of building that infrastructure yourself disappears and every capability you build feels simple and intuitive from day one. With everything running on the same grid, you can build what you need today and expand into richer workflows and agentic automation over time on the same foundation. **Compliance built-in** GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO certified. Unlock regulated markets while building trust. **Regional deployments** Data stays in-region with data centres across the US, UK, EU, and APAC. **Reliability at scale** High-availability infrastructure with 99.99% uptime, even when providers fail. ## Connecting agents, systems and teams Agents act, systems record, and teams decide. Serving all three typically means piecing together separate tools and managing the gaps between them. Cronofy's temporal infrastructure connects all three, so there's one foundation to build on and nothing left unconnected. ### Agents Agents get the availability and meeting context they need to act autonomously. --- ### Systems Every booking and meeting outcome feeds back into the system where work happens. --- ### Teams Freed from coordination, teams focus on decisions, not admin surrounding meeting workflows. ## Choose an integration path With human support and clear developer documentation, get started quickly with the best option for your platform and combine approaches as you scale. ### Need full control? Build custom meeting workflows with our API. --- ### Want to launch fast? Embed scheduling with a pre-built UI. --- ### Building with Agents? Handle agentic workflows with our MCP server. > Implementing Cronofy was painless – they provide a simple and clear API that allowed me to have the integration live to customers in less than one month. — Drew Zader, Senior Software Engineer, Handshake ## Launch faster and build a product users stick with From startups to enterprise platforms, teams use Cronofy to launch both embedded and agentic experiences faster. ### Ship features in days, not weeks Skip the time and cost of building them yourself, while your team stays focused on what makes your product different. --- ### Power experiences users trust Handle edge cases and provider downtime automatically, so workflows continue to run smoothly as your product scales. --- ### Keep users in the flow of work Ship experiences that keep users inside your platform, not bouncing between external tools, so workflows stay connected and consistent. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ## Powering SaaS applications of all sizes ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- # Scheduler Plug-ins ## Schedule from the apps you already use with our range of plug-ins Bring personalized, multi-person scheduling to wherever you need it on the web. ## Find the plug-in for the software that you use The contact details of the people we want to meet are usually stored in the SaaS tools and applications we use everyday. Not all of these come with the scheduling functionality that you need to create and send meeting requests. Our plug-ins bring the power of Cronofy scheduling to the app. Find yours. ‍ ## Chrome Extension Install the Cronofy Chrome extension ## Edge Extension Install Cronofy for Edge ## Firefox Extension Get the Cronofy Firefox extension ## Outlook Add-In Get the Cronofy Outlook Add-In ## Gmail Add-In The Gmail extension ships as part of our Chrome extension. Get the Cronofy Gmail add-in --- # The 5 best tools for recruiters to use right now Not sure which recruitment tech to choose? We round up the five best bits of digital kit for external recruiters to start using today. Technology in recruiting has come a long way since the heavy-handed ATS systems of old. Today, you can find recruitment platforms instilled with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and many other types of cutting-edge tech that will make your job easier. There’s a huge range of hiring platforms out there, from all-encompassing recruitment management systems to standalone tools that tackle niche challenges. You’ll even find recruiting software built specifically for agencies and external staffing consultants. But first, why use these newfangled tools? What’s wrong with a good old job board? Well, we don’t need to tell you that time kills deals. That’s why the best recruitment software is all about making the processes faster and smoother for you and the candidate. A lengthy or convoluted application process is a colossal roadblock to finding the best talent: according to Appcast, [92% of applicants](https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/most-people-never-finish-online-job-applications.aspx) that start an online application never complete it. Anything that automates time-consuming manual admin, eliminates the need for back-and-forth communication, or surfaces the information you need more quickly is a must-have. Plus, these hiring tools can elevate the candidate experience, giving them a better impression of you and the client. With so many options out there, we thought we’d round up some of the best bits of digital kit that you can start using today. Let’s take a look at some of the best recruitment platforms and tools you can use right now. ‍ ### Video interviewing Thanks to the pandemic and subsequent fallout, the world and their grandma are pretty well-acquainted with video calling software. But if you’re using video calls as part of your recruiting process—and with remote work on the rise, why wouldn’t you be?—then it’s time to upgrade. The best video interviewing platforms for recruiters go way beyond your standard Zoom call. They’re enriched with smart features like highly customizable one-way interviews, where a candidate gives answers to pre-set questions on video. These platforms give you the chance to review footage at another time and screen large numbers of applicants in a more efficient manner (especially when you have applicants in multiple time zones). Other functionality to look out for includes time controls for tests and assessments, templates for different question formats, whiteboards and shared digital workspaces, and rating systems so you can record instant feedback on a candidate’s answers. One of the latest video interviewing platforms to hit the market is [Indeed Interview](https://www.indeed.com/employers/interview). The creators of one of the world’s biggest job boards have developed an accessible yet feature-rich tool that lets recruiters do things like send reminders to candidates, customize welcome messages, communicate with your virtual lobby, preview resumes, and make notes in real-time. ‍ ### Artificial Intelligence AI is everywhere. It’s making playlists for you, it’s beating you at video games, it’s deciding what content you see on social media—it’s even driving cars. There’s no shortage of uses for AI in the recruitment industry either, and it’s rapidly becoming a more accessible and popular tool for recruiters. Research by IndustryARC estimates that use of [AI in staffing](https://www.industryarc.com/Report/19231/artificial-intelligence-in-recruitment-market.html) will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 7% in the next few years. Recruitment software infused with AI can help size-up candidates’ resumes, match them to job roles, write job descriptions, and communicate with applicants throughout their journey. As well as reducing your workload by handling manual tasks and its ability to parse unfathomable amounts of data at speed, AI also has the potential to eliminate inherent biases that can creep into the hiring process. So what kind of thing can AI take off your hands? AI recruitment platform Skillate, for example, [helps you write better job ads](https://www.skillate.com/) by suggesting more relevant keywords and skills. The tool bases its advice on insights it’s gleaned from 20 million candidate profiles. It also speeds up the screening stage using a handy chatbot that automatically gathers information like notice periods and salary expectations to give you a fuller picture of applicants, without the legwork. ‍ ### Recruitment CRM As a recruiter, you’re probably switching between tons of apps, software, and communication methods all day long. Meeting clients and candidate wherever they are, and whatever type of contact they prefer, is key to delivering a great customer experience—but it can get messy. Having one centralized place to store information about a job, a candidate, or a client, log your communications, and track the hiring progress is essential. That’s where a CRM comes in. A CRM is more than a digital address book. It’s a record of every interaction and every vital piece of data that crops up during the recruitment lifecycle. This information is available across your team so that everyone has the most up-to-date view on how a placement, or even a relationship with a prospective client, is going. These platforms offer a single source of truth for recruiters, and form the bedrock of any organized staffing agency. There are countless CRM systems out there to choose from, with many purpose-built for staffing professionals. Bullhorn, for instance, offers [a CRM designed specifically for recruiting](https://www.bullhorn.com/), and features mobile-friendly functionality to help you keep up with fast-moving hiring cycles. Helping you tackle job orders, reduce time-to-fill, and make more placements, it even sprinkles in a little automation to save you time. ‍ ### Applicant Tracking System Applicant Tracking Systems are one of the most enduring recruitment software types, having been around since the late 1990s. Starting as a simple, secure storage system for companies to house applicant resumes, the humble ATS has evolved massively over the years. Modern ATS platforms do more than just scan for keywords and weed out poorly optimized resumes, which is good news considering that almost 99% of Fortune 500 companies [use one](https://www.jobscan.co/blog/8-things-you-need-to-know-about-applicant-tracking-systems/) for their internal hiring. What makes the ATS an even better tool for you is that there are now platforms built specifically for agencies and independent recruiters. Smart platforms like [recruiterflow](https://recruiterflow.com/applicant-tracking-software) not only parse resumes and organize your talent pool, but they also offer features like client portals to make submitting and reviewing candidates to potential employers faster. Many are harnessing the incredible power of data analytics to help recruiters make more informed decisions faster. One example of recruiting software that’s putting data to work is [Greenhouse](https://www.greenhouse.io/uk/recruiting). The platform’s robust reporting functionality allows recruiters to constantly optimize and improve their process, cutting time-to-hire. Greenhouse even goes one step further with its Greenhouse Predicts feature, which uses predictive analytics to calculate your chance of hiring a candidate on time—meaning you can work to speed up the process and get candidates locked down before they move on to new opportunities. Relevant bonus tip: whichever ATS you decide to take advantage of, make sure that candidates can access them on mobile devices. Since 2020, more job applications have been made on mobile devices than on desktops and that disparity is only growing. ‍ ### Automated Scheduling Are you free Tuesday? How about Thursday? Oh you’re in a different time zone? I could maybe do 11am. No? Okay, I’ll check my diary and get back to you… That kind of exchange probably sounds very familiar—although often it can take place over days, with emails pinging back and forth and lots of waiting around for responses. Scheduling interviews is one of the most time-consuming stages of the hiring process, and one of the most crucial. You’ve found a top candidate who’s actively job-hunting, but you’re struggling to find a suitable time for an interview. By the time you’ve got something arranged, they might’ve had several other interviews already, sending your role to the bottom of the pile. Using automated scheduling, you can have an interview done and dusted in the time it usually takes just to book it in. This smart, hands-off method of scheduling saves time, improves the candidate experience (reducing drop-outs), and gets top candidates in front of clients faster. A tool like [Cronofy Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) can speed up your hiring process by 59%. This handy app updates available slots in real-time, adjusts to reflect time-zone differences, and completely cuts out the need to yo-yo between the candidate and the client to find out availability. It integrates with all the most widely used email platforms too, so you can schedule interviews from anywhere, on any device. ‍ *Want to learn more about how the Scheduler can help you recruit the best talent for your clients faster than ever?* *[Book a demo today](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo)* *and chat to our expert team!* --- # Instant real-time call scheduling with UpCounsel UpCounsel is an innovative virtual marketplace connecting business leaders and in-house counsel with qualified outside lawyers and attorneys. UpCounsel is an innovative virtual marketplace connecting business leaders and in-house counsel with qualified outside lawyers and attorneys. **In a fast-moving company such as a startup, there’s no predicting what kind of legal issues could arise. From reviewing business agreements to filing a patent or getting advice on visas, sometimes businesses need to call on qualified external legal counsel.** Traditionally, it can take days – or even weeks – just to get an initial appointment with a lawyer. UpCounsel was created to solve this problem and allow lawyers and attorneys to be reached quickly and easily. UpCounsel is a straightforward online platform, and works like other online marketplaces in different industries. Lawyers create their profiles on the platform, specifying their areas of expertise, qualifications, and location. Businesses and professionals with a legal challenge can then post a job on UpCounsel and interested lawyers can send them proposals. The user can then choose their preferred proposal. The decision can be based on a variety of factors such as cost, user reviews, and expertise in a specific legal area. For example, a Brooklyn-based startup busy finalizing a product could be looking for [lawyers in New York](https://www.upcounsel.com/startup-attorneys-new-york-ny) who specialize in patents. The benefits for lawyers are multiple: they receive more job requests, grow their clientele, and increase their visibility. ## The Challenge UpCounsel makes obtaining legal advice faster. However, posting a job and sifting through proposals can still take time and is reliant on the availability of the legal professionals answering the job postings. Sometimes a company needs a legal answer quickly or they risk losing business. Receiving a bid is great but they also need to talk to the lawyer as soon as possible. That’s not always straight forward, it depends on the availability of the lawyers and it can take several emails to find a time that works everyone. That’s still a lot simpler and more cost-effective than having to book a meeting with a law firm, but what if this process could be even more streamlined? The UpCounsel team felt that was possible and set out to find a way to allow users to schedule calls with lawyers and attorneys based on their real-time availability right after they received a bid. ## The solution The UpCounsel team wanted to enable users to schedule calls with lawyers who bid on their job postings. They quickly identified that to achieve this they needed to allow lawyers to sync their calendars with their UpCounsel profile. That’s when they contacted Cronofy. With the Cronofy Calendar API online calendars can be synced to software and enterprise applications no matter what calendar service they use. The UpCounsel development team tested the API and started building an instant call scheduling feature that would allow users to book calls with available lawyers in a matter of minutes, not hours or days. This brand-new feature, ‘Instant Call Scheduling’, has been a success since its launch. Clients can now click a scheduling button on the lawyer’s profile page, pick the time slot they want, and schedule a call. It has dramatically boosted the visibility of lawyers who choose to display their availability, as well as their chances of putting the winning proposal on a job posting. However, lawyers host plenty of confidential and sensitive information on their calendars from the names of other clients to specific cases details. That’s why it was paramount to UpCounsel that their users’ data was protected. They decide to use Cronofy’s free/busy feature to only access availability information – no sensitive data needs to be hosted or protected because it is not accessible via the calendar integration. ‍ Instant call scheduling from UpCounsel has changed the way that both lawyers and clients used the website. They no longer need to spend time messaging each other to organize a phone call – everything can be scheduled instantly. Let’s take a closer look at how this works. ## How it works When a lawyer joins UpCounsel and creates their profile, they’re offered the option to sync their calendar to UpCounsel using Cronofy. Because Cronofy works with all the major calendar services, they simply have to pick which one they use. Once they’ve authorized Cronofy to connect to their calendar, they must choose which of their calendars they wish to connect to UpCounsel. Currently, each user can connect a single calendar but UpCounsel is planning on allowing multiple calendars to be connected in the future. Lawyers will then have the possibility to connect both their personal and professional calendars, even if they use different calendar services. That will be handy if they want to ensure that professional commitments don’t clash with their personal lives. All the event information that Cronofy returns is kept private: UpCounsel only accesses attorneys’ free/busy information to ensure that only available time slots are proposed to users looking to schedule a call. After syncing their calendars, lawyers are offered the additional option to block out times when they don’t want to appear available for calls, even if their calendar is free. This is really useful. Most legal professionals only want to dedicate a couple of days each week to take calls. The rest of their time will be spent on other tasks, such as client meetings, working their cases or going to court for example. As their schedules and priorities change with unexpected events, attorneys can edit their availability to reflect when they are actually free. As soon as a client schedules a phone call with them, it’s automatically added to the attorney’s calendar, and that time slot is blocked, preventing any double-bookings. Should any changes be made, their calendar will be instantly updated. If the client cancels the phone call, it’s automatically deleted from the lawyers’ schedule. It’s just as simple from the potential client’s side, too. When a client receives a proposal from a calendar connected lawyer, they are offered the option to ‘Schedule Instant Free Phone Consult’. Clicking this option displays the attorney’s free/busy information for the next week. Calls must be scheduled at least four hours in advance, giving attorneys plenty of time to see the event in their calendar and prepare for the conversation. When the client selects a time slot then clicks ‘Schedule the Call’, it’s automatically added to the attorney’s calendar. Leveraging the Cronofy API, UpCounsel created an easy-to-use feature that enables lawyers to grow their business and allow users and businesses to obtain legal advice faster. This feature has become a key to UpCounsel’s rapid growth and is a reason why it is the fastest-growing legal marketplace. > Integrating with Cronofy was really straightforward. Their documentation and support are first-class. We were able to quickly and easily integrate calendar availability into our call scheduling feature without having to worry about setting up several disparate calendar service integrations. — Chris Yancey, Full stack engineer, UpCounsel ### Add appointment booking to your online marketplace If your business model relies on putting people in touch seamlessly, calendar sync can help you grow. If you want to see Cronofy in action, don’t hesitate to [book your demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo/). ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # How developers can use ChatGPT’s calendar connectors to streamline appointment booking Want to streamline calendars with the help AI? OpenAI’s latest release with GPT-5 now allows for calendar integrations. In this post, we’ll walk you through to implement this new feature to build appointment booking chatbots, and how to build a solution that scales. Want to streamline calendars with the help AI? OpenAI’s latest release with GPT-5 now allows for calendar integrations. In this post, we’ll walk you through to implement this new feature to build appointment booking chatbots, and how to build a solution that actually scales. **Want the TL;DR? Summarize this post with:** - [ChatGPT](https://chat.openai.com/?q=Read+Summarize+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/chatgpt-calendar-connectors) - [Perplexity](https://www.perplexity.ai/search/new?q=Provide+a+comprehensive+summary+of+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/chatgpt-calendar-connectors) - [Claude](https://claude.ai/new?q=Read+and+summarize+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/chatgpt-calendar-connectors) OpenAI’s new calendar connector is the latest step in ChatGPT acting like your personal assistant. With the new calendar connector enabled, you can ask things like “show me what my day looks like today” and ChatGPT will show you your calendar events for that day. But these new connectors are read-only. They can reference and display events, but they can’t actually create or edit them. If you want to book or reschedule something, you still have to do it manually in your own calendar. For developers, the real opportunity comes from OpenAI’s function calling. Instead of being limited to read-only calendar views, you can build application features where ChatGPT’s model takes a user’s natural language input and routes it through your own infrastructure, prompting your application to query the Google Calendar API or Microsoft Graph API - the model then confirms the result back to the user in plain language. This means a SaaS chatbot could take a messy request like *“I need a call with support to help me debug this issue”* and turn it into a confirmed calendar booking. ## What is function calling? OpenAI’s ‘function calling’ lets developers define custom functions (or ‘tools’) that the ChatGPT model can call when it detects the right intent in a user’s message. Instead of just replying with text to the user of no real value or outcome, ChatGPT can output a structured JSON call to one of your functions, which your backend then executes. ## How does function calling work? As the developer, you create function definitions like `find_free_slots` or `create_event`, each with a name, description, and a JSON schema for the parameters they accept. OpenAI has detailed documentation on how to create function definitions [here](https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling). This is what a function definition might look like for a `find_free_slots` function call. ```json { "type": "function", "name": "find_free_slots", "description": "Finds available calendar slots", "parameters": { "type": "object", "properties": { "participants": { "type": "array", "items": { "type": "string" }, "description": "List of email addresses that should be included" }, "required_duration": { "type": "integer", "description": "Length of the requested meeting in minutes" }, "query_period": { "type": "string", "description": "Desired time range for the meeting." } }, "required": [ "attendees", "duration_minutes", "query_period" ], "additionalProperties": false }, "strict": true } ``` You then integrate the OpenAI API (the same models that power ChatGPT) into whatever interface your users interact with, for example a chat window inside your SaaS app or a support widget on your website. The user types free-form text into this interface, and your app forwards that text (along with your function definitions) to the OpenAI API. ## **What it looks like in practice:** **1. **Your user starts a new conversation. A user might type something unstructured like: *“I keep getting errors whenever I run multiple queries at the same time. I don’t know what's going on, I have read your docs but can’t find an obvious cause. I really need to talk with someone in support when I’m next free tomorrow afternoon. I’m in London.”* **2.** The model decides which tool to use. The model recognises this is a scheduling intent and generates a function call, which might look like the following: ```json { "id": "fc_24680uk", "call_id": "call_24680uk", "type": "function_call", "name": "find_free_slots", "arguments": "{\"participants\":[\"support@company.com\"],\"required_duration\"minutes:30,\"query_period\":\"tomorrow afternoon\",\"time_zone\":\"Europe/London\"}" } ``` **3. **Your backend executes the function. The `find_free_slots` endpoint in your app executes the code that queries the Google Calendar/Microsoft Graph API to find the next available slot. It applies your defined business rules, like working hours and buffers, and returns structured available slots. **4.** The ChatGPT model converts this to a natural response for your user. It takes the structured response and turns it into user-friendly text: *“I found 15:30-16:00 tomorrow. Do you want to book it?”* **5.** User confirms: *“Yes.”* **6.** The OpenAI API calls another function. This time, the model outputs a call to your `create_event` tool, passing the confirmed slot and details. **7.** Your backend finalises the booking: `create_event` triggers your API call to Google’s Calendar API/Microsoft Graph API, creates the calendar entry, and returns success. **8.** The ChatGPT model closes the loop with the user. *“Your support call is booked in for tomorrow at 15:30–16:00. You’ll get a calendar invite.”* Function calling essentially turns the ChatGPT model into the interpreter and orchestrator. It understands what the user wants, chooses the right tool, and formats the function call with the correct arguments. Your backend remains responsible for executing the actual calendar API calls to find availability and complete the booking. ## What about building calendar integrations? OpenAI’s function calling gives developers a fast track to building automated booking chatbots that understand a user’s natural language input. But while this solves the front-end intelligence problem of understanding what the user wants and orchestrating function calls, the hardest part of scheduling still remains - building reliable calendar integrations that actually sync, schedule, reschedule, and handle time zones. ## How to build compliant scheduling solutions that actually scale By using Cronofy’s APIs, your chatbot can go beyond just finding intent. It can be part of a stack that automates the entire scheduling flow. From checking availability to booking, rescheduling, and keeping calendars in sync across providers, Cronofy removes the burden of maintaining complex calendar integrations so your team can spend more time building more seamless experiences for users. [Get your sandbox](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) [Speak to a technical specialist](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-api) ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### How doctoranytime Transformed Telehealth Booking with Real-Time Calendar Sync Doctoranytime is a European-based healthcare marketplace, allowing patients to find and book appointments with the best doctor for them using Cronofy's White Label API. We speak to their Head of Growth to see how this has transformed their platform. Case Study --- ### How did Mercu create a scheduling experience on WhatsApp with Cronofy's API? Video 01:08 --- # SmartRecruiters interview scheduling Schedule streamlined interviews from inside SmartRecruiters with Cronofy. Book a demo today! ## Find interviewer availability without leaving SmartRecruiters Display available interviewer slots and generate booking links for candidates—all from within your SmartRecruiters workflow. Streamline candidate scheduling and improve time-to-hire. [Book 1:1 demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) [Go to SmartRecruiters marketplace](https://marketplace.smartrecruiters.com/partners/cronofy) > We're able to move candidates through hiring much quicker – we've shaved a week off the processes we were previously running. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise **Rotate interviewers with pools** **Set up panel or team interviews** **Override blocked calendar slots** **Book multiple interviews in one stage** Scheduling with Cronofy in SmartRecruiters SmartRecruiters vs Cronofy for SmartRecruiters - 1-to-1 - Panel - Override interviewer "busy" times - Allow private events - Add candidate profile and interview kit to interviewers' invite ## Schedule panels and multiple interviews in one stage No more painful workarounds or back and forth to find interviewer availability. Without leaving SmartRecruiters, combine availability from different interviewers or from a pool of interviewers. [Watch video demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9-v3CSa4Yk) ## Manage interviewer workloads Ensure your team is not overburdened with candidate assessments by adding pre-defined daily and weekly interview limits for each team member. Cronofy automatically assigns interviews within these limits keeping your hiring team enthusiastic throughout the hiring process. [See how to rotate interviewers](https://youtu.be/piMTxz_363g?si=2iPfEuOId14IPVL0&t=374) ## Scheduling made simple - **Schedule an interview with Cronofy in SmartRecruiters** (00:55) - **Schedule based on a pool of interviewers in your team** (01:10) ## Control scheduling pipeline Track and manage your scheduled interviews in one place. View and edit who gets added to interviews, who can cancel and reschedule, and know precisely when key events are happening. Automate routine scheduling tasks and workflows with templates that can be changed anytime. [See how to track interviews](https://youtu.be/TmmRisdUwLg) ## Process screening in bulk Personalized booking links are sent from preset email templates when moving a group of applicants to the screening stage, all from within SmartRecruiters. Focus your time on finding the best talent, not time consuming scheduling tasks. [Learn more](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/smartrecruiters/automation/how-it-works) ## Schedule candidates globally Avoid timezone mixups and reach the best candidates worldwide. Cronofy presents time slots in the candidate's timezone, eliminating confusion and missed connections. [See pricing](/pricing) Streamline scheduling in SmartRecruiters [Book 1:1 demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Google Calendar downtime Here at Cronofy we’re acutely aware that things are not always 200 OK, and Monday was one such day as Google Calendar was largely down for 3 hours. Our platform was built from day one to account for such periods. It is one of the reasons that we hold a copy of calendar data that we continuously keep up-to-date. Here at Cronofy we’re acutely aware that things are not always 200 OK, and Monday was one such day as Google Calendar was largely down for 3 hours. Our platform was built from day one to account for such periods. It is one of the reasons that we hold a copy of calendar data that we continuously keep up-to-date. Here at Cronofy we’re acutely aware that [things are not always 200 OK](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/its-not-always-200-ok/), and Monday was one such day as [Google Calendar was largely down for 3 hours](https://www.google.co.uk/appsstatus#hl=en-GB&v=issue&sid=2&iid=cc21ebe3962430b2e4ae2b52e3dde98f). Our platform was built from day one to account for such periods. It is one of the reasons that we hold a copy of calendar data that we continuously keep up-to-date. In addition to raw performance, when a service becomes unavailable we can respond to availability queries with the latest data we have which is almost always preferable to no response at all. At all times we act as an intelligent buffer between your application and the calendars of your users. Usually this buffer is cleared as soon as it is added to, but during periods of disruption we’ll accumulate calendar changes, and reconcile them when the service becomes available again. From your point of view, you don’t need to worry that Google Calendar is down, we’ll keep you informed via [our status page of the situation](https://status.cronofy.com/) and we will synchronize everything as soon as we can. These benefits do not come without some cost. In places it comes all the way back to the design of the API, for example when creating an event you receive a response of 202 Accepted (we’ll do that) rather than a 200 OK (we’ve done that) as many developers expect. One reason for this is that we may not be able to create the event straight away. Rather than needing you to code around the reason for that, of which calendar service downtime is one of the most significant, we handle such edge cases transparently. While sometimes initially strange, this approach helps us provide a reliable service that shields you from the complexity of integrating with multiple calendars services. Each of them has their own service levels and quirks that it’s our job to worry about, not yours. Our goal is to help you to write less code, in the small that means creating an event is an "upsert" so you don’t have to care whether you are creating or updating an existing event. In the large that is creating a unified scheduling platform that integrates with all major calendar providers, and features such as [UI Elements](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/) that can drastically reduce the work required to [connect your application to your users’ schedules](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduling-apis/). --- # Full calendar sync adds incredible value to law firms using CASEpeer CASEpeer is a case management solution that enables law firms across the US to manage their cases better and faster. Users benefit from having all the information they need in one place. CASEpeer is a case management solution that enables law firms across the US to manage their cases better and faster. Users benefit from having all the information they need in one place. [CASEpeer](https://www.casepeer.com/) is a case management solution that enables law firms across the US to manage their cases better and faster. Users benefit from having all the information they need in one place. Files are automatically organized and accessible anytime, anywhere. Tasks can be assigned and prioritized, and deadlines can be added as cases progress. Litigation attorneys are constantly running from one case to another. Having a platform that uses a variety of tools to organize their day adds incredible value to their lives. With easily accessible information, instant in-app alerts for new and completed tasks, and information on upcoming deadlines, attorneys can reduce the burden of administrative tasks and focus on their clients instead. Communicating with clients has never been easier. CASEpeer tracks email correspondence and has an in-app text messaging facility that allows the sending and receiving of text messages without the need for lawyers to share their phone number. Clients also have access to their own portal on CASEpeer where they can view important information and updates regarding their case. ‍ Law firms benefit from increased automation which means less hours wasted on admin tasks and easy reporting tools that are available to aid data-driven decisions. ‍ CASEpeer has been proven to win and retain more clients, maximize settlements and increase profits for law firms. ## The Challenge [CASEpeer](https://www.casepeer.com/) helps law firms of all shapes and sizes across the US to manage their cases better and faster from intake to settlement. However, managing more than one calendar can be a mammoth task, especially when attorneys are always on the go. CASEpeer’s users can add calendar events and meetings directly to the online platform, but what about the meetings and other commitments attorneys have on their personal calendars? In order to ensure that meetings are being kept and deadlines are met, CASEpeer wanted to offer a complete and straightforward solution to their clients. When dealing with litigation cases and sensitive information, the last thing attorneys want to do is skip between multiple calendars. CASEpeer wanted to give their users the possibility to sync their personal calendars to their platform and have all their meetings and commitments in one place. To achieve their goal, the team at CASEpeer needed to integrate and maintain connections with all the major calendar services. Integrating with just one calendar provider takes weeks of development time; integrating with all major calendar providers would have taken them months. The team at CASEpeer decided to find outside expertise that could help them to achieve full calendar sync for their users in a fraction of that time. [Cronofy’s Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/) works with all major calendar providers: Google, iCloud, Outlook.com, Office 365, and Exchange. The connections are maintained by us, which means even less time spent by developers on the integration process. Our mission is to help SaaS companies worldwide deliver life-changing scheduling solutions to their users, freeing them from mundane administrative tasks and allowing them to spend their time on what really matters, their clients. ## The Solution [CASEpeer](https://www.casepeer.com/) use the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/) to allow their users to sync their personal calendars to the case management platform. Since its implementation, over 80% of CASEpeer users are taking full advantage of this feature. When setting up, users are prompted to sync their calendar of choice to the online platform, using Cronofy. CASEpeer uses this information to display all events on their online platform. Users can edit events directly on CASEpeer and don’t need to switch between the platform and their calendar applications. Due to the real-time, two-way calendar sync that the Cronofy Calendar API enables, new events will be automatically added to their synced calendars as well. The opposite is also true: if an event is created via their personal calendar, the same event will be added to CASEpeer. There’s no risk of double-booking or missing appointments. We’ve built a best-in-class sync engine that allows two-way calendar sync in real-time. Users have the choice of adding as much information as they need into their calendar events, from case name, identification information, and location that syncs to their maps, all making for a smoother transition from one case to another. Every business deals with sensitive information on a daily basis, but when it comes to law firms, keeping information safe is paramount. With Cronofy’s APIs, you can rest assured your users’ calendar data is always kept secure. With our help, the team at CASEpeer was able to relieve their users of the burden of managing multiple calendars and allowed them to focus on their cases, by adding two-way, real-time calendar sync to their online platform. > Utilizing Cronofy as part of our solution we were able to deliver a lot of functionality in a short amount of time. — Gabriela Cubeiro, Co-Founder and CEO, CASEpeer ### Create great scheduling features with full calendar sync from Cronofy Take the hassle out of integrating with individual calendar providers with the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/). ‍ If you’re a developer, sign up for free and start building straight away with our easy-to-use SDKs and sample apps. ‍ If you’re a product owner or simply interested to find out more about the Cronofy API please get in touch via the form below. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # Behind the scenes: Cronofy does Valencia! Find out what the Cronofy team got up to on our bi-annual company meet up. This time, we hit the beautiful Spanish coastal city of Valencia! Find out what the Cronofy team got up to on our bi-annual company meet up. This time, we hit the beautiful Spanish coastal city of Valencia! As a company, we look to prioritise our teams work-life balance and provide flexibility to their working days. We work as a largely remote company and benefit from being able to employ people from different countries and backgrounds. This is a big contributor towards creating new innovative ideas for our products and services. We know that it's still important that we make the effort to regularly as teams, across our offices in London, Nottingham, and Amsterdam. However, the nature of remote working means that we don’t have the opportunity to all come together as a company very often. To offset this, we organize bi-annual company meet ups or “all-hands” so we can all get together in person, share ideas, and work on projects across different team functions. This November, we all made the journey to Spain's third largest city, Valencia, for four jam-packed days. There was a great mix of individual and team social events as well as the opportunity to work together on important product documentation. Fortunately for us, we also lucked in with lots of winter sunshine! ## Exploring the city The four days started with everyone travelling from their home destinations around the UK and Europe. To kick start the trip, we all met for dinner tasting many traditional Valencian flavours. The dinner included arguably the most famous of Spanish dishes, paella, which originated from the city. The next couple of days involved a mixture of working and socialising. Everyone got to choose their preferred activity for their first full day in the city, from visiting the Mestalla football ground to a tour of the famous San Jose caves, in one of Europe’s largest subterranean rivers. Other options included a Valencia sightseeing tour either on bus or foot to get a real feel for what the city has to offer. ‍ We also had a top-secret pre-arranged team activity to enjoy, which saw us competing in a GPS treasure hunt challenge across Valencia, comprising of photo and video challenges as well as trivia questions. We've found team-based activities are great for bringing people together and showcasing the strength of everyone's communication skills. ## Eating with the fishes We experienced a diverse range of flavours from around Valencia, culminating in our dinner on the final night at Oceanografic Valencia, which is the largest aquarium in Europe. It was a truly unique experience, being surrounded by all manner of sea creature as we enjoyed our meals. ## Work and play Our work meetings were split over two days and comprised of a mixture of presentations and practical team tasks. Our company leaders shared strategy and plans for the upcoming six months, to ensure all teams were on board with a joint vision and informed project planning for the new year. As openness and honesty is one of our core company values, these presentations are important for upholding our culture. A valuable takeaway from the trip was the work we did on our [Scheduler product documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/scheduler/getting-started/). We had a goal to make the documentation easier to navigate and find the relevant information depending on what our customers want to achieve. We worked in cross-functional groups to add important updates and new content to our existing docs site. The new resource is split by job function, and walks our customers through making the most of the Scheduler’s capabilities depending on their specific needs. This work will benefit many existing customers and those yet to sign up. This was a great example of what we can achieve when working across teams, having people with different sets of knowledge and perspectives to create a fully rounded resource. The whole team felt energised and inspired from the trip, not just in terms of the work planned for the next year but also the relationships cultivated with other people in the company they may not have necessarily spoken to regularly before. ‍ > "Valencia was a great opportunity to meet up with colleagues across the business who you wouldn’t normally see, and get to know each other better. The mix of social and work collaboration meant we could really enjoy ourselves. For some of our newer team members, it was a wonderful introduction to who Cronofy are, and where we are going as a business." Mark Harbottle, Head of Talent ‍ Our next meet up is scheduled for May, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store! ### What Speaking at the World's Largest TA Event Taught Me About Candidate Experience Cronofy's Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, keeps the pulse on candidate experience at the world's largest TA event, Recfest. Read on to see the top learnings from his presentation, and get insights on how to deliver the experience candidates want and deserve — they're set to make recruiters' workflows smoother, too. Blog Post 2024-10-08T11:34:34.762Z --- ### Dogfooding: How we use our Scheduler product internally No, it’s not a new diet craze - ‘Eating your own dog food’ is one of the best product testing practices for a business to implement. We explain how and why we use it within Cronofy. Blog Post 2021-09-12T14:00:00.000Z --- ### Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Blog Post 2024-06-19T12:00:32.123Z --- # Hiring coordinator now schedules interviews in 30 seconds from within BambooHR See how a hiring coordinator from ONWA now schedules interviews in 30 seconds from within BambooHR using Cronofy. See how a hiring coordinator from ONWA now schedules interviews in 30 seconds using Cronofy within BambooHR, and learn more about how she was able to upskill thanks to claiming back hours from manual administrative work. > Manual scheduling was setting me back so far, especially when you have to chase people or respond to interview requests. There was no breathing space. It was a huge ordeal. — Tanya Towner, Human Resources Coordinator, Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA) Success for ONWA **No more manual scheduling** Scheduling interviews with Cronofy in BambooHR now happens in 30 seconds **Future-proofing** Prepared for hiring peaks and troughs with a fair pricing model charging only for active users **New opportunities** Hours of free time given back to the organization enables upskilling ## The problem: # Losing against your calendar: crushed under the admin burden of manual scheduling As the sole Human Resources Coordinator at ONWA, Tanya Towner juggles a lot of hats when it comes to hiring, onboarding, and employee benefits. We speak with Tanya to hear about how swapping out back-and-forth emailing and calls for Cronofy’s [interview scheduling automation](http://cronofy.com/scheduler/use-cases/interview-scheduling) not only lets candidates book interviews in seconds, but also enables her to focus on higher level priorities and upskill within her organization. Accounting for the fluctuation in hiring activity throughout the year was at the top of the agenda. “I was looking to streamline our previous process, because we’re either dormant or we have thirty interviews to book.” The manual interview scheduling process was tedious and time-consuming, requiring recruiters to step outside of BambooHR to disconnected tools like email or phone to get candidates booked in. “Before Cronofy’s [scheduler](http://cronofy.com/scheduler), it was picking up the phone, calling people, sending email follow-ups, understanding if they were interested or not,” Tanya recalled. > It might have taken me a week to book thirty interviews, and that's a good week. This was just not working for us. ONWA understood that getting the most in-demand candidates scheduled for interviews before competitors will give them the edge they need, and this means having to move with speed. > We know how aggressive the job market is. We want everything done in two weeks—interview done, hired, and onboarding kicked off. This is our ideal goal, because you’re going to lose quality candidates if you take any longer. More personally, the sheer volume of manual work was difficult to manage for a small HR team that was tasked with far more than just [recruitment coordination](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams). “It was setting me back so far,” Tanya shares. "It was a struggle to get through emails, and onboarding tasks start to build up. Making time to reach out to people was such a challenge, especially when you have to chase people or respond to interview requests. There was no breathing space. It was a huge ordeal." ## The solution: # A scheduling tool for 365 days of the year, that charges fairly for active interviewers, not empty seats As a not-for-profit organization, it was important for ONWA to choose an interview scheduling tool with fair pricing. Cronofy’s [active user billing model](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing) charges for active users, rather than empty seats. This means that you only pay for a user when they are added to a calendar event in that month, becoming especially valuable during periods of low hiring activity. [Learn more about Cronofy's pricing](https://www.bamboohr.com/integrations/listings/cronofy) When making the choice for the right tool, they broke down the true costs of manual scheduling. While free on the surface, the sheer amount of time and inefficiency was having a significant impact on the team’s capacity. “This means the cost and the time that goes into scheduling the interviews previously, how much time it took me, how long it took us to get the interview, and the approval for hire. All of these things mattered to us, and they were taking longer than we wanted,” explains Tanya. > We realized that automating this would save time for everybody, not just myself. Cronofy took the guesswork out of availability for both candidates and hiring managers, and minimized the need to switch between tools. “Cronofy in BambooHR streamlines scheduling—it’s a one-stop shop. It’s an easy, quick, and understandable process to the candidate. It’s so straightforward. I send you an invitation and you accept it.” Scheduling interviews now happens without needing to make time for it. > Even if I’m busy, and it needs to be done right now, scheduling with Cronofy in BambooHR literally takes 30 seconds and you’re done. This has given Tanya back control of her diary, and allowed her to organize her working day better. “When you have no time, it’s much harder to give things the attention that they deserve,” she shares. "When you’re scheduling manually, you’re not winning." This is how automating their interview scheduling enabled the organization to take on so much more. ## The result: # More than just scheduling: Taking back time to upskill and empower employees throughout the organization > The day that I got to use Cronofy for the first time, I had the realization that scheduling will be so easy, and I will not be so overwhelmed. Tanya recalls previous periods of high growth that required her to schedule manually at scale, leaving little time for anything else. “This was the answer to what I was experiencing. I would not have moved past the previous manual process.” Rescheduling interviews has also never been easier. > There was recently an interview that got rescheduled, because one of the panel members was ill. Instead of having to pick up the phone and interrupt everything I was doing in my workflow, I was able to just re-send other times to reschedule to the interviewee. It was so streamlined, it didn’t even interrupt my day. By eliminating thankless manual scheduling gruntwork with well-placed automation, ONWA is now left with more time to focus on work empowering the community they serve. After getting back hours per week during peak hiring periods, Tanya has even had the chance to upskill and complete a college course. “Getting Cronofy has enabled me to amplify my skill set, because my time was freed up. Beforehand, there would have been no way for this to happen—I’d be too stressed and too tired. Now, I was able to take a college course to add more potential to myself,” she explains, reflecting on her continued drive to improve, despite an already busy schedule. “The more I get to learn, the more valuable I become.” Now, ONWA can dedicate more resources to assembling their dream team to support the Association in their mission of providing a voice for Indigenous women’s issues in Ontario. So, what does winning look like to ONWA? “Scheduling without the hiccups, chasing, or chaos,” puts Tanya simply. The organization now seamlessly schedules interviews without having to leave BambooHR. Users can take advantage of scheduling for a variety of scenarios, including screening calls, [**panel interviews**](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/automate-and-optimize-best-practices-for-managing-large-interviewer-pools), and 1:1 interviews with hiring managers. To make things even smoother, Cronofy users can perform a [**directory sync**](https://docs.cronofy.com/scheduler/enterprise-onboarding/connecting-organization-calendars/provisioning-accounts/) to connect the organization’s calendars for availability, eliminating any need for internal back-and-forths. This removes any barriers to scheduling meetings on behalf of someone else, or adding them as an attendee. Users also have the ability to book meetings into blocked spaces if required, avoiding potential conflicts or delays to getting interviews over the line. Ready to upgrade your BambooHR interview scheduling experience? New users can get a 90-day trial and try Cronofy in BambooHR for themselves—just click below and activate your offer today. [Try Cronofy in BambooHR](/interview-scheduling-in-bamboohr) ### Pinpoint streamlines interview experiences with real-time scheduling Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. Case Study --- ### Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Blog Post 2024-06-19T12:00:32.123Z --- ### How a scheduling integration with Cronofy freed thousands of hours for BambooHR users BambooHR’s dual focus on candidate experience and removing administrative fatigue led them to integrate Cronofy’s embedded scheduler to help save recruiters thousands of hours from manual scheduling. Case Study --- # How Will Automation Change The Recruiting Game in 2022? Eli Franklin, Recruitment Specialist at Recruit CRM, looks at how automation continues to change the recruiting and staffing landscape and how recruiters can reap the benefits of automation throughout the hiring process. Eli Franklin, Recruitment Specialist at Recruit CRM, looks at how automation continues to change the recruiting and staffing landscape and how recruiters can reap the benefits of automation throughout the hiring process. The adoption of automation is booming across all industries. The increasing use of automation combined with AI is transforming core company processes, with the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the shift to digital. The rise of recruitment automation has hugely impacted the sector, and it's now becoming intrinsic to successful hiring, with increasing job vacancies and decreasing pools of candidates making the hiring landscape more competitive than ever. Automation is proving to be the solution for time-strapped recruiters and HR teams looking to win top talent as quickly as possible, and looks set to continue into 2022. According to a [LinkedIn survey on talent trends](https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/recruiting-tips/global-talent-trends-2020), 35% of talent professionals and hiring managers say that automation is the top trend impacting how they hire. [Applicant Tracking Systems](https://recruitcrm.io/blogs/what-is-applicant-tracking-system) and Recruitment CRMs are becoming commonplace, helping hiring teams find the right candidates at a much faster rate, fill job roles quicker and improve company brand image. Recruiters are increasingly looking for ways to save time on manual work, leaving more time for valuable tasks like relationship-building. ### **Which recruitment processes are being automated?** **‍**Recruiters and hiring managers are often swamped by the sheer volume of candidate data and administrative tasks they have to deal with. Digital tools, software, and automated technology can now replace the steps of the recruitment process that hold no value to complete manually. Tasks including building and storing candidate files, emailing candidates, [scheduling interviews](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/interview-scheduling), producing and uploading job ads, and reviewing CVs are managed seamlessly with automation. Recruiters can gather candidate information, maintain and build talent pools, track candidates, and evaluate the overall recruitment process with automation. With the availability of data reports and analytics tracking, data-influenced decisions improve the quality of hires and speed up hiring decisions. Automation isn't just a boon for recruiters. Automation also significantly speeds up the application process for candidates – which improves their hiring experience. ### ‍**How will automation change recruiting in 2022?** With technology constantly advancing and proving to hold multiple benefits for the recruitment sector, the adoption of automation will only continue to accelerate. Here are four key areas that automation will change in the recruitment sector in 2022: ‍ 1. **Assessment of Candidates** Assessing candidates based on their applications and CVs can be insufficient, especially for highly skilled or senior-level positions. We'll see automated skill assessment tools rise in popularity throughout the year, which will enhance the assessment process. Automated skill-testing allows recruiters to evaluate and understand potential candidates more objectively and they can see their skills in action. As a result, it saves valuable time and resources while providing recruiters with more accurate and unbiased results than simply assessing a resume themselves. The best part is that recruiters have no manual work to go through – instead, the assessment tool prepares results automatically, and you can create preset questionnaires according to your requirements. 1. **Automated interview scheduling** According to a [recent poll by Yello,](https://yello.co/blog/automated-interview-scheduling-recruiters-need/) 41% of recruiters still schedule interviews over the phone. With rising job vacancies and decreased talent pools, recruiters will be looking for ways to boost efficiency in 2022, and automated interview scheduling is a top priority. By automating the interview scheduling process, recruiters can provide candidates with available time slots, allowing them to schedule interviews for their preferred time and instantly update the recruiter and candidate's calendars. This means no more time-wasting back-and-forth phone calls or emails trying to find a suitable time for everyone. Recruiters can also automate confirmations and follow-up communication to ensure consistent communication with the candidate using minimal effort, keeping the candidate and recruiter happy. Automating these steps helps speed up the hiring process, retaining top talent and resulting in higher quality hires. Recruiters will increasingly look to automated scheduling to reduce admin tasks that provide little value so they can stay competitive. 1. **Automated Sourcing** Sourcing and identifying top talent is probably one of the most time-consuming tasks for any recruiter. Making a poor hire costs time and money, so it's crucial to get this step right; according to the US Department of Labor's estimation, the average cost of a bad hire is around 30% of the employee's first-year earnings. Automated sourcing has already changed the recruitment game and looks set to dominate in 2022. There are several methods for reaching candidates with automated tools used for sourcing; social media tools, candidate rediscovery software, sourcing chatbots, and even AI-powered candidate screenings are all ways to automate the sourcing process. [According to Forbes,](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/07/12/welcome-to-the-age-of-recruiting-automation/?sh=2678197e1865) recruiters spend nearly a third of their workweek (about 13 hours) sourcing candidates for a single role – fortunately, automation offers efficient ways to modernize and streamline recruiting efforts. 1. **Elimination of Unconscious Bias** Diversity and inclusion have consistently been hot topics for hiring businesses in recent years, regardless of industry. The way we assess and interview can be affected by unconscious bias, whether towards gender, age, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality. This results in reduced quality of hire, innovation, and creativity in the workforce. Many businesses have struggled to create a hiring process that is fair and without bias, and are realising automation could hold the key to support a fair and inclusive recruitment process in 2022. According to a recent[ report from HubSpot](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/202646/Recruiting%20Automation%20Trends%20Report%20(Final).pdf), 61% of talent acquisition professionals believe recruiting automation can help reduce unconscious bias. Tools such as resume parsers and text analyzers, and those that help form objective decision-making based on skills and traits, can help recruiters build diverse teams. ### **Key Takeaways** The recruiting and staffing industry is constantly evolving. Automation will continue to transform the recruitment field in 2022, and will soon dominate the administrative time-consuming processes that provide little value to both the recruiter and the candidate to be done manually. It’s clear that adopting automation is crucial for recruiters to stay relevant to the modern candidate; a recent [report from SurveyMonkey and Microsoft ](https://www.cio.com/article/3082775/millennials-are-shaking-up-workplace-communication.html)stated that 93% of the 1000+ millennial workers surveyed said that a business having up-to-date technology is an important factor when choosing a workplace. Recruiters need to prioritize automation to attract the best talent in today's world and speed up time-to-hire, leaving them with more time to build and nurture candidate relationships. 2022 will undoubtedly be the year that transforms hiring processes with automation and changes the recruitment game. *Eli is a Recruitment Specialist at **[Recruit CRM](https://recruitcrm.io)**. She has worked in the technology sector for the past seven years, and has been within the recruitment technology space specifically for five of those years.* --- # Why Cronofy is committing to an agentic future with Microsoft’s Agentic Launchpad As part of our next steps in delivering agentic value, we're delighted to share that Cronofy is part of Microsoft and NVIDIA's Agentic Launchpad, alongside the UK’s most innovative companies building the next wave of autonomous AI systems. Read on to see what this means for our product. As part of our next steps in delivering agentic value, we're delighted to share that Cronofy is part of Microsoft and NVIDIA's Agentic Launchpad, alongside the UK’s most innovative companies building the next wave of autonomous AI systems. Read on to see what this means for our product. At Cronofy, we provide teams and product builders with the tools to schedule and run meetings effortlessly. Now, we’re honing in on delivering agentic value. That’s why we’re delighted to announce that Cronofy is joining Microsoft and NVIDIA's Agentic Launchpad, alongside the UK’s most innovative companies building the next wave of autonomous AI systems. This program is part of Microsoft's $30 billion investment in UK AI infrastructure, pairing companies with Azure credits, NVIDIA's AI tools, and direct engineering support from both Microsoft and NVIDIA teams. What we’re already solving at Cronofy Over 180,000 organisations are already using Cronofy for their meeting and scheduling infrastructure. Teams embed Cronofy into their product or processes to empower both humans and AI agents to schedule, reschedule, transcribe and summarise any meeting, no matter their complexity. By embedding directly into existing workflows, we let teams focus on what matters most, without the friction of manual coordination. Why Cronofy’s infrastructure gets more out of your AI budget Unlike solutions that rely on deploying expensive AI for every task, Cronofy delivers cost-effective, scalable infrastructure that focuses on security, privacy, and reliable performance. We’ve built a platform that merges the best of traditional SaaS with AI to handle all the scheduling mechanics seamlessly. This frees up AI budgets for what actually needs intelligence, like deal scoring, candidate evaluation, or customer insights, whatever your product or niche. Why hybrid agentic & human workflows are our focus Most AI agents hit the same wall: they can't actually get meetings booked. They generate the email, draft the follow-up, then hand calendar coordination back to a human, or hallucinate unavailable times. Cronofy handles the full meeting lifecycle: scheduling, rescheduling, transcribing, and summarizing. This end-to-end experience drives unprecedented efficiency gains for both internal team meetings and external client calls. Agents can book meetings autonomously using real-time calendar data or pre-booked blocks, and humans keep full control when they need it. Now, agents and humans will work side-by-side inside products like CRM, applicant tracking systems, or wherever your workflow lives, and solve the fundamental time-drain of manual meeting coordination and follow-up. Why the Agentic Launchpad? We’ve chosen Microsoft’s Agentic Launchpad as the platform to scale our mission to bring more value to meetings. As part of this initiative, we’ll be collaborating with Microsoft and NVIDIA to accelerate how scheduling and meeting infrastructure plugs into agentic systems. You can find out more about [Microsoft’s Agentic Launchpad here](https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/industry/blog/cross-industry/2025/12/18/agentic-launchpad-cohort/). ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # 6 Benefits of Automation in the Workplace From scheduling interviews to booking a taxi, automation is everywhere. While some are afraid that AI, automation, and robots are coming for their jobs, results show otherwise: it’s helping us to do our jobs. Not just faster, but better, too. Productivity is increasing because we’re not spending as much time on tedious tasks. We have more time to spend working toward key objectives and helping the business to grow instead of on necessary but time-consuming tasks that eat up our time. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the benefits of automation in the workplace. From scheduling interviews to booking a taxi, automation is everywhere. While some are afraid that AI, automation, and robots are coming for their jobs, results show otherwise: it’s helping us to do our jobs. Not just faster, but better, too. Productivity is increasing because we’re not spending as much time on tedious tasks. We have more time to spend working toward key objectives and helping the business to grow instead of on necessary but time-consuming tasks that eat up our time. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the benefits of automation in the workplace. From scheduling interviews to booking a taxi, automation is everywhere. While some are afraid that AI, automation, and robots are coming for their jobs, results show otherwise: it’s helping us to do our jobs. Not just faster, but better, too. Productivity is increasing because we’re not spending as much time on tedious tasks. We have more time to spend working toward key objectives and helping the business to grow instead of on necessary but time-consuming tasks that eat up our time. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the benefits of automation in the workplace. ## Reduced time to fill The longer a role remains open, the more businesses lose out not just from missing an employee, but from other employees filling in for that empty role, too. Reducing their time to fill is therefore crucial to reducing what can become a significant loss of productivity. Applicant tracking systems and candidate relationship management systems can help with almost every step of the hiring process. It can shortlist candidates faster and better than a human; it can schedule interviews, and it can even conduct interviews. While this reduces the face time that candidates get with recruitment teams, it saves recruitment teams hours every week. They can conduct in-person interviews more effectively because they have more time to prepare, meaning they’re more likely to hire the right person first time. ## More effective employee onboarding It’s estimated that 20% of employee turnover happens [during the first 45 days](http://www.refreshleadership.com/index.php/2016/04/infographic-onboarding-statistics/). An effective onboarding process is crucial to reducing this figure. A more effective onboarding process also reduces how long an employee takes to reach full productivity, which is estimated to be between eight to 12 months. Organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 54% better productivity from new hires. A longer onboarding process also reduces how long it takes for new employees to reach full productivity by 50-75%.A standardized onboarding process also increases employee retention by 50%.Automation can help companies to improve their onboarding process by creating automated workflows. These could include regular emails to help them through their first few weeks or when they pass a milestone, or the automated scheduling of meetings with their colleagues. Onboarding apps can automatically tick off when tasks are complete and notify anyone involved that is holding up the onboarding flow. These flows can be used for every new hire, with steps added or removed based on the new hire’s responsibilities. ## Greater employee retention and a better working environment With such a competitive recruitment market, the best way for businesses to avoid the lengthy and expensive hiring process is to retain their current employees. Automating repetitive tasks is a great way to do this. When tedious tasks are automated, employees are made to feel valued. This makes them happier in their role and gives them more time to get the job done. In fact, happy employees are [31% more productive](https://www.talent-works.com/2018/08/22/workplace-stats-infographic/) than their less happy colleagues. Their improved mood and productivity has a ripple effect on those around them, too. It helps to build a more welcoming working environment which can even catch on to new hires. ## Improved productivity Workplace productivity is at an all-time low. It’s therefore imperative that businesses find ways to improve – and fast – if they want to surpass their competitors. Employees lose around 520 hours per year to repetitive tasks that could be automated. Tasks like scheduling a meeting or organizing an interview are simple but can eat away at their time so quickly they don’t even notice. Automation is a great way for businesses to improve employee productivity. Repetitive tasks that could be automated [cost the US economy $13,000 per employee](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-businesses-wasting-up-to-18-trillion-annually-on-repetitive-employee-tasks-samanage-survey-says-300224177.html). Across a workforce of 140 million, that means the US economy misses out on $1.8 trillion every year. Just think of how much money could be generated if those tasks were automated…More than one in three believe that their company’s technology is outdated. A fifth, meanwhile, want non-essential tasks automated. When you think of the time that they could gain, is it any wonder? The extra time means that they can get more done, generate more money for the business, and maybe even earn a pay raise for themselves. None of that can happen if tedious tasks aren’t automated, though. ## Stronger employer brand Employer brands are everything. Job-hunting candidates will change their mind about applying for a role or reject a job offer if they discover a company has a poor employer brand. Automating tasks during every step of the employee’s journey within a company is one way to [improve employer brands](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-build-a-strong-employer-brand-image/). During the hiring process, responding to candidates faster using an ATS that shortlists means candidates aren't waiting around only to be rejected. As they progress, interview scheduling that they're in control of further helps to [create a better employee experience](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-experience/). In the increasingly candidate-driven market, steps such as this help companies to stand out. Automating employees’ tasks also improves employer brands. When employees talk about the company with their friends and family, they’re more likely to speak highly of their employer. This leaves a positive impression on their friends and family, making them more likely to spread the word, too. They may even apply for roles in the future if something fitting their skillset arises. ## Faster growth Ultimately, isn’t this what every business strives for? There’s no denying that automation is an investment. Automation software doesn’t always come cheap, then there’s the added cost of installing it and training employees to use it. It all sounds like an expensive risk when you put it like that. But, when you look at the long-term gains, it’s a no-brainer. Automating tasks frees employees up to focus on other tasks that help them to generate more money for the business. Since they have more time, their output goes up, then, so does the business’s revenue. Since revenue is going up, businesses can hire more employees, invest in more products and services, and even create new ones to share with their customers faster. ## Conclusion Automation in the workplace has huge benefits for everyone. It speeds up tedious tasks, improving candidates’ and employees’ experiences. This then improves revenue, productivity, and employer brand. It’s no longer a case of *if* businesses will embrace automation, but a case of *when*. Businesses that fail to automate tasks risk losing the best candidates and their best employees to companies that are looking to the future and are more in tune with the needs of twenty-first century employees. How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? [Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/) --- # Automated Scheduling and Calendar Sync for HR Software A workplace study conducted in 2016 revealed that employees in the US lose an average of 520 hours per year on tasks that could be automated. That works out at roughly one working day per week lost, and an average of $13,000 a year per employee wasted on simple, repetitive tasks. Across the whole of the US workforce – more than 140 million people – this amounts to a staggering cost of $1.8 trillion every year. Technology plays a crucial role in helping us to achieve more. Automating tasks gives employees more time to focus on what they were really hired to do. The time won back can also be used for training and personal development, which will further their progression in their role and career. Enabling and encouraging continual self-development also means they’re more likely to be satisfied in their role. When employers invest in the right technology, employees lose less time to monotonous tasks. This contributes to a better employee experience and a more positive working environment. Employees’ lives can be changed overnight thanks to automation. [Download the white paper](https://www.cronofy.com/how-automated-scheduling-and-calendar-sync-can-transform-hr/) ## Hiring Our [survey of HR professionals](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2017/) showed that it takes over a month for 60% of vacancies to be filled. This may not sound that long, but in the competitive world of recruitment it can be the difference between hiring the best person for a role and losing them to the competition. The best candidates are off the market fast. The longer a company takes to organize interviews and meet the candidate in person, the more likely they are to miss out. A long hiring process is painful for everyone involved. Recruiters spend hours on the phone or writing emails trying to find an interview time that works for everyone. It also means weeks – maybe even months – with an open position. Team members have to bridge the gap, or projects come to a standstill. Real-time calendar sync speeds up the hiring process. It allows for interview and call scheduling to be automated. Dozens of interviews can be set up in one click and added to the calendars of all attendees. ‍ ## Training Training is a crucial part of an employee’s development during their time within a company. But making sure that training fits seamlessly into their work life can be tricky – employees often need to reorganize their schedules so that they can attend sessions. Blocking out a couple of hours or even days for a training session means coordinating the schedules of dozens of employees. The more employees that are involved, the harder it is to find the right time, the right room, and the right equipment. Instead of booking a training session then seeing how many people can attend, training sessions can be organized based on how many people are interested. If there isn’t enough interest, it can be canceled before it’s even been arranged. There’s less time wasted for everyone involved. ‍ ## Meeting organization Organizing a meeting requires lots of small, simple tasks like sending emails or making phone calls. These quickly add up. If it takes two minutes to send an email, and it takes 10 emails to find the right time for everyone, that’s 20 minutes lost to the first part of organizing the meeting. They haven’t even begun to find a room or any required resources yet. Adding calendar sync to meeting room booking software eradicates the need to book everything individually. Meeting organizers save hours, giving them more time to spend on meeting preparation. ## Paid time off management Booking paid time off may not seem like a big deal, but it often requires jumping through countless hoops just so that an employee can book a well-earned break. This can lead to frustration, deterring them from using all of their holiday entitlement. Not taking regular breaks damages employees’ mental health and leads to stagnation in their role. It’s therefore imperative that businesses encourage employees to use their holiday entitlement. When paid time off management software is connected to an employee’s calendar, they can request leave straight from their calendar. What was once a complicated process is simple and stress-free. Employees also don’t need to learn how to use dozens of different tools – they can continue to manage their time from one place: their calendar. ## Conclusion These are just a handful of the ways automated scheduling and calendar sync can create better experiences for businesses and employees. For more examples, [check out our new white paper](https://www.cronofy.com/how-automated-scheduling-and-calendar-sync-can-transform-hr/). Discover how automated scheduling and calendar sync can transform HR [Get the white paper](https://www.cronofy.com/how-automated-scheduling-and-calendar-sync-can-transform-hr/) --- # Cronofy Meeting Agents | Schedule, Record & Transcribe Meetings with One API Add meeting recording, transcription, and insights to your application without extra vendors or complex integrations. Cronofy’s Meeting Agent extends our API to power the entire meeting lifecycle through one secure, scalable platform. ## A single API to record, transcribe and summarize meetings Meeting Agents run entirely on Cronofy’s infrastructure, turning meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams into structured data your product can build on. Start testing with 24 free hours of recording. [Get started](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer?utm_medium=meeting_agentlp) [Speak to a human](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/meeting-agents#85726821a8ed) ## Meeting capture built with compliance at the core Most meeting capture APIs focus on outputs. Meeting Agents are built around where data runs and who has access to it. ### Single processor by design Cronofy, an EU-based provider, runs the entire meeting capture workflow on its own infrastructure with no third-party vendors or subprocessors. --- ### Region-specific deployments Meeting data is processed and stored only in the selected region, with dedicated data centres in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Singapore. --- ### Compliance built-in Cronofy is GDPR and HIPAA compliant, with SOC 2 and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certifications. Ship new capabilities without increasing risk. How they work ## Two ways to integrate Meeting Agents Deploy meeting agents rapidly as a standalone solution, or use them as a extension of Cronofy's scheduling infrastructure to support the entire meeting workflow with one integration. Standalone Use the Meeting Agent API to dispatch instantly using a meeting join URL, or schedule them to join at a specific time. This works as a standalone integration, with no dependency on scheduling. Fully integrated Attach a Meeting Agent directly to the calendar event when scheduling meetings via Cronofy. If the meeting is updated or rescheduled, everything stays aligned with the right session. ## Capture audio and video recordings Give your users a record of every meeting, directly inside your product so they can review and reference exactly what happened without relying on external tools. - Capture audio and video recordings from every meeting - Support Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams - Deliver files ready for in-app playback ## Analyze recordings with diarized transcripts Automatically structure meetings into searchable, actionable data your product can understand and build on. - Transcription is hosted entirely on Cronofy’s infrastructure - Generate speaker-attributed transcripts with timestamps - Use transcript data to power things like scorecards and insights ## Automatically generate meeting summaries Remove the need for manual note-taking or external tools by surfacing summaries inside your product. - Deliver summaries as ready made outputs - Build on the summary to highlight key moments and next steps - Populate records and trigger follow-up workflows inside your product ## Unlock new capabilities with meeting data When meeting data lives inside your product, it starts powering decisions and automation. ### HR Tech Auto-capture interviews and generate consistent summaries and scorecards. Reduce manual admin to support faster, fairer hiring decisions. --- ### CRM and Sales Turn meetings into CRM records. Capture sales calls, auto-populate notes, and give reps clear visibility into next steps and deal risk. --- ### Healthcare Auto-document consultations and generate summaries that populate patient records. Reduce admin and improve continuity of care. --- ### Coaching Capture coaching sessions automatically. Generate reflections, track progress over time, and let coaches focus on the conversation. ## Get started in minutes Watch the demo below and create a free account to start testing Meeting Agents with 24 free hours of recording. If you’re ready to explore your use case in more detail, contact our team to discuss your requirements and next steps. [Get started](/book-a-demo-api) [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ### Get started with Meeting Agents Duration: 04:00 ## Leading enterprises trust Cronofy to power meeting capabilities ## Frequently Asked Questions **Q: What are Meeting Agents by Cronofy?** A: Meeting Agents are a unified API for capturing meeting recordings, transcripts, and AI-generated summaries from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. They handle meeting access, recording, and data delivery so product teams can focus on building differentiated AI features and meeting workflows, without maintaining bots or conferencing integrations. **Q: How can I start using Meeting Agents?** A: It’s quick to get started with Meeting Agents. Create a free account and start testing with 24 free hours meeting recording. You can review the documentation and how to get started [here](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/). **Q: How is Meeting Agents pricing structured?** A: Meeting Agents are priced based on monthly usage, with all costs inclusive of meeting recording, transcription, and data processing. The first 24 hours of usage are free to facilitate testing, then pricing scales as follows: - 0–4,000 hours / month: $0.79/hour - 4,001–8,000 hours / month: $0.69/hour - 8,001–16,000 hours / month: $0.59/hour - 16,001+ hours / month: contact us Charges are metered per second so you only ever pay for exactly what you use. A minimum monthly commitment of $99 applies when using the standalone Meeting Agent API. **Q: How do Meeting Agents work?** A: Meeting Agents can be deployed in a number of ways - Dispatch an agent to any meeting ad-hoc via a single API call. - Schedule a Meeting Agent to join a meeting at a specific time. - Attach an agent to a calendar event when creating or updating it **Q: What are Cronofy’s security and compliance credentials?** A: Cronofy is a European company, built with compliance at our foundation. Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. You can view detailed information about our [compliance policy here](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy). **Q: Where will meeting data be stored?** A: You choose where your data is processed and stored. Cronofy operates six data centres in: Australia, Canada, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All meeting data is processed exclusively within your selected region. **Q: Which conferencing platforms do Meeting Agents support?** A: Meeting Agents currently support Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. **Q: What languages are supported?** A: We support the following languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Swiss German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malay, Dutch, Flemish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Chinese. **Q: Will my users be able to opt-out of meeting recording?** A: Yes. You control when Meeting Agents are dispatched, and end users can accept or decline an agent joining a call. Cronofy provides the infrastructure, while integrators retain full control over recording behaviour. **Q: Can the Meeting Agent be white-labeled?** A: Yes. The name and avatar displayed by Meeting Agents are fully configurable to match your product. --- # BambooHR partnership announcement Cronofy partners with BambooHR! Cronofy, the industry’s leading scheduling platform to help recruiters streamline efficiency and increase speed-to-hire, has partnered with BambooHR, the leading software platform for human resources. ‍ With this integration, users can now seamlessly schedule individual, multi-person, group, panel and complex interviews with just a few clicks. What usually takes recruiters 2-5 days to arrange, can be done in 2-3 hours. Leaving you time to focus on developing candidate relationships, evaluating recruitment funnel metrics and building your talent pools. ‍ “We’re immensely proud of our partnership with BambooHR, as we help more recruiters hit their talent acquisition targets and remove the stress out of interview scheduling for everyone. BambooHR is trusted by their 30,000 customers across the globe, and our embedded integration delivers a solution that reduces back-and-forth interview scheduling and rescheduling, and saves them precious time.” Adam Bird, CEO and Co-founder, Cronofy ‍ Rachel Kaplowitz, Product Director - Core of BambooHR said: ‍ "We're thrilled to unveil our integration with Cronofy! Beyond simplifying interview scheduling, this integration is designed to alleviate our customers' workloads, enhance candidate experiences, and minimize errors - all in support of BambooHR's mission to set people free to do great work." ‍ BambooHR users haven’t had an integrated scheduling tool that offers the features and complex scheduling that Cronofy delivers. This integration is now available to all BambooHR customers. Learn more about the integration [here](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-bamboohr) --- # Inside Cronofy with David Jiang, Technical Account Manager Our third instalment of our Inside Cronofy series! We sat down with Technical Account Manager, David Jiang, to learn more about his role at Cronofy. Our third instalment of our Inside Cronofy series! We sat down with Technical Account Manager, David Jiang, to learn more about his role at Cronofy. Welcome to the third installment of our Inside Cronofy interview series! Today we're sitting down with Technical Account Manager David Jiang to learn more about his role and and the kind of clients he's currently working with. #### Hi David, thanks for speaking with me today! Firstly, could you tell me a bit about yourself and your role at Cronofy? So I'm a Technical Account Manager, and my role is to identify the scheduling needs of prospective customers and explain how we can help them solve these problems. This role in particular requires more technical knowledge because you often need to understand APIs and the customers' systems to see how well Cronofy could fit. I explain how we can help in a deeper way, from a very technical point of view. #### Sounds interesting! How long have you been working for Cronofy? I've been at Cronofy for six months. #### What were you doing before you joined Cronofy? Before joining Cronofy, I worked as a technical account manager but focused more on the post-sales process. So I didn't work with potential customers to understand their needs; they had already signed a contract saying, "we are ready to use your platform." The sales team would then pass me to customers, and I would help them work with our platform, explain how the technology works and help them on their projects. It also required some integration work, so I would do some analysis and coding, identify their needs, and serve their requirements. #### What does a typical day at Cronofy look like for you? I will normally start the day by preparing for a phone call with a prospect. I would do some research on them, looking at what type of industry they're in, how we can potentially help them, and what encouraged them to want to work with us. I'd then have a call with them to explain how our API works and how we can help. If they're technical, I will go into more detail to show what we could potentially do by using this part of the API or showing what the user journey could look like, like a story. I really try to go deep into that, and people are pretty satisfied with the result - but I digress! Aside from that, after a prospect call, I follow up with everything that has been discussed to help them make a decision. Then, I might have technical calls with prospects or existing customers that would focus on their integration. So they could be building a proof of concept or starting development, and I would be there to guide them and say, "this is how you could do the integration." The call could also be related to fixing some issues or doing a review of their integration. So I can comment on why certain parts of the integration don't seem right. I'm really here to be an advisor, like a consultant, to help prospects and customers solve their requirements. #### Makes sense! So what does the sales cycle look like at Cronofy? So first, the marketing team provides a lead that might be interested in building scheduling functionalities. Then I would discuss requirements with the lead and show how Cronofy might be able to help. After that, the prospect usually gets started on either creating a proof of concept or directly beginning the development. We might do an implementation to check that everything is going well, and once they're ready to go into Production, I help them go through the verification process. Then they're ready to go live! > "In six months, **I've learned so much in terms of business, the strategy of sales, and even technical knowledge.** This role touches upon so many fields, and I like working with all the different teams, from Marketing to Engineering. It's been fantastic." #### Do you have a particular approach to sales? I would say at any point, always be honest and straightforward with a prospect or customer. In my case, I particularly focus on building a long-lasting relationship and helping them grow as a business because this really is a win-win situation. I want to be a partner for them and not just consider them as a customer. #### I love this approach! So now that you've been with us for six months, what is it that you've enjoyed most about working at Cronofy? A lot of things! Of course, our colleagues and the culture. But also the fact that I get to work on many different tasks and projects. I'm learning lots of things I've not experienced before - to give a bit of background, I wasn't in sales at all before this role. In six months, I've learned so much in terms of business, the strategy of sales, and even technical knowledge. This role touches upon so many fields, and I like working with all the different teams, from Marketing to Engineering. It's been fantastic. #### It's wonderful to hear you've had such a positive experience! What would you say to anyone who is considering applying for a role with us? I would say if you're looking to learn and you're eager to progress quickly in your career, or even as a person, join us at Cronofy. One thing I love about Cronofy that I forgot to mention is the support they provide you in your career. So whatever your career path, whether you want to be more technical, more managerial, or deal with more key customers, Cronofy can help you and guide you on the right path. *Does Cronofy sound like the perfect fit for your career? If you're interested in joining our team, head to our **[Careers page](https://www.cronofy.com/careers)** to see our current open positions or submit your CV to recruitment@cronofy.com!* --- # Why Your External Training Program Needs Calendar Sync It makes sense for businesses to invest in technologies that create a better training environment for employees looking to improve their skills. But there’s only so much that can be achieved with in-house training, and while online courses are great, nothing beats the external knowledge or objectivity you get from courses delivered in person. External speakers and mentors can answer any questions that you may have and tailor their answers to your company, something which can make a huge difference. It makes sense for businesses to invest in technologies that create a better training environment for employees looking to improve their skills. But there’s only so much that can be achieved with in-house training, and while online courses are great, nothing beats the external knowledge or objectivity you get from courses delivered in person. External speakers and mentors can answer any questions that you may have and tailor their answers to your company, something which can make a huge difference. It makes sense for businesses to invest in technologies that create a [better training environment for employees](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-create-a-better-learning-environment-for-your-employees/) looking to improve their skills. But there’s only so much that can be achieved with in-house training, and while online courses are great, nothing beats the external knowledge or objectivity you get from courses delivered in person. External speakers and mentors can answer any questions that you may have and tailor their answers to your company, something which can make a huge difference. That is why many organizations hire the services of external speakers and mentors to help them train their teams. External training provides the team with knowledge in various areas of expertise from HR to Marketing and Sales. It’s easy to get stuck in company culture and lose sight of outside trends, which is why it’s always good to bring in someone from the outside. In-person training sessions are also more engaging than a webinar or online conference. And let’s face it employees are more likely to give someone their undivided attention if they stand a few feet away from them. Arranging for external trainers to come into your office and make sure that all interested employees can attend isn’t always easy, though. Consultants are busy people and so are your employees. Finding a time that works for everyone can be a real pain and hinder productivity. Let’s look at some of the ways you can implement a smooth process when booking external training. ## Syncing employees’ calendars to your HR software The main problem when it comes to blocking a couple of hours or a few days for a training session revolves around coordinating the schedules of the employees that need or want to attend the session. The more employees that are involved, the more complicated this can get. It’s common for training courses to be pushed back or rescheduled. This is a hassle and means the employees will have to wait a few extra weeks before implementing their learnings. By syncing your organization’s calendars with your HR software – or any tool you use for booking training courses – the person in charge of scheduling external speakers can access the real-time availability of all the interested employees. This makes it easy to see which time slots can work for everyone. It is also possible to generate a booking link and send it to the external speaker so that they can pick the time that works best for them. Once they have chosen a time the event will be added to the calendars of every attendee. The beauty of calendar sync is that everything updates in real-time. Notifications can be sent when changes occur in different calendars. There’s no risk of double-booking and if the session needs to be rescheduled it only takes a few seconds to generate a new booking link. This saves your HR team a lot of time – no more email chains and back-and-forth conversations – whilst keeping the distraction to a minimal for both employees and speakers. ## Enhanced communications with the speakers Should the speaker be a regular at the company, their calendar can also be synced to your booking software to access their real-time availability. This can then be used to book training sessions even quicker. But in most cases that simply doesn’t make sense and there is no incentive for the consultants or speakers to let you access their calendar information. This is when Smart Invites comes in. This new feature allows you to transform classic ICS file into smart ICS files. Instead of sending an invite into the ether because speakers’ calendars aren’t connected to your software you are able to track what happens to it. This means that you get notified if the invite is accepted or moved and can ring up the speaker to make sure everything is still fine on their end and that they can still make the time you agreed on. To make things even easier for speakers who haven’t visited your offices before, extra information – such as the building’s address, or who to ask for on arrival – can be added to calendar invites. Geolocation details for example can be useful to ensure that 20 employees don’t spend half an hour for someone stuck in a traffic jam because they didn’t set off on time. By leveraging the existing smartphone infrastructure – and GPS technology – it only takes a tap of the finger to get direction and the latest traffic information. ## Booking resources and meeting rooms The most effective training is the most interactive. It’s therefore important to give external speakers access to any equipment they may need whether that’s a laptop or a screen, a parking space, or a camera. Calendars can be set up for resources too! This allow them to be booked and managed easily. The availability of a screen can be treated exactly like the availability of an employee and used as a parameter in deciding which time will work best for a session. Finding the perfect meeting room can also be tricky, especially when you need it for an extended period. But it can be automated by creating calendars for each meeting room. However, before you press send on a calendar invite it’s worth thinking about the meeting room itself. The learning environment can greatly impact the success of training and how much information your employees will retain. If the room is too warm or too cold they’ll be too distracted to think straight. Room temperatures should be consistent, and around 18-20 degrees – average room temperature. Chairs should support people’s back and allow for their knees to be parallel to the floor. Tables or desk should be at a height that’s comfortable for people to place their wrist on. This can seem like nit-picking but it can make a real difference. ## Get the best people at the best time The knowledge and expertise of external speakers can make a huge difference to your team. Coordinating their schedule with everyone else’s is a complicated process, but with calendar sync, the whole thing can be automated. There’s no stress for the organizer, the attendees, or the speaker. The external speakers also get a great impression of your company because coordinating everything is straightforward, quick, and easy. This great experience means that they’re more likely to enjoy their time working with your company and help you to foster strong relationships that will help your team grow. To find out more about our calendar sync solution and our new feature, [contact us today](https://www.cronofy.com/contact) or [book your free demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo/)! ‍ ### How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? **[Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/)** ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Agreena recruiters are automating panel interview scheduling and saving 5 hours a week each Discover how Agreena has transformed their interview scheduling process with Cronofy without leaving their ATS, Lever. Agreena helps farmers profitably transition to regenerative agriculture and companies achieve sustainability goals. **Seamless workflow** Using Cronofy to schedule without needing to leave Lever **5 hours saved per recruiter** Team now spending less time on admin and more on recruiting **Complex panel interviews solved** Pre-picked pools of interviewers chosen on real-time calendar availability ## The problem # Manual processes holding small recruitment team from scaling to address climate challenge 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 is on a mission to support more farmers in adopting [regenerative farming practices](https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/). 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. With this comes team expansion, going from 100 to 150 employees in 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. > My philosophy now in recruiting, seeing how recruiting teams and recruiting operations are changing, I want to focus on leveraging tools in our portfolio, as opposed to just adding headcount. — Joseph de Garr Wilkinson, Head of Talent, Agreena 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 regularly causing delays and frustrations for everyone, from candidate to recruiter. The team soon found there were many 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. > Scheduling **panel interviews** was impossible. In every single hiring process that we have, there's a panel interview involved, so it's a labour intensive process that you have to get right. I don't want our recruiters spending 30 minutes trying to schedule one candidate in a calendar with multiple people across time zones. ## The solution # **Future-proofing: A scheduling tool seamlessly fitting into Lever that grows with the team’s needs** 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 calendar tetris 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 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 found pricing and the implementation length unsuitable for a scaling startup. They needed a more affordable and flexible solution to accommodate their growth. That’s why Cronofy, which bills for active users rather than empty seats, was the perfect fit. ‍Rescheduling is made easy 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. > Because we're such a small team, we can't always be immediately on hand if the candidate is having to reschedule with a short notice period. Having a rescheduling feature that was great from an admin point of view, but also, from an experience point of view, as it gives the **candidate ownership** to drive their own agenda. Scheduling complex panel interviews was also a top need. 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, and users can set available times and limits to ensure a fair burden. Everyone is notified and gets an automated calendar update. ‍Delayed scheduling was solved with Cronofy’s Scheduling On Behalf Of feature. A recruiter 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 # Hours of time gained back: Recruiters now focusing on finding the best candidates, not email back-and-forth 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. This transformation means a considerable return on investment since implementing Cronofy, saving time, speeding up the hiring process, and improving the quality of candidates coming in thanks to the additional capacity given back to the team. > Hiring managers have seen an **increase in the volume of interviews** that they have in their calendars now. They also have better candidates, because we now have that time back to focus on sourcing. The candidate experience has been improved as they can enjoy a smoother, streamlined recruitment process. They feel their time has been respected by being able to pick their own time slot depending on their agenda—in fact, [the majority](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#7a316694eca9) of candidates report saying they prefer to pick their own interview times. 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 love about their job – finding and attracting the right people to their roles. > Our recruiters can now own the end-to-end hiring journey. They can make sure that **candidates are having a great experience**, but are able to do it in a much more seamless way. The fact that Cronofy integrates with Lever means they’re **spending a lot less time on the admin, everything just works**. 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. Want to try Cronofy for yourself? Learn more about our Scheduler for recruitment teams here: [Scheduler for Recruiters using Lever](/interview-scheduling-in-lever) ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Cronofy becomes a certified Lever integration partner! We've partnered up with another leading ATS, Lever, and have launched our integration for their users! Blog Post 2023-01-30T15:05:00.000Z --- ### How to Keep Recruitment Human-Centric in The Age of AI AI is transforming recruitment, making it faster and smarter to hire talent. But no technology can replace the importance of human connection. Let’s explore how to balance AI, automation, and personal interaction to enhance your hiring process. Blog Post 2024-10-14T13:46:00.000Z --- # Scheduling for Hospitality ## Scheduling for Hospitality > Integrating with Cronofy was really straightforward. Their documentation and support are first-class. We were able to quickly and easily integrate calendar availability into our call scheduling feature without having to worry about setting up several disparate calendar service integrations. — Chris Yancey, Full stack engineer, UpCounsel ## Online booking for hospitality - Organize events, restaurant bookings, hotel bookings, and more easier and faster - Sync appointments to calendars as soon as they’re made. Any appointments added to synced calendars will sync across to your software, too - One person can sync multiple calendars to your software - Provide a better experience for attendees and organizers ## Real-time bookings make it easier for everyone - Track event registrations - Close events when registration is full - Reopen bookings when someone cancels to minimize the risk of missed bookings - Make it easier for customers to cancel and reduce no shows - Avoid double-bookings - Sync your software to a network of calendars Set up [virtual calendars](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/calendars-events/application-calendars/) for restaurant tables, games equipment, etc ## Send staff shifts to their calendars to accept or decline - Track which shifts need more staff - Manage shifts from software or managers’ calendars - Send open shifts to employees’ calendars to accept or decline - Add upcoming shifts to employees’ calendars to avoid double-bookings ## Protect users' privacy - Real-time booking helps organizers to find service providers at any time of day or night - Slots reopen if a service provider receives a cancellation, maximizing their revenue and minimizing wasted time - Send [trackable calendar invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/) to service providers to confirm their attendance and send them all the necessary information --- # About Us About Cronofy ## Transforming time management for high-performance work Our mission ## Build a world where you can schedule 95% faster. Where teams perform at high speed. Successful teams are ambitious, they grow fast and they don’t waste time. As they scale, their needs become more and more complex. These teams have an efficiency stack of trusted tools that help unlock potential and keep time focussed on strategic work. Cronofy’s scheduling stack is designed for high performance teams and their complex needs, specifically as they grow. Group meetings booked in seconds, workflows integrated into the tools you already use and e-mail clients communicating seamlessly unlike any other booking technology. Cronofy creates momentum for teams and individuals who want to focus on strategizing, collaborating, and delivering - not booking. Our story ## Our story Founded in Europe by two engineers in 2014 who had become frustrated by how their schedules weren't connected to anything. Whilst others focused on building beautiful user interfaces to support simple booking experiences, Adam and Garry knew the problems weren't just skin deep. Business scheduling has multiple constraints. People are scheduling for individuals and groups, not just themselves. Data flows have to be secure and controlled. The applications that businesses rely on have to be kept in sync, in real-time. A new approach was required. A reimagining of calendars and the infrastructure that companies use to manage their employees' time. Fast forward to the present day and the Cronofy scheduling platform is helping tens of thousands of teams improve their efficiency and free up time for what's important. Working at Cronofy Join our fast growing team We're a high-growth, product-focused company led by a successful serial entrepreneur. Cronofy is at that exciting stage where every person that joins the team can have a major hand in our success and rapidly advance their careers in the process. [See open roles](https://www.cronofy.com/careers#Open-Positions) ## Our principles How we approach work every day. Truth Honesty is not just the right thing to do. Lies and half-truths can feel expedient in the short-term, but the freedom gained from confronting the truth is where high performance and trust comes from. When this baby hits 142kph... The magic happens when we operate at a speed that we can maintain long-term. We favor guidelines over rules and constantly prioritize value delivery without sacrificing the future. Back from the future We immerse ourselves in the future. We continuously question and challenge norms in order to find better answers to the scheduling problems of today and tomorrow. Stop & look around once in a while Knowledge work requires deep focus and mental energy. Social time together as well as away from work is critical to high performance and personal wellbeing. Zero in We start with users and build our priorities around their jobs to be done. Our experiments are thoughtful and collaborative. Successes and failures are reviewed together so we're always improving. ## Let's talk numbers **180k+** Companies using Cronofy **1Bn+** Events processed **4.8** G2 Rating **95%** Customer satisfaction score Leadership Team Meet the founders **Adam Bird **CEO & Co-founder Adam is a highly technical and experienced technology entrepreneur with a passion for continuous improvement that pervades every aspect of his life. A lover of cycling and craft beer but he never really got on with having a beard for that hipster hat-trick. [Linkedin](https://uk.linkedin.com/in/adambird) **Garry Shutler **CTO & Co-founder Garry has wide ranging experience as a tech leader including being lead developer at Zopa, the world’s oldest and Europe’s largest peer-to-peer lending service. He’s tackled many challenges that involve scale, highly sensitive data, and where a high degree of accuracy and high level of availability is paramount. He's a husband, father, cyclist, and avid proponent of the Oxford comma. [Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gshutler/) Offices Meet us in person **Amsterdam** Mr Treublaan 7 Amsterdam 1097 DP The Netherlands [View map](https://goo.gl/maps/HoLvkEQ2f8CcxPsF9) **Nottingham** 1 Broadway Nottingham NG1 1PR UK [View map](https://goo.gl/maps/YrrqCL3neUnkZKkg6) **London** Runway East 20 St. Thomas Street London SE1 9RS UK [View map](https://goo.gl/maps/srkQpLJkFA2PKJwp7) **New York** 228 Park Ave S New York NY 10003 USA [View map](https://goo.gl/maps/DQkt53LCbA5Kq4kRA) --- # Security Compliance ## Security Compliance Cronofy is committed to mitigating risk and ensuring that Cronofy services meet regulatory and security compliance requirements. Regulatory Environment Cronofy complies with relevant legal, industry, and regulatory requirements as well as industry best practices. Geographically discrete production instances allow our customers to use our services and stay compliant with regional regulations. Top Tier Infrastructure Provider Cronofy’s service is hosted at Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres, which are highly scalable, secure, and reliable. AWS complies with leading security policies and frameworks, including SSAE 16, SOC framework, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS. Data Retention Cronofy retains the minimum amount of information required to deliver services to our customers and end-users. More information on data retention and data retention periods can be found in our Data Management policy: [https://docs.cronofy.com/policies/data-management/](https://docs.cronofy.com/policies/data-management/). ISO 27001, 27701 & 27018 certified Cronofy’s ISMS (Information security management system) has been independently audited and meets the standards set out by the International Standards Organization for the ISO 27001, 27701 & 27018 standards. A copy of all of Cronofy’s ISO certificates are available publicly and reports are available on request after signing a mutual NDA. SOC2 Type 2 Attested The security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and/or privacy controls of Cronofy were audited, based on their compliance with the AICPA’s SOC2 Standard. Cronofy’s controls were found to be designed effectively and are suitably operated. A copy of the Cronofy SOC2 Type 2 report is available on request. EU General Data Protection Regulation Cronofy is compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and can provide a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) on request. HIPAA Compliance Cronofy is HIPAA-ready and can supply a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) on request. California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Cronofy complies with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). --- # How Better Scheduling can Benefit Real Estate Software Software providers are always competing to deliver the best possible experience to their users. In an industry that’s worth trillions of dollars, a seamless user experience is imperative at every step of the buying or renting process. A slow process can lead to frustration for everyone involved, causing a loss of custom for realtors and software companies alike. Integrating a realtor’s schedule with the software that they use provides a better experience for them and their customers. Software providers are always competing to deliver the best possible experience to their users. In an industry that’s worth trillions of dollars, a seamless user experience is imperative at every step of the buying or renting process. A slow process can lead to frustration for everyone involved, causing a loss of custom for realtors and software companies alike. Integrating a realtor’s schedule with the software that they use provides a better experience for them and their customers. Software providers are always competing to deliver the best possible experience to their users. In an industry that’s worth trillions of dollars, a seamless user experience is imperative at every step of the buying or renting process. A slow process can lead to frustration for everyone involved, causing a loss of custom for realtors and software companies alike. Integrating a realtor’s schedule with the software that they use provides a better experience for them and their customers. Everything is kept in one place, meaning that realtors have the dates they need in front of them when they speak to a client. Clients aren’t kept waiting on the phone or in-person while the realtor checks their schedule. This gives customers the impression that the person they’re working with is well-organized and trustworthy, which helps them to relax in what is traditionally a stressful period in someone’s life. Let’s take a look at some of the other ways better scheduling in the real estate sector can benefit everyone. ## Schedule viewings faster Viewings are crucial to selling or renting out a property. The more viewings a realtor has, the faster the property will be taken off the market. That’s why it’s pivotal they get as many viewings as possible, and quickly. Cronofy allows realtors to do just that. [Virtual calendars](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/calendars/application-calendars/) for properties can be created, allowing appointments to be scheduled in real time. This means that even if five people click on the appointment scheduling link at the same time, they won’t all be able to book the same viewing slot. Everything is scheduled neatly with no chance for double bookings. Details of the booking can also be synced to the realtor’s calendar, ensuring that they’re there when the property is viewed. Realtors can also set the times in which they want to be able to do viewings – or times in which the house is available for viewings – with [Availability Rules](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/). This is a UI Element that gives them full control over their schedules and the schedules of the properties they’re selling. Whether an appointment is added to a realtor’s schedule via the app or their calendar, all changes sync in real time, preventing any scheduling conflicts. Viewings can be scheduled easily using our Slot Picker. This presents the [real-time availability](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) of a person or property for potential buyers or renters to pick a time that suits them. ## Avoid missed appointments [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/) can be sent to potential buyers or renters so that they have all the details they need for their viewing. This could include [geolocation](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/), which would even inform them of the time that they need to leave to reach their appointment. Additional features like this help to create a better experience for buyers and also mean that when they sell their property, they’re more likely to use the same company, helping to drive repeat business and also increasing the likelihood that they’ll recommend the company to their friends.[17% of business comes from referrals](https://learn.g2.com/real-estate-statistics) and 13% comes from repeat business, so providing the best customer experience is imperative to driving sales. Additional information on the viewers of the property can also be added to the calendar event, keeping everything in one place for realtors and even making it available offline for properties that don’t have adequate internet access. If a viewing needs to be rescheduled, this can be done as easily as scheduling an appointment. Once the appointment has been canceled, the person can choose a new time using the Slot Picker or Availability Viewer. Your software can also track if the Smart Invite has been accepted, declined, or deleted. This helps realtors to understand how viewers are engaging with their appointments and if they intend to show up on the day. They can then use this information to inform their decisions about contact with the viewers. Appointments can also be sent straight to the calendars of home owners so that they are aware of when viewings are scheduled for. This helps to keep them informed, providing a better experience and informing their own viewing and buying process. Smart Invites are also useful for rental companies to send to maintenance workers. Since they can be tracked, rental companies can ensure that the person carrying out the work has confirmed their attendance. If they can’t make it, the appointment can be easily rescheduled. Since it’s such a seamless process to book an appointment, issues with rental properties can be solved much faster, providing a better experience for renters who often wait weeks or months for issues to be solved. ## Organize open houses easily Open houses can be an effective way to sell a property, but they can be complicated to organize. Creating a virtual calendar for the property means that all the hard work is done for the realtor. Once the calendar is created, they can then set the hours the property will be available and divide the day into slots. They can then set the number of people allowed in during the time slot with [Bookable Events](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api-alpha/bookable-events/). Realtors can then provide a more tailored experience to the viewers, never worrying about too many people showing up at once or there being a lull during the day. It also gives them time to organize the rest of their day around the open house, such as if they need to make any phone calls. Organizing open houses in this way not only makes it easier to do, but it also saves them time, meaning that they have more time to stage the house, advertise, and work on their other sales. ## Conclusion As you can see, there are lots of ways that better scheduling can benefit everyone involved in the real estate industry. Whether it’s booking viewings, organizing maintenance, or spending more time with clients, Cronofy’s scheduling solutions are just what your business needs to give your customers a better experience. After all, nobody signs up for a job to spend all day organizing appointments. Why make them worry about that when they could be spending more time with buyers and renters, helping them to find the perfect new home? You can explore adding any of these solution to your software by getting in touch with our sales team today, or trying the API out for yourself. --- # Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. **[Teamtailor](https://www.teamtailor.com/en/product)**** is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems.** Employers can create career sites to attract the right candidates. These sites can showcase the company culture and the benefits of being part of the team. > Cronofy’s documentation, sample apps and support is excellent and has enabled a fast and painless calendar integration. Not having to integrate with different calendar providers and having almost no maintenance to speak of has allowed us to focus on delivering scheduling solutions based on the real-time availability of our users quickly. — David Wennergren, CTO & Co-founder, Teamtailor [Teamtailor](https://www.teamtailor.com/en/product) pride themselves in being an intuitive, easy-to-use, and candidate-focused platform requiring minimal technical integration. It’s the perfect tool to successfully acquire high profile candidates, where recruiters can manage all applications and schedule interviews. Candidates can easily access the information they require and apply for a position in one easy step. ## The Challenge Interview scheduling is time-consuming, every interview involves several back-and-forth emails and phone calls to both candidates and members of the interview panel to find times when everyone is free. Having to manage multiple calendars, monitor email conversations and phone calls, and check people’s schedules causes considerable delays to the recruiting process while adding additional stress and frustration to recruiters and candidates alike. [Teamtailor](https://www.teamtailor.com/en/product) have an ongoing commitment to simplify and streamline the interview scheduling process. They identified a need for an online scheduling system where recruiters and their teams can sync their work calendars and access availabilities in real-time. Their goal was to offer a fast and easy recruitment process to candidates. They also wanted to decrease the time recruiters and hiring managers spent on administrative tasks, giving them more time to spend preparing for interviews. However, building full calendar sync that works with all major calendar providers is not easy. It requires months of development time, as well as ongoing maintenance for the developers. Cronofy is helping market-leading HR Tech software providers to deliver great scheduling experiences to recruiters and candidates. We understand interview scheduling challenges and their impact on the candidate experience and employer brand. This is what makes Cronofy the ideal technology partner to help Teamtailor’s developers deliver real-time and secure calendar sync to their users. [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) enables a two-way, real-time full calendar sync between SaaS applications and all major calendar services providers like Google, Apple, Outlook, Office 365 and Exchange. ## The Solution Using our technology [Teamtailor](https://www.teamtailor.com/en/product) has managed to reduce development time from months to weeks allowing them to focus on building other exciting features for their users. Recruiters and hiring managers can authorize Cronofy to access their work calendars and then return their availability in real time based on the events in their schedule. Our [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) helps meeting organizers find times when all the members of the interview panel are free. Recruiters need only to access the candidate’s profile and select ‘schedule a meeting’. They can choose who needs to be in the interview and the location. Candidates are then sent a booking link that allow them to choose the time slot that suits them best from a list of proposed times. Once an interview is booked, events are added to the panelists’ calendars and this time slot will no longer be shown as available. But Teamtailor didn’t stop there. After they achieved full calendar sync they identified another opportunity to improve the interview scheduling process. Missed interviews and last-minute rescheduling is a drain on resources and adds stress for recruiters and admin staff. Using Cronofy’s [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/) feature, Teamtailor is able to track what happens to the invites sent to candidates. Recruiters know if the invite was accepted, declined, or moved. Candidates don’t have to grant Cronofy access to their calendars. They don’t see any difference between a Smart Invite and a classic calendar event. This makes it easier to track attendance and reach out if someone doesn’t respond or makes a change to their interview. With the help of Cronofy, Teamtailor has further streamlined the interview scheduling process, offering a better candidate experience, lessening administrative tasks and the ability to hire the right candidate faster and simpler. ### Learn how full calendar sync from Cronofy can help you achieve your goals Take the hassle out of integrating with individual calendar providers with the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/). If you’re a developer, sign up for free to start building straight away with our easy-to-use SDKs and sample apps. If you’d like to find out more about Cronofy, get in touch. ### Case Studies --- ### Webinar hub --- # Accelerate scheduling productivity for recruiting teams Transform your hiring process with Cronofy's scheduling enhancements. Experience greater control with editable events, ATS placeholders, and multi-language support. Streamline your recruitment and improve candidate experiences. Learn how our solutions can boost your hiring efficiency today! What upgrades were made to the Cronofy Scheduler in 2024 to support recruitment teams, and what should you look out for in 2025? Read on to discover the powerful scheduling features that helped teams hire desired talent, faster. 2024 Product Roundup The Cronofy product team delivered several high-impact features and enhancements to our scheduler product in 2024, improving the hiring effectiveness for recruiting teams through greater scheduling control and the reduction of manual, low-value tasks. Through listening to our customers and understanding the specific needs of hiring teams, we identified and acted on three key areas: - **Scheduling control:** The ability to edit details of already scheduled events and choose what event information is sent to candidates and interviewers. - **Scheduling at scale: **ATS Placeholders in event descriptions, and a sleek sidebar extension for better context and scheduling workflow. - **Scheduling for all:** Supporting 5 languages, new ATS integrations, and more complex interview types. Let's unpack these improvements in more detail! ## ATS Placeholders From within your ATS, dynamically render candidate and job details into any scheduling invite, eliminating the risk of inputting key details wrong. Placeholders not only reduce the risk of human error but also speed up interview scheduling coordination. [Read more on ATS Placeholders](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/Cronofy-october-2024-product-updates#0c955967ef08) ## Editing Scheduled Events We’ve made it possible to edit existing scheduled events. Recruiters and coordinators can update the date or time of an event without being part of the calendar invite. This eliminates the need to chase interviewers for last minute changes in their calendars or for you to create a new invite from scratch. [Read more on editing events](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/Cronofy-october-2024-product-updates#128bf1062ea4) ## Separate Calendar Invites Protect internal information about an interview from candidates with Separate Invites. Send separate calendar invites to different participants of a meeting in one go. [More on Separate Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/send-separate-calendar-invites-to-different-participants-in-a-single-meeting) ## Language Translations Cronofy Scheduler users can now schedule in German, French, Italian, and Spanish; we’re working on more languages to make scheduling a native and seamless experience for your team. ## SuccessFactors Integration Our SuccessFactors integration solves the manual scheduling burden for SuccessFactors customers. Add automated scheduling into your SuccessFactors workflow in days, a seriously fast and powerful addition to your hiring processes and efficiency. [Explore the SuccessFactors integration](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-successfactors) Explore these changes in the Cronofy Scheduler ## What Else? We didn't stop there, the team made several additional enhancements to the scheduler in 2024 such as a revamped Request Details page and improving the mobile experience of booking pages. This is all part of making the scheduling experience as streamlined and frictionless as possible. We also deepened our SmartRecruiters integration by enabling admins give interviewers access to candidate profiles on the fly via Hireloop. ## Enhanced Scheduling That Delivered Real Results Beyond an improved scheduling experience that eliminates long email chains and time-consuming manual scheduling, Cronofy users are scheduling interviews in record time and reporting a smoother candidate experience. > Within months of going live with Cronofy, what took us 6 days to schedule an interview, now has a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ## What's Coming for Cronofy This Year? We’ve already made a big start to 2025 with exciting releases that continue to improve the scheduling experience for more hiring use cases: - Improved browser extension experience: A sidebar view that works seamlessly inside your ATS and stays open alongside other pages— holding in-progress events even when you switch tabs. - Availability modes: Control that ensures recruiters find sufficient interviewer availability through a hiring process while keeping interviewers in control of their calendars and the times they choose for interviews. Look out for more information on these new releases in weeks to come. ## Spend More Time Interviewing and Less Time Scheduling in 2025 For teams that are wanting to improve hiring productivity in 2025, Cronofy is the reliable solution for interview scheduling automation that empowers recruiters with flexible controls to schedule any kind of interview, a truly seamless scheduling process that keeps scheduling inside your ATS and give an experience candidates love. Want to achieve results like Wise? Learn more about Cronofy's scheduling automation for recruitment teams. [Discover Interview Scheduling with Cronofy](/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) --- # Testing ## Rob and Joe's Test Page --- # Agents need temporal infrastructure Humans have long been the glue between siloed systems, scheduling and coordinating manually because the software wasn't capable of sharing context. Here's how Cronofy's temporal infrastructure lets agents collapse that work into seconds. Humans have long been the glue between siloed systems, scheduling and coordinating manually, because the software they were using wasn't capable of sharing context. Agents can finally take that work on and collapse hours into moments, but only if they have temporal infrastructure underneath them: real-time availability, the rules for when someone is genuinely free, and a permissions model that decides who sees what. A waiting agent is no faster than a human, and here's why that matters. For the last thirty years, SaaS products have quietly relied on a workaround: a human at a computer, gluing together context the systems wouldn't share with each other. Not because the integration was technically hard. Because the products didn't want to share. Hoarding context is how SaaS wins, sharing with a neighbor lowers switching cost, which is easy to deprioritize. At every business there's spreadsheets that are load bearing for the business. These are so prevalent there's a term for them: End-User Developed Applications (EUDAs). Most exist to fill contextual gaps, system A holds some context, system B holds some other context, and a spreadsheet and humans glue it together. If you're lucky, it's somewhere shared and backed up rather than just someone's desktop. If you're unlucky, there's not even a spreadsheet, it's just in someone's head. A common version of this in scheduling is something most people will recognize - either because they did it, or because they watched someone else do it. A recruiter opens the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to see where a candidate is in the pipeline, switches to their calendar to find a slot, mentally cross-references the hiring manager's preferences, checks the candidate's availability over email, books the room, updates the ATS, sends the invite. Somewhere in the middle they remember that this particular interviewer doesn't take meetings on Fridays unless the candidate is strong enough to make it worth their while. The recruiter wasn't routing information. They were combining context from several systems - calendars, the ATS, the CRM, whatever else mattered - and applying rules that *might* be in a spreadsheet. The systems weren't connected so the human was the glue. ## Why the integration never happened It isn't always a conscious decision that data is inaccessible. Where context isn't actively hoarded, programmatic access often just isn't prioritized. The need hasn't been high enough. Google has had an open feature request for an API to expose working hours since 2018, it just isn't a priority for them to build and support that over other features. Where humans are the glue, building software to do the work of those people was prohibitively expensive, if it was possible at all. The result was a stack of well-designed silos held together by people doing coordination work by hand. ## What agents change Rote automation has been possible for decades. Roughly speaking, if a workflow could be fully automated at reasonable cost, it already has been. Agents are interesting because they can operate in the fuzzy area where previously only humans could. Agents can also work around the API problem by driving the human interface when necessary, alongside the APIs available. It's slower than using an API, but it makes the impossible possible, and that's often enough. Plenty of back-office systems were built in-house and never needed an API because there was no demand for one. Others were built thirty years ago when APIs weren't really a thing. These systems are often critical to how the business functions, and there's real inertia behind them. Agents are the first thing capable of making them part of modern workflows. Agents aren't capable of taking on all of this work, some parts still need human judgment, or a human touch. But through a combination of being able to combine siloed contexts and a level of pattern recognition, they can take on a lot of low-value, rote work. That leaves the interesting parts of work for the humans in the loop. ## Speed is the whole game A human coordinator takes minutes, hours, or days. An agent can do the same work in seconds. We've seen countless examples of how this plays out. For example, Wise c[ut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes using Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling). Most of that win came from temporal infrastructure and automation rather than agents, but the principle generalizes: collapsing coordination time is where the value is, and agents can address fuzzier cases that pure automation cannot. Scheduling is often the major bottleneck in hiring. The actual interviews might take a day of human time spread across a process, but it can take weeks for those interviews to actually happen. If you can complete the process and make an offer in the time it takes a competitor to arrange their screening call, you improve your odds of hiring the best candidates and filling the position sooner. There are echoes of lean manufacturing here. The "work in progress" (WIP) of knowledge work are the workflows in progress at any point in time. The bottlenecks in a workflow are the decision points. If there's a fork in the road someone, or something, needs to decide which path to take. Agents can take more of those decisions away from human minds, but that will move them on to a step where a human is necessary. Be it a conversation with a customer is necessary to drive a decision, or a sign off for a contract, at some point in a high-value workflow a human is needed. Humans have always been the bottleneck in workflows, but it will be even more apparent when the decisions they are involved in reduce, but become more important. Making the low-value calls and understanding relevant context is where agents remove the busywork of any given workflow. They need to pull on human time for workflows to progress, especially if it requires several of them to move forward. Weeks to minutes, hours to seconds. That order of magnitude is where the transformation lives. ## Calendar Tetris One human in the loop is annoying but survivable. The problem doesn't degrade linearly as you add more people - it follows a power curve. Calendar Tetris is a term we've heard used for it, with one important difference: the rows don't disappear, you just never seem to get the shape you need. Once enough people are involved, there's no time when everyone is truly free, and you end up going around in circles asking about exceptions with a single coordinator at the center. Agents can streamline this by holding several of those conversations in parallel without losing sight of the bigger picture. Agents can scale horizontally on-demand in a way that a human workforce just cannot. Decision points like "when can we meet to get to a decision on this" takes five minutes rather than five hours. The workflow presses on a day sooner. ## What temporal infrastructure actually contains Real-time availability is the obvious part. The less obvious parts are what make it infrastructure rather than a feature. Declared future intent matters. So do pre-approved decisions the agent can enact on without escalating - what we think of as pre-approved availability. An interviewer earmarks Tuesday and Thursday afternoons specifically for interviews, separate from their general working hours, and they can be booked within that window without asking. For some, more control is needed in terms of time demanded, an individual contributor involved in hiring can declare a ceiling of one interview a day and three a week. These contextual rules are what move you from "good old scheduling" to the temporal grid. It's easy to know when someone is free according to their calendar, but there's a lot more nuance into knowing when someone is available. The rules are attached primarily to the person's identity but also to context from the system of record. If it's a high-value client, a strong candidate, or an important role, the rule may bend. The temporal grid is where these rules live because the grid is what lets us expand from "weekday afternoons are for interviews" to "are Tuesday mornings good for X like they are for Y?" The source of these rules doesn't really matter. The person might declare it themselves. A coordinator or manager might set it up on their behalf to satisfy a requirement without the person having a say. An agent might infer it from behavior and propose it back for confirmation. What matters is that the rule is surfaced, stored, and distributed appropriately. ## The access model matters as much as the rules Most people building agent infrastructure assume the hard part is the rules. At least as hard, if harder, it's deciding who gets to see them and at what fidelity. A sales agent might see that a particular interviewer is unavailable at a given time without seeing why. A candidate-side agent sees even less. They don't know who is available, just that the time itself is available to them. We do this today: candidates use single-use scheduling links that show only the times open to them. The details of the panel, who's involved, why a slot is blocked, are completely hidden. Permissions filters have to exist alongside the rules, and quite often the existence of those filters is a prerequisite for anyone being willing to share their availability in the first place. This is also why temporal infrastructure can't sit inside any single SaaS product. No single product can see across the organization, and no single product can be trusted to abide by rules that aren't theirs to hold. ## What rules engines can't do Our rules engine today handles firm availability: working hours, buffer times, constraints; layered on top of the live availability from people's calendars. It's powerful and meets the vast majority of needs, but it has a ceiling. "I could move an internal meeting to accommodate that external one" is something a human will tell you immediately, but is genuinely hard to encode as a rule. The decision usually comes down to an equation in someone's head full of "it depends" and "unless", which they probably couldn't fully enumerate even if asked. It's all about the specific context at hand. This is what agents are for - not a better rules engine, but a different kind of capability entirely. ## Layers of agents The future isn't about one single agent. It is many specialists working in harmony. A scheduling agent may defer to a rule-based agent in the first instance, then deploy more heuristic-based agents depending on the outcome. Those in turn may pull on the coordinating agent for more context to inform the scheduling question, ie. "is this a high value deal?", to unlock another layer of permissions and rules. Eventually, if needed, it escalates to a human: > Hi Ada, we're looking to arrange a meeting with MegaCorp, can I move your 1:1 with Alan on Friday for this? Everyone else is free at that time. I'll let Alan know the context if you agree. Scope and context expands only as needed. This limiting risk by not oversharing and improves efficiency by using the simplest solution possible. A scheduling scalpel most of the time, but able to call on a human with an axe when needed. ## What this opens up The biggest opportunity isn't the meetings that agents will book that humans would have booked anyway. It's the meetings that don't happen today because the latency makes them pointless. "I think we're good to go, but we need a meeting with the exec team before we move." That meeting might take four weeks to land, and the entire initiative waits behind it. The coordination cost is higher than the perceived urgency, so the meeting either drifts or never happens, and the project ages while it does. Collapse the coordination cost and the math changes. Meetings that wouldn't survive a four-week scheduling delay become viable because they can happen tomorrow. As we automate what is now possible, new bottlenecks and new possibilities will reveal themselves, either to humans or to agents. Most of them we can't imagine today. Systems always benefited from temporal context but humans absorbed the cost. A waiting agent is no faster than a human. [Learn more about temporal infrastructure](/home) ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- ### The Scheduling Agent for Slack is live: ask about your calendar, book, and reschedule in one place The Cronofy Scheduling Agent for Slack is live. Schedule new meetings, ask what's on your calendar, move existing meetings, and pull people on or off the invite. All from inside Slack, all grounded in real-time availability. Blog Post 2026-05-14T15:16:14.653Z --- ### Product Q&A: Build vs Buy Lessons for Talent Acquisition with Jobylon’s CPO Every team faces the same question eventually: build a key roadmap feature yourself, or bring in a vendor to do it? Most frameworks for thinking through this consequential decision ignore the messy reality of what happens after product leaders make their choice. Cronofy’s CEO and co-founder Adam Bird sat down with Alex Tidgård, CPO at Jobylon, to talk through how he approaches build vs buy, what he learned the hard way, and why scheduling was a clear case for buying. Blog Post 2026-04-28T09:01:50.571Z --- # 3 Ways to Send Patient Prescription Reminders When a patient forgets to take their medication, or takes it at the wrong time, it can hamper their treatment or even delay recovery. Their treatment then becomes more expensive and time-consuming for them and their doctor. The last few years have seen the rise of smartphones, and with it, the opportunity to send reminders. The most well-known way to do this is via text message. These have been proven to be an effective way to reduce patient no-shows. However, they’re expensive. It isn’t scalable for most healthcare providers to do this as a way to send prescription reminders to patients. When a patient forgets to take their medication, or takes it at the wrong time, it can hamper their treatment or even delay recovery. Their treatment then becomes more expensive and time-consuming for them and their doctor. The last few years have seen the rise of smartphones, and with it, the opportunity to send reminders. The most well-known way to do this is via text message. These have been proven to be an effective way to reduce patient no-shows. However, they’re expensive. It isn’t scalable for most healthcare providers to do this as a way to send prescription reminders to patients. When a patient forgets to take their medication, or takes it at the wrong time, it can hamper their treatment or even delay recovery. Their treatment then becomes more expensive and time-consuming for them and their doctor. The last few years have seen the rise of smartphones, and with it, the opportunity to send reminders. The most well-known way to do this is via text message. These have been proven to be an effective way to [reduce patient no-shows](https://textlocal.com/blog/2016/03/07/infographic-missed-appointments/). However, they’re expensive. It isn’t scalable for most healthcare providers to do this as a way to send prescription reminders to patients. However, there is an alternative. Calendar notifications can be sent – for free – via a patient’s calendar. These work even if the patient has no cell reception, and automatically adjust to a new time zone should a patient travel abroad. Here are just some of the ways in which software applications and patients’ calendars can work together to send patient prescription reminders. ## Patient management systems Patient management systems help healthcare providers to track every stage of a patient’s journey. Adding calendar sync to these makes it even easier for them to do this. When a patient’s calendar is connected to patient management system, reminders can be sent via their calendar, notifying them to take their medication. Should they need to increase or decrease their dosage, reminders can be updated as soon as their medical record changes. Sometimes, patients need a prescription but may not need to see a doctor. Calendar connectivity means that patients automatically have their treatment plan to hand whenever they need it. Reminders can also be set up to remind a patient to order their repeat prescription when they start to run low. For instance, if a patient has a 30-day supply of tablets, when they have a week or so left, they can be reminded to order some more. This ensures that they order it in plenty of time and therefore never run out. Connecting patients’ calendars to patient management systems saves doctors, nurses, and administration staff time. Doctors and nurses don’t need to spend as long talking patients through their prescription, as it can all be found in one place. Giving patients somewhere to refer back to is particularly useful for new or long-term medication, as it’s easy to forget what needs to be taken and when. It also saves administration staff time because they don’t need to respond to patient queries about what medication they have and when it’s next due. ## Healthcare tracking applications The past few years have seen an explosion in the numbers of tools that can help patients follow their treatments or change their lifestyle. Apps such as MyTherapy, Clue, Cara, and Health Mapper allow patients to track their symptoms over a long-term basis. They can also be set up to send patients notifications when it’s time to take their medication. For medication that must be taken within a certain window in order to be effective, this is crucial. The calendars within these applications then mean that patients can see when they’ve taken their medication, and track how it affects their symptoms. This information can then be used by patients and doctors to adjust their medication accordingly. Apps can also be set up so that patients can mark off when they’ve taken their medication. This ensures that even if they see a notification and snooze it, the application can continue to remind them until it is taken. ## Smart speakers Smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home are becoming increasingly popular in our homes. They tell us the weather forecast, suggest recipes, and wake us up in the morning. Why not use them to remind us to take medication, too? When a smart speaker is calendar synced, it can use the information sent by the software application to notify the patient to take their medication. This is useful for elderly or blind patients who may not use a smartphone, but can have their treatment plan synced to the phone of a relative. ## Conclusion Sending patients prescription reminders ensures patients get their medication when they need it. Building calendar sync into patient management services or healthcare applications is a cheaper way for software providers to offer a prescription reminder service. It takes advantage of a device people use every day – their smartphones – while also being cheaper than the more commonly used text message reminders. Adding reminders via a patient’s calendar also means that they see it each time they open their calendar. This means it’s more likely to be on their mind building up to when they need to take their medication, unlike text messages, which are easy to forget about until the patient receives the notification. ## Want to add prescription reminders to your software? [Contact us today](https://www.cronofy.com/developer) to find out how calendar sync can help you do just that! ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # Calendar - Help Articles Learn how to set up your calendar, related availability and what data is accessed and stored with Cronofy ## Calendar Connect your calendar and start scheduling! Here we explain how this is done and how to understand your availability. **Q: What can Cronofy read in my calendar?** A: This policy sets out how Cronofy collects, handles and stores data to meet our data protection standards, fulfil the rights of our customers, end-users and meet the requirements set out by regulators and the law. Our [Data Management](https://docs.cronofy.com/policies/data-management/) documentation details all information and data that we store. **Q: Do you store users’ calendar information?** A: We store all calendar information including event details, but not their contacts. **Q: Where is your data hosted?** A: Either USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia or Singapore. They are run on completely separate instances with no data transfer between the data centers. **Q: Can I connect an iCloud calendar?** A: Unfortunately at this time its not possible to sign up with a iCloud account. **Q: Which calendar providers can I use with Cronofy?** A: We support Google and Microsoft calendars. --- # Workflow Automation with AI: New Tech, Same Problems There's an exciting opportunity to automate business workflows with AI agents, but is it that straightforward? Cronofy's CEO Adam Bird breaks down the right (and wrong) scenarios to implement these tools. There's an exciting opportunity to automate business workflows with AI agents, but is it that straightforward? Cronofy's CEO Adam Bird breaks down the right (and wrong) scenarios to implement these tools. Automating business workflows with AI Agents represents an exciting opportunity for companies to drive productivity. Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, talks about being in the business of digital labour. Leaning into this idea that you will hire a digital workforce so you won’t need to hire a human one with inevitable associated, very human, HR challenges. It’s easy to get lost in the hyperbole around AI replacing humans, but the reality is much less binary. AI Agents, like any technology, will replace some things that people do and allow them to do other things that AI can’t do. Harnessed wisely, they represent an answer to the productivity malaise that’s affecting economies with aging and shrinking working populations. The main challenge we’re facing when adopting these technologies is one of a mindset shift. Computers have always been predictable. They are **deterministic**. You provide the same inputs, you get the same outputs. The current generation of AI technologies, based on Large Language Models (LLM) do not follow this mode of operation. Instead they essentially predict what comes next based on the inputs. The output represents something that matches what should be expected. They are **probabilistic**. They are probably right. They therefore make mistakes. ## New tech, same problems The good news for people designing workflows that include these probabilistic workers is that humans make mistakes to and have done for millennia. It’s part of our makeup. Making mistakes is what has allowed us to evolve our amazing minds and capabilities. Sometimes those mistakes turn out to be the new way of thinking, or way of doing things. The way we operate businesses is with mistakes in mind. All of our processes have various checks and balances in place to catch the inevitable miss-steps, ideally before they have a negative impact on the business. The scale of these checks and the levels of control and oversight they introduce are generally in proportion to the risk of mistakes. In a customer service workflow for a low-cost consumer item, the jeopardy is low. When you’re operating in a highly regulated industry like mortgage broking, mistakes can threaten the entire business. Operations teams in different industries and with different use cases will be adopting these technologies at different speeds according to their risk appetite. Where mistakes can be accommodated in a cost effective way, there will be clear ROI to be taken advantage of. ## Scheduling: probabilistic or deterministic? Scheduling is part of so many business workflows. The reason Cronofy exists is because we saw how hard it was to allow system of record applications that run these workflows to get access to people’s schedules and make decisions about them. The challenge a probabilistic model has with making a scheduling decision for an individual is understanding the context for that decision. Prioritisation, ie. is meeting A sufficiently more important than meeting B to justify rescheduling the latter, is the hardest problem in scheduling. The information required to make this decision almost certainly doesn’t exist in the calendar, it may exist in the associated system of record apps (CRM, Recruiting, etc), but often there is a large component that exists in the minds of the people involved. So it’s not available to a model, even if the model could make use of it. I have a sales meeting in my calendar with a prospect. It’s a small value deal according to the CRM. I also have an interview with a candidate that the recruiting team have been struggling to find a time for. They want to book over the sales meeting so they can get the candidate through the process as quickly as possible. Who should win? Context around the sales meeting is that whilst it is a small deal, it’s as a result of an introduction by a new partner who we want to impress with how well we service their network. Which meeting should take precedence now? The candidate has been fantastic in the interview process and is in multiple processes so speed is of the essence. Does that change things? In the absence of the ability to delegate decision making to a model, people need to be able to understand the behaviour of a system and thus predict the outcomes. Scheduling is one of those decision making processes that needs predictability. It needs to be deterministic. It has to give people the capability to define the rules and heuristics for the system to use when operating in an automated context. But, it needs to give people the flexibility to take exceptional decisions when necessary. ## Automation with AI Agents What we’re talking about with AI Agents is a new type of automation. But, it’s just software that can be combined with other software. Business workflows of the future will be formed from a collection of probabilistic and deterministic operations. The two are absolutely not mutually exclusive. An example for volume recruitment would be: 1. AI Agent processes a job application and decides whether a candidate should be contacted. 1. Another AI Agent contacts the candidate by text or voice to ask them a series of screening questions to assess fit. 1. If the candidate passes this screen, then this agent hands off to a Scheduling Engine to allow the candidate to choose a time for their first interview which is recorded in the recruiting system. 1. Scheduling Engine then hands back to the AI Agent to wrap up with candidate and prep them for the interview. This represents a combination of probabilistic and deterministic decision making with checks and balances where necessary. Recruiters can periodically assess whether applications are being interpreted correctly. They can review screening transcripts to assess the efficacy of the scoring. They can tweak the scheduling rules to make sure candidates can book in as quickly as possible. Now look back over the process and replace AI Agent with Person. Each will need a requisite skill level necessary to conduct the task. The same checks and balances would be in place. A person could do any one of those steps. What is different about AI Agents is that they are becoming capable enough. AI Agents are also cheaper to run, which opens up additional possibilities. What if step 5 was an AI Agent contacting the candidate 24 hours before their interview to make sure they had everything they needed? If the candidate has concerns, then they could be connected with a Person straight away to discuss them. Most of the time, the candidate will be fine and will likely be pleased to receive the call, whether it was obviously automated or not. Someone cared enough to program it in to the process. If the candidate isn’t fine, or has more questions, enter the human to empathise, discuss and do what they can to set the candidate up for success. ## Workflows of the future Business workflows will look very similar to how they look today, certainly in the short to medium term. They will still be composed of a series of tasks. Instead of being performed people and deterministic software as they are today, probabilistic software will be added to take on certain types of tasks. ### Interpreting natural language responses, assessing fit to a profile - **probabilistic**. ### Finding a time for a meeting, performing a commission calculation - **deterministic**. Probabilistic software needs a management approach to its outputs that’s more akin to coping with humans and the randomness they introduce. This new software also opens other opportunities to delight stakeholders in ways that would be uneconomic or impractical if a person was required to run the task at scale. As we have always done with new software, we will revel in the efficiency and productivity gains of the new tools we’ve brought to bear on our workflows. Then we’ll discover all the other things we could be doing, and the cycle will start again. I'll be speaking on stage on this topic at HR Tech Amsterdam - find the details of the session below. [Add session to calendar](https://www.hrtechnologyeurope.com/hr-tech-2025-agenda/cronofy) ![Balancing automation efficiency with human touch]() ### Cronofy Partners with Whereby for Integrated Video Calls and Streamlined Scheduling Integrations Cronofy is integrating with Whereby's public API to bring users robust scheduling capabilities and customizable video conferencing in one streamlined offering. Read on to see how this is defining the future of meeting creation, and how you can get started today. --- ### What's New in Cronofy? Product Updates Cronofy deepens its ATS integrations with Placeholders, now enables flexible event editing for recruiters and German language support. These enhancements will improve productivity, scheduling at scale and global team collaboration. Read on to learn how Cronofy is streamlining scheduling with these updates. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- # ISO27701 and Cronofy’s continuing commitment to security We're constantly looking for ways to protect our customers’ data and their users data. The next step in our compliance program is ISO27701. We're constantly looking for ways to protect our customers’ data and their users data. The next step in our compliance program is ISO27701. Cronofy is constantly looking for ways to protect our customers’ data and the data of our customer’s users. As part of this, we go to great lengths to research and evaluate new and appropriate accreditations, certifications and technologies. We’re incredibly proud of our [SOC2](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/soc2), [ISO27001](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/iso27001) and ISO27018 accreditations, along with our [GDPR](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/gdpr) and [CCPA](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/ccpa) compliance. However, we understand that there is always room for improvement, as we continue to maintain our position as the market leader when it comes to secure, Enterprise Scheduling. ### **Continuous improvement** Security and compliance are constantly evolving entities. There are so many variables that must be taken into account when running a comprehensive compliance program. Threats and risks to your business are continually changing, including customer requirements, your software and your infrastructure. These variables and the landscape of ever-changing threats are why Cronofy operates a continuously improving approach to our compliance program, constantly evaluating the best ways to protect and secure our customer’s data. The next step in our compliance program is completion of the ISO27701 certification. ‍ ### **ISO27701** The ISO and IEC created ISO27701 to provide specific guidance on implementing controls and policies to meet the requirements of the Data Protection Act 201 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The ISO27701 standard provides an overarching framework, which specifies how to successfully protect and store PII (Personally Identifiable Information) by establishing a Privacy Information Management System (PIMS). ISO27701 ensures that companies have appropriate policies and controls in place to ensure the security of PII, despite the ever-changing privacy and threat landscape. ‍ ### **What’s next?** Implementing a PIMS under ISO27701 is no small feat and requires careful execution to ensure complete compliance. Cronofy’s ISO27701 audit is scheduled for March 2022 and we are fully committed to meeting all of the outlined requirements. Until then, Cronofy customers can be confident that with our existing ISO27001, ISO27018, SOC2 Type 1, SOC 2 Type 2, CCPA and GDPR compliance. When you partner with Cronofy, you are working with the most secure, reliable and compliant scheduling platform on the market. Please reach out to our dedicated compliance team with any questions at [privacy@cronofy.com](mailto:privacy@cronofy.com). --- # Nearly half of candidates have disengaged or dropped out of a hiring process due to interview scheduling frustrations finds Cronofy's latest survey We’ve always believed scheduling should be seamless, secure and efficient. It’s why we exist. And it’s why we partnered with OnePoll to survey 6,500 candidates. We’ve always believed scheduling should be seamless, secure and efficient. It’s why we exist. And it’s why we partnered with OnePoll to survey 6,500 candidates. At Cronofy, we’ve always believed scheduling should be seamless, secure and efficient. It’s why we exist. And it’s why [we partnered with OnePoll to survey 6,500 candidates](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-report) – all who had gone through a hiring process in the past year – from the US, UK, France and Germany. The aim? To better understand the impact of interview scheduling on candidate experience and employer perception. The survey shows that **43% of candidates globally have dropped out of a hiring process because of interview scheduling delays**. The results speak for themselves and you can dig into our report to find out more. [DOWNLOAD THE REPORT](https://info.cronofy.com/hubfs/Candidate_Expectations_Report_2021.pdf) We wanted to clarify the value of investing in better interview scheduling. Is it just a nice to have feature or is it a key difference between a business able to hire and grow and one which is struggling to acquire top talent? We’ve been working and speaking with recruiters and HR technology providers for many years, but this time we wanted to hear things directly from the candidates themselves. The results of this survey give recruiters and talent acquisition teams real insight into what candidates expect and want in the hiring process. We’ve achieved what we set out to do, delivering concrete data on areas that could be easily improved by HR professionals and the businesses they work for. The survey data we present in this report clearly shows that businesses can, and do, lose out on top talent because of interview scheduling delays. And that has further consequences on their ability to hire. In conclusion, we’ve discovered that **first-class interview scheduling is worth more than the sum of its parts.** If you want specific insight into the [US, UK, German or French](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download) hiring market results, download the relevant infographic using the link below: [DOWNLOAD THE INFOGRAPHICS](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download) --- # BambooHR Candidate Expectations Report Webinar October 2023 Since 2021, Cronofy has surveyed 6,500 candidates each year ato understand their preferences and frustrations with the hiring journey. Our aim is to help recruiters improve their processes so they’re more efficient and provide a great candidate experience. An in-depth look at the frustrations, expectations and preferences. Adam and guests will focus on the data in the UK and US. Join us for an exclusive webinar where we will dive into the data and reveal the true story behind the recruiter and candidate experiences from 2023, and how to plan for 2024. The recruiter and candidate experience have a strong impact on hiring results and company success, so where do we start to improve these experiences? It starts with listening and understanding the data! Hear our experts dive into the data from Employ’s 2023 Recruiter Nation Report and Cronofy’s 2023 Candidate Expectations Report. Learn how the recruiters and candidates feel about: - The speed of the hiring process - When and where to use AI and Automation - Employer branding - And much more! Don’t miss out on this opportunity to leverage the data from these reports and gain practical insights to take back to your team. Reserve your spot now by registering for this can’t-miss webinar. Experts dive into the data from Employ’s 2023 Recruiter Nation Report and Cronofy’s 2023 Candidate Expectations Report. ### Candidate Expectations Report --- ### Customer stories: Agreena --- ### Use Case: Interview Scheduling --- # An interview with a top five scoring CEO in our financial advisor report Barry is CEO of Paradigm Norton, a leading financial planning firm, which featured in our recent report. We sat with him to discuss the results. Barry is CEO of Paradigm Norton, a leading financial planning firm, which featured in our recent report. We sat with him to discuss the results. *Barry Horner is CEO and Co-founder of Paradigm Norton, a leading financial planning firm which has won dozens of awards in the last 20 years for its customer-centric approach.* Paradigm Norton was among the top five scoring firms in our recent [First Impressions report](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/first-impressions-report-announcement/), looking at how leading financial advisors make the best possible impact on potential clients. We sat down with Barry to discuss the results – read on for what he had to say about this and more. ### **How do you approach the client experience?** From my perspective, the whole client experience starts with those initial touch points. I think about examples like the Ritz Carlton, which is known for excellent customer service right from the moment you reach their front door. We are a relatively small team of about 75 – so when we receive a new client inquiry, it is emailed to about six or seven different people, and I’m always on the list. I’m keen that the team jump on new client enquiries promptly and make the right initial impression. It’s about using scripts that make sure all the key messages are communicated, without it feeling like it’s a script to the client. I think it’s so important that the speed of response and then follow up email and call to the client all make the right initial impression. ‍ ### **You are obviously in a people business – but how do you use technology to support your team offering a great experience to your clients?** There are many challenges in the world of financial planning, in that there isn’t always a lot of joined up technology. But when it comes to initial inquiries, they typically come from the website or directly through email. We use [Intelligent Office](https://www.intelliflo.com/solutions) as a portal behind the scenes, and that’s starting to help us join the dots between data. The current website form does ask: do you have an existing financial adviser, can you give me a little bit more information – but it’s that careful balance of not wanting to be too intrusive too quickly. We’ve found through inquiries that sometimes people are quite cautious and the information that they initially provide might appear modest. And then they reveal that sitting in the background is a whole load more resources for us to work with in terms of size and complexity. So I think how you capture this information in a sensitive way is really key. ‍ ### **How have you seen the kinds of clients approaching financial advice change?** Going back 10 years, our typical client would be probably 50-60+, whereas now we are seeing more enquiries coming from the younger generation, who may have set up a tech company and come into money earlier for example. Something we have been very mindful about for the next iteration of our website, which we are currently building is: how do we make our services attractive for a good cross section of the population? With some of the more recent client stories on the site, we’ve tried to be a bit more accessible and present clients of more modest means. The fact remains, you probably need GBP 300,000 or more to make it cost effective for a firm like ours to appropriately manage a client with all the associated costs and the high compliance burden that we have to shoulder. We are about to start doing lots more on social media – and we have recently refreshed all of our Instagram and Facebook accounts with new branding, look and feel. And we are about to launch a podcast series interviewing people with common ‘money and life’ issues. Often potential clients think the conversation we’re going to have with them is that we’re going to bring out some whizzy charts and show them if you come to us, we can do better than the firm down the road. Actually, the way we invest using a “low cost market return” approach means that we’re just buying the whole market and not trying to outsmart it. So our clear value add is around the planning side and helping identify a clients life goals and making sure that they can afford to do all that they have articulated. It’s about taking clients along that journey of: let’s put the investments aside for a minute and talk about what’s really important to you. Let’s talk about giving and philanthropy. Let’s talk about intergenerational transfer. Let’s talk about when you want to retire and your dream home. What charities do you want to support? What do you want your legacy to be? ‍ ### **What do you feel are the biggest areas of innovations you’ve introduced in recent years? What about looking forward?** We have a Client Board with 12 of our clients sitting on that, and you get really good feedback in terms of what we’re doing. We were due to meet just before Covid changed everything, so we have yet to gather their thoughts on the turbulent last 12 months that we have all had to navigate. After every significant piece of work, we send out a questionnaire to clients asking how well we have served them and they respond. We then calculate as a ‘net promoter score’ which is always very high. When it comes to meeting with our clients face-to-face, we think about the end-to-end client experience from having a car parking space right by the front door, to greeting them with Paradigm Norton branded umbrellas if it’s raining, to nice coffee and drinks etc I think it would be great if we had technology that worked like an Apple iphone, but unfortunately we are subject to what’s available — and frankly, in our space, it isn’t always great. There’s not a lot of connectivity, so there’s a huge amount of manual processing that goes on behind the scenes, of spreadsheet analysis and that sort of thing. But we try and make it invisible to clients so they don’t see the heavy lifting. The reports that are sent to clients look great, but actually behind the scenes, there has been a huge amount of manual intervention to get there. ‍ ### **How do you think the effects of Covid have changed the market and expectations?** I think the biggest overwhelming thing that’s changed with the last 12 months is that we will never go back to doing all of our client meetings as we did before. I had a client meeting the other day and there’s myself, one of our Chartered Financial Planners, an executive assistant who helpfully takes the notes and a senior member from our tax team. Then the client themselves is quite often overseas. So getting everyone in the same place to meet had been a real problem. We had a situation recently, there were four of us all dialling into a video call and working in different locations around the country, with the client’s wife in one location and he was somewhere else. And he just said “this is brilliant, why haven’t we done this before?” Even our older clients have embraced technology incredibly well because they have got used to the tech using FaceTime with their grandchildren, and all of that. A few are asking if we can do this permanently. And naturally all of this comes with a cost saving to us — and an environmental saving from less travel which is perfect as we are a B Corp and we are very planet conscious. *[Download our free report](https://info.cronofy.com/hubfs/first-impression-report-2021.pdf)** for more information on the first impressions leading UK financial advisors make on their prospects.* --- # How to Write Great API Documentation Every Time What goes into creating the best API documentation is a contentious subject. Most developers have their own opinions on what should and shouldn’t go in to API documentation. It’s rare for everyone to agree. Everything from what you put in it to how things are laid out will affect the experience for your customers. That’s why getting it right is so crucial. What goes into creating the best API documentation is a contentious subject. Most developers have their own opinions on what should and shouldn’t go in to API documentation. It’s rare for everyone to agree. Everything from what you put in it to how things are laid out will affect the experience for your customers. That’s why getting it right is so crucial. What goes into creating the best API documentation is a contentious subject. Most developers have their own opinions on what should and shouldn’t go in to API documentation. It’s rare for everyone to agree. Everything from what you put in it to how things are laid out will affect the experience for your customers. That’s why getting it right is so crucial. Fail to get it right and you risk deterring prospects from using your API because they don’t understand how things work, or worse — a slew of support tickets that take up everyone’s time. I spoke to Cronofy’s development team to find out more about how they approach writing ours. ## Consider it when developing a new feature "Not considering your API documentation as part of your product is usually the root cause of bad documentation," says Stephen, our Senior Developer. "The API documentation is the first thing we consider whenever we are developing a new feature. We often have long discussions about the correct terminology for each property, trying to avoid ambiguity wherever we can." This is important to ensure that it’s as simple and easy-to-understand as possible. The vaguer your description of a feature or element of it is, the more likely it is to confuse customers and the more support requests you’re likely to get. Factoring in the documentation while building the new feature also gives you time to work through any issues. Customers can give you feedback during alpha and beta phases, further allowing you to refine the docs before it goes live. > "Not considering your API documentation as part of your product is usually the root cause of bad documentation." **Stephen, Senior Developer** Stephen continued by saying this: "The API design does change during our development phase and often when we write SDK and format documentation we spot things we’d like to tidy up before making things public as we never change our public API. Another key aspect of this is our Alpha and Beta phases where we rely on our customers to let us know how fit for purpose the documentation is. "When the product does go live, you can rest assured that you’ve worked out most of the kinks and it will help your users get to grips with the new feature. ## Have clear examples "With the most complex API methods giving examples and extra supporting documentation is essential. If you don’t do this you’ll often be paying this back though additional support requests," says Garry Shutler our CTO. > "With the most complex API methods giving examples and extra supporting documentation is essential." **Garry Shutler, CTO** "Many of our endpoints have optional parameters, but there's a common set that are required and optional ones we recommend are set. So I start with a request that reflects those best practices, and the kind of response that can be expected to be received in return. "This provides a context around which to explain all possible parameters, what their potential values are, what their default are if they aren't provided, and finally what that all means together. "By starting with an example, you put an image in people’s heads. This image helps with their understanding. Customers and prospects will understand your product/feature much faster with an explanation like this. Common usage examples also incorporate storytelling to show your users what they could create with the new feature. The more context you provide for your customers, they more likely they are to understand the feature and be excited about adding it to their software. ## Usability and consistency are key > "Simple things like making the documentation available offline or adding deep linking really help." **Stephen, Senior Developer** Usability is a must in all aspects of software development, and API documentation is no different. "Key things like usability, consistency, and features are often overlooked. Simple things like making the documentation available offline or adding deep linking really help," says Stephen. "My pet peeves are when you have parts of the documentation which contradict themselves or leave things as ambiguous. It doesn’t matter if you know what the behaviour is, write it down so others do too. "For example, if the definition of a property states a value must be greater than zero but the validation states the value must be positive, the implementer must make a decision if 0 is a valid input." ## Don’t rely on tools to generate it for you It’s easy to want to rely on automation tools to fix things for you, but if you want to create the best experience for your users, this isn’t the best way to go. "You see things such as a thing having a field named 'comment' and a description of 'the thing's comment'. This doesn't tell you what type it is, or could be, though you might guess it's a string. Nor does it tell you the format of that string. It could be plain text, HTML, Markdown, or something else. It doesn't tell you how long that string may be so you can cleanse your requests and size your database field appropriately. It doesn't tell you whether it's ASCII, UTF-8, or something else so you can use the correct type of encoding," says Garry Shutler. "There's just so much you then have to work out yourself as the developer, and that compounds over every developer that uses that API. So what saves the publisher a few hours, costs their customers hours each." > "It’s easy to want to rely on automation tools to fix things for you, but if you want to create the best experience for your users, this isn’t the best way to go." **Garry Shutler, CTO** Sometimes the time and cost savings for you aren’t worth it when you consider the end-user experience. And really, isn’t how your customers feel the most important thing? If they don’t like what you’re doing, they’re less likely to recommend you to their network, which means less custom for you. A great experience, on the other hand, means they’re more likely to recommend you to their network, further increasing your influence, attracting new customers, and giving you more money to build more features. ## Conclusion What makes great API documentation may be a contentious subject, but for the most part, the basics are pretty simple: - Consider it as part of your feature, not an after thought - Have clear examples - Be consistent - Think about the user experience - Don’t rely on tools to generate it for you All these elements work together to ensure that your customers fully understand what they can build through using your API. This means they’re more likely to use it to its fullest. A well-documented API also means you’re less likely to get frequent support tickets from customers who don’t understand how X or Y feature works or why something isn’t working for them. Taking the extra time to put together a consistent, well-considered documentation will pay dividends in the long run. What do you think makes for great API documentation? Let us know on [Twitter](https://www.twitter.com/cronofy)! We originally published this post on [Hacker Noon](https://hackernoon.com/how-to-write-great-api-documentation-every-time-8f7e001a9d7c). --- # Embedded Scheduling for Product Teams BambooHR have recently gone live as the first partner of our new Embedded Scheduler. Their customers can now install Cronofy into their BambooHR instance and get full access to multi-person scheduling linked in real-time to their and their colleagues’ calendars. BambooHR have recently gone live as the first partner of our new Embedded Scheduler. Their customers can now install Cronofy into their BambooHR instance and get full access to multi-person scheduling linked in real-time to their and their colleagues’ calendars. [BambooHR](https://www.bamboohr.com/product-updates/interview-scheduling-with-cronofy) have recently gone live as the first partner of our new Embedded Scheduler. Their customers can now install Cronofy into their BambooHR instance and get full access to multi-person scheduling linked in real-time to their and their colleagues’ calendars. I’m delighted that the team at BambooHR have taken this path. They recognised that building native scheduling into their Hiring module was going to be a significant undertaking. Recruiters schedule interviews in myriad ways, a product team’s nightmare. Far more pragmatic to let the specialist team at Cronofy solve for all of the ways and focus on other more important, differentiating features. ## It all started with the API Of the many hundreds of SaaS applications that Cronofy already powers the scheduling for, over 70 are supporting recruiting workflows. This has given us a front row seat to the challenges product teams face when delivering native interview scheduling to their users. To date this has been through a white label API. Cronofy provides the infrastructure to connect with calendars securely, maintain data in real-time and provide methods for conducting complex queries to find times for meetings to happen. The product teams at our customers then build the UI, with help from our components, to manage the rules, decide who’s suitable, and allow times to be selected. Despite us taking on the infrastructure and scheduling calculation burden for our customers, the effort required to support all of their customers scheduling needs can be still be significant. Whilst our Availability API supports multiple group options with the ability to set quotas for numbers of meetings, the integrating application still needs to provide the UI to allow their customers to define their specific version of those rules. For many product teams, providing a native user experience is paramount. They are prepared to take on the additional effort required in order to maintain that high level of control. Our API stack is deliberately designed to give product teams like this exactly the level of control they want and need. However, for many teams the priority is on delivering value as quickly as possible. We see a large number of product teams wanting to focus on building differentiating features. For them, something like scheduling is a table-stakes features that should ideally be outsourced. For this reason we’ve built the Scheduler on top of our existing stack, provided an API and made it embeddable. ## First came the Scheduling Assistant Over the last couple of years, here at Cronofy we’ve been building out our own scheduling assistant app called the Scheduler. We refer to it as a scheduling assistant because it is designed to work alongside an existing app that manages a business workflow. For example, it extends the scheduling capabilities of recruiting systems like [Greenhouse](https://www.greenhouse.com/uk/integrations/cronofy), [Lever](https://leverpartner.com/listings/cronofy), [SmartRecruiters](https://marketplace.smartrecruiters.com/product/cronofy/) and SuccessFactors without the recruiter having to leave that software. Recruiters are both wonderful and terrible to serve from a scheduling perspective. Wonderful because scheduling interviews is such an important part of the role that any improvements can have a significant impact on key KPIs like time to hire. Terrible because scheduling interviews is a messy business involving multiple people with all sorts of demands on their time. The messiness is where we focused our efforts. Automation is ‘easy’. Happy path scheduling makes for a wonderful demo but rarely survives contact with the real world. Interviewers have jobs, responsibilities, family commitments and sometimes fragile bodies, all of which must be worked around by a recruiter whilst at the same time doing the best by the candidates. Our solution is a scheduling assistant that, of course, allows for automation but importantly allows for control to be taken by the recruiter when needed. Flexibility to book over blocked, times, chose a specific panel, offer pre-agreed times, all whilst giving the candidate the control to book when suits them. And, most importantly have everything updated back in the recruiting system. ## Then we made it embeddable The design approach to the Scheduler has always been to ultimately allow any developer to embed it into their applications with as little effort as possible. No complex authentication flows. No onerous onboarding process. Just add an npm package to your repo, mark up the appropriate pages and you’ve got scheduling embedded, almost natively, into your application. We have a rich set of javascript callbacks and webhooks that allow developers to surface latest status information about scheduling processes natively in app. So that they can progressively enhance their implementation as they learn more how their customers are actually scheduling from their app now that they can. The feedback from early developers using the embed is consistent surprise at how little they have to do in order to get it live. The software contract is a simple one. Embed this component, add some context and Cronofy will return scheduled meetings, in BambooHR’s case these are interviews. How complex it was to craft the rules for who should be involved and when should be considered become Cronofy’s concern. ## More to come With more developers working with the embedded Scheduler and associated APIs I’m looking forward to seeing how many more use cases we can support. For example, we have high touch financial institutions plugging into their internal systems and using it to deliver personalised scheduling for their clients. We also have our existing white label API customers using it as an upgrade path for clients who need more customisable scheduling options than they’ve included natively. You can find out more about the [Embedded Scheduler here](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/scheduler-api). Try it and let us know what you’ve built. ‍ --- # Cronofy ATS Integration Partners | Streamline Your Hiring Process Discover Cronofy's ATS integration partners to enhance your hiring process. Explore integrations that improve scheduling efficiency and candidate experience. # Explore Our ATS Integration Partners --- # Maximizing Return on Investment in Your Product At Cronofy, we endeavour to spend our time well. Time is the lifeblood of any company: capital either buys you more time or allows you to bring on more people to increase your bandwidth. Time will always move forward and you want your product to at the same pace. A lot of time can be wasted doing the wrong thing and that's why we aim to commit as little as needed to test an idea at each stage along its journey to being a feature. It doesn’t matter how many X your engineers are if they’re implementing the wrong thing. At Cronofy, we endeavour to spend our time well. Time is the lifeblood of any company: capital either buys you more time or allows you to bring on more people to increase your bandwidth. Time will always move forward and you want your product to at the same pace. A lot of time can be wasted doing the wrong thing and that's why we aim to commit as little as needed to test an idea at each stage along its journey to being a feature. It doesn’t matter how many X your engineers are if they’re implementing the wrong thing. At Cronofy, we endeavour to spend our time well. Time is the lifeblood of any company: capital either buys you more time or allows you to bring on more people to increase your bandwidth. Time will always move forward and you want your product to at the same pace. A lot of time can be wasted doing the wrong thing and that's why we aim to commit as little as needed to test an idea at each stage along its journey to being a feature. It doesn’t matter how many X your engineers are if they’re implementing the wrong thing. ## Do as little as possible, but no less 👩‍🔬 Optimizing for feedback is built into the DNA of the company. It's what leads us to punch above our weight. Here's how we approach developing an idea into a feature before a single line of code is written: - Have a discussion about whether something is technically feasible - Add an entry to the "future" roadmap, perhaps with a paragraph or two to clarify what the feature aims to achieve if it isn't clear from the title - Wait and listen to customers and prospects (often someone will have triggered the initial idea) - Test the waters with prospects, being careful to apply the [Mom Test](http://momtestbook.com/), without committing to anything The aim of all this is to build evidence that there is a need to be addressed. By this point, at worst a few hours have been spent with some initial investigation into feasibility. The conversations with customers and prospects would have happened anyway; we've just got some more value out of them. This doesn't mean that we don't ever build anything speculatively. Sometimes you have the conviction to build a car rather than a better horse, but over 90% of our features are proved this way before any significant commitment is made. Having something in the roadmap for them gives a point to collate ideas we come across incidentally. That could be quotes or [use cases](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/) from customers, links to related documentation, anything that fleshes out either an idea or how it might be realized. #### Output - A seed of an idea to be tested - A place to record findings - Total time risked: 1-2 hours ## Bottom out the why ❓ When we gather enough confidence there is a real need there, we'll spend more time fleshing out why the feature needs to exist: what need is it filling? What problem is it solving? This provides useful context to anyone coming into contact with the feature later down the line. Be that an engineer implementing it, a marketer describing it, or an account executive recommending it to a prospect or customer. Even these few paragraphs or pages are open to scrutiny. Does it fully explain the "why"? Particularly without the context of any verbal conversations that have taken place? Do we have enough examples of the problems it should be solving? This initial draft will generally be written by one person and reviewed by another. Once both are happy, we share it in Slack so that potentially anyone can provide feedback. If there's someone who is expected to bring particular insight then their feedback would be requested explicitly, but ideally they'd be one of the two original authors. This will collectively take a day of time to create and usually there will still be no commitment to delivering the feature. This primarily serves to allow people to test the water with more authority about what something might do, allow engineers to develop the system with some idea of what it may need to be capable of in the medium term in case there are opportunities to make that easier, or to better inform how much time it may take. This enables the collection of more precise feedback and insight from customers and prospects, and potentially saves time further down the line by reducing how hard it may be to implement if it comes to it. #### Output - A better frame for discovery - A place to record findings - Total time risked: 1 day ## Maybe now start on the "how" 📝 Up until now, we've been building a clear picture of the capability gap that's being filled. Inevitably some idea of how the problem will be solved has been formed, but we try and keep that as abstract as we can for as long as we can. The next stage is to flesh out the initial brief. It's often easy to get carried away with everything a feature *could* address, but what we want to get to is what it *must* address. Hopefully, the chances of developing something that will not be used have been minimized through the previous activities, but there's still a possibility. The aim of this stage is to generate a brief to be implemented. In the discovery phase many use cases may have been recorded, in which case these may be narrowed down or distilled to the most common ones we must solve. These become the yardstick by which the brief is measured. If it cannot be seen how they are covered by the brief, it is insufficient in scope, or contains insufficient detail. Conversely, if there is functionality in the brief that doesn't apply to any use case that's a sign it can, and probably should, be cut. Depending on what the feature involves, some prototypes can help bring clarity. This may be visual mockups for something end-user facing, or example request-responses for API calls. The key is that they be lightweight: a sketch not a render. They are intended to add context to the brief, not form a specification. Not only do we not want to paint ourself into a corner, but we don't want to discourage people from adding their perspective. A visual experience may be sub-optimal once realized or much harder to implement than anticipated; an API design may be inefficient when the reality of implementation hits. We don't want to restrict a change in direction at a later date in the face of reality. We're making sure that such a change is made with knowledge of the underlying goal in mind. Once the brief is settled, again we will have a couple of people work on this together, then it is again shared internally. We will usually call out more people for explicit feedback than the previous phase. #### Output - A strong definition of the capability gap to be filled - A shared understanding of what we *expect* to deliver - Total time risked: 3 days ## Share more widely 📡 We've gained sufficient confidence that there is a need to be satisfied, we know approximately what we are going to do to solve it, and we should have a good idea of how long it will take to deliver. The next step is to work out *when* we need to deliver it. At this point we have something concrete rather than abstract and so it is a good time to share with the prospects and customers who showed an interest in the feature. This conversation also serves as a check that they still have the need, intend to use Cronofy to do so, and when that is expected to happen. To this point, only a few days have been invested in the feature. Usually the delivery will involve weeks, or even months, of effort. We want to avoid knowingly spending time developing a feature that won't be used for several months. It's much better to deliver a feature with a lower perceived value that will be used straightaway over a high value feature that won't be used for several months. We want a return on the investments we make as soon as possible in all things. The ultimate feedback comes from usage, something which cannot be replicated. Plus customer priorities change all the time, the same way ours do. Doing something as late as possible but no later helps minimize this risk. Again, at this point, a feature may pause on its journey through the lifecycle. We may have a customer who needed clarity on what we could deliver before they proceeded to the next phase of their due diligence, and they may not intend on integrating Cronofy for another six months. #### Output - Confirmation of satisfying a customer requirement - An earmark of when this may be needed, usually no more precise than a given quarter - Total time risked: 5 days ## Do we implement yet? ✋ We've tried so hard, and come so far. But in the end, does it even matter? Perhaps not. We've invested a week of cumulative effort so far, but it is much more expensive to implement, and then have to maintain, a feature that is not needed or at best has a niche market. Every change has a mostly intangible long-tail cost, which however pessimistically you try to be when you define it, is higher than you expect. Particularly given our context as an API provider, as soon as we release a feature we're supporting it for a long time, whether we like it or not. ## What do we implement? 🎯 With a customer or three chomping at the bit for a feature, we can finally justify the investment in the development now, and the commitment to maintain it for the foreseeable future. But how do we go about implementing it? Referring to the brief, we can start defining one or more specifications. The brief will outline the capability required for this phase and the total time we're expecting to invest to implement it, but there is often a smaller not quite-viable feature set that covers a specific end-to-end experience. This is often the best place to start to dig into the known unknowns, and shake the tree for unknown unknowns. An end-to-end example will result in something tangible for everyone involved and give a better idea of how the constituent parts will hang together. Ideally this will be possible to deliver in a week or two; we're still trying to keep iterations very small and we're now tackling the unknown of how the feature will fit into the system. A specification will be a more detailed version of a subset of the brief. It will often use the mockups or draft documentation within the brief as a starting point, but it is not tied to them. We're usually several months older and wiser since the brief was written and we want to do the best job we are capable of today. Ideally a specification will be developed by at least one person close to the implementation. We want as much context as possible to be in the mind of the implementer as no form of communication is perfect. Specifications are cheaper to iterate on than code, and serve as a great check against what was written in the brief and what was intended. Again, our collective thinking may have moved forward making the brief out of date, defining the work as close to the point of implementation as is possible leads to the best implementation we are capable of. We don't treat this as a gated process: each specification can be implemented straight away. We find it a useful process to ensure everything is thought through and trust each other to solicit feedback as needed. While the specification is precise and focused, the brief acts as a guide to the implementer of what they may need to account for in the near future. This helps when evaluating implementation options as a more informed choice can be made about which path is the most likely to work out in the future. Predictions are never going to be perfect, but by being informed we hope to avoid spending time backtracking that could be spent improving other parts of the feature or working on something different altogether. This end-to-end implementation will rarely be made available to customers, but it will be released to production. As much as unknowns are risky, the impact of a change on production is also a risk. The larger the change, the larger the risk, and so we minimize this by releasing often as even if something is not in active use, we then know it hasn't impacted any other feature unexpectedly. Above automated tests, each change required on the journey to implement a feature will be measured against the related brief and specification. For example, specifications will often include drafts for our public documentation, so a common test is to ignore the code and follow the documentation, as naively as you can manage, to see if it guided you through the journey to a successful result. This can be great feedback either on the documentation, or the errors returned by the API. The further towards sharing the feature we are, the more thorough this kind of check will be. #### Output - Specifications to implement and measure the implementation against - A functional implementation that exercises things end-to-end to surface surprises - Total time risked: 2-3 weeks ## Now we implement, right? 🛠 Yes, we've minimized the risks as much as we can without actually implementing the feature: - We've validated a capability gap that customers need - We've built up shared context around the capability and how we're going to address it - We've implemented something that, while limited, does work - We've released it to production to know it doesn't break anything else The next milestone is to get something that fulfills the majority of the brief which could be shared with the known customers for their feedback. As with everything we do, we want the out-the-box experience to be a strong starting point – if not perfect – for 80% of cases, but give people the power to lift the hood and tweak to suit their needs. Perhaps counter-intuitively getting that final result is best approached by starting from the foundations of a feature and working upwards, rather than starting from a more abstract idea and adding configuration options. Once that foundation is laid, that is usually the point at which we will reach to the customers we discovered earlier to get their feedback. The initial implementation may be a bit daunting to use at first, but we're going to be much more engaged in helping the customers use the feature at this early stage to hear where the rough edges are first hand. The documentation will be improved throughout the process through having to explain it to another audience. We should also gain insight into common implementation patterns. This should lead to more sensible defaults, or a higher-level API which is easier to approach, than we could have made an educated guess at. The benefit to the customer is that they get their hands on the feature first, and they can influence what the earliest implementation is capable of. #### Output - A useful feature! - Total time risked: 4-8 weeks ## Hello, World! 👋 Once the majority of the brief is satisfied, this is usually when a feature will be made more widely available by being publicized as an alpha feature. There may be some known capabilities we want to add, or rough edges when it comes to the overall development experience, but it will be both useful and stable to the best of our knowledge. The goal of the alpha phase is to garner feedback from customers outside of the initial cohort. This can be through other customers we didn't realize had a requirement satisfied by the feature or new prospects that come along. The feature having more visibility helps grease the wheels to a wider pool of feedback. Development hasn't stopped. We'll continue until we've satisfied the entirety of our brief, and may have responded to feedback from customers, or in the case of something relying on external parties, possibly responded to the exotic edge cases you only find in the wild. Even several years in I'm still occasionally surprised by what we come across! #### Output - A very useful feature! - Total time risked invested: 6-12 weeks ## Beta, baby ✊ Our brief satisfied, and customer feedback received and addressed, the feature will be moved to beta. Our guarantee of stability is even stronger than the alpha phase, and the supporting tooling and documentation is to the standard we expect of ourselves. The goal of this phase is to verify all those things to be true, generally by having several customers using the feature in production without issue. We generally do not expect to need to make any changes during this phase. We're happy the feature is done according to its current brief. We’re looking for end-user success as a proving point for this stage, not just implementation within customer products. By now we will know the feature can be used by our customers to improve their workflows, but we’re looking for their use to be a success in the wild. As a company we’ll be building marketing collateral for an appropriately sized launch campaign. The ultimate goal of a feature is not only to solve problems for customers, but to generate new leads from people looking to solve similar problems. ## Ready for launch 🚀 The feature is proven and hardened. Marketing and sales has been collateral created. The next step is to truly announce it to the world as ready for everyone to make use of. This may sound like the end, but it’s usually only the beginning. There’s often many variants of the feature within the original brief that were cut out of scope. We won’t develop those speculatively; we’ll start the process all over again but with a much shorter overall timeline as the foundation of the feature is already in place, in use, and built with half an eye on such things coming in the future. ## Reducing uncertainty every step of the way 🔦 The essence of this approach is to reduce our exposure in terms of time spent without a return on our investment. We look at each stage and ask "what's the largest risk?" and then, "what's the cheapest way we can mitigate it?" With judicious application of the [Pareto Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle) we strive to maximize the amount of time we spend with a known return at the end. That approach is applied to everything we do, not just product development. --- # Scheduling Agent for Microsoft Teams | Cronofy Schedule meetings directly in Microsoft Teams. @mention colleagues, check availability, confirm in one reply. Calendar invitations sent automatically. ## Schedule meetings without leaving Teams @mention the people who need to be in the meeting, say what it's about, and Cronofy checks real-time availability, navigates time zones, and sends calendar invitations. All without leaving Teams. [Get it from the Teams Store](https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/saas/wa200010416?tab=overview) [Talk to a human](#form-829ed116-324e-48cd-9731-a588ba8553c8) ## Ask, Pick, Done! Step 1 — Ask Cronofy. In any Teams chat or channel, @mention the Scheduling Agent along with the colleagues you want to meet. Tell it what the meeting is about and any constraints. The agent interprets natural language. Step 2 — Review suggested times. Cronofy checks connected calendars for every participant in real time, across time zones and working hours. It replies with times that work for everyone. Step 3 — Confirm and go. Select a time. Calendar invitations are sent automatically with the correct details and time zone. ## Multi-person, multi-timezone, one message @mention everyone who needs to be in the meeting, whether they are in your team or across the organization. Cronofy finds times that work across all of their calendars. Time zones are handled automatically. When plans shift, ask the agent to reschedule. For external participants, invitees can self-schedule via personalized links. ## Install from the Teams Store. Connect calendars. Go. Get the Scheduling Agent from the Microsoft Teams Store or Microsoft AppSource. An administrator connects calendars through Cronofy (Microsoft 365, Google, Exchange, Apple). Once connected, team members can start scheduling immediately. No training needed. Scheduling templates and organizational configurations are available for enterprise deployments. [Get it from the Teams Store](https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/saas/wa200010416?tab=overview) ## Built for enterprise trust requirements ISO 27001, ISO 27018, ISO 27701, and SOC 2 certified. Full support for GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Calendar data is processed in Cronofy's own data centers, not passed through third-party AI services. The Scheduling Agent uses AI to interpret natural-language requests. AI-generated suggestions may not always be accurate. Review all suggestions before confirming. To report concerns about AI-generated content, contact support@cronofy.com. ## Designed for the Microsoft ecosystem The Scheduling Agent integrates with Microsoft 365 calendars through Cronofy's Enterprise 365 Connector. For organizations using Microsoft Copilot, the same scheduling capabilities are available through Cronofy's MCP Server, enabling Copilot to schedule meetings on behalf of your team. One temporal grid across the Microsoft ecosystem. ## Your next meeting is a message away --- # Inside Cronofy with Mark Harbottle, Head of Talent Our fourth instalment of our Inside Cronofy series! We sat down with Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, to learn more about his role at Cronofy. Our fourth instalment of our Inside Cronofy series! We sat down with Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, to learn more about his role at Cronofy. Welcome to the fourth installment of [our Inside Cronofy interview series](/blog-category/inside-cronofy)! Today we're sitting down with Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, to learn more about his role and the projects he's currently working on. ‍ ### Hi Mark, thanks for speaking with me today! Firstly, could you tell me a bit about yourself and your role at Cronofy? I'm the Head of Talent at Cronofy; I'm responsible for employee attraction, retention, development, and motivation. ‍ ### Great, and how long have you been with Cronofy? I will have been with Cronofy for one year at the end of January. It's flown by! ‍ ### What were you doing before you joined? My background has always been in IT recruitment. I ran my own firm for a while, and then focused on regional IT recruitment in my home city, Newcastle upon Tyne. I really enjoyed the job, but I've always had a passion for people, talent, and culture, which is why I started studying for my CIPD qualification during lockdown and completed that last year. CIPD certifications are the recognized professional standard for HR specialists in the UK and are highly valuable for the role I was looking for. I wanted a role where I could utilize my recruitment experience and also allow me to develop my skills in the broader area of HR. Cronofy is a perfect fit for me and my ambitions. ‍ ### Could you tell me about a project you're working on right now? My job is full of important internal projects, but one of the most interesting ones has been developing our Competency Framework. I've been working on defining what excellent looks like at Cronofy, setting out the individual competencies of our levels of seniority, and the areas of competency that are so important to succeeding while working here. We'll use the framework to support career development for all our team members. ‍ ### Sounds interesting! Is anyone else involved in this project? Although I've led the project, I've had loads of support from our Management team. They've helped me define the competencies within their departments and integrate our framework across our review process to ensure we're maximizing its value. I definitely couldn't have done this without their support. ‍ ### Why would you say this project is important? We've always been great at giving feedback here, and I realized last year that although we put a significant focus on personal development and career opportunities, there wasn't as much structure around a career path as there could be. I've been working on a framework that provides clarity on the range of opportunities at Cronofy and gives visibility on what our team members need to do to progress internally. Simply put, it's important because it shows everyone what they need to do to be as successful as they can at Cronofy. Once we finish this project and we've fully rolled out our competency framework across all departments, I hope that we can publish it for full transparency of anyone who is thinking of applying for a role. ‍ ### Sounds like a really valuable project – what have you enjoyed most? I've really enjoyed the challenge! It was a big project to embark on so early in my employment at Cronofy, with such a significant long-term impact. I've definitely learned a lot during this project. That being said, the satisfaction is in the result. Seeing colleagues develop themselves while staying true to [our Principles](https://www.cronofy.com/about) is so rewarding. It's also something that I'll be revisiting every year to assess its impact - could we be doing better? Do we need to make any amendments to get more value? It'll be interesting to reflect on it later in 2022. ‍ ### Now that you've been with us for a year, what would you say you enjoy about working at Cronofy? I relish the freedom to work on important things that I feel will bring value and help the company grow and manage my job around my family life. I have a two-year-old at home, and being able to be 'present' in his life makes everything worthwhile. I adore my colleagues; even though we primarily work remotely, I have a really strong relationship with all of them. Working at Cronofy is fast-paced and challenging; the business has already been through so much in my year working here. It's so exciting to see the growth happening in real-time, and I adore being part of this journey. ‍ ### Finally, what would you say to anyone who's considering applying for a role with us? Firstly I'd say if you want to be part of a fast-paced startup that has doubled in headcount in the last year and is making a real difference to people's lives, then this is absolutely the place for you. I'd also say that if flexibility, transparency, rewarding work, a tight-knit community, and a principles-driven culture are things you value in a job, you should certainly apply. ‍ *Does Cronofy sound like the perfect fit for your career? If you're interested in joining our team, head to our **[Careers page](https://www.cronofy.com/careers)** to see our current open positions or submit your CV to recruitment@cronofy.com!* --- # Temporal Infrastructure for Microsoft - Cronofy Cronofy's Temporal Grid is the missing coordination layer in your Microsoft stack. Scheduling Agent for Teams and Outlook. MCP Server for Copilot and Azure AI Foundry. ## The missing layer in your Microsoft stack You are under pressure to show real AI outcomes - fast. The Microsoft stack is powerful, but agents, systems and teams still cannot coordinate across calendars, conferencing and meetings without a temporal infrastructure layer. That is what Cronofy provides. [For humans](#mspage-agent-section) [For agents](#mspage-mcp-section) Powering time for over 180,000 companies ## The Scheduling Agent for Microsoft Teams and Outlook Microsoft Teams ## Multi-person scheduling, directly inside Teams Stop switching between calendars and chats. The Cronofy Scheduling Agent lives natively in Microsoft Teams, handling multi-person, multi-timezone, multi-domain scheduling on your behalf. @mention colleagues, choose from AI-suggested times and confirm in a single reply - without leaving Teams. Calendar invitations are sent automatically with the correct details and time zone. [Get the Scheduling Agent for Microsoft Teams](/scheduling-agent/microsoft-teams) Microsoft Outlook and Office ## Schedule from wherever you work in Office Whether you are drafting an email or managing your calendar, the Cronofy Scheduling Agent works across Outlook and Office to coordinate availability automatically. No back-and-forth, no context-switching - just meetings booked at the right time with the right people. Get it from the Microsoft Marketplace and connect your organisation's calendars in minutes. [Get the Scheduling Agent for Microsoft Office](https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/office/wa200001836?tab=overview) ## The Cronofy MCP Server for Copilot and Azure AI Foundry Microsoft Copilot ## Let Copilot schedule meetings in real time The Cronofy MCP Server gives Microsoft Copilot the scheduling intelligence it needs to act. Your Copilot agents can check real-time availability, create booking links and schedule meetings - all through the Model Context Protocol, without you building any orchestration layer yourself. Cronofy handles calendars, availability context, coordination and booking logic behind the scenes - so your team ships agentic scheduling fast, without building complex integrations. [View on Microsoft Connector Gallery](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/cronofymcp/) Azure AI Foundry ## Build agentic scheduling workflows on Foundry Connect your Azure AI Foundry agents to Cronofy's scheduling infrastructure in minutes. Your agents get real-time availability context, booking logic and meeting coordination - all handled by Cronofy, so your team can focus on the workflows that differentiate your product. One MCP Server. One temporal grid. Immediate tangible outcomes across your entire Microsoft agentic stack. [View on Microsoft Connector Gallery](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/cronofymcp/) Immediate tangible outcomes ## Designed to deliver results with minimal effort The entire suite is built to give you immediate, measurable outcomes - without months of implementation. Whether you are deploying the Scheduling Agent for your teams or integrating the MCP Server into your agentic stack, Cronofy connects to your existing Microsoft environment and starts delivering value from day one. Why time is the missing layer ## Your Microsoft stack does not coordinate time natively Calendars, meetings and conferencing are fundamental to every business outcome - but Microsoft 365 does not include an infrastructure layer that agents, systems and teams can rely on to coordinate across all three. The result is manual scheduling, broken workflows, and AI agents that cannot reliably execute time-sensitive tasks. Cronofy's Temporal Grid is that layer. Built on 10 years of calendar and scheduling infrastructure, it connects Exchange, Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 into a unified, programmable foundation for time. ![Microsoft 365 Certified]() *The Microsoft 365 Certification logo represents that this app has achieved Microsoft 365 Certification. In addition to app security, this program reviews the practices and procedures the app publisher employs. While customer data is under control of the app publisher, you can rest assured that Microsoft has validated that the app will handle it in a safe and secure manner.* --- # Insights from Flexa’s candidate data: What do job seekers want? What will the future of work look like, and what should companies do to accommodate candidate wishes? Our friends over at the flexible work platform Flexa share data on what employees are looking for in their next job in 2024 and beyond. What will the future of work look like, and what should companies do to accommodate candidate wishes? Our friends over at the flexible work platform Flexa share data on what employees are looking for in their next job in 2024 and beyond. As job seekers’ preferences and priorities evolve, understanding these shifts is crucial for attracting the right talent to your company. At Flexa, we analyse millions of data points to uncover what the future of work looks like and how candidate demands are changing. In this blog, we’ll explore the significant changes we've observed over the past six months, and offer insights on how to attract and retain diverse talent. When candidates join Flexa to find their ideal role, we ask them to share their top preferences. Here’s what our data from 2024 reveals about what employees are looking for in their next job. ## **🌍 The freedom to work from anywhere** Work From Anywhere schemes have gained significant traction since the pandemic. Since January 2024, we've seen an increase of 177% when it comes to candidates selecting WFA schemes as a preference in their next role. Companies like [Boomi](https://flexa.careers/companies/boomi?utm_source=Cronofy), [Not On The High Street](https://flexa.careers/companies/noths?utm_source=Cronofy), and [Cronofy](https://flexa.careers/companies/cronofy?utm_source=Cronofy) are leading the way, offering employees the freedom to work from different countries for extended periods. With the flexibility to work from any location, employees can take advantage of travelling to new places or visiting family abroad without using up their annual leave. As long as work commitments are fulfilled, the location is not a concern. However, it's important to note that [Work From Anywhere policies](https://flexa.careers/blog/work-from-anywhere-wfa-wtf?utm_source=Cronofy) often have tax implications, and employees could be limited to working abroad for a certain number of days each year. These schemes offer many advantages, such as enhanced flexibility and control over work schedules, better work-life balance, and increased productivity. They provide employees with a unique opportunity to blend work and travel while enjoying the perks of remote working. ## **💻 Hybrid vs remote – what do candidates want?** Post-2020, the rise of remote working has been undeniable. Candidates who previously rarely questioned their work location now have a voice in deciding where they want to work. While [hybrid working](https://flexa.careers/blog/what-is-hybrid-working?utm_source=Cronofy) and in-office arrangements may be gaining traction, flexibility remains a key consideration for many employees. Although there’s been a slight decline in demand for flexibility—dropping from 75% in April to 64% in August—it’s important to acknowledge that the freedom to work in a way that suits one’s lifestyle is still a priority for candidates. The ability to choose where work happens, whether from home, a co-working space, or even a beach in Bali, has become non-negotiable for many. This shift reflects a deeper change in how we view the relationship between work and life. As hybrid working rises, offering a balance between office time and remote options, it's important for employers to continue providing flexibility. It’s not just about how often employees work in the office—it’s about empowering them to integrate work seamlessly into their lives. This freedom is what drives engagement and attracts top talent in today's evolving workplace. ## **🗓️ The evolved working week: a growing trend** The candidate preference for an evolved work week (which might look like a 4-day week, 4.5-day week or 9-day fortnight) has increased by 68% over the last year. But what exactly is an evolved working week? - The [4-day week](https://flexa.careers/blog/benefits-of-the-four-day-week?utm_source=Cronofy) is when, instead of the traditional 5-day schedule, employees work for 4 days, maintaining their standard daily hours. This setup doesn't involve compressed hours or reduced pay, making it an attractive option for employees seeking a better work-life balance. - The 4.5-day week may work differently for each company. At Flexa we have half-day Fridays, meaning our team can switch off for the weekend earlier, and come back refreshed on Monday. - The [9-day fortnight](https://flexa.careers/flexapedia/what-is-a-9-day-fortnight?utm_source=Cronofy) is a flexible working set-up where employees work nine days out of each two week period, for example, taking every other Friday as a non-working day. The increase in demand for an evolved working week reflects significant changes in modern lifestyles and employee preferences. People want more flexibility in how they work, with a balance that accommodates their personal commitments and allows them to prioritise their wellbeing. We’ve already seen companies of varying sizes and across different industries, including [Huel](https://flexa.careers/companies/huel?utm_source=Cronofy), [Coppafeel](https://flexa.careers/companies/coppafeel?utm_source=Cronofy), [Simprints](https://flexa.careers/companies/simprints?utm_source=Cronofy) and [Atom Bank](https://flexa.careers/companies/atombank?utm_source=Cronofy), leading the way with an evolved working week. Forward-thinking companies that are able to adapt to these preferences will have a competitive advantage in being able to attract and retain top talent. Through understanding the flexible working preferences that candidates want, companies can better attract talent that aligns with their organisational culture and goals. And they’re investing in retaining them through providing a working environment where they can thrive. ## **❤️ Prioritising mental health: a benefit employers can’t afford to miss** Research indicates that 89% of employees believe their mental health affects their work life. Additionally, new findings from Deloitte reveal that poor mental health costs employers £51 billion annually. Given these figures, it’s no surprise that mental health support has become a non-negotiable factor for candidates when considering new roles. Our data shows that preferences for mental health days have risen significantly, from 8% in January to 34% by August 2024. Offering [mental health days](https://flexa.careers/blog/what-are-mental-health-days-and-why-do-they-matter?utm_source=Cronofy) and platforms as part of employee benefits is important for creating a healthy and productive workplace. Mental health is just as important as physical health, and providing time for employees to rest and recharge can prevent burnout, reduce stress, and improve overall well-being. Mental health days give employees the chance to focus on self-care, which can lead to better concentration, creativity, and job satisfaction when they return to work. Beyond mental health days, offering platforms for support—such as counselling services, wellness apps, or mindfulness programs—shows that an organisation genuinely values the well-being of its staff. These resources help employees feel supported during difficult times. By prioritising mental health in the benefits package, employers create a more engaged, resilient workforce that can adapt and thrive in a demanding environment. In a competitive job market, these benefits can also be a deciding factor for top talent when choosing between potential employers. ## **🌴 Unlimited leave is on the rise** The 20% increase in candidates preferring unlimited leave, signals a growing demand for work-life balance. This shift reflects an increasing value placed on work-life balance and personal well-being, driven by the modern workforce’s desire for autonomy and support. For employers, this trend means it's important to adapt to evolving expectations by considering or enhancing their leave policies. Companies that offer flexible benefits like unlimited leave can gain a competitive advantage, boost employee morale, and improve retention. However, successful implementation requires clear guidelines and effective management to ensure the policy is beneficial and fair. Unlimited annual leave can have both [benefits and challenges](https://flexa.careers/blog/what-is-unlimited-annual-leave?utm_source=Cronofy), but when implemented properly it can be a standout benefit for companies. It can boost productivity by motivating employees to complete their work efficiently to fully enjoy their time off; improve work-life balance by allowing employees to take necessary breaks; and attract and retain top talent who value flexibility. However, challenges include concerns about potential misuse and the risk of employees taking less time off due to uncertainty about what's acceptable. To maximise its effectiveness, companies should ensure clear guidelines, encourage regular use, and lead by example to create a supportive culture around this benefit. ## **Unlocking talent with a powerful EVP** As we move further into 2024, one thing is clear: the companies that will thrive are those that listen to what job seekers really want and aren't afraid to innovate in response. The future of work is here, and it's more flexible, balanced, and employee-centric than ever before. Job seekers now prioritise roles that offer balance, flexibility, and alignment with their personal values. But what does this mean for employers? And how can companies leverage this data to attract talent that aligns with their values and culture? To succeed, employers must adapt to these evolving expectations by creating work environments that resonate with the modern workforce. Central to this is embedding these preferences into your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Companies on Flexa are already doing this successfully, showcasing their mission, values, culture, and benefits. To get started, try Flexa's [2-minute EVP quiz](https://flexa.careers/evp-quiz?utm_source=Cronofy) for insights into how you can enhance your EVP and attract talent that truly aligns with your organisation. [Explore Cronofy's profile on Flexa](https://flexa.careers/companies/cronofy?utm_source=Cronofy) ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # Introducing Cronofy Meeting Agents: From Scheduling to Insights Join us as we introduce Cronofy Meeting Agents, a powerful new capability that automatically records and transcribes meetings scheduled via your application, helping your users capture insights, improve productivity, and make more confident decisions. Join us as we introduce Cronofy Meeting Agents, the latest evolution of our API that automatically records and transcribes meetings scheduled via your application, helping your users capture insights, improve productivity, and make more confident decisions. Built on the same infrastructure trusted by healthcare, finance, and enterprise teams worldwide, Meeting Agents extend Cronofy’s API beyond scheduling to deliver end-to-end meeting insights with the same compliance, privacy, and reliability that power millions of scheduling workflows today. See how Cronofy is helping product teams go beyond scheduling and turn every meeting into a source of structured, actionable insight. --- # Add online meeting links to events with Conferencing Services We're excited to introduce the latest feature of the Cronofy API, Conferencing Services! This core feature, available on all plans, is live from today. We're excited to introduce the latest feature of the Cronofy API, Conferencing Services! This core feature, available on all plans, is live from today. We're excited to introduce the latest feature of the Cronofy API, [Conferencing Services](https://www.cronofy.com/conferencing-services/)! This core feature, available on all plans, is live from today and will allow developers to add phone and video conferencing links to events scheduled through the Cronofy API. With Conferencing Services, Cronofy is now providing a zero configuration option thanks to our partnership with 8×8, as well as offering support for Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and GoTo conferences. This is a feature that has long been planned as part of our roadmap. We've decided to fast track its release because remote working is becoming more and more important to businesses around the world with millions of employees now working from home full-time. Being able to see the people you are meeting with is critical in some cases, for example video interviews or training sessions. It also helps improve communication, morale and productivity in many other instances like team meetings, sales and support calls or online doctor’s visits. Making scheduling online meetings as simple as possible for software businesses and their clients is just a small way that Cronofy are able to make a difference now and for the long term. The way it works is simple. [Developers now have the option](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api-alpha/conferencing-services/) to add phone and video conferencing links as an additional attribute to the calendar events created with the Cronofy API.Thanks to our partnership with 8×8, a leading provider of cloud communications solutions, this feature doesn’t require any configuration. Google and G-Suite users will have Google Meet links automatically generated. Users of all other calendars will get a 8×8 online conferencing link generated for each event. > "The [8x8.vc](https://8x8.vc/) service is designed to provide on demand access to secure video meetings for anyone with a web browser. We're genuinely excited that Cronofy is bringing this capability to any service that they're powering scheduling for." *‍***Emil Ivov, Head of Product, Video Collaboration, 8x8** **‍** **‍**However, we also understand that many companies have conference services that they prefer to use. In much the same way as end-users can link calendar services to their account, they can now authorize supported conferencing service providers to ensure meeting links are generated using their preferred tool. In practice it means that all users can choose to authorize Cronofy to use their Zoom, GoTo or Microsoft Teams account to generate the conferencing details > "Cronofy is dedicated to being the best scheduling infrastructure for SaaS vendors. Conference services are a critical part of meetings, especially now. Delivering support for online meetings as a turn-key capability is absolutely consistent with that focus." *‍***Adam Bird, CEO, Cronofy** **‍** **‍**Finally, Conferencing Services is built to work no matter how an event is generated through the Cronofy API. This means that customers using our Real Time Scheduling or our Real Time Sequencing managed UI can simply add the instruction to the event templates and they’ll automatically be able to support remote meetings.We can't wait to see how you're going to use this new feature as part of your scheduling workflows. If you have any question or would like more information don't hesitate to contact us! --- # Introducing Buffers for the Availability API Scheduling platforms are great for organizing appointments. But unless your users block out time before or after appointments, they risk back-to-back meetings with no time to prepare or travel between locations. Scheduling platforms are great for organizing appointments. But unless your users block out time before or after appointments, they risk back-to-back meetings with no time to prepare or travel between locations. Scheduling platforms are great for organizing appointments. But unless your users block out time before or after appointments, they risk back-to-back meetings with no time to prepare or travel between locations. To solve this problem, we recently added support for buffers on our [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) and [Real-Time Scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/real-time-scheduling/). Buffers allow you to define a minimum gap in minutes before or after a busy period. This means your users have total control over how busy their schedules are. ## Mind the gap As a user's calendar changes, our buffers will continue to ensure the required gaps are kept between any new events scheduled via Cronofy. No events are placed in a user's calendar – they can enjoy a clutter-free schedule. Best of all, if you use buffers with Real-Time Scheduling, the slots available will use your customer's real-time availability to ensure their buffers are always kept – even when other events are booked in. ## Use cases ### Assessment days Assessment days can be a big part of hiring at-scale. Buffers mean that the day can be set up so that there's plenty of time between each session for rooms to be set up, candidates to walk from one location to another, or even just to grab some lunch. ### House calls If your customers travel from location to location, buffers mean that there's no risk of two appointments at opposite ends of a city being scheduled back-to-back. Buffers can be set up to give them plenty of time to travel from one client to the next. If you use our [geolocation](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/) feature, your users could even set the location of the event in their calendar. ## How it works Integration is simple – call our Availability API or Real-Time Scheduling with your required buffers and we'll return results with the buffer already applied to any busy periods. No need to change any existing integrations with our API. To define a before and after buffer, add this to an existing call to the Availability API: { "buffer": { "before": { "minutes": 30 }, "after": { "minutes" 30 } } } You can define how long or short you want the buffer to be. You also have the option to set maximum buffer times. If sequential events have before and after buffers, these are collapsed into one, as shown in the diagram below. If the events are separated by a busy period both buffers will still be honored. We've also taken the time to add support to all our [official SDK libraries](https://github.com/cronofy) so you can get started quickly. Buffer support for the Availability API and Real-Time Scheduling is available now. To find out more about what you can do with buffers, check out our [API documentation](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/) and [sign up for your free developer account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) to try it out. --- # Thanks for contacting Cronofy # Thanks for getting in touch! Schedule a time to talk below. [Schedule your call now](https://app.cronofy.com/pls/Mv8Iy7wp) In the meantime, you might be interested in. ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### Hiring coordinator now schedules interviews in 30 seconds from within BambooHR See how a hiring coordinator from ONWA now schedules interviews in 30 seconds using Cronofy within BambooHR, and learn more about how she was able to upskill thanks to claiming back hours from manual administrative work. Case Study --- # What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Explore the top calendar APIs of 2025 for integrating scheduling into your app. Compare Google, Microsoft, Cronofy, Nylas, and Cal.com with pros, cons, and real-world considerations for developers and product teams. Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. **Want the TL;DR? Summarize this post with:** - [ChatGPT](https://chat.openai.com/?q=Read+and+summarize+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/best-calendar-apis) - [Perplexity](https://www.perplexity.ai/search/new?q=Provide+a+comprehensive+summary+of+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/best-calendar-apis) - [Claude](https://claude.ai/new?q=Read+and+summarize+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/best-calendar-apis) ## The Best Calendar APIs for Scheduling When teams start building scheduling functionality into their applications, the first question is often: *Should we build this ourselves using Google or Microsoft APIs, or use a unified calendar API that handles the complexity for us?* It’s a question I’ve been exploring since joining Cronofy, and I recently shared my take in [this blog post](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/should-you-build-or-buy-scheduling-infrastructure). After speaking with customers, developers, and product teams, one thing is clear: building your own calendar and scheduling infrastructure can seem simple at first, but the real challenges show up at scale. Managing availability, syncing updates in real time, handling time zones, and avoiding double bookings across providers quickly becomes a full-time job. While Cronofy has powered scheduling in thousands of apps over the past decade, the appetite for Calendar APIs has continued to rise and there is now a growing list of options to evaluate as you go through your own build vs. buy debate. From platforms powering recruitment and education, to healthcare and travel, it’s clear that scheduling infrastructure is a critical component of modern apps, but not every API fits every use case. ## What is a Calendar API? A calendar API enables developers to embed calendar and scheduling functionality into their applications. It allows your app to create and manage events, check user availability, send invites, and sync with providers like Google, Microsoft, and Apple without users ever leaving your product. When you’re evaluating calendar APIs, you’ll come across a couple of different options. First are calendar APIs provided by major calendar providers like Google and Microsoft. They’re powerful, but they also require you to build and manage each calendar integration separately. Providers like Cronofy, Nylas, and Cal.com offer unified calendar APIs to take away the complexity of managing calendar integrations individually. They give you a single API that can access and query all of the major calendar providers, often packaged with more advanced scheduling features like time zone handling and smart availability logic. While Cronofy has powered scheduling in thousands of apps over the past decade, the appetite for Calendar APIs has continued to rise and there is now a growing list of options to evaluate as you go through your own build vs. buy debate. ## Best Calendar APIs ## Google Calendar API The [Google Calendar API](https://developers.google.com/workspace/calendar/api/guides/overview) is one of the most commonly used calendar integrations. It lets you manage events, access free/busy info, and handle notifications - but you will need to build and maintain any Google Calendar API integration yourself. ### Pros - Free to use and integrate. - Supports creating, updating, deleting events, access to free/busy information, setting reminders, managing recurring events, and more. - Push notifications via webhooks let you listen for event changes to maintain a more up-to-date view of availability. ### Things to consider - You may encounter errors during peak usage or when scaling across users unless quotas are manually raised. - The API only supports Google accounts. If your users are on Microsoft, Apple, or Exchange, you’ll need to build separate integrations for each. - Google occasionally changes the API, requiring you to monitor changelogs and update your implementation to prevent breaking changes. ## Microsoft Outlook (Graph) API [Microsoft’s API](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/use-the-api) provides full access to Outlook and Exchange calendars, enabling event creation, syncing, and reminders. While powerful, it also requires the handling of OAuth flows and staying ahead of API changes. ### Pros - Free to use and integrate. - Supports webhook-based change notifications, enabling more responsive sync with proper setup and token management. - Microsoft's API offers a single endpoint for accessing not just calendars, but also email, contacts, users, and files. ### Things to consider - Complex workflows (e.g. multi-attendee, priority routing) need to be custom-built. - The Microsoft Graph API is large and multifaceted, which can be overwhelming for developers only needing calendar functionality. - Microsoft evolves the Graph API frequently, and some changes can break existing implementations. ## Cronofy Calendar API [Cronofy’s API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer) offers enterprise-ready, real‑time calendar sync and scheduling with embeddable and customizable UI components - all with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. It focuses exclusively on scheduling infrastructure, letting teams build faster and avoid ongoing maintenance of integrations. ### Pros - Beyond just reading and writing events, Cronofy provides native scheduling functionality including availability querying, real-time availability APIs, meeting invite workflows and customizable UI components. - Cronofy’s Sync Engine maintains a cache of users' availability, meaning your application only needs to make a single API call to fetch the availability of multiple calendars - helping to reduce latency and increasing reliability if your service. If a provider experiences downtime, Cronofy continues serving the most recently synced availability data, ensuring a consistent experience for users. - Unlike solutions that frequently sunset API versions or require migrations, Cronofy prioritizes backward compatibility and long-term support to prevent surprise breaking changes. - Cronofy [prioritizes privacy](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy) with full GDPR, HIPAA and SOC 2 compliance, as well as a no-known-bugs policy. Many customers trust it to handle regulated data in healthcare, recruiting, and finance. ### Things to consider - If you’re looking for a self-hosted, open-source scheduling engine, Cronofy isn’t built for that. It's a managed SaaS infrastructure focused on reliability and scale. - Cronofy doesn’t offer contact or email APIs like Nylas, which could be a downside depending on what you are planning to build. ## Nylas Calendar API [Nylas](https://www.nylas.com/products/calendar-api/) offers a unified calendar API that covers multiple providers (Google, Outlook, Exchange, Apple) and includes scheduling-specific features like availability checks, native UI components, and notifications, all aimed at accelerating development of custom scheduling workflows. ### Pros - Beyond just reading and writing events, Nylas provides more advanced scheduling functionality including availability querying. - Nylas offers embeddable UI widgets like scheduling pages, which help teams ship faster without having to design scheduling flows from scratch. - Nylas supports webhook notifications for calendar events and availability changes, helping developers maintain up-to-date schedules inside their apps. ### Things to consider - Nylas recently transitioned to a new domain-specific model (v3), requiring additional logic and infrastructure to support cross-company scheduling workflows. If your platform works across multiple organizations, you may need to build additional layers or infrastructure to handle those queries. - Nylas supports calendars, contacts, and email APIs which can be beneficial depending on your use case, but also means they don’t exclusively focus on scheduling infrastructure. - Nylas’ backend often relies on external API calls to calendar providers for real-time data. In contrast to Cronofy’s cached sync engine, this can lead to latency or reliability issues at scale, particularly when querying many calendars. ## Cal.com API [Cal.com](http://cal.com/) provides an open source, REST style API that lets you self-host or use hosted scheduling components with full control over UI and scheduling flows. You get flexibility and white-label options, but self hosting your own instance brings additional operational overhead. ### Pros - Cal.com provides open-source access to their entire scheduling platform, giving developers complete control over how scheduling looks, behaves, and integrates into their environment. - Like Cronofy, you can build highly customizable scheduling workflows with configurable rules, availability, buffers, and embedded scheduling buttons. - Whether it’s 1:1, group, or round-robin scheduling, Cal.com supports a variety of meeting flows out-of-the-box. This flexibility makes it suitable for teams with diverse scheduling needs. ### Things to consider - Unlike API-first solutions, Cal.com expects end users to create accounts, verify emails, and interact with their interface even if they’re only using scheduling through your application. - Running your own instance means you’re responsible for updates, uptime, bug fixing, and infrastructure costs. This can outweigh the benefits of open source if you don’t have dedicated ops support. ## Which Calendar API is right for you? Choosing a calendar API isn’t just about choosing endpoints or technical specs - it’s a decision that shapes the reliability, scalability, and user experience of your product. You’re also choosing how much time it will take your engineering team to implement and maintain it, how reliable it will be as your platform scales, and whether it’s going to create a smooth or frustrating experience for your end users. If you're building something where scheduling infrastructure forms a critical piece of your customer experience, like hiring platforms, telehealth apps, or CRMs, investing in infrastructure that's built for scale and reliability is just as important as picking an API that gives you the endpoints you need. Cronofy was built by developers for developers, so we understand the importance of testing integrations - you can create a free sandbox environment and connect up to 20 calendar accounts to test Cronofy with real data and real events. If you’d rather talk through your specific use case with one of our scheduling specialists, you can book a time with them below. [Get my sandbox](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) [Speak to a scheduling expert](/book-a-demo-api) ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### New to Cronofy’s White Label API? So am I - Let’s Break It Down Together You’re a developer who needs to build out a scheduling workflow within your application. You’ve found Cronofy’s White Label API, but aren’t quite sure how the pieces fit together. I’m new here too, so let’s figure it out together. Blog Post 2025-03-31T13:56:00.000Z --- # Behind the scenes: Cronofy hits Amsterdam! Every six months Cronofy organises a companywide meet up. This May, we met in Amsterdam to give our teams the chance to see our recently opened office and the sights this wonderful European capital has to offer. Every six months Cronofy organises a companywide meet up, and we always try to choose a different location. This year, we chose Amsterdam, to give our teams the chance to see our recently opened office and see the sights that this wonderful European capital has to offer. There’s huge value in these meet ups; it always amazes me how much stronger our relationships are after these events, seeing people bond in ways that Zoom just can’t offer, while providing the perfect opportunity to realign the direction we’re going and lay the ground work for the next six months of success. We always split our time into social and collaborative work, with updates and events sprinkled throughout. Here are the headlines of our four days in Amsterdam. ‍ ## The journey begins For both environmental and social reasons, trips like this usually start on the Eurostar. A great chance to catch up and drink an unhealthy amount of coffee in the absence of a stable wi-fi connection. Getting nearly 30 people through a metro system in a new city inevitably meant we nearly left some people behind, but this first obstacle was passed with flying colours. We stayed at the Van der Valk hotel in Overamstel, an exceptional place for weary heads but not for long - we had reservations at L’Osteria, an Italian restaurant on the marina who served up the largest pizzas and pasta dishes ever seen. Kudos to our Head of Sales, Mark, who did an astonishing job of clearing his table! ## Socials, competitor wargaming and sushi The first part of the second day was dedicated to a range of social activities chosen by individuals. Some groups took museum tours; the van Gough or RijksMuseum. A large group rented bikes and went to find windmills, others went rock climbing or took a tour of the Ajax FC’s stadium. We also gave people the option for free time in Amsterdam, which I know was time well spent. For the afternoon, after a spot of lunch we joined together in a workspace for some reflective presentations around what we've achieved in the last six months from our CEO, CTO, Head of Sales and Head of Talent. It was great to recall how much has happened and how far we’ve come, but also take the time to celebrate other achievements, whether it was relocation, weddings, engagements, or growing families! We also started our two-day group activity - competitor wargaming. An opportunity to research our international competitors to learn more about the scheduling landscape, and really understand our strengths and opportunities for improvements in a challenging industry. As we were working in cross-departmental teams, it also gave us a chance to work with people we wouldn't normally work with and listen to different perspectives. Wednesday was topped off by a visit to George Marina, a restaurant right on the riverside for some of the best sushi and steaks around. ## Rainy boat tours and rebranding The last full day included a group social activity; a boat tour through the canals of Amsterdam seeing the sights and learning more about the city. We were unfortunate to do it in the rain, but fortunate enough that we were sheltered! In the afternoon, our design team formally unveiled **[our company rebrand](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/visual-identity-2023)** – a slick, Swiss-inspired red, black and white colour scheme with bold graphics and fonts. Such a huge amount of work has gone into this and it was fascinating to learn about the branding journey. it perfectly reflects us as a company and what we want our product to be. We finished the day off with presenting our competitor research back to the group; a collective learning experience that really brought us all together and reinforced our strong brand position. We also used the day to welcome some of our new starters joining us in the coming weeks - meeting their soon-to-be colleagues and providing the context behind our new branding will really put them on a strong foot when they join us. We wanted to end the week on a high, so after our dinner at North African restaurant Rainarai, we all visited the immerse audiovisual experience AMAZE which was a truly unique experience to remember. ## Return home There were definitely a few weary heads around breakfast on Friday morning, but our journey in Amsterdam had come to an end. We departed to the Eurostar for a few early nights over the weekend! Holding a companywide meet up event every 6 months is always a challenge. We have colleagues across the UK, Netherlands, France and Spain, and there is a real commitment from everyone to make these meet ups happen, but the benefit is exponential. To see the colleagues you wouldn’t normally spend time with helps build stronger relationships - and trust - across departments, we have a stronger understanding of our vision and take huge strides forward as a business together. They are priceless, and continue to define the culture of working at Cronofy. --- # Calendar Connectivity for Hotel Reservation Software ## Calendar Connectivity for Hotel Reservation Software Help to prevent the billions of dollars lost to missed appointments every year. ## Create a better booking experience Hotels that don’t us an online hotel reservation system risk losing out on the 80% of people who now [book their holidays online](http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/articles/41280/80-booking-holidays-online-finds-study). This means less customers, less reviews, and less annual revenue. Booking software that uses calendar sync changes all this. ## Let customers book online in real-time When hotel reservation systems are calendar connected, they can attract the attention of customers looking to make last-minute bookings. Reservations are pushed to a hotel’s schedule in real-time, preventing any double bookings. Any changes can be synced to customers’ calendars in real-time, ensuring they always have the latest information to hand. ## Add rich details to calendar events Cronofy allows calendar users to add rich details to events. These rich details can be used to share information with customers such as the type of room they’ve booked, what their room number is, or details on how to get to their room in a large hotel. [Geolocation](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/) information can also be added to calendar events, which can be set up so that customers receive an alert when it’s time to leave based on their location and factors such as current traffic. ## Use calendars as interfaces to your software When a hotel reservation system is calendar synced, it can be set up so that customers can make changes to their reservation from their calendar service. Should they need to change their arrival time, for example, they can do this from their calendar. Updates are then pushed to the hotel reservation system. --- # The Best Team Collaboration Tools for Remote Work When you’re part of a remote team, the collaboration tools you use can make your work life easier or more difficult. They can reduce stress or they can add to it. They can help you better connect with your other team members, or they can be the wedge that drives you apart. When you’re part of a remote team, the collaboration tools you use can make your work life easier or more difficult. They can reduce stress or they can add to it. They can help you better connect with your other team members, or they can be the wedge that drives you apart. When you’re part of a remote team, the collaboration tools you use can make your work life easier or more difficult. They can reduce stress or they can add to it. They can help you better connect with your other team members, or they can be the wedge that drives you apart. Finding the right tools is therefore imperative. I spoke to some of my remote teammates to see what challenges they face, and what team collaboration tools they couldn’t live without. ### What are the biggest challenges you face as part of a distributed team? **Garry:** Communication, communication, and communication. Passive communication doesn’t happen. For example, you can’t see a colleague with their head in their hands because they’re struggling with something and ask if they need help. To counter this you need to build an environment where people are proactive about asking for help. You also need to be deliberate about making time for active communication to compensate. ‍ > **"You need to build an environment where people are proactive about asking for help."** Garry Shutler, CTO and Co-founder ‍ The default mode of communication when working remotely is text. Text scales really well and can be consumed at people’s leisure. But text is ripe for misunderstanding of tone, context, intent, no matter how hard you try. So it’s great for specifications and so on that are factual and you may wish to refer to multiple times, but can be poor for delivering feedback and similar activities. Video helps with this, but requires at least two people to be in the same “place” at the same time so is more disruptive. I’m experimenting with using [Loom](https://www.loom.com/) as a middle-ground where it’s video that can be consumed at the audience’s leisure. It’s early days but it seems promising. I’m starting to think that chat is a bad medium for these reasons. It’s got all the downsides of textual communication, but still needs people to be in the same “place” at the same time. Not as strongly as video, but the expectation people generally have are responses will be within minutes. The nature of group chat means the conversation will have moved on if that’s not the case. **Jeremy:** I personally work from our Nottingham office most days but many of my stakeholders either work from other offices or from home. I think the main challenge with distributed team – and this is going to sound obvious – is that it makes communication at all levels more difficult. When you are in the same office, it’s easy to catch-up informally or to book a meeting room with a whiteboard to do a brainstorming session. When one of you works remotely you need to rely on technology more which is why we use tools like Slack, Zoom, and Notion to keep communication channels as open as possible. I have found that you need to be more careful when communicating with remote team members in writing through a messaging tool like Slack. Your tone of voice doesn’t always come through which can create misunderstandings. At Cronofy we’ve found that encouraging the use of video conferencing tools like Zoom really helps. **Kristina:** Knowing who’s where and when. Since a lot of people travel, it can be difficult to keep up with where everyone is and when they’ll be around. This then makes communication more of a challenge, particularly if someone is in a different time zone for a few days. The software we use is therefore crucial to ensuring that everyone communicates effectively. You also have to be more mindful of *how* you write something, as written communication is rife for misunderstanding. This is when ensuring that you write clearly and concisely is imperative. **Laura:** As a relatively new team member I worried that it would take months to get to know everyone as people are so dispersed. but this hasn’t been the case. The retreat in Mallorca, where everyone was together for several days, certainly fast-tracked this process but it’s also just obvious that everyone makes the effort to be themselves and to include and consult with all members of the team. It doesn’t feel like we are all working separately as we are all in regular communication. I have to work closely with the sales team and making sure that I’m with them in the London office once a week has been transformational to my learning and forming a relationship with them. **Tom:** I’m tempted to say that the biggest challenge that we face is a social one, but that’s never actually been an issue here at Cronofy. Because we have regular in-person meetups and there’s a “remote first” attitude across the whole organization, the “sense of team” has always been strong. In reality, the biggest challenge is the lack of a universal “sarcasm” punctuation mark. Tone can be really hard to judge when you mostly interact via text, so you have to think carefully about how you phrase things. Cronofy’s banter game is strong, though, so I think we’re all managing it well. ### What one collaboration tool could you not live without? **Garry:** There’s not really one, but I can narrow it down to two: - File sharing – if you’re not in the same office you have to be able to look at the same thing, even with a basic tool you’d be able to share documents, source code, etc. We use Notion, Dropbox, and Github as specialist tools for this purpose. - Video conferencing – video is just so much better than voice alone, so this would trump that, and I’ve gone into the pitfalls of text. We use Zoom for this. **Jeremy:** Slack seems the obvious choice here as it is the messaging tool we use everyday. And thanks to the Zoom integration I don’t even have to leave Slack to start a video call. However, I’d say that the most important collaboration tool for me and my team is Notion. It is a brilliant tool that allows us to keep all our documents in one place and to manage projects easily with task boards and to-do list. We use it to manage our daily tasks and to run our weekly stand-ups smoothly, even with remote colleagues. It also has a desktop version which is ideal to work offline when traveling (I don’t get any commissions on their sales I promise)! **Kristina:** Calendars. We can schedule meetings with each other, share our availability with team members, and also include topics we need to discuss in calendar notes. They also make it easier for us to collaborate with people outside of the company. It’s also useful when our calendars connect with the software we use such as Slack and Zoom. We can schedule meetings with each other without flitting between multiple programs. **Laura:** Having a centralized tool like Notion means that all information is stored in one place and we can collaborate easily on things like copy, or see what each other is working on. It’s also been invaluable for me in the learning phase of my onboarding. The Charlie HR integration with Slack lets us all know if someone is sick or has time booked off so there is never any confusion about who is available. Having a centralized tool like Notion means that all information is stored in one place and we can collaborate easily. **Tom:** Slack and Zoom and (shudder) email are all essential tools for remote working, but for me the tool that truly enables collaboration is GIT. Solid version control is a key part of any code-based workflow, but we literally could not be as effective team without being able to branch and merge our code. It allows us to work independently and safely combine all our efforts. As a bonus, the ability to review works-in-progress and collaborate on the same code at the same time makes all our work better. ### What are the most important things you need to be successful working remotely or with remote colleagues? **Garry:** A stable, fast internet connection and a decent laptop are must-haves. You’re going to need to stream video and move files around. On a personal level you need to be self-organized and -driven. There’s not someone looking over your shoulder so you need to look over your own and keep yourself honest. You also need to be self-aware to realize when you need to ask for help, and confident or humble enough to do it. > **"You need to be self-aware to realise when you need to ask for help, and confident or humble enough to do it."** Garry Shutler, CTO and Co-founder ‍ **Jeremy:** I believe the most important principle to live by in a distributed team is “do not cut corners”! It’s true in every aspect of our work days. Make the time to have a video conversation instead of just sending an email or message on Slack. Make the time to have a video conversation instead of just sending an email or message on Slack. Feedback and comments delivered face-to-face are always better received and more constructive because tone-of-voice and body language are key elements to human communication. It also applies to the technology stack of the company. Invest in the tools that your team need to communicate efficiently across multiple locations. Slack and Zoom I have mentioned before but the hardware is important too. A good pair of headphones and a quality microphone can make a world of difference and help everyone focus on what matters: the conversations. **Kristina:** A decent laptop. Mine broke the other day, and I was completely lost without it. A laptop is what makes your world go around when you work remotely, so one that does what it needs to do is imperative. It’s the glue that holds everything you do together, because without it all the tools you need are completely useless. A laptop is what makes your world go around when you work remotely. **Laura:** Having visibility and transparency on each others’ calendar and schedule is vital. I’ve worked in places in the past where team members, particularly senior managers and directors don’t allow access, even for ‘free’ and ‘busy’ and this can make booking time in to work on projects or meet incredibly difficult. At Cronofy this isn’t the case: everyone makes a concerted effort to communicate and share as many details of their plans and working day as possible. If someone isn’t going to be based where they usually are, or is working from home, it’s almost always in the calendar. > **"Remote working lives or dies by the attitude of the whole team."** Tom Hazeldine, Senior Developer ‍ **Tom:** In my opinion, remote working lives or dies by the attitude of the whole team. Complete buy-in is by far the most important thing. What makes our experience at Cronofy so successful is that even though some of the team are co-located some of the time, everyone is committed to a “remote first” style of working. Those of us who are remote for the majority of the time never experience office FOMO because the office-based team make the extra effort to keep us in the loop. Our water-cooler is in the cloud, and I feel like I know my remote teammates far better than people I’ve shared a desk with in the past. ## Conclusion There you have it! Effective communication – and the tools that enable it – are paramount to the success of a remote team. This includes the right software *and* the right hardware. A great laptop, reliable interview, decent headphones, and a good microphone help to ensure you communicate effectively with colleagues. Software is also important. It should do the job you need from it and evolve as you do. Collaboration tools like Notion make a huge difference to our experience at Cronofy. Being mindful of how you use language when writing and speaking is also important when you work remotely. Context is often lost when you’re not dealing with someone in-person, therefore thinking before you type or speak ensures that the right message gets across. What are your tips for remote working? [Let us know what you think over on Twitter!](https://twitter.com/cronofy) --- # Embed meeting capabilities into your CRM Use our API and let users schedule meetings, record calls, generate AI summaries, and trigger follow-up actions ## Embed meeting scheduling, recording and transcription into your CRM Let users schedule meetings, record calls, generate AI summaries, and trigger follow-up actions. Skip building or maintaining complex calendar and conferencing integrations yourself. Focus on delivering the AI features that matter. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/customer-relationship-management#8d137a7e9f1b7dbeadf50fc8890f91cb) [Talk to a human](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/customer-relationship-management#8d137a7e9f1b7dbeadf50fc8890f91cb) ## The meeting layer your CRM is missing From schedulers to note-taking apps, external tools fragment workflows and slow reps down. Cronofy brings meetings back into your CRM to keep deals moving. ## Let reps book meetings in seconds Deals stall while reps chase availability, manage time zones, and send reminders manually. Cronofy automates meeting scheduling for your users. Build custom booking flows with our API, or use our MCP server for agentic workflows. Meetings get booked faster and reps stay focused on selling. [Learn more](/developer/product-builders-old) > Scheduling sales meetings with external calendars takes 15 minutes. With our system and the Cronofy integration, the calendars are linked. It takes five seconds, so you save 15 minutes per meeting booked. If you have a hundred agents, you can quickly calculate the amount of time saved. It’s a big advantage. — Jouko Koskinen, CEO, Smindle ## Capture calls and provide AI summaries If deal notes and call summaries live in external tools, your platform can't act on what’s discussed. Meeting Agents capture, transcribe, and summarize sales conversations automatically. Reps skip the note-taking. Your platform unlocks the data to auto-populate deal notes, trigger follow-ups, and guide next steps. [Learn more](/developer/meeting-agents) ## Integrate Cronofy your way Pick what fits your needs, or combine approaches as you scale. ### White-label API For teams who need complete flexibility. Build custom workflows and UX with our API, designed for deep integrations where every detail matters. --- ### Embedded Scheduler For teams who want to launch even faster, drop booking links into your product with a pre-built UI and minimal setup. --- ### AI-native Scheduling For AI-powered apps. Let agents handle scheduling through our MCP server. Perfect for conversational interfaces and agentic workflows. ## Why product teams choose Cronofy Time to value ## Ship meeting capabilities in weeks Building in-house means months lost to timezone logic, conferencing setup, and calendar edge cases. Cronofy's pre-built meeting and scheduling infrastructure gets you live faster. Skip the maintenance and focus on what sets your product apart. Differentiate your product ## Deliver the experience your users now expect Your users want faster workflows and visibility. Competitors are already embedding agentic scheduling and AI-powered meeting capture. Cronofy helps you keep pace. Automate scheduling, capture meeting data, and trigger next steps, all without users leaving your CRM. Boost stickiness ## Make your CRM the place where work gets done Broken scheduling pushes reps back to email. Missing notes push them to third-party tools. Every gap in your CRM becomes a churn risk. Cronofy embeds reliable meeting workflows into your CRM, reducing drop-off, boosting adoption, and keeping users in flow. Made in Europe ## Build trust and unlock regulated markets Meeting data demands serious security. That's why Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001/27701/27018 certified. Six regional data centers give you full control over data residency. Pass security reviews easier and win enterprise deals quicker. ## Ready to add meeting capabilities to your CRM? After submitting the form, you'll be able to book time with a member of our team. In a 30 minute call, we'll walk through your specific use case, show relevant API flows and integration examples, and answer any technical or product questions you have. ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- # Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. **Want the TL;DR? Summarize this post with:** - [ChatGPT](https://chat.openai.com/?q=Read+Summarize+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/should-you-build-or-buy-scheduling-infrastructure) - [Perplexity](https://www.perplexity.ai/search/new?q=Provide+a+comprehensive+summary+of+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/should-you-build-or-buy-scheduling-infrastructure) - [Claude](https://claude.ai/new?q=Read+and+summarize+the+content+at+https://www.cronofy.com/blog/should-you-build-or-buy-scheduling-infrastructure) On the surface, building your own in-app scheduling solution might seem like the most cost effective approach. But once you’ve set up your first calendar integration, then the second, and then the third, all before you’ve even considered how you’re going to manage availability or time zone logic, you’ll likely start to hit snags. Let’s face it, you wouldn’t try to rebuild Stripe for your payments, so why try and rebuild scheduling infrastructure for your application? In the case of [Heal.me](http://Heal.me), they had that exact realization - “**I came across Cronofy’s calendar synchronization API and thought - this is wild, we’re trying to do all of this ourselves, when there’s a tool that does this for us.”** Get the take of Cronofy CEO and Co-founder Adam, on why more companies are opting to buy below: ### Build or Buy Calendar Integrations? Duration: 01:00 ## The Complexities of Building your own Scheduling Software If you opt to build scheduling infrastructure yourself, it’s important to understand the operational burden involved - it’s not just a matter of building a few calendar integrations and forgetting about them. If you're going down the building route, here are a few pointers to make sure you’re creating a scheduling flow that works for your users. ## Allowing users to reschedule or cancel appointments without manual intervention Ensuring appointment changes are automatically updated across all parties calendars without creating confusing for your teams and users requires a lot of time figuring out logic and error handling. Make sure you have this working reliably across all use cases and avoid the need for manual intervention to make sure the process is as smooth as possible. ## **Keeping your application synced with users’ calendars in real-time** Ensuring real-time sync across multiple calendar providers is technically demanding for your dev team, especially if your users are wanting to sync their work, personal and other calendars to show their real-time availability. Make sure you’ve considered how to handle sync errors or delays, as any inconsistency between your application and users’ calendars can lead to missed opportunities and frustrated customers. ## Automatically detecting and adjusting timezones Time zone management is one of the most error-prone aspects of scheduling. Get your time zone logic right from the start, as even small mistakes can lead to double bookings or missed meetings. ## **Sending calendar invites and appointment reminders** Automating invites and reminders that work reliably across all calendar providers is one of the key aspects of a smooth scheduling flow, so make sure your booking system does so as expected and prevent important slots getting missed. ## **Providing an intuitive booking experience** While all the technical aspects are important, consider the user experience as well. Test the usability of your booking flow and ensure it integrates seamlessly with your app’s existing UI and UX. Keep in mind that building and maintaining these features requires continuous development effort, often taking valuable time away from other critical tasks. Before Heal.me realized Cronofy could solve their scheduling challenges, they spent a lot of time fixing bugs and not enough time building the features that would set their platform apart - **“Wasting time on calendar bugs becomes an annoyance when we have critical features that we need to build and get out. It makes sense to hand this over to somebody that specializes in it, rather than hire fifteen developers to focus on all the calendar integrations.”** ## Is Buying Scheduling Software the Smarter Choice? Since switching to Cronofy, our customers have seen significant operational benefits - it’s these operational gains that can make all the difference when you're considering building a solution in-house or opting for a third-party provider. ## **Focus on features, not scheduling infrastructure** Think of scheduling like a commodity item. It’s necessary, but it’s never going to be a core differentiator for your product or service. By buying scheduling software, you can offload this functionality to experts and allow your product team to focus on features that drive innovation and growth. [Doctor Anytime](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/real-time-calendar-sync-telehealth), a European-based healthcare marketplace, saw the decision to buy scheduling software pay off, allowing them to focus on enhancing the patient and user experience. As they put it, "**We didn’t want doctors’ calendars to be our primary focus. Thanks to this integration, our engineering team is saving time and focusing on what really matters for us – the patient and user experience challenge. We’ve reduced user friction and increased the quality of our product."** This shift in focus has allowed their team to innovate and deliver higher-quality experiences without getting bogged down in scheduling complexities. ## **Cut costs and streamline operations** Developing and maintaining an in-house scheduling solution is not only resource-intensive but also costly in terms of both time and money. From ensuring the system stays up-to-date with multiple calendar integrations to handling issues like time zone management and conflict resolution, these ongoing operational tasks can quickly drain your team's resources. By integrating a third-party solution, you can eliminate the need for a dedicated team to manage and maintain the system, reducing long-term costs associated with support, updates, and troubleshooting. ## Why Buying Scheduling Software Makes Sense for Your Business When it comes to scheduling, the decision to build or buy is more than just a technical choice - it’s an operational one. While building your own solution might seem like a cost-effective approach at first, the hidden complexities and ongoing maintenance required can quickly turn into a drain on your resources. By choosing a third-party scheduling API like Cronofy, you not only save time and money but also free up your team to focus on what truly matters: building innovative features that drive your product forward. The operational gains are clear - so why not hand off the complexity of scheduling to the specialists and focus on scaling your business? You can learn more about integrating Cronofy's APIs [here](https://www.cronofy.com/developer). ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### How doctoranytime Transformed Telehealth Booking with Real-Time Calendar Sync Doctoranytime is a European-based healthcare marketplace, allowing patients to find and book appointments with the best doctor for them using Cronofy's White Label API. We speak to their Head of Growth to see how this has transformed their platform. Case Study --- ### How did Mercu create a scheduling experience on WhatsApp with Cronofy's API? Video 01:08 --- # How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. > Within months of going live with Cronofy, what took us 6 days to schedule an interview, now has a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise Success for Wise **6 days to 90 minutes** Getting interviews booked in calendars now happening in minutes, not days **Manual scheduling burden eliminated** Recruiters now focusing on assembling the right team to pursue a $10 trillion opportunity **Competitive edge** Hiring candidates before the competition by completing interviews in 6 days - the time they used to take just to schedule ## The problem: # Time-consuming manual scheduling holding recruiters back at a critical hiring peak [Wise](www.wise.com), the global technology company, has been building the best way to move and manage the world’s money since 2011. With Wise Account and Wise Business, people and businesses can hold over 40 currencies, move money between countries, and spend money abroad. Large companies and banks use Wise technology too, building an entirely new network for money globally. The team now sits at 5,500 people spread across offices globally. Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation at Wise, tells us the story of how the company has transformed in the past five and a half years. The scale of the opportunity puts the company’s exponential growth into perspective – the market size of money moved across borders sits at $1 trillion for personal customers, with the figures rising to $10 trillion for SMBs. “Banks charge quite a large amount in hidden fees, and we’re trying to get rid of that,” explains Mark. > Having the growth that we’ve had, and the markets that we’re looking to go after, we need to make sure we’ve got the right people in the right roles, at the right time. The recruitment team has always been central to that, and their goal is to attract and hire talented people around the world to achieve our vision, which is money without borders. With the size of the challenge on their hands, it was paramount for Wise to scale their team – this meant pursuing the right candidates by giving them the exceptional experience they deserved. Streamlining the traditionally time-consuming interview scheduling process sat at the heart of this goal. ## The solution: # Delivering irresistible experiences to every candidate with seamless scheduling “We approach our recruitment mission through three key pillars,” contextualizes Mark. “First, to create an irresistible recruitment experience not just for candidates, but for hiring managers too. Second, building skills for the future, and third, to optimize our ways of working.” With this in mind, Wise chose Cronofy to power their interview scheduling capabilities, enabling Wise to recruit exceptional talent to build the future of their company. To Wise, providing an outstanding experience is an actuality embedded throughout both the business and the product. “One of our greatest growth levers is word of mouth”, explains Mark. “Our customers are truly advocates of Wise, and we want our candidates to feel the same about our recruitment process.” This is essential for both user and employee advocacy, explains Mark, and it starts at the interview process. “We don’t want to just give a good experience. It needs to be an irresistible one.” Interview processes begin by aligning the hiring team on expectations, as well as “setting the criteria we’re going to be looking for in these interviews, and how these attributes fit into our bigger cultural piece at Wise.” With a mixture of both online and in-person processes, scheduling these meetings as seamlessly as possible is a key priority. Recruiters now use [Cronofy to schedule within SmartRecruiters](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-smartrecruiters), generating self-scheduling links for candidates. This empowers candidates to book any type of interview directly instead of first needing to request anyone’s availability, regardless if the interviewer comes from an interviewer pool. Once the candidates choose their interview slot, this will be reflected back in their profile on SmartRecruiters. > Initially, when we first looked for a vendor, it was because volumes were growing, the administrative burden started to become a bit too much for recruiters. We want them to focus on recruiting, not doing the administrative part of scheduling interviews. We then started to scale a small coordination team to do this. But again, the burden just grew too big. When hiring large volumes, it's just not a good use of people's time when there's tools and technology out there that can do that hard work for you. The decision to automate interview scheduling came instinctively after manual scheduling began to impede the company’s desire to scale. ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Duration: 0:46 ## The result: # Hiring exceptional candidates before competitors thanks to well-placed automation Wise was able to bring the vision they wanted to life knowing they had Cronofy’s support team to lean on. “From day one, what stood out after we selected Cronofy was the strong support. It has been some of the best we've experienced in terms of understanding our challenges and the kinds of requests we were making, all the way to slight adjustments in the product or how things worked,” shared Mark. The impact of implementing automated scheduling embedded within the company’s applicant tracking system has meant booking interviews is now seamless and streamlined, allowing recruiters to move with greater velocity than ever before. > Within just a few months, we’ve gone from taking around 6 days to schedule an interview, to now having a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes. This unparalleled acceleration was possible thanks to the eradication of time-consuming manual scheduling tasks. Wise are able to move quality candidates through the process much faster than before, reducing the risk of dropouts. “Interviews are now happening within 5-6 days of the interview request being sent. That used to be how long it took us to schedule, so we're moving much quicker – we're shaving a week off of the processes that we're running.” In a hiring world where delays and email back-and-forth are the unfortunate norm, candidates are sharing their excitement over the newly streamlined process too. > Since implementing Cronofy, we've actually had candidates give unprompted feedback to us on how easy and smooth the scheduling of interviews was. We’ve never had that before. Team expansion is a “constant evolution” for Wise; the company is continuing its focus on making irresistible experience a reality by “creating exceptional moments throughout the hiring process that the candidates will remember, and feel that they've been treated really well.” Honing in on moving candidates through the process with efficiency and personal touch, Wise aims to create memorable moments that outshine the unavoidable minutiae of hiring – the inevitable rejections, and the times where candidates may have to wait longer for a decision. For Wise, using the right tools to augment their talent teams to do what they love has proved a winning formula. “You’re not going to create irresistible experiences purely through technology and automation,” explains Mark. “You’re going to need those personal elements.” By removing the administrative burden of scheduling, Wise is now empowering their talent team to focus on delivering human touch and personalization at the moments candidates want them most. [Learn more about Scheduler for Recruiters](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) Unlock high-performance hiring for your team ## Book Demo ### Hiring coordinator now schedules interviews in 30 seconds from within BambooHR See how a hiring coordinator from ONWA now schedules interviews in 30 seconds using Cronofy within BambooHR, and learn more about how she was able to upskill thanks to claiming back hours from manual administrative work. Case Study --- ### Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Blog Post 2024-06-19T12:00:32.123Z --- ### Rethinking Recruitment: More Coordinators Don't Always Improve Time-to-Hire There are many scenarios where attaching people to problems creates bottlenecks, scaling up coordinator teams during high-volume hiring seasons is one. We look at why this is no longer an efficient approach and what modern teams do differently today. Blog Post 2024-12-18T09:00:00.000Z --- # Live Travel Itineraries ## Live Travel Itineraries ## Notify customers of changes as they happen When trains are delayed, flights are rescheduled or buses are running late, it can be difficult to inform all your customers. Not only that, but it takes time, and if it’s a last-minute change, it’s almost impossible to tell everyone before it’s too late. With Cronofy, you can notify your customers of any changes as they happen. Our API updates in real-time, so instead of making countless phone calls, just a few clicks can notify all your customers about any changes, whether it’s delays or redirections. ## All the information, all in one place There’s lots of important information to factor in when travelling. Juggling booking references, hotel details, taxi numbers and more can lead to huge piles of paperwork that often get lost in the bottom of bags. With the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/), everything a customer needs to know can be added to the calendar event. There’s no more digging through bags looking for paperwork. As most calendars can be accessed offline, users don’t even need to worry about having internet access when they travel. ## Arrive in plenty of time When customers have a flight or a train to catch, it’s crucial that they arrive on time, but no one can guarantee how bad traffic will be. Our [geolocation feature](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/) can be set up to notify customers when it’s time to leave. It works with the built-in GPS from their smartphone to calculate how long it will take them to get to their destination with current traffic. ## Connect to multiple calendar softwares Travel can be stressful whether you do it all the time or hardly ever. Ensuring that every customer has up-to-date information in their calendars can be difficult when there are multiple calendar platforms out there. Cronofy works with all the popular calendar services including Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar. Even if users with a shared booking use different calendar services, updates will sync across to everyone. --- # Embed complete meeting workflows into your product Let users schedule meetings, record calls, generate AI summaries, and trigger follow-up actions ## Let users find time, book meetings, capture outcomes, and trigger follow-ups. Your users' most important workflows start with finding time to meet. Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure behind those workflows, controlling availability, coordinating scheduling, and unlocking what those meetings reveal, so you can power it all inside your product without the complexity of building it yourself. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ![Graphic displaying three of Cronofy's capabilities: Availability, full scheduling lifecycle and meeting intelligence being made possible by Cronofy's temporal infrastructure including Agents, Systems and Teams.]() Powering time for over 180,000 companies ## Make your SaaS product the place meetings, decisions and actions live Meetings are where decisions get made and outcomes are recorded, but building the infrastructure to manage them reliably inside your product is complex. Teams spend months trying to piece it together themselves, only to create fragile integrations that break as platforms change and automation grows. Cronofy provides the infrastructure layer that keeps meeting workflows reliable and embedded in your product. ## Unify and control user availability Get a real-time view of your user's availability across calendars, with full control over working hours, buffers, and booking rules. Always show the right time to meet, so your users and agents can coordinate time without conflicts or delays. [See how we unify availability](/developer/capability/control-availability) ## Power the full scheduling lifecycle Handle booking, rescheduling, cancellations, conferencing, and meeting capture with one system. Keep meetings accurate as they change, without manual coordination or broken workflows - whether they're triggered by a person or an agent. [See how we power the full lifecycle](/developer/capability/full-scheduling-lifecycle) ## Capture meeting intelligence Capture what happens in every meeting and turn it into structured data your product can act on. Trigger follow-ups, updates, and agentic workflows automatically, based on real meeting outcomes. [See how we capture meeting intelligence](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## Replace fragmented integrations with one system Cronofy's Temporal Infrastructure is the foundation for every meeting workflow, bringing together availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence in one modular system. At the core is the Temporal Grid, built on decades of experience handling the hardest parts of meeting workflows. It unifies calendars, availability, conferencing, meeting data, and compliance, so the complexity of building that infrastructure yourself disappears and every capability you build feels simple and intuitive from day one. With everything running on the same grid, you can build what you need today and expand into richer workflows and agentic automation over time on the same foundation. **Compliance built-in** GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO certified. Unlock regulated markets while building trust. **Regional deployments** Data stays in-region with data centres across the US, UK, EU, and APAC. **Reliability at scale** High-availability infrastructure with 99.99% uptime, even when providers fail. ## Connecting agents, systems and teams Agents act, systems record, and teams decide. Serving all three typically means piecing together separate tools and managing the gaps between them. Cronofy's temporal infrastructure connects all three, so there's one foundation to build on and nothing left unconnected. ### Agents Agents get the availability and meeting context they need to act autonomously. --- ### Systems Every booking and meeting outcome feeds back into the system where work happens. --- ### Teams Freed from coordination, teams focus on decisions, not admin surrounding meeting workflows. ## Choose an integration path With human support and clear developer documentation, get started quickly with the best option for your platform and combine approaches as you scale. ### Need full control? Build custom meeting workflows with our API. --- ### Want to launch fast? Embed scheduling with a pre-built UI. --- ### Building with Agents? Handle agentic workflows with our MCP server. > Implementing Cronofy was painless – they provide a simple and clear API that allowed me to have the integration live to customers in less than one month. — Drew Zader, Senior Software Engineer, Handshake ## Launch faster and build a product users stick with From startups to enterprise platforms, teams use Cronofy to launch both embedded and agentic experiences faster. ### Ship features in days, not weeks Skip the time and cost of building them yourself, while your team stays focused on what makes your product different. --- ### Power experiences users trust Handle edge cases and provider downtime automatically, so workflows continue to run smoothly as your product scales. --- ### Keep users in the flow of work Ship experiences that keep users inside your platform, not bouncing between external tools, so workflows stay connected and consistent. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ## Powering SaaS applications of all sizes ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- # Offering scheduling as a service One of the Cronofy API’s most popular uses is enabling companies to provide great scheduling services. For example, if your business involves your customers or staff having to arrange meetings, appointments, events, or activities of any kind, making your scheduling service as streamlined as possible is essential. One of the Cronofy API’s most popular uses is enabling companies to provide great scheduling services. For example, if your business involves your customers or staff having to arrange meetings, appointments, events, or activities of any kind, making your scheduling service as streamlined as possible is essential. One of the Cronofy API’s most popular uses is enabling companies to provide great scheduling services. For example, if your business involves your customers or staff having to arrange meetings, appointments, events, or activities of any kind, making your scheduling service as streamlined as possible is essential. There are two key elements at play here: - The straightforward implementation and easy maintenance coveted by developers. - The flexibility, reliability, ease of use, and privacy demands of end users. Unfortunately, these rarely co-exist; there’s almost always some degree of compromise required. If you’re manually integrating with calendar APIs, then making your scheduling service flexible by allowing end users to connect their choice of (Google, Exchange, Outlook, Office 365 or Apple iCloud) calendars means compromising on developer sanity and adding to your business costs. The good news is that it’s possible to give everyone what they want and need from their calendar integration by using the Cronofy API. The end result is that you provide online scheduling that your customers love to use and your developers love to work with. ## What to consider The specifics will come down to your own business, needs, and customers, but here’s a quick checklist of questions you may want to answer before the project starts: - How will my staff/customers use this feature? - What do my staff/customers want to achieve from using it? - What do they expect to be able to do? - What problems does it solve for them? - What business challenges/aims does it meet? - What do my developers want, need, and expect from this? - How will this be implemented? - How will it change existing services? - How will it be maintained? - How will it look (UX, integration with other products/services/software etc.)? ## How it works in practice By implementing the Cronofy API for your scheduling, you can offer your customers accurate calendar information with automatic, dependable syncing and better privacy straight out of the box. They can use whichever calendar provider they prefer, instantly making your offering better than your competitors’. Cronofy is also versatile enough to be integrated with your existing services and software for a seamless experience all round. We have several clients who use Cronofy to handle the scheduling aspect of their service, including CoachLogix, a business coaching platform that helps coaches to manage their time successfully. Their scheduling service uses Cronofy to read in live availability dates and push appointments out the moment they’re made, eliminating the chance of double booking and the need for manual user management. CoachLogix’s other Cronofy-powered benefits include: - Reliable real-time availability information, meaning vacant slots and scheduled bookings are always up to date. - Controlled calendar sharing, so user privacy is maintained. - One-stop easy booking management for multiple customers. - User-centric workflow: there’s no need for users to change how they work or the calendar provider they use. - Automatic scheduling efficiency, with no need for manual schedule management such as editing or deleting bookings. The end result is a fully functional scheduling system that works seamlessly as part of CoachLogix’s dependable time management service. It’s a win-win situation for both staff and customers. #### If you’d like to find out more about how you can use Cronofy for your business, [contact us today](https://www.cronofy.com/developer)! ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # How Calendar Sync Can Transform Patient Scheduling Software Going to the hospital or doctor’s office is a stressful experience for patients. Worries about health and concerns about getting the right support is enough to make anyone nervous. Making it hard to book or change appointment only add more stress. And even after the appointments has taken place, patients can need help with their treatment or require follow-ups appointments. Going to the hospital or doctor’s office is a stressful experience for patients. Worries about health and concerns about getting the right support is enough to make anyone nervous. Making it hard to book or change appointment only add more stress. And even after the appointments has taken place, patients can need help with their treatment or require follow-ups appointments. Going to the hospital or doctor’s office is a stressful experience for patients. Worries about health and concerns about getting the right support is enough to make anyone nervous. Making it hard to book or change appointment only add more stress. And even after the appointments has taken place, patients can need help with their treatment or require follow-ups appointments. There are even more challenges in hospitals where beds can be hard to find and appointments may need to be rescheduled at a moment’s notice due to emergencies. Healthcare is a unique industry where the health of patients and the service provided always need to take precedence over financial considerations. In some countries, healthcare services are publicly funded. In others, they’re private. Like other businesses, hospitals and doctor’s offices need to differentiate themselves from the competition. Offering patients the best possible experience whilst managing the costs of running a business is the key to success. With staff shortages and the rising costs of care, it can be difficult to provide the experience patients expect. These are areas where technology – and specifically, calendar sync – can help. Few need harmonious scheduling more than healthcare. Connecting the schedules of patients and healthcare professionals allows for better communication and an improved patient experience. ## Straightforward Appointment Booking The [schedule of a doctor’s office](https://www.cronofy.com/api-for-healthcare) can be a nightmare to manage. Everyday, each doctor has dozens of appointments booked. There will be cancellations that open a last-minute spot. Ideally, these time slots need filling to provide a better service and use everyone’s time efficiently. With real-time calendar sync, patients can access the calendar of the doctor they want to see via the booking interface of the Patient Scheduling Software. They can then pick the timeslot they want. If a timeslot becomes available, someone else can book it as soon as the doctor’s calendar updates. This helps making sure that patients can get the appointment time that works best for them while optimizing the office’s schedule. Used with real-time availability features, it can help to automate the entire appointment booking process. When it comes to referrals, patients can be waiting weeks or months to see a specialist. Online bookings based on real-time availability means that these appointments can be booked on the same day. This helps to improve the service and reduces waiting times. Cronofy’s Smart Invites can be used to take this even further. Smart Invites replace classic ICS files and allow the sender to track what happens to the invitations they send. They can see if calendar events are accepted, declined or moved. Admin staff can then follow-up with patients who haven’t accepted an invitation to check if they intend to come. This can contribute to prevent no-shows. ## Reduce no-shows with Appointment Reminders One of the main challenges in the healthcare industry right now is the rising cost of missed appointments. It’s especially critical in countries like the UK where the National Health Service (NHS) is funded by taxpayers. With diminishing budgets, every pound really matters when it comes to providing the best quality of service. Reports from 2016 have shown that the 8 million [missed appointments cost the NHS £1 billion](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nhs-appointment-no-shows-waste-time-costs-1-billion-health-service-nurse-doctors-gps-a8137686.html) last year. For a country as small as the UK, this number is huge. Money like this could be used to fund thousands of surgeries or pay for more staff and beds. This is such an issue that the NHS has now decided to tell patients who don’t show up [how much they’ve cost the NHS](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33375976). In countries like the US, it can be a cost paid directly by patients. Reminding them of their upcoming appointments is an important part of the service. This is where using calendar sync to connect patients’ schedules to Patient Scheduling Software can be transformative. Any healthcare booking software will be able to return, in real-time, the availability of doctors. With calendar sync, the appointment can be added to the patient’s and hospital or doctor office’s calendars. This then enables [appointment reminders](https://www.cronofy.com/api-for-healthcare) to be sent to reduce the number of no-shows. An online booking platform can then add events to the calendar of the patient once the appointment is booked. It’s more efficient that than just sending an email confirmation or even showing a popup window. This in return means that healthcare professionals can take advantage of smartphone technology. Push notifications can be used as reminders instead of text messages. And best of all? They’re free! ## Providing better patient care The patient experience doesn’t stop once they’ve booked an appointment. Providing patients with assistance long after they’ve left the office, surgery, or hospital goes a long way. One of the obstacles on the path to recovery can be adhering to a treatment plan. It’s hard to introduce new elements into someone’s routine. If a patient needs to check their glucose level or remember to take a pill in the middle of the day, a reminder can help them stick to their prescription. This has previously been done via text message, but calendar sync is a cheaper alternative for you to add to your software. Calendar sync can take things even further. Hospitals can use software to create a treatment schedule, then sync it with the patient’s calendar. Reminders can then be sent a few minutes before the treatment needs to be administered. It could even be taken further by asking the patient to confirm each event, ensuring that treatments don’t get missed. A recent trend is also to enroll patients in lifestyle coaching programs to help them change their habits and stay healthy. This can go from reminding them to exercise to recommending meals. Using technology such as smart speakers and virtual assistants could make notifications more impactful and increase the chances of a patient sticking to the plan. Using smart speakers and virtual speakers to help with treatment plans isn’t widespread yet, but it’s a trend that is worth monitoring going forward. ## Assisting staff with administrative tasks There are countless tasks that need to be carried out every day to ensure that hospitals and doctor’s offices run as smoothly as possible. This falls on the shoulders of the admin staff, who much track the availability of beds and help medical practitioners to keep on top of their schedules. As well as this, they’re also the first point of contact for many patients. Their days are busy and often stressful, and they get little thanks for the hard work that they do. But, using a patient administration software (PAS), many of the tasks that they do can be automated, giving them more time to focus on patient care. A PAS can be connected to medical practitioners’ calendars as well as to the schedules of bookable resources like beds. They can see, at-a-glance, who and what is free, and when. For example, managing the schedules of operating rooms is easier when staff can see their status for the day or week at a glance. This ensure minimal delays when a room is needed for an urgent operation. Other use cases can range from managing new patient registrations and scheduling their appointments, to helping doctors and nurses book training sessions and conferences. ## Get started now From Patient Scheduling Software to coaching applications, technology already helps healthcare professionals around the world to manage their activities and provide a better quality of care. For patients, calendar sync allows them to book their appointments online. This reduces the number of missed appointments and means they can get seen faster. Building calendar sync into patient management software eases some of the administrative challenges of the healthcare industry. Our Unified Calendar API works with all major calendar services so you can focus on building the best features for your users. Take a look at [our documentation](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/), [create your free account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer), and start building calendar integration into your healthcare software today. ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Inside Cronofy with Shannon Walker from the Engineering team Our latest instalment of interview series Inside Cronofy: with Shannon Walker, a Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering team! Our latest instalment of interview series Inside Cronofy: with Shannon Walker, a Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering team! *Welcome to the latest instalment in our ****Inside Cronofy: interview series**** where we sit down with members of the Cronofy team, to learn about the various projects they work on. Today we speak with Shannon Walker, Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering team!* ### So Shannon, please tell me about yourself and your role at Cronofy My current role at Cronofy is as a Senior Software Engineer. The bulk of my work lies mostly in the front end, and some of my responsibilities include designing and developing features, working on bug fixes, reviewing pull requests, writing documentation, things like that. I am looking to do more work that's a bit more full-stack as well because up until now, I've mostly only been in front-end. I'm looking to expand my skillset a little bit. ‍ ### Great, and how long have you been with Cronofy? I joined at the beginning of January this year, so going on almost seven months now! ‍ ### And what were you doing before you joined? Before I joined Cronofy, I was in a very similar role for a company that specialises in HR and payroll software. The project I was working on mostly in that role was converting their payroll software from a desktop application into a cloud based solution. ‍ ### Could you tell me about a project that you're working on right now? I'm working on a number of different projects right now, but the main one that I'm always focused on is to improve accessibility across all the different products that we have at Cronofy. One of the reasons I really enjoy this project is because I think improving and implementing good accessibility helps break down barriers for disabled users, but it also improves things for everybody. It's not just disabled users that you're making improvements for at the end of the day. ‍ ### Amazing. And so what is your role within this project? So this was a project that I kicked off myself when I joined Cronofy. I have the full support of the company to start it off, but accessibility is something that I'm really passionate about. I wanted to take charge and lead the project to implement the improvements. ‍ ### Okay, so who else is involved in this project? Pretty much the entire dev team! The reason I say that is, for example, one of the things that I've done so far in the project is implementing a basic accessibility auditing tool. What this tool does is on our local environments - it will highlight any accessibility violations into the console so any developer working on the website can see it. We're taking the approach of leaving things better than you found it. If anybody working in any area of the website spots an accessibility violation, it gets flagged and you can just fix it as part of the work that you're doing within that area. So implementing a tool like that takes the pressure off just one person and allows the entire team to have a hand in fixing and improving things. ‍ ### So why is this project important? Most people like to think of accessibility as only really applying to permanently disabled users. But really all it takes is one accident or a temporary medical issue for anyone to struggle with the same barriers and the same issues. The more we can do to lessen those barriers or reduce those difficulties, the better it's going to be for all our users. Really at the end of the day, it boils down to having empathy for your users. ‍ ### What is it that you're enjoying most about it then? Improving accessibility in a product that has already been so well-developed can be quite challenging. I've come across some interesting issues where I don't always know the best way to fix things. There's a lot of learning involved and I'm by no means an accessibility expert - which I'm hoping to change! I am studying for a qualification as a Web Accessibility Specialist, but there's just been a lot of very interesting problems that I've come across. On top of that I know that the work that I'm doing is helping to improve things for everyone, which is really satisfying! ‍ ### Is there anything else that you want to add about this project? Just the fact that it's really refreshing to work in a company that takes accessibility seriously. It's often the thing that gets put on the back burner in favor of feature developments and is often deprioritized unless you're reaching the very basic level of requirements that you legally have to. It's so refreshing to work in a company that actively wants to improve things fully and is giving me the capacity and the agency to do that. ‍ ### What do you enjoy about working at Cronofy? One of the things I honestly enjoy a lot about working at Cronofy is the culture. There is a very strong culture of trust and open communication working here. It's also a culture that is consistent across the business, which is something that is not always the case. I've often seen companies with different subcultures for different departments, whereas here, the culture is consistent for everyone. It's really nice to see that everyone is invested in improving things and everyone believes in the culture that we have here. ‍ ### Finally, what would you say to anyone who's considering applying for a role with us? In short, I would just say go for it. I actually hesitated applying to Cronofy because at the time we were only advertising for Senior Engineers, and I wasn't quite at that level. But the way that they were talking about the culture and the principles listed on the website was really appealing to me so I decided to just go for it and try anyway. You don't know till you ask! I think if you want to work in a company that has a great culture, that trusts their employees and genuinely cares about them, then I would definitely say apply.*‍* ‍ *We hope you enjoyed the interview and the insight into Cronofy's culture. Don't hesitate to head to our **[Careers page](https://www.cronofy.com/careers)** to see our current open positions or to submit your CV to our HR team.* --- # Candidate Expectations, Frustrations and Preferences Our expert panel explore exclusive insights and data on what candidates expect and want from the hiring process! **Let's explore exclusive insights and data on what candidates expect and want from the hiring process!** Each year we survey 6,500 candidates across the globe to understand their preferences and frustrations with the hiring journey. We aim to help recruiters improve their processes so they’re more efficient. It’s crucial to know what the candidate wants and expects from the hiring process to fill your roles. Join Hung Lee and a panel of expert guests as they dig into the insights for 2023, and how it compares to the last two years. Candidate expectations frustrations and preferences --- # Uncovering Scheduling Inefficiencies Discover how to cut interview scheduling from days to minutes, improve candidate experience, and gain a hiring edge with proven strategies and automation tools. Discover how to cut interview scheduling from days to minutes, improve candidate experience, and gain a hiring edge with proven strategies and automation tools. For most talent teams, scheduling feels like an unavoidable chore or an afterthought in an already packed hiring process. Yet coordinating interviews often eats up 4–6 hours per week on back-and-forth emails, calendar checks, and reschedules, creating a hidden cost that erodes recruiter bandwidth and drags out time-to-hire. Scheduling: The Quiet Bottleneck Despite its impact, scheduling rarely tops the list of priorities for improvement. Recruiters accept it as “just part of the job,” while hiring managers might assume someone else is handling the details. But the data tells a different story: - **[42%](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-deal-with-interview-scheduling-delays)** of candidates have abandoned a process because it took too long to book an interview. - **[36%](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-2024-out-now)** say they’ll wait a month or more before disengaging — a 12% jump year-over-year. - **[31%](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-2024-out-now)** report their first interview took 2–3 weeks just to schedule. When your talent team is juggling 20 interviews a week, these lags compound: you could be losing up to two full business days of candidate progress to nothing but calendar management. How Delays Turn into Lost Opportunities Every extra business day spent wrangling schedules is a window for competitors to swoop in. One of our customers, Wise, saw their time-to-schedule shrink from [6 days to a median of 90 minutes](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling) after automating interviews, turning a week-long bottleneck into near-instant booking. If you are still manually pinging calendars, you are handing the hiring advantage to faster-moving rivals. Mapping Your Scheduling Workflow To tackle this bottleneck, start by outlining each step in your current process: 1. Initiation: Who sends the first invitation? 1. Availability gathering: Email threads? Shared spreadsheets? 1. Confirmation: Is the meeting auto-booked or manually added? 1. Rescheduling: What triggers a restart of the cycle? Once mapped, identify where candidates and recruiters hit friction. Are slow email responses adding 24–48 hours? Do manual time-zone conversions introduce errors? What’s your average number of email threads per interview? Quick Wins and Long-Term Improvements **Quick Wins** - Standardize availability windows. Offer fixed slots (e.g. “Tues/Thurs, 2–4 pm”) instead of “What works for you?” - Use templated self-scheduling links. Embed them in your outreach so candidates book themselves without back-and-forth. **Long-Term Gains** - Adopt integrated scheduling tools. Solutions like [Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) pull live availability from your HRIS and ATS, collapsing invites into a single click. - Enable shared-stakeholder views. Let panel members see each other’s free slots at a glance, eliminating the need for email coordination. Measuring Success After rolling out improvements, track: - Time-to-confirmation (aim for under 2 hours) - Reschedule rate (target a sub-10% rate) Candidate satisfaction (use a 1–5 pulse survey; baseline with the [2024 Candidate Expectations Report](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-2024-out-now)) By shining a light on scheduling, you turn a hidden cost into a strategic advantage. Automating these steps not only accelerates your hiring timeline, as in Wise’s case where recruiters now book in 90 minutes instead of 6 days, but also frees your talent team to focus on relationship-building and candidate experience. Scheduling should not be “just the cost of doing business.” It should be your competitive differentiator. [Speak to a Scheduling Expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Cronofy and JobAdder Interview Scheduling Survey 2019 Results At Cronofy, we aim to help companies simplify the hiring process for everyone. We wanted a way to understand the pain points companies deal with when hiring so that we can better help them now and in the future. That's why we chose to work with JobAdder – one of the first customers to use our calendar sync API – by surveying 272 of their external recruiters about their experiences. JobAdder is a software company with the goal of making recruitment more accessible and intuitive. They seemed like the perfect partner for what we planned to do. At Cronofy, we aim to help companies simplify the hiring process for everyone. We wanted a way to understand the pain points companies deal with when hiring so that we can better help them now and in the future. That's why we chose to work with JobAdder – one of the first customers to use our calendar sync API – by surveying 272 of their external recruiters about their experiences. JobAdder is a software company with the goal of making recruitment more accessible and intuitive. They seemed like the perfect partner for what we planned to do. At Cronofy, we aim to help companies simplify the hiring process for everyone. We wanted a way to understand the pain points companies deal with when hiring so that we can better help them now and in the future. That's why we chose to work with JobAdder – one of the first customers to use our calendar sync API – by surveying 272 of their external recruiters about their experiences. [JobAdder](https://www.jobadder.com) is a software company with the goal of making recruitment more accessible and intuitive. They seemed like the perfect partner for what we planned to do. ## Key findings - **60%** of recruiters have to send 3 or more emails/make 3 or more phone calls to schedule an interview - **41%** take 3 or more days to schedule an interview - **26%** take 4 or more days to schedule an interview - **11%** take a full week or longer to schedule ## Time to schedule an interview Over two-thirds of respondents indicated that they spend more than a day scheduling an interview, while 10% take more than a full week! This raises the question: are candidates dropping off along the way? The longer the hiring process takes, the more frustrating it gets for the candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters involved. Candidates may have to take multiple times out of their working day to answer the phone or respond to emails, which can make it more obvious to current employers that they’re job hunting – something most people don’t want their current employers to know. Hiring managers’ days, meanwhile, are disrupted when they have to respond to emails or phone calls. If they wait to respond at a time that’s convenient, or if they only check their emails at certain times of the day, this can further hold up the hiring process for candidates and recruiters. This can mean that it takes almost 24 hours just to get a response to an email. Emails are also more likely to get lost in a sea of other emails, while voicemails aren’t always listened to. This isn't an ideal situation for anyone involved. ## Communication channels and time to hire Both of these results show why the interview scheduling process takes so long: recruiters have to send too many emails and make too many phone calls. The more people that are involved, the longer it takes. Candidates and employees don’t always see the emails right away, which can delay the process even further. Candidates are also traditionally offered only a handful of times to choose from. If they can’t make any of these times, the recruiter has to go back to the interview or interviewers to find alternatives. This can drag out the [interview scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/interview-scheduling/) process further. It’s a convoluted process that schedules interviews around interviewers, not candidates. Candidates that are applying for multiple vacancies will be more likely to choose the company that creates as frictionless a hiring process as possible. They’ll see this as a reflection of their company values and what life is like as an employee there. The more candidates that go through this process, the more likely the company is to receive negative reviews on sites like [Glassdoor](https://www.glassdoor.com) and suffer damage to their [employer brand](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-build-a-strong-employer-brand-image/). Future hiring processes will then struggle with fewer applicants, further increasing their time and cost to hire. Needing to take time out of their day to respond to emails or answer phone calls also interrupts interviewers’ days. If they spend 15 minutes on the phone or writing an email response, and they send three emails, that’s 45 minutes lost to interview scheduling for one person involved in the process to interview one person. If they interview five people for the role, they lose 225 minutes for every role they fill. If the interview panel contains more than one person – which our survey shows most interviews do – that’s 450 minutes lost to fill one role. This goes up the more candidates that are interviewed and the more interviews that are required. > If they spend 15 minutes on the phone or writing an email response, and they send three emails, that's 45 minutes lost to interview scheduling for one person. This interrupts the interviewer’s day and makes it harder for them to get back to their everyday tasks. When we’re interrupted, it can take us an average of [25 minutes to focus again](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html), which means that for the 45 minutes an interviewer spends responding to emails, they lose at least 65 minutes of productive time on top of the time they spend writing the email. This is a huge loss to businesses, particularly smaller ones that are short on team members and can’t afford to stretch their already thin resources any further. ## Number of interview panelists The survey shows that almost two thirds of companies have at least two people on an interview panel. While this can be a useful way to filter candidates and test their knowledge, the more people that are involved in the interview, the more complicated it becomes to schedule. They each have to take time out of their day to suggest times that they’re available to speak with candidates, and if none of these are compatible with their colleagues’ schedules, they have to check their schedules again. This might cause rescheduling issues for multiple parties. > Almost two thirds of companies have at least two people on an interview panel. Calendar sync means that interviewers don’t need to check their schedules and suggest times – their recruitment software can suggest times for them.If the software uses [Availability Rules](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/), they can even specify the times that they’d like to be available for interview so that interviews only occur during those hours.With [20% of candidates leaving within the first 45 days](https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/new-hire-turnover-rate), ensuring that the right person is offered the role is pivotal. Not doing so can mean that the company has to repeat the hiring process less than two months after having offered the role. This doubles their cost to hire, takes more time out of the hiring manager’s days, and can eat into employees’ time as they have to fill in for the vacant role. ## Candidate no-shows For every 10 interviews that are held, 20% of companies deal with a no-show rate of 20% or higher. This wastes both recruiters’ and interviewers’ times. Recruiters – and the companies they work with – need to get better at reminding candidates of when their interview is, whether that’s using a [Smart Invite](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/), email, or text message reminder. > 20% of companies suffer from a no-show rate of 20% or higher. If it’s complicated to cancel an interview, candidates are less likely to cancel. Recruiters therefore need to make it as easy as possible for candidates to cancel or reschedule their interview. This reduces the time wasted for recruiters and interviewers, giving them more time to work on finding the right person instead of wasting it waiting around for no one to show up. Fewer no-shows mean a faster time to hire and is a sign of a strong employer brand. ## Conclusion Recruiters have to spend too much time on basic admin tasks. They then have less time to help companies find the right person, while companies and candidates have to wait longer for responses. Improving the interview scheduling experience leads to a better experience for candidates, interviewers, and recruiters. When recruiters can share their availability with candidates and let them book an interview in seconds, it saves everyone time. These tools mean that they don’t have to take time out of their day to find times to meet with candidates; they don’t have to disrupt their day to schedule an interview at all. Over the course of a working year, this can save them days’ – or even weeks' – worth of time. Companies like JobAdder help recruiters save time so that they can spend more of it fostering relationships with companies and finding the perfect fit for their roles. Hiring managers, meanwhile, don’t need to worry about responding to emails imminently so that they don’t miss out on candidates, nor do they lose hours of time to scheduling interviews for every position they need to fill. Recruiters and interviewers have more time to spend on other tasks such as interview preparation. This means they’re more prepared when it’s time to interview, and so they’re more likely to ask the right qualifying questions to candidates. These can make a huge difference to if they get the answers they need from someone to decide if they’re the right fit for the role. Recruiters have more time to work with more candidates and businesses that are hiring, giving them the chance to earn more commission and help more candidates to find their dream role. Candidates, meanwhile, don’t have to wait by the phone or constantly refresh their emails. They can schedule their interview in their own time. This provides them with a better reflection of the company, making them more likely to accept the role if they’re offered it. Candidates that aren’t successful are more likely to have a positive view of the company, making them more likely to leave a positive review on sites like Glassdoor and reapply for future positions. It’s never been easier to add interview scheduling to your HR software. Cronofy provides all the tools you need. It works with all major calendar services, too, meaning that you don’t need to worry about any of your clients missing out from the benefits of interview scheduling. To find out more about how your customers could benefit from interview scheduling in your software, [contact us today](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo/). --- # Automate and Optimize: Best Practices for Managing Large Interviewer Pools Learn how to manage your interviewer pools and how to distribute workload fairly in the hiring process. Are you tired of the scheduling gymnastics that come with managing large interviewer pools? The constant back-and-forth, the endless calendar checks, the inevitable overload for some while others sit idle — sound familiar? Let’s explore how automating your interview scheduling can be a game-changer for your team. Managing large pools of interviewers is a complex task that can quickly become overwhelming, especially for companies hiring for technical roles. Juggling schedules and workloads often leads to inefficiencies, delays in the hiring process, and a poor candidate experience. If your team struggles to fairly distribute interviews across hiring teams, it might be time for a more efficient approach. ## **The Challenges of Manual Interview Distribution** For many companies, managing interviewer pools involves relying on spreadsheets and manual tracking to distribute interviews. While this works in theory, in practice, your reality might look more like this: - **Overloaded Interviewers**: Some interviewers are swamped with back-to-back interviews, leading to burnout and disengagement. - **Underutilized Talent**: Other interviewers have availability but are left out, leading to frustration. - **Scheduling Gridlock:** Coordinating schedules across different time zones manually is a logistical nightmare, resulting in delays, rescheduling headaches, and a disjointed candidate experience. The result? A recruitment process that feels more like a struggle than a strategy. ## How Cronofy’s Selection Rules Make Life Easier Selection Rules in Cronofy are groups of people with added rules set by an admin to automate and control how interviewers are selected into meetings. With selection rules, group members are automatically rotated, reducing the time spent on manual workload distribution or determining who’s available to meet candidates. For example, you can create a selection rule called “Developers” with five members from the engineering team, set conditions always to select two engineers, and limit each engineer to no more than two interviews weekly. Cronofy respects these conditions whenever that pool is selected during an interview setup. Some of the efficiency gains you see with Selection Rules include: - **Balanced Workloads:** By limiting the number of interviews each interviewer can handle daily or weekly, Cronofy ensures no one is overloaded and keeps everyone engaged in the hiring process. - **Streamlined Scheduling:** Forget about cross-checking calendars or manually coordinating across time zones. Cronofy handles it all, reducing scheduling time from days to hours. ## **Best Practices for Managing Interviewer Workloads With Selection Rules** Here’s how to make the most of this Cronofy capability: - **Set Clear Rules:** Begin by setting up Selection Rules that reflect your team’s capacity, hiring goals, and the right people for the specific role you’re hiring for. Determine the maximum number of interviews each interviewer can handle in a day or week and regularly review these limits to ensure they remain aligned with your team’s needs. This will set the foundation for balanced workloads and ensure no one is overburdened. - **Maintain Calendar Hygiene: **For automation to work effectively, it’s crucial that everyone’s calendar is up-to-date and accurately reflects their availability. Encourage your team to maintain strong [calendar hygiene](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/calendar-hygiene-a-guide-to-cleaning-up-messy-calendars) by regularly updating their schedules and blocking out time for focused work. This simple habit will prevent scheduling conflicts, reduce the need for manual adjustments, and ensure that the automation can run smoothly. - **Gather Interviewer Feedback: **Understanding how candidates perceive your interview process is key to continuous improvement. After each interview, consider surveying candidates to gain insights into their experience, whether they were hired or not. Use this feedback to fine-tune your process and enhance candidate and interviewer satisfaction. - **Keep Everyone in the Loop: **Transparency is vital. Ensure your interviewers understand how Selection Rules work, their limits, and how they fit into the process. This way, everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. ## **Turn Scheduling Chaos into a Competitive Advantage** Managing interviewer pools doesn’t have to be a logistical nightmare. With the right tools, you can turn a chaotic process into a streamlined operation that benefits both your team and your candidates. Cronofy’s advanced scheduling capabilities not only save you time but also enhance the overall experience for everyone involved. Schedule a demo with Cronofy and see how automation can transform your process. [Speak to a scheduling expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Recruitment Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? --- ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- # Fintech Hiring Trends: Stay Ahead in the Talent Race We asked 800+ candidates worldwide their thoughts about hiring in fintech right now. Dive into our latest report and learn how to secure top hires. ## Fintech Hiring Trends: Stay Ahead in the Talent Race We asked 800+ candidates worldwide their thoughts about hiring in fintech right now. Dive into our latest report and learn how to secure top hires. [Download Report](#form-e92c5a50-50fa-4f74-b5a3-8a0a9cff5543) ## Download Report ## Reliable, Trusted Interview Scheduling ## Reduce Admin and Delays Interview scheduling automation tools for every scenario without leaving your ATS. Candidate self-scheduling links, scheduling multiple candidates at once, panel interviewer limits and availability pools— all save on the scheduling admin burden. ## Calendar and ATS Integration Cronofy integrates with over 70+ Applicant Systems. Use placeholders to pull candidate data directly from your ATS and schedule at the click of a button across different timezones and languages. ## Secure and Compliant Data protection is essential for regulatory companies — that's why an effective security and privacy programme is central to how we operate. ## How Wise Streamlined Interview Scheduling for a Faster, Smoother Hiring Process ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Duration: 0:46 Learn how **[Wise](https://try.cronofy.com/fintech/clkg/https/wise.com/)**, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. [Learn More](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling#case-study-hero) --- # Q&A: What product teams get wrong about building meeting capture Meeting capture tends to get scoped as a single feature on the roadmap, competing with five others. We sat down with Cronofy’s Lead Product Manager, Nataliia Senatorova, to get her take on why meeting data matters, what you can build with it, and why product teams should be reframing meeting capture as infrastructure that could unlock intelligent AI features. Meeting capture tends to get scoped as a single feature on the roadmap, competing with five others. We sat down with Cronofy’s Lead Product Manager, Nataliia Senatorova, to get her take on why meeting data matters, what you can build with it, and why product teams should be reframing meeting capture as infrastructure that could unlock intelligent AI features. ## 1. Underestimating the importance of owning their users’ meeting data The triggers for Product Managers deciding they need to own meeting intelligence are usually the same. Users are leaving your platform to take notes in a third-party AI notetaker. Recordings are living in tools you don't control. Decisions are being made from conversations your product never saw. At some point, a product team looks at this and decides: we should own this. But is there more to the picture? ### Why do product managers underestimate the urgency of owning meeting data natively? Duration: 00:29 "The question isn't really about native or nothing," Nataliia explains, taking the example of applicant tracking systems. "The real risk is that valuable data is just never becoming part of your product." When meeting data sits outside your platform, it doesn’t power your workflows, and everything built on top of it becomes harder: scorecards, candidate summaries, ATS sync. "Capturing meeting data natively gives you the strategic leverage, because you own the workflow layer that you can then build on top of.” ## 2. Treating the recording as the end goal Getting meeting data into the product is step one. What teams build (or don’t build) with it next is where most of the value gets left on the table. ### What can product teams build once they have access to structured meeting data? Duration: 00:39 "The value is never in the recording itself, it's what you can actually turn this conversation into," says Nataliia. “The transcript in itself is just the raw material. The product value comes from the workflow you build on top of it." That shift in thinking changes how the work gets scoped, and how ambitiously teams look at potential features. ## 3. Pitching it as a feature, not infrastructure When meeting capture sits on the roadmap as a single feature, it loses prioritisation conversations. The problem is that teams don’t frame it as infrastructure, and see it more as an isolated AI feature. ### What does meeting capture unlock for your product, and why should you prioritise it? Duration: 00:34 If a single capability unlocks notes, scorecards, search, reporting, and workflow automation, it stops competing with the roadmap and starts underpinning it. "It's not really about one roadmap item competing against the others," Nataliia says, "because then it's easily becoming the foundation for several of them, and even the strategic pillar in itself." The downstream potential is significant. Clean, structured meeting data is what makes building genuinely intelligent AI features possible. ## 4. Taking the vendor demo at face value Vendor evaluation is where surface-level assessments can cost teams months. Even if the demo looks clean and the documentation looks complete, the real questions often only surface later down the line. ### What should PMs ask vendors ahead of committing to third-party integrations? Duration: 00:31 "The real question you need to answer during the process is: can we trust this vendor enough to make it a part of a real meeting workflow?" advises Nataliia. The biggest risks with third-party integrations tend to cluster around data residency and reliability, both of which are harder to assess from a demo than from a direct conversation about uptime SLAs and incident handling. Ways of working matter too. "Your vendor needs to feel like a true partner, since you will be co-innovating a lot together." ## 5. Underestimating what the build actually involves Consent, storage, permissions, data retention, integrations, uptime, maintenance all need owning from day one. You can build a working prototype easily, but the real problems come when you go live, and may take up more roadmap time than teams think. ### How should you prioritise meeting intelligence against your roadmap? Duration: 00:38 "This is not just about recording plus transcription. What will happen when external platforms change something? Who are you going to put on those tasks? When you have the estimates conversation, you also need to include the full operational complexity that you will need to take care of from day one." ## Compliant meeting capture & infrastructure, ready to deploy today Cronofy’s Meeting Agents give product teams the recording, transcription, and structured data layer, so they focus on building features on top, not the infrastructure beneath. Meeting Agents are EU-based, GDPR and HIPAA compliant, and built to handle the uptime, consent, and data residency requirements that meeting capture demands. Still unsure whether you need to build, buy, or something in between? Nataliia is holding a limited round of 15-minute consultations for those scoping out meeting capture for their product. No sales, no pitch decks, just advice from a PM who has seen these projects before. [Chat with Nataliia about what you're building](/lp/product-manager-consultation) [Read docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/) ### 5 ways SaaS platforms can use meeting data to power AI features Meeting data rarely flows into SaaS platforms - users rely on standalone notetakers, and the insights end up elsewhere. When transcripts, recordings, and summaries flow directly into your product, they let you build AI features that weren't possible before. Here are five ways to put that data to work. Blog Post 2026-02-11T13:43:31.851Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # Flexible alternative to GoodTime Cronofy’s interview scheduling tools are for recruiters who are looking for value, flexibility and security. ## A reliable, end-to-end scheduling alternative to GoodTime Integrate scheduling into your existing tools and enjoy more flexibility without breaking the bank. Cronofy runs in your ATS and gives coordinators more control. Ask about our European Support team! [Speak to a scheduling specialist](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) ## Schedule any interview for yourself or other interviewers From phone screens to panels or back-to-back interviews, Cronofy gives coordinators full visibility into calendars and more control so they can schedule complex meetings faster for anyone. ## Impress candidates at Hello Personalize scheduling links and booking pages for each candidate, allowing them to self-book or reschedule appointments without back-and-forth emails. ## One Cronofy account, multiple brands Shared service? No problem. Manage multiple brands and domains under one account with a consistent experience for your candidates across touchpoints. ## Keep your interviewers happy Keep your teams productive by ensuring everyone gets a fair share of the workload with automated interview rotation and easy-to-set limits. ## Schedule with candidates wherever they are Cronofy booking links support multiple languages and time zones your candidates are in, keeping you competitive in the global job market. ## Why GoodTime customers switch to Cronofy ## Automate scheduling from day 1 GoodTime users report that it can take several months of implementation before the Go-Live date. With Cronofy, recruiters can schedule interviews in seconds once signed up! Our browser extensions allow you to schedule directly from your ATS from day 1 while you build deeper automation with workflows, templates, and full ATS integrations. [See our browser extension in action!](https://docs.cronofy.com/scheduler/browser-extension/) ## Reliable sync with Microsoft Outlook calendars Cronofy powers scheduling workflows in hundreds of business applications. Many years of supporting Microsoft calendars, from on-premise Exchange to fully cloud-based Microsoft 365 domains, has enabled us to deliver the most robust and reliable sync for these services. You can rely on real-time availability and event updates with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. [See how Cronofy works with Office calendars!](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/cronofy-for-office/) ## Cronofy is easy to use and sophisticated when you need it to be Thanks to its lightweight design and its extensions Cronofy can easily be used by recruiters as part of their daily processes. It’s built so they can switch between full automation and manual scheduling as required. GoodTime is designed for coordinators working within large recruitment teams and solely focuses on full automation. [Discover how Cronofy helps recruiters!](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/use-cases/interview-scheduling) ## We hold ourselves to the highest security standard Cronofy is a European provider and as such data security and compliance is something we never compromise on. We are independently audited and certified, and let you choose between 6 data centers, including one in Germany for all our customers serving EU citizens and who must be GDPR compliant. GoodTime currently only offers data hosting in the US. [Find out more about our data centers](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/data-centers/) ## Only pay for what you use Cronofy is the one solution that scales with you because we know the people involved in interviews change based on seasonality and the open roles. That’s why you only pay when you actively use Cronofy. You also don't have to compromise scheduling speed to cut costs during slow hiring season. [Learn more about active user pricing!](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing/scheduler-plans) > Our recruiters can now own the end-to-end hiring journey. They can make sure that **candidates are having a great experience**, but are able to do it in a much more seamless way. The fact that Cronofy integrates with Lever means they’re **spending a lot less time on the admin, everything just works**. — Joseph de Garr Wilkinson, Head of Talent, Agreena ### See how Cronofy works with your ATS From a good time, to a great time Speak to our scheduling experts to learn how Cronofy makes hiring efficient and tailored to your needs. [Speak to a specialist](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Competency frameworks: what they are and how we built ours How does your company measure your team's individual performance? Our Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, explains how he built a competency framework that's used across all departments at Cronofy. How does your company measure your team's individual performance? Our Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, explains how he built a competency framework that's used across all departments at Cronofy. At Cronofy, we prioritize our team's personal development. We want everyone to feel that they can do anything and go anywhere. Last year, we pinpointed there was a lack of clarity in terms of how team members could reach the next stages in their career, and wanted this to change. It was a question of, how can we outline the different career paths, the skills required, and the support needed for our team members on their individual journeys? The answer for us was a competency framework. The [CIPD](https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/fundamentals/people/performance/competency-factsheet#gref) defines a competency framework as "a structure that sets out and defines each individual competency (such as problem-solving or people management) required by individuals working in an organisation or part of that organisation." They're unique to every business, being shaped by your company culture, so it's important to use this as a guide when creating your own. ‍ ### Defining and planning As a starting point, we set out the following aims: - Define existing roles at Cronofy, and show what is required to excel in these positions - Identify (and help provide) learning and development opportunities for progression - Show the different career routes people can choose - Help with creating and defining new roles we need to hire for - Assist with objective interviewing. At its core, this was about providing clear career paths and environments that encourage personal development. Setting out a structure of progression is useful at this point, so you can attach competencies to defined seniority levels. We came up with this: There are factors to our process that could differ depending on the size of your business, as we’re too small a company to have VP’s, Chiefs and Directors. Larger businesses would add these levels after “Head of”. We also ensured there was some flexibility to this framework – stepping into a management role can be done from any IC level, and an IC1 junior could jump to IC3 if they were excelling in the competencies of their role. We also designed this career path to fit into any department to provide consistency across the business. ‍ ### Deciding progression requirements We had to define the behaviors for each level that were transferable across departments. When researching other competency frameworks, many of them felt impersonal. Lots of large companies use KSB (Knowledge, Skills, Behaviors), while many startups use a variety of competency titles like ‘Leadership’ and ‘Influencing’ with behaviors to describe them. We wanted something simple that could be accurately measured, easily defined, and assessed from interview through to a career at Cronofy. We settled on three pillars that were going to define our competency framework: - **Individual competencies:** The skills required at that specific IC level - **Collective competencies:** Their ability to work/engage with other people and teams - **Cultural competencies:** We hire against our Principles, so it’s important an employee shows evidence of adhering to them in their approach to work. When looking at our successful employees, they perform well in all three areas. The bad hires we’ve encountered in the past have often had high technical ability but low alignment with our Principles, which hammered home just how important this pillar is to our framework. ‍ ### Building the Competency Framework Creating the content for a competency framework is challenging. For us, it came down to a few things: firstly, defining the difference between a **job description** and a **competency**. ‍*A job description encompasses the duties you do day to day, a competency is the skills and behaviors required to perform those duties to a high standard.* As a management team, we agreed that we wanted to incorporate six areas into our competency framework template - something that would fit every role in the business. **Hiring:** Almost everyone in the business has some sort of responsibility for hiring - whether that’s supporting with interviewing, right up to sourcing talent **Feedback:** Honest, transparent 360 feedback is paramount to our culture **Principles:** Alignment with or demonstration of our principles (depending on seniority) **Ambition:** Everyone should have ambitions but they will all be different. It might be to become a Manager, or maybe just succeed in their IC level **Communication:** Because we’re a remote-first business so solid team and cross-team communication is vital **Use of data:** Being a fast-growth startup we look to the data to make improvements and come up with experiments. Once we had this information we created the below master competency framework template: This template forms the foundation of every IC role in the business. It was designed to be individual for each role so it can be used by anyone in the business. One of the challenges we continue to have comes when we hire for a new role. We aim to create competency frameworks to help assess candidates fairly and equally – you can find our ‘how to guide’ on creating these [here](https://www.markharbs.com/post/competency-framework-design-guide) if you're looking for guidance on creating your own. ‍ ### Measuring success Measuring the success of a competency framework shouldn’t be overly complicated. In our case, we created 3-5 statements against each competency pillar which would be assessed on a scale 1-4: **Does not meet expectations:** Isn’t meeting the expectations that are appropriate for the role. Additional direction and support are needed, as is a willingness or ability to improve **Meets expectations:** Achieves core goals for the role **Exceeds expectations:** Sometimes exceeds expectations, requires little or no additional direction to achieve the core goals of the role **Consistently exceeds expectations:** Exceeds expectations and consistently delivers beyond the goals of the position. Influences others to perform better During a review, each statement would be assessed on the above scale, and the employee would receive a total score. They’d agree between themselves and their manager how far into an IC level they were, and subsequently what needs to be achieved / demonstrated to reach the next level, thus creating learning and development opportunities as well as clear career progression. It also provides a reflection of **not only competency level, but also the fairest compensation.** Here’s an example to demonstrate based on a fictitious role at Cronofy: Let’s say you’re a Business Analyst at Cronofy at IC2 going into your review. You’re being paid £45K per annum, and the band for that role is £40-50K. As your competencies are assessed, your average score is 3 (exceeds expectations). That would put you 75% of the way through your IC2 band, which means you should expect to be earning 75% of the budget. Using this method, we’d increase your salary to £47,500 to represent experience and performance. With the above example, it meant that we could be absolutely transparent to someone about how much they're being paid and why. Since the rollout, we've given many of our team members a pay rise to reflect the level they're at. This is what a competency framework should look to achieve – analysing performance resulting in fair, equal pay with complete transparency. The assessment of performance needs to be agreed by both employee and manager. The whole purpose of our review process is that it’s a discussion and mutual agreement. Two way communication is absolutely vital to making this a success. ‍ ## Final thoughts It was a long journey to building a competency framework for Cronofy that encompassed all team functions and seniority, but we’ve reached our ultimate goal - clarity on what success looks like at Cronofy, a fair and equal assessment process, but most importantly transparency on how and where people can progress with us. Over time we’ll be refining this, and working hard to hold ourselves accountable for making sure people are as successful as they can be at Cronofy. ‍ *If you’d like to get in touch to discuss this model or your own approach to competency frameworks, you can contact Mark at **[mark@cronofy.com](mailto:mark@cronofy.com)**.* ‍ --- # Ship features, not scheduling. Integrate powerful real-time scheduling with Cronofy’s flexible White Label API and fully managed Embedded Scheduler. Simplify calendar integrations, time zone handling, and scheduling logic with easy-to-use APIs designed for developers and product teams. ## Ship features, not scheduling infrastructure. Building scheduling infrastructure and workflows from scratch isn’t easy. Now, you can integrate with Cronofy and leave the calendar integrations, time zone handling, and scheduling logic to us. Test the APIs > Although on the surface it seems simple, we knew scheduling was very complex, and we knew we wanted to launch quickly. That’s why opting for Cronofy’s API was the obvious choice. — Jascha Zittel, Co-founder, Mercu Stack or Embed? ## The choice is yours. Build your own scheduling UI by stacking Cronofy's customizable White Label API endpoints, or integrate scheduling faster with the real-time Scheduler API and embed a fully managed solution straight into your application. [White-label API](https://www.cronofy.com/ship-features-not-scheduling#ff0725b7efec) [Embedded Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/ship-features-not-scheduling#31c472f4df4baf8713d477bc52c97509) We build, you stack. ## White-Label API For complete control over the user experience and a fully customized scheduling solution, Cronofy’s White Label API gives you the flexibility to build exactly what you need. Select and integrate specific API endpoints and tailor the entire scheduling flow to match your application’s needs. - [**Calendar API:**](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api) Your Gateway to Calendar Data - [**Availability API:**](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/availability-api) Find the Perfect Time, Instantly - [**UI Elements:**](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) Pre-built and Customizable UI [Learn more](/developer/white-label-api-old) [Explore the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/getting-started/) We build, you embed. ## Scheduler API Want to get real-time scheduling up and running quickly out of the box? The [Scheduler API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/scheduler-api) encompasses all of the functionality of the White Label API, but allows you to embed real-time scheduling capabilities directly into your application with just a few lines of code. No need to build scheduling interface from scratch. Now you can generate and embed real-time booking links within your applications with just a few calls to the Scheduler API. [Learn more](/developer/scheduler-api) [Explore the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/) ## Everything you need to get started **Developer Account** Start querying APIs with no credit card required **Quickstart Tutorials** Tutorials to help you get started **API Reference** Full reference of Cronofy APIs **SDKs** Bring our APIs to any stack ## Need help building? Speak with a technical specialist --- # How to Organize Multi-Part Interviews in Minutes with Calendar Sync Multi-part interviews are an effective way for companies to get to know different sides of a candidate. For instance, they can assess their technical skills in one part of the interview, their soft skills and previous experience in another, then share details about the company culture in another. All of these help both companies and candidates find out who is the best fit for the role so that they can make the right hiring decision. Multi-part interviews are an effective way for companies to get to know different sides of a candidate. For instance, they can assess their technical skills in one part of the interview, their soft skills and previous experience in another, then share details about the company culture in another. All of these help both companies and candidates find out who is the best fit for the role so that they can make the right hiring decision. Multi-part interviews are an effective way for companies to get to know different sides of a candidate. For instance, they can assess their technical skills in one part of the interview, their soft skills and previous experience in another, then share details about the company culture in another. All of these help both companies and candidates find out who is the best fit for the role so that they can make the right hiring decision. And making the right hiring decision really is crucial. Up to [20% of employee churn](http://blog.clickboarding.com/18-jaw-dropping-onboarding-stats-you-need-to-know) happens within the first 45 days. This means that companies have to go through the lengthy hiring process again. When it can cost an average of $4,000 for every hire that’s made, this quickly adds up to not only time, but also money, lost. Money that could have been spent on other projects or developing employees’ skills. Multi-part interviews also make life easier for candidates. Instead of needing to take multiple days off to interview for one role, every part of the interview can be done on the same day. This means candidates need to make less adjustments to their schedules, providing a far superior candidate experience. This well-organized, well thought out scheduling process also reflects well on the business. It boosts their employer brand and demonstrates that it’s a modern, forward-thinking business that utilizes the latest tools. However, multi-part interviews are a nightmare to organize. There are the schedules of hiring managers to factor in, finding the right-sized room, the availability of any resources that are needed, then there are candidates to reach out to for their availability…it’s a lengthy process that can easily add up to days lost just to organizing one interview, let alone a sequence of them. Many of our solutions work together to make organizing a multi-part interview a breeze. This creates a better experience for candidates, hiring managers, and the interview organizers. It’s a more user-friendly, more cost-effective process for everyone. Let’s take a look at the different elements involved in organizing a multi-part interview, and how we can help speed this process up. ## Factor in everyone’s schedules in an instant Finding times to meet often results in seemingly endless back-and-forth emails and phone calls. When interviews need to be held in a particular order, this is even more tiresome. It takes hours for the interview organizer to put all of the moving parts together. It often results in hiring managers having to move already scheduled appointments to ensure they can make the chosen interview day, too. Should several multi-part interviews need to be conducted over the course of days or weeks, this takes even longer. [Intelligent Sequencing](https://www.cronofy.com/intelligent-sequencing/) means that organizers can say goodbye to this tedious process. All they need to do is tell the system who needs to be present for each part of the interview, then they’re done. It really is that simple. Intelligent Sequencing can also factor in whether a sequence of events needs to be conducted in a particular order or if that order is flexible. If the order is fixed, it will only return days and times when each part of the interview is conducted in the right order. If the order is flexible, it will return options where each part happens in the orders that best suits the people required. This means whatever type of interview your users wish to conduct, they have full flexibility and control over how it’s structured without the hassle of coordinating everything manually. But employees’ schedules aren’t the only thing Intelligent Sequencing can help with… ## Book rooms and resources at the same time Rooms and resources are another important part of interviews. After all, if there’s nowhere to conduct the interview, it isn’t going to leave a positive impression on candidates. If candidates are required to conduct a presentation, it’s important that they have the required screens and other equipment that they need. This is particularly important for group interviews, which require rooms of a certain size to accommodate everyone. [Bookable Resources](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/) allow your users to create calendars for rooms and resources within their organization. This means there’s no chance of these being double-booked when they’re needed. The booking system can also factor in their availability when working out the best days and times for multi-part interviews. Should some parts of the interview be conducted in groups and others individually, this can also be factored in. Capacity Booking means that when a room reaches a required limit, that time slot will be closed off and no longer offered to candidates. This prevents rooms from being over capacity, or there not being enough equipment to go around. ## Add buffers between parts When an interview is held in a large organization, it’s important to give candidates time to move between locations. It’s also important to ensure that those conducting the interview have plenty of time to prepare. Buffers ensure that interviewers and candidates have breathing room between appointments. You can set a minimum and maximum buffer between each part of the interview. These don’t appear as calendar events, but anything scheduled via Cronofy will honor them. For example, if one part of an interview is scheduled for 3pm, and the before buffer is set to 30 minutes, Cronofy will see the user’s calendar as blocked out from 2:30pm. That means if a colleague tries to schedule a 30-minute meeting with them using Cronofy, it won’t return between 2:30pm and 3pm that day as a suggested time for the meeting. ## Send booking links to candidates Even when the interview scheduling process is automated, dozens of emails still need to be sent out to candidates with available days and times to choose from. This can be awkward if more than one person chooses the same time slot. The alternatives are to email one candidate at a time and wait for a reply before contacting someone else, or to give each candidate different times to choose from. Neither of these scenarios is ideal. With [Real-Time Scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/real-time-scheduling/), your users can generate a booking link to send to candidates. This booking link will then take them to a booking page where they can schedule their interview based on the availability of everyone and everything mentioned above. Once they’ve chosen their day and time, it’s automatically added to the calendars of the people, rooms, and resources required on that day. This ensures nothing and nobody will get double-booked. [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/) can also be sent to candidates. These are one-off calendar invites that companies can use to confirm the attendance of interviewees. If a candidate doesn’t accept the calendar invite, the company can reach out to them to confirm their attendance. Information such as the location of the interview and whom to ask for on arrival can also be added to this calendar invite. A simple booking process like this provides a far better candidate experience. This means that candidates are more likely to speak highly of the business even if they’re unsuccessful in their application. They’re then more likely to continue using the company’s services and may even recommend them to family and friends. A poor candidate experience, on the other hand, means that they’re more likely to take their business – and that of their friends and family – elsewhere. ## Conclusion Organizing an interview is a seemingly simple process that quickly adds up to take days, sometimes even weeks. The longer it takes, the worse the process is for candidates and the more likely they are to go elsewhere. It also means that businesses are more likely to lose the best talent to their competitors thanks to a clunky hiring process. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, we’re making it our mission to change all of that. Two-way calendar sync means that it’s easier – and faster – for your users to schedule even the most complex interview processes. They can say goodbye to spending hours on the phone or writing countless emails. Instead, they can spend their time on higher-value tasks like preparing for – and conducting – the interviews themselves. These tedious tasks [cost the US economy $1.8 trillion per year](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-businesses-wasting-up-to-18-trillion-annually-on-repetitive-employee-tasks-samanage-survey-says-300224177.html), making it vital that businesses do everything they can to streamline repetitive tasks. Doing so provides a better employee experience, improves companies’ employer brands, and gives employees more time to help the company grow. How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? **[Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/)** --- # Why Google Calendar integration is just not enough Really useful software unobtrusively blends into the lives of its users and makes their lives easier without needing them to drastically change what it is they do day to day, so if you’re in the business of building really useful software, at some point you’re going to need to interact with a calendar. Really useful software unobtrusively blends into the lives of its users and makes their lives easier without needing them to drastically change what it is they do day to day, so if you’re in the business of building really useful software, at some point you’re going to need to interact with a calendar. Really useful software unobtrusively blends into the lives of its users and makes their lives easier without needing them to drastically change what it is they do day to day, so if you’re in the business of building really useful software, at some point you’re going to need to interact with a calendar. As a developer looking to build services around Calendar events, your first instinct is to build your software around the calendar that you use, and let’s face it, that’s probably Google Calendar. Good news is Google provide a set of well-designed, well-documented, easy-to-use APIs for interacting with their users’ calendars – there are a number of libraries to handle authentication, there’s Push Notifications and sample code, before you know it your app is planting events in your calendar and fetching data back too, however the mistake has already been made. ## You are not your users The mistake we so often make in the tech industry is thinking that the way we live, the services we consume and the software we use is the same as everybody else. That our predilection for problem-solving, for finding the latest, greatest tool for the job is shared by the rest of the world. Google Calendar is brilliant; we use it extensively at Cronofy. I use it for my personal schedule as do most others that I speak to, particularly in the tech industry. However for the hundreds of millions of calendar users outside of our tech bubble, the story is very different. ## Enter Microsoft Exchange Server Remember when your email, calendars and contacts were served from a long-suffering, overheating server in a cupboard in the corner of the room? If you do, it’s a distant memory, but this remains the way calendars are served for hundreds of millions of businesspeople around the world. Microsoft is dominating this market – 64% and growing. A major new version was introduced just last year. Despite being a dusty box in the corner, on-premise Exchange can be synced with smartphones, accessed via the web and via APIs using Exchange Web Services. There are also many companies making a good business offering cloud-hosted instances of Exchange, all accessible via the web. ## But what of the cloud calendars? No doubt, Google is in the lead in the cloud calendar market but Microsoft is doing well here too – currently they serve upwards of 31% of cloud calendars using Outlook.com and Office365 (that’s hundreds of millions of people). Microsoft’s share of the cloud-based calendar market is seeing strong growth. With a smooth path to upgrade, they are succeeding in making sure that when their Exchange customers want to retire their dusty box in the corner and move to the cloud that Office365 is the defacto place to go. Not forgetting Apple – their iCloud service provides a cloud-based calendar service out of the box to every Apple device and now boasts over 782 million users – these are not the sort of numbers you can afford to ignore. ## Enter Cronofy With such a competitive, ever-changing calendar market, it’s not a good use of your time to be [building and maintaining integrations](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/build-vs-buy-scheduling-automation-software) with every calendar service used by your customers as they change, new ones get added and old ones get replaced. It is the same reason you don’t build your own payment provider to take card payments, your own messaging service to send text messages and your own database to store information. By integrating with Cronofy you can benefit from a well-designed, well-documented, easy-to-use API for interacting with your users’ calendars, including Push Notifications and code libraries to make it even easier; you’ll be able to offer your users integration with every calendar service, past, present and future with one API. Best of all you’ll be able to spend your time focusing on building the parts of your software that make it uniquely valuable to your customers. ### GoDaddy integrates real-time appointment scheduling for business customers If you have a small business, a website is crucial. GoDaddy offers all the tools entrepreneurs and businesses need to build their online presence. Case Study --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- # How to improve your hiring experience for candidates and the hiring team Mark Harbottle and Erica Wallace touched on important themes surrounding the dynamics between recruitment teams, hiring managers and candidates. In this webinar we explore: - Automation vs over-automation - Human touch in the recruitment process - Feedback and trust between recruitment teams and hiring managers Whether you're a seasoned HR professional or new to talent acquisition, this webinar offers invaluable insights into optimizing your hiring practices and attracting top talent. Practical strategies for elevating the hiring experience for everyone involved. --- # Give every user a way to schedule: Introducing new Calendar Access Modes Enable privacy-focused scheduling with Cronofy’s new Free/Busy and No Access options designed for strict compliance needs. Cronofy is excited to introduce Calendar Access Modes, giving product teams new ways to offer secure scheduling with flexible permissions that meet strict privacy and compliance needs. Up until now, Cronofy has required read-write access to your users calendars, even if your application only required Free/Busy access, due to the scopes available from the Calendar providers. Recent new options from Google and Microsoft allow Cronofy to connect to your users calendars with less permissions; perfect for the privacy conscious and in organizations with strict compliance criteria. Calendar Access Modes give you the option of offering Free/Busy access or No Calendar Access to control the amount of data shared with Cronofy. ## Why we built new access modes Calendar data carries sensitive personal and business information, and many enterprise buyers and compliance teams remain nervous about granting third-party applications full read-write access to employee calendars. They want to know exactly what data is being transferred, how it’s used, and whether permissions can be limited. We’ve always taken compliance seriously to show that we view ourselves as responsible custodians of your data, but that isn’t always enough for every organization to gain confidence. Without more privacy-focused connection options, adoption stalls and users choose not to connect at all. As teams move upmarket, those objections only intensify. Even when your scheduling features deliver obvious value, full access requests trigger red flags in compliance reviews. This often stops deals entirely. At Cronofy, we've already built our infrastructure to meet the most demanding compliance requirements with certifications across GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018, with local data hosting available across six global data centers. Now we're taking that foundation further by giving our customers the flexibility to offer different levels of calendar access that match their users organizational policies and comfort levels. ## What they deliver Our new Access Modes are embedded directly into the OAuth flow when users connect their calendar to your application, giving them three options for how much access they grant Cronofy. This is available when your application requests `free_busy_write` access to users calendars. **Read-write Access**: - The existing default connection option for users. - Cronofy will put calendar events directly into users’ calendars on behalf of your application. - Your user’s availability will be kept up to date to be used with the Availability APIs. **Free/Busy Access (new!)**: - Cronofy will now only have access to users’ free/busy status, which can be used with the Availability APIs. - Events and updates will be delivered to users via email invitations, rather than being written directly to their calendars. **No Calendar Access (new!)**: - This access mode is beneficial to use by those end users who cannot connect a calendar in any form to Cronofy. - Events and updates will be delivered to users via email invitations, rather than being written directly to their calendars. - Without real calendar data, you can use our Availability APIs to help control when you should be considered free. We will also reflect availability coming from events created through Cronofy. ## Offering the new access modes to your customers Offering Calendar Access Modes has two simple steps. First, enable the access modes you’d like in the Features section of your application: ![Example transcript of Cronofy Meeting Agent]() Secondly, extend your Authorization logic to parse the `userinfo.profiles` list of all profiles, rather than just the `linking_profile` details. This will let your application spot when a user connects a single `read_write` calendar, or the pair of a `free_busy` Google or Microsoft calendar and a writable Cronofy calendar. ## Get started To learn more about setting up the new Free/Busy or No Access modes, you can view the detailed documentation [here](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/authorization/access-modes/). If you'd prefer a walkthrough of how Access Modes fit your specific use case, feel free to [book a call](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-api) with our team. Here's to calendar connections that work for everyone. ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### New to Cronofy’s White Label API? So am I - Let’s Break It Down Together You’re a developer who needs to build out a scheduling workflow within your application. You’ve found Cronofy’s White Label API, but aren’t quite sure how the pieces fit together. I’m new here too, so let’s figure it out together. Blog Post 2025-03-31T13:56:00.000Z --- # Availability API Updates There have been several updates to our API this month, mostly focused around our scheduling capabilities. Here's a roundup of them. There have been several updates to our API this month, mostly focused around our scheduling capabilities. Here's a roundup of them. There have been several updates to our API this month, mostly focused around our scheduling capabilities. ## Availability Response Formats We've extended our Availability end-point to support two new formats: **slots** and **overlapping_slots** in addition to the existing **periods** format. Our approach with API design is to aim for maximum flexibility in the first instance, then work with customers to understand what additional functionality they'd like to offload to Cronofy. With these two new formats, you can request that Cronofy generates the bookable slots that your application can offer users. You can see **slots** in action in our [Slot Picker UI Element](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/slot-picker/) and **overlapping_slots** in [Availability Viewer](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/availability-viewer/). See the [Availability documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/scheduling/availability/#response_format) for more details. ## Real-Time Scheduling A couple of small but important updates here. The first is to support a **minimum notice period** required before a slot can be booked. If your users need 24 hours to prepare for a booking, this gives them that. See the [Real-Time Scheduling documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/scheduling/real-time-scheduling/#minimum_notice) for more details. We also now support **creating private events** as part of the scheduling flow. [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/) also support private events now. ## Availability Rule Selection The Availability Rules provided as part of [Managed Availability](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/managed-availability/) allow you to control the working hours used by any Cronofy Availability query. To support situations where your users need different working hours, we now allow one or more availability rules to be selected as part of the Availability query. Typically, this is used when people work from different locations or they operate a different schedule for different types of work. See the [Availability document](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/scheduling/availability/#participants.members.availability_rule_ids) from more details. ## Availability Query Limits Currently the Availability queries are limited to up to 10 participants over a 35-day period. We're working hard on increasing those limits to support additional use cases. For example: - How do I find a meeting room that's available in the next two hours from the 50 possible? - I have 25 coaches suitable to support a user, how do I find who's available in the next few days? We'll soon be enabling this for some of our existing customers. If you would benefit from this functionality and want to be part of the early test group, get in touch at hello@cronofy.com. --- # How to Create a Better User Experience for Your Online Marketplace Global retail e-commerce sales for products and services will reach $4000 billion by 2020. Online marketplaces are the main reason for this figure. They’re a way for vendors to meet customers in a trusted environment. Customers can also find out more about vendors before making a decision. User experience plays a huge role in the success of any product, and online marketplaces are no different. Global retail e-commerce sales for products and services will reach $4000 billion by 2020. Online marketplaces are the main reason for this figure. They’re a way for vendors to meet customers in a trusted environment. Customers can also find out more about vendors before making a decision. User experience plays a huge role in the success of any product, and online marketplaces are no different. Global retail e-commerce sales for products and services will reach $4000 billion by 2020.Online marketplaces are the main reason for this figure. They’re a way for vendors to meet customers in a trusted environment. Customers can also find out more about vendors before making a decision. User experience plays a huge role in the success of any product, and online marketplaces are no different. A poor user experience means losing vendors and their potential customers to other marketplaces. A great user experience means more vendors and more potential customers. The key step is to make it as simple as possible for customers to find the right vendor for them. The easier this is, the more likely they are to convert on your marketplace and recommend your marketplace to their network. Other factors such as a user-friendly booking process and a reviewing system also play a part in how good your user experience is. Let’s explore in more depth some key areas that can boost your user experience. ## Mobile-friendliness [M-commerce](https://www.nchannel.com/blog/ecommerce-stats-trends-online-shopping/) will account for 45% of the US e-commerce market – for products and services – by 2020. It’s therefore crucial that businesses offer the best mobile experience possible. A responsive website also helps with SEO, since Google favors websites that are mobile-friendly. Better SEO means more vendors and potential customers finding the site, which means you’ll attract more custom and generate more money. You could also provide a better user experience by developing your own app. This is an expensive investment, but is a way to attract new and old customers. It also increases your reach as you can show up on two more search engines: the App Store and Google Play Store. Customers and vendors want to be able to do as much in-app as possible. The more they can do, the less likely they are to take their conversation outside of the app and leave you losing revenue. ## Ratings and reviews Customers want to see what other customers think. They want to know what their experience was, and if they’d work with that vendor again. This helps future customers to form decisions about who they want to work with. Adding a review tab to the vendor’s profile makes it easy for prospects to find reviews. Since they play such a huge part in decision making, it’s important to make reviews easily accessible. Unfortunately, only 30% of us have left reviews online. This makes it harder for businesses to attract attention and gain the trust of people that haven’t heard of them before. The easier it is for customers to leave reviews, the more likely they are to do so. A clear, simple reviewing interface encourages users to share their experiences. Some people prefer to only leave a star rating, so this could be an option. Others prefer to explain their rating, which is why you need to give them the option to write a review as well. To encourage users to leave a review, you can offer suggestions of what to write about, such as how responsive the vendor was or how efficiently they worked. Email reminders are an effective way to encourage customers to leave reviews. These can be sent the day after an appointment, when the experience is fresh in their mind. If they don’t leave a review after that, you could send a reminder a week or so later to remind them. ## Search functionality Search is a huge part of online bookings. Failing to provide the right search criteria makes it harder for customers to find the right vendors for the job that they need. This means that they could end up hiring the wrong person, or that they don’t find anyone at all and take their custom elsewhere instead. Customers should be able to search for as many criteria as possible when finding a vendor. Location is a big part of this – if a vendor can’t travel to their location, there’s no point in that vendor being presented to them. Likewise if they offer similar services but not exactly what someone wants, for instance, someone who maintains garden fences when you really need someone to manufacture a garden gate. Other filter criteria could include: ratings, the number of reviews, how long the person has been in business, if they have a fixed address, if they have a website, if they do online quotes, if they offer online booking through calendar sync, or how long it takes them to respond to queries. ## Easy quotes and communication Communication between customers and vendors is crucial to the success of online marketplaces. The easier it is for them to communicate, the better the user experience is. Pricing is a huge part of why we choose someone for a job. Offering customers to the ability to get quotes quickly helps to increase conversions because customers know what they’re going to get from the start. They won’t risk engaging with a vendor who’s out of their price range and risk wasting everyone’s time. You could give vendors the ability to show their costs upfront for the services they provide. Another option is to have a brief template for customers to send to vendors so that they can provide a custom quote. You could even give vendors the ability to create stock responses based on the cost of particular jobs. This makes it easier and faster for them to respond to customers. ## Online booking Allowing prospects to book appointments with vendors through you means that they can get the job done faster. Customers get the services they need faster, vendors get more custom, and you get more conversions on your marketplace. When customers can book appointments on your marketplace, they don’t need to take time out of their day to organize an appointment. They can book it at their own convenience. This makes a huge difference, since 58% of consumers shop online due to opening hours. Failing to offer this service means that vendors may miss out on custom, and you’ll miss out on it by association. When vendors’ calendars sync automatically with your marketplace, it’s even easier. They don’t need to worry about double-bookings. Everything syncs in real-time, which means that even if they make a phone booking, they can see everything that’s been scheduled in, even if it was only done a few minutes ago. Offering online booking means that vendors don’t need to take as many phone calls during the day. This gives them more time to spend with customers and on getting work done. They can then finish jobs sooner, giving them time to do more work and make more money. Two-way calendar sync means that not only can potential customers see a vendor’s availability, but they can also book slots from within your software. These slots automatically sync to the vendor’s calendar, removing the risk of double-bookings. Online booking interfaces should be clear and easy to use. Presenting a calendar interface that clearly shows when a vendor is free or busy is one way to do this. If a vendor is free, the slot can be presented as green. If they’re busy, it can be crossed out or shown as red. This makes it clear to potential customers which dates are available. They can then use this information to check their own schedule and pick a time that best suits them, even if they book in the middle of the night. The simpler it is for a customer to book a time – and the fewer steps that are involved – the more likely they are to do so. Complicated booking processes lead to loss of custom because people don’t have the patience to sit through long-winded booking processes. ## Conclusion Providing a better user experience helps you to stand out from your competition. It also makes your customers happier, which means that you get better reviews. Better reviews and happier customers means that you can attract more clients, generate more money, and grow your business faster. So really, why wouldn’t you create a better user experience for your online marketplace? --- # Unlock meeting data to power your AI strategy Turn meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams into recordings, transcripts, and AI summaries to power post-meeting action and intelligence. ## Unlock meeting data to power your AI strategy Meeting Agents run entirely on Cronofy’s infrastructure, turning meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams into recordings, transcripts, and AI summaries to power post-meeting action and intelligence. Start testing with 24 free hours of recording. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) ## Meetings hold the context your product needs Meetings contain some of the richest signals in any workflow, but that data rarely exists in a form systems can use. Capturing it requires coordinating conferencing integrations, recording pipelines, transcription, and AI processing, while managing sensitive data and compliance requirements while users are left relying on manual notes or external tools. Cronofy provides the infrastructure to access, capture, and structure meeting intelligence, so your product can act on what actually happened. Recording ## Capture audio and video recordings Give your users a record of the meetings they want to capture, directly inside your product so they can review and reference exactly what happened without relying on external tools. - Capture audio and video recordings from every meeting - Support Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams - Deliver files ready for in-app playback Transcription ## Analyze recordings with diarized transcripts Automatically structure meetings into searchable, actionable data your product can understand and build on. - Transcription is hosted entirely on Cronofy’s infrastructure - Generate speaker-attributed transcripts with timestamps - Use transcript data to power things like scorecards and insights AI summaries ## Automatically generate meeting summaries Remove the need for manual note-taking or external tools by surfacing summaries inside your product. - Deliver summaries as ready made outputs - Build on the summary to highlight key moments and next steps - Populate records and trigger follow-up workflows inside your product Agentic workflows ## Power automation and agentic workflows Give agents the context they need to understand conversations and take action on behalf of users. From follow-ups to workflow updates, agents can move from conversation to execution without manual input. ## Meeting capture built with compliance at the core Most meeting capture APIs focus on outputs. Meeting Agents are built around where data runs and who has access to it. ### Single processor by design Cronofy, an EU-based provider, runs the entire meeting capture workflow on its own infrastructure with no third-party vendors or subprocessors. --- ### Region-specific deployments Meeting data is processed and stored only in the selected region, with dedicated data centres in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Singapore. --- ### Compliance built-in Cronofy is GDPR and HIPAA compliant, with SOC 2 and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certifications. Ship new capabilities without increasing risk. ### Get started with Meeting Agents Duration: 04:00 ## Start capturing meetings in minutes Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ## Built on the infrastructure that powers meetings Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure is the foundation for every meeting workflow, bringing together availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence in one modular system. At the core is the Temporal Grid, built on decades of experience handling the hardest parts of meeting workflows. It unifies calendars, availability, conferencing, meeting data, and compliance, taking away the complexity of building the underlying infrastructure yourself, so every capability you build with feels simple and intuitive from day one. Because everything runs on the same grid, you can use Meeting Agents on their own and grow into richer workflows and agent-driven automation over time on the same foundation. [See all capabilities](/home) ## Choose an integration path Deploy meeting agents rapidly as a standalone solution, or use them as an extension of Cronofy's temporal infrastructure to support the entire meeting workflow with one integration. ### Standalone Use the Meeting Agent API to dispatch instantly using a meeting join URL, or schedule them to join at a specific time. This works as a standalone integration, with no dependency on scheduling. --- ### Fully integrated Attach a Meeting Agent directly to the calendar event when scheduling meetings via Cronofy. If the meeting is updated or rescheduled, everything stays aligned with the right session. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ## Frequently Asked Questions **Q: What are Meeting Agents by Cronofy?** A: Meeting Agents are a unified API for capturing meeting recordings, transcripts, and AI-generated summaries from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. They handle meeting access, recording, and data delivery so product teams can focus on building differentiated AI features and meeting workflows, without maintaining bots or conferencing integrations. **Q: How can I start using Meeting Agents?** A: It’s quick to get started with Meeting Agents. Create a free account and start testing with 24 free hours meeting recording. You can review the documentation and how to get started [here](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/). **Q: How is Meeting Agents pricing structured?** A: Meeting Agents are priced based on monthly usage, with all costs inclusive of meeting recording, transcription, and data processing. The first 24 hours of usage are free to facilitate testing, then pricing scales as follows: - 0–4,000 hours / month: $0.79/hour - 4,001–8,000 hours / month: $0.69/hour - 8,001–16,000 hours / month: $0.59/hour - 16,001+ hours / month: contact us Charges are metered per second so you only ever pay for exactly what you use. A minimum monthly commitment of $99 applies when using the standalone Meeting Agent API. **Q: How do Meeting Agents work?** A: Meeting Agents can be deployed in a number of ways - Dispatch an agent to any meeting ad-hoc via a single API call. - Schedule a Meeting Agent to join a meeting at a specific time. - Attach an agent to a calendar event when creating or updating it **Q: What are Cronofy’s security and compliance credentials?** A: Cronofy is a European company, built with compliance at our foundation. Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. You can view detailed information about our [compliance policy here](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy). **Q: Where will meeting data be stored?** A: You choose where your data is processed and stored. Cronofy operates six data centres in: Australia, Canada, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All meeting data is processed exclusively within your selected region. **Q: Which conferencing platforms do Meeting Agents support?** A: Meeting Agents currently support Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. **Q: What languages are supported?** A: We support the following languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Swiss German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malay, Dutch, Flemish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Chinese. **Q: Will my users be able to opt-out of meeting recording?** A: Yes. You control when Meeting Agents are dispatched, and end users can accept or decline an agent joining a call. Cronofy provides the infrastructure, while integrators retain full control over recording behaviour. **Q: Can the Meeting Agent be white-labeled?** A: Yes. The name and avatar displayed by Meeting Agents are fully configurable to match your product. --- # Using tools to improve efficiency ## Recruit at scale, no matter the size of your team. Talent teams have gotten smaller, and many don’t have a scheduling tool to support ambitious hiring goals. Cronofy helps you connect with top talent faster to improve the candidate experience. [Customer success stories](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies) [Book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) ## Schedule multi-person meetings in minutes, not days Combined availability helps you tackle complex scheduling across multiple organizations without the back-and-forth. Compare availability with multiple internal and external participants for interviews and panel interviews. with ease. Cronofy booking pages can be public or personalized to each guest. You can offer free slots during office hours **or** set custom times. ## Simplify scheduling for talent teams and candidates Now you can always stay in control of your calendar: - Automate interview scheduling for any size or type of interview - Find times in busy calendars - Add personal scheduling rules No need to spend your time manually scheduling interviews. Our automation and ease of use will help free up your time to proactively recruit, build your talent pool, and source candidates. ## Be more productive without leaving your ATS Our integrations work with the software you’re already using. Supercharge your existing tools with automated scheduling for speed and results. ## Agreena recruiters are automating panel interview scheduling and saving 5 hours a week each Discover how Agreena has transformed their interview scheduling process in Lever with Cronofy [Read the case study](#) ## Understand the impact on candidates in the hiring process Each year, we gather insights and opinions from 6,500 candidates across the US, UK, France and Germany who have applied for jobs in the last 12 months. [Read more](/candidate-expectations-report-2023) --- # Rethinking Recruitment: You Don’t Need More Coordinators to Improve Time-to-Hire --- # Recruiting Brainfood - Candidate psychology in the hiring process Psychology perspective on the candidate experience for recruiters In this webinar, we discussed the current job market trends and their impact on candidates through the hiring process. We explore: - What recruiters should be aware of - What recruiters can do to help improve the candidate experience - How recruiters can engage their hiring teams to have empathy for candidates when managing interviews - What candidates should expect or demand from hiring teams this season Psychology perspective on the candidate experience for recruiters. --- # Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Being an HR generalist isn’t going out of fashion anytime soon. With leaner teams and tighter budgets, it’s both a great time to be a solo HR professional at your organization and perhaps the worst time. Recent numbers show that [HR headcount has been dropping](https://www.hr-brew.com/stories/2023/07/20/hr-jobs-are-on-the-decline), with many HR professionals managing entire functions alone. If this is you, the balancing act is all too familiar; from hiring to onboarding to payroll and everything in between. This can feel overwhelming but offers unique growth opportunities, allowing you to develop a breadth of expertise across various HR responsibilities, giving you insight into every corner of the business, and positioning you as an indispensable resource within your organization. If anyone understands your organization's inner workings, it’s you. ## There’s no reward nor fulfillment doing repetitive tasks Routine tasks consume valuable hours that could be directed towards initiatives driving company growth or finally completing that SHRM course for your next certification. > When you’re scheduling manually, you’re not winning. — Tanya Towner, Human Resources Coordinator, Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA) Even if you’ve gotten good at powering through routine work, you are better off channeling your time towards more impactful projects like building engagement programs, fostering talent, and supporting employee well-being. The good news is you can do this, even with limited resources. ## Automation is your friend, and there are tools at your disposal One of the highest-return areas for automation is interview scheduling. Coordinating interview times, navigating availability, and updating candidates can be a logistical nightmare, consuming valuable hours each week. As Tanya Towner, HR coordinator at ONWA, experienced,[ manually scheduling thirty interviews used to take her a whole week](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/hiring-coordinator-schedules-interviews-in-30-seconds-bamboohr-cronofy). Tools like Cronofy streamline interview scheduling, freeing up your schedule for more impactful work. Like Tanya, you can schedule interviews in seconds with automation and [don’t need to break the bank for it](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/hiring-coordinator-schedules-interviews-in-30-seconds-bamboohr-cronofy). That’s not all; AI notetakers and interview intelligence tools like[ BrightHire ](https://brighthire.com/)improve decision-making throughout the hiring process. Automation means your HR team—no matter how small—can operate like a much larger team, scaling your impact without scaling your workload. > Even if I’m busy, and it needs to be done right now, scheduling with Cronofy in BambooHR literally takes 30 seconds and you’re done. — Tanya Towner, Human Resources Coordinator, Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA) ## Focus on people, not paperwork It’s time for you to drive real impact in your organization. [Cronofy’s interview scheduling solution](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-bamboohr) streamlines hiring so you can be your best self at work. Ready to see the difference? Book a demo with Cronofy today and transform how you work. [Schedule a personalized demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Brexit, GDPR, and Data Protection: Where Cronofy stands on the UK government’s proposals Data privacy and security are on the top of our list of priorities. Learn about our ongoing commitment to data protection. Data privacy and security are on the top of our list of priorities. Learn about our ongoing commitment to data protection. **Cronofy confirms its ongoing commitment to data protection and plans to incorporate in the Netherlands under EU data protection regulations.** **‍** Data privacy and security are and always will be top on our list of priorities. We strive to maintain the highest level of security; be it with our continued efforts to [obtaining certifications](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/) that prove how well we protect data, including ISO27001, ISO27018 and SOC 2 Type 2, as well as our commitment to GDPR and CCPA – we never compromise when it comes to protecting our customers and users’ data. It is what sets us apart from the competition. When the UK government announced proposals to move away from GDPR and downgrade data protection following Brexit, our CEO and co-founder, Adam Bird, simply had to take action and speak out. Adam [published a post](https://adambird.com/posts/back-to-eu/) on his personal blog, which TechCrunch subsequently [covered in this article](https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/so-much-for-levelling-up/). The topic powerfully resonates with the entire UK technology sector, which is generally feeling perturbed by these government announcements. Our position as custodians of huge amounts of personal data means that the recently announced proposal must be taken with utmost seriousness. We want to stress one thing; **our customers can rest assured that our data protection standards will be unaffected by the UK government proposals**. The EU approves UK GDPR legislation as adequate for processing EU citizens’ data. The UK government is proposing changes, but it will be a while before any changes get voted on by the UK parliament. However, we understand that our customers may be concerned about being contracted under UK data protection laws. Therefore, we decided it was important to move swiftly and preemptively to offer them another option as soon as possible. As explained in Adam’s post, we are establishing a presence in the Netherlands, Cronofy BV, and will offer our current and future EU customers the opportunity to contract with this new entity. That will become the new HQ for all of our GDPR activities, meaning we can be under the oversight of the Dutch data regulator and thus the EU. The customer data under this contract will continue to be governed by GDPR as we believe it should be. **Adam had the following to say:** > **“We were feeling more and more uncomfortable with the position that the UK government was taking over data privacy. While Cronofy will always do the right thing, there were increasing questions about whether the UK data protection rules would continue to match that.** **“To demonstrate our commitment to protecting personal data, it was only right that we incorporate back in the European Union, thus giving our customers the confidence that our words are backed up by legal obligation.”** ‍ If you’re interested in contracting with Cronofy BV, please contact your account manager or email us at [support@cronofy.com](#) and we will notify you as soon as this is available. Likewise, if you have any questions or concerns about our data protection and security commitments, get in touch – we’d be more than happy to discuss it with you. --- # 5 ways SaaS platforms can use meeting data to power AI features Meeting data rarely flows into SaaS platforms. Users supplement with individual notetakers and the data ends up elsewhere. When transcripts, recordings, and summaries flow directly into your product, they become the foundation for AI features that weren't possible before. We look at five ways SaaS platforms can use meeting data to deliver valuable AI features. Meeting data rarely flows into SaaS platforms - users rely on standalone notetakers, and the insights end up elsewhere. When transcripts, recordings, and summaries flow directly into your product, they let you build AI features that weren't possible before. Here are five ways to put that data to work. Meeting data is one of the richest sources of context in any business workflow, but most SaaS platforms never capture it. Users supplement with individual notetakers, and the data ends up somewhere else. When transcripts, recordings, and summaries flow directly into your product, they become the foundation for AI features that weren't possible before. Here, we cover five ways SaaS platforms can use meeting data to automate workflows, surface insights, and deliver more value to users. Use case 1: Auto-populating records **The problem:** Users spend time manually logging what happened in meetings: updating CRM records after sales calls, adding interview notes to an ATS, writing up session summaries in coaching platforms. It's tedious, inconsistent, and often skipped. **How meeting data solves it:** Transcripts and AI summaries can auto-populate fields and records immediately after a call ends. Deal notes, candidate feedback, and client session summaries appear without manual entry. **Example:** A CRM that automatically updates the deal record with key discussion points, next steps, and objections raised, ready for the rep to review and refine rather than write from scratch. Use case 2: Intelligent scoring and assessment **The problem:** Scoring candidates, deals, or clients typically relies on structured inputs like form responses, activity data, stage progression. But the real signal often lives in what was said during the meeting. **How meeting data solves it:** Feed data to AI to analyse transcripts to score based on conversation content: confidence, engagement, specific phrases, or how questions were answered. **Example:** An ATS that scores candidates based on interview responses, flagging strong answers on key competencies or concerns worth discussing in debrief. Use case 3: Automating follow-ups and next steps **The problem:** Action items discussed in meetings often get lost. Users forget to send follow-ups, create tasks, or update statuses based on what was agreed. Without meeting data, most pushes into follow-up action are generic. **How meeting data solves it:** You can extract action items and commitments from transcripts, then trigger workflows, e.g. creating tasks that aren’t generic ‘send email’ pushes, and suggesting email content based on what actually happened in the call. **Example:** A CRM that detects when a sales rep commits to sending a proposal or scheduling a demo, then drafts the follow-up email and creates a task with a deadline. Use case 4: Coaching and performance insights **The problem:** Managers want to their line reports improve, but reviewing every call is impractical, and self-reported summaries lack objectivity. **How meeting data solves it:** You can surface patterns across calls like talk-to-listen ratios, question quality, how objections are handled, which gives managers data to coach from without listening to hours of recordings. **Example:** A sales enablement tool that flags calls where reps talked more than 70% of the time, or where pricing was discussed before discovery was complete. Use case 5: Search and retrieve insights from previous meetings **The problem:** Knowledge amongst teams gets lost. Users can't rely on remembering what was discussed with a client six months ago, or what was agreed in an earlier interview round without digging through their own notes. **How meeting data solves it:** Transcripts become searchable records. Users can query past meetings by keyword, participant, or topic, which surfaces context that would otherwise be forgotten. **Example:** A CRM where a rep preparing for a renewal call can search "pricing concerns" and instantly see every past conversation where the client raised budget issues. This helps them inform their objection handling in the future. Why meeting capture inside your application is the first step All five use cases require meeting data to live inside your product, not in a separate notetaker app. Structured data alone (fields, logs, activity) can't power these features. The AI intelligence layer you want to build is only as useful as the data it has access to. Meeting data unlocks a category of AI features that SaaS platforms couldn't build before. The platforms capturing this data now are building differentiation that compounds over time. For product teams weighing up whether to add meeting capture, the question isn't just "should we record meetings?" but "what could we build if we had this data?" [See how Meeting Agents can power your AI](/developer/meeting-agents) ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # It's not always 200 OK When creating the Cronofy API, we didn’t just want to create a one API for all the calendar services, we wanted to deal with many of the problems when integrating with those APIs individually.Through judicious use of the less commonly encountered 202 Accepted we’ve endeavored to do just that. When creating the Cronofy API, we didn’t just want to create a one API for all the calendar services, we wanted to deal with many of the problems when integrating with those APIs individually.Through judicious use of the less commonly encountered 202 Accepted we’ve endeavored to do just that. When creating the [Cronofy API](http://web.archive.org/web/20240616224949/https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/), we didn’t just want to create a one API for all the calendar services, we wanted to deal with many of the problems when integrating with those APIs individually. Through judicious use of the less commonly encountered 202 Accepted we’ve endeavored to do just that. ## A definition ### 202 Accepted The request has been accepted for processing, but the processing has not been completed. The request might or might not eventually be acted upon, as it might be disallowed when processing actually takes place. For our purposes, the request will always eventually be acted upon. However, it is true that it might be disallowed when processing actually takes place. For example, the credentials for the user may no longer be valid. In that case we will get the user to authenticate again and then reattempt the request, all without you having to be involved. Also, the calendar service may be down temporarily, which I’ll go into later, amongst various other potential problems. When acting as an intermediary between you and the calendar services, this response is the most accurate description of what is actually happening, and it has some other benefits too. ## Shaving yaks A common source of pain when integrating with a new API is creating a mapping table from your internal data to the ID determined by the API. There’s also the complexity of knowing whether you need to issue an insert for a new event or an update for an existing one. We wanted to deal with all this complexity for you and so decided on an “upsert” model for [creating and updating events](http://web.archive.org/web/20240616224949/https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/#upsert-event). You give us a value uniquely identifying the event you want to create within your system and we worry about the actions required to make that into reality. No mapping required, no response to parse containing all the information you just sent us, just a 202 Accepted and the knowledge we’ll update your users calendar as soon as possible. ## Embracing failure Another thing we felt we had to deal with for you was downstream failure. All calendar providers can, and do, have downtime and if we were to directly proxy your requests you would have to deal with the consequences of that yourself. We are all about making things as smooth for you as possible so that isn’t acceptable. Therefore, as much as is possible, each downstream action we need to perform on your behalf is done asynchronously via a queue and background processors. This queuing infrastructure allows us to shield you from downstream failure, continuing to attempt to make the change you requested in the face of failure without you having to worry or create similar infrastructure yourself. Even if the worst happens and a problem occurs whilst you are talking to our API you don’t need to worry. There’s not the problem of your “create” succeeding but you not having the ID so you cannot update it later, your delete succeeding and so a subsequent one will result in an error, you can just try again. You can just tell us the state you want an event to be in and we’ll make sure the event in your customer’s calendar reflects that. All this is why our response for create or update, and delete, event requests is 202 Accepted. Everything might not be 200 OK right now, but once it is we’ll make sure that the world looks the way you want it to. --- # Embed Real-Time Scheduling in Your Applications with UI Elements Our Calendar and Scheduling APIs are helping hundreds of companies deliver better scheduling to hundreds of thousands of users. But not every product integrated with Cronofy has an existing calendar interface. We see a lot of our customers build user interface elements on top of the Cronofy APIs. These can take further hours of development time, increasing how long it takes before your customers can benefit from two-way calendar sync. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the first three Cronofy UI Elements. Our Calendar and Scheduling APIs are helping hundreds of companies deliver better scheduling to hundreds of thousands of users. But not every product integrated with Cronofy has an existing calendar interface. We see a lot of our customers build user interface elements on top of the Cronofy APIs. These can take further hours of development time, increasing how long it takes before your customers can benefit from two-way calendar sync. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the first three Cronofy UI Elements. Our Calendar and Scheduling APIs are helping hundreds of companies deliver better scheduling to hundreds of thousands of users. But not every product integrated with Cronofy has an existing calendar interface. We see a lot of our customers [build user interface elements](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/build-vs-buy-scheduling-automation-software) on top of the Cronofy APIs. These can take further hours of development time, increasing how long it takes before your customers can benefit from two-way calendar sync. That's why we're excited to introduce the first three Cronofy UI Elements – the **Slot Picker**, the **Availability Viewer**, and the **Agenda View**. They're JavaScript components designed to be embedded within your web or SaaS application. They include customizable options, too. For instance, the Agenda Viewer will automatically pick up the website's fonts. UI Elements are free to use but aren't stand-alone products. They're powered by our Calendar and Scheduling APIs. Which UI Elements you can use will depend on the plan you're on. For example, to use the Availability Viewer Element, you'll need to be on a plan that gives you access to the Availability API. The documentation for the UI Elements is available on our new – and improved – [developer site](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/). ### Slot Picker The Cronofy Slot Picker UI element is an embeddable version of our [Real-Time Scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/real-time-scheduling/) interface. It's built on top of our Availability API to query a calendar synced with Cronofy and allow people to self-book in a few clicks. The user will start by picking the day they want before choosing a time slot and confirming their booking. They always have the option to go back to the previous step of the process. Once the time slot is booked it won't appear as a bookable time slot for anyone else. The Slot Picker can be used to present the availability of a recruiter or a service provider to streamline online booking. [Read the Slot Picker developer documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/slot-picker/). ### Availability Viewer The Availability Viewer UI element is an advanced slot picker tool that leverages our Availability API to present free time slots in an interactive, week-based, calendar interface. The availabilities are presented as free/busy on a calendar view – a grid of days, Sunday to Saturday. Free time slots are left blank and busy time slots are indicated. If the availability query spans more than one week the user can browse the Availability Viewer one week at a time. The Availability Viewer can be embedded in an applicant tracking system to allow admin staff to view when members of an interview panel are free. But it doesn't stop there – freelancers could embed the Availability Viewer to let website visitors self-book appointments. ‍[Read the Availability Viewer developer documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/availability-viewer/) . ### Agenda View The Agenda View UI element displays events for a single-day period. This UI Element leverages the Unified Calendar API to sync the UI with the connected calendar. The Agenda View shows time slots for existing events. For example, if the calendar user has a meeting from 9am to 10am and no other meeting that day, the Agenda Viewer will only display that single event when this day is selected. Clicking an event reveals the full details for that event.The Agenda View can be used on internal tools to improve project management processes. Project managers could use it to see the workload of a team member and allocate work accordingly. ‍[Read the Agenda View developer documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/agenda-viewer/). We hope these UI Elements help you to deliver great real-time scheduling experiences to your users quicker. If you have any questions on how you can use the UI Elements don't hesitate to [get in touch](https://www.cronofy.com/contact/). --- # How to schedule interviews in Greenhouse ## How to schedule interviews in Greenhouse See how you can enable automation for advanced-stage interview use-cases inside your Greenhouse workflow with Cronofy. So you’ve invested in the Greenhouse ATS - now it’s time to get the most out of it! Embedding Cronofy’s interview scheduling capabilities into your workflows elevates your Greenhouse ATS experience, helping you streamline scheduling and improve time-to-schedule. Interview scheduling is a recruiter's bugbear. When done manually, it can easily spiral into a time-wasting back-and-forth exchange between the recruiter, candidate, and interviewers, which leaves all parties frustrated and stressed. It can even lead to candidates dropping out of the hiring process; our [2024 Candidate Expectations report](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ae57a23ff9d5) showed that 42% of respondents had left the recruitment process due to delays – particularly with interview scheduling. ## What is an ATS? An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is software used to streamline the hiring process. It can collect applications and candidate information, such as contact details and the role they’ve applied for. It also tracks where a candidate is in the recruitment process and any communication between the candidate and the company. Recruiters can easily organize and filter potential hires based on experience and skill set. At its essence, an ATS automates the manual admin that can eat into time spent on valuable tasks, like relationship building and candidate sourcing. Greenhouse is a popular ATS within the recruitment sector. In this guide, we’ll show you how to schedule an interview through Greenhouse and how [integrating with Cronofy can save your recruitment team hundreds of hours a year.](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-greenhouse) ## Introduction to Greenhouse ## What is Greenhouse? Greenhouse provides recruiting and onboarding software as a service, and is one of the top ATS providers used by recruitment and HR teams. The system is known for being feature-rich and intuitive and is now used by over 4000 companies, including Airbnb and Time Inc., to streamline their hiring processes. It is customizable and scalable, with the ability to fit a business's hiring needs. ## What can you use Greenhouse software for? Greenhouse software allows you to craft hiring plans for every position, customize for each member of your hiring team, and report on the results. The main features that the Greenhouse ATS provides are: - Candidate sourcing and screening - Storing candidate details - Communication tracking - Candidate behavior reporting - Job application collection - Advertising roles - Interview organization - Resume parsing ## Can I schedule interviews in Greenhouse? Yes, Greenhouse users can schedule interviews through the platform's native scheduling tool. Greenhouse's scheduling setup is available to all subscription tiers and splits the scheduling process into a two-step flow: creating an interview schedule and sending the interviewer invitations. Greenhouse also offers a 'Candidate self-schedule’ option to advanced and expert subscription holders, which provides candidates with a self-booking link. You can only use this feature when scheduling a single interview with just one interviewer. ## How can Cronofy enhance Greenhouse native scheduling? The Cronofy integration makes interview scheduling inside Greenhouse more streamlined, allowing you to offer candidates availability in a few clicks. It's also highly scalable, allowing you to schedule easily during high-volume hiring seasons. Here are some of the key ways it can enhance the existing functionality of the Greenhouse scheduling tool: - **Automated interviewer selection** When using the Greenhouse native scheduling tool, you'll need to select your chosen interviewers for each candidate manually. To save time, users can set up Cronofy to automatically select the best interviewer for the role from a pool of potential interviewers. They will have already shared their calendars with Cronofy, so choosing the ideal person is easy. - **Instant booking and real-time availability** The native tool requires interviews to be organized internally between interviewers before confirming with the candidate. The recruiter then needs to manually send an email of confirmation to the candidate through the Greenhouse platform. If you're working with many candidates and interviewers, Cronofy can help alleviate some admin from your day. Candidates are emailed automatically with a self-serving booking link once they move from one stage of the recruitment process to the next. The availability updates in real-time, so no chance of double-booking. Once the candidate selects a time, it automatically updates the candidate's and interviewer's calendars for instant confirmation. - **Scales with complex interview use cases** Cronofy enhances Greenhouse's native offering with scalable, sophisticated interview scheduling use cases, such as [panel interviews and sequenced interviews](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-greenhouse#452f5111128c). The Greenhouse 'Candidate self-schedule' tool works similarly to the above; candidates can choose an interview slot using a scheduling link sent to them by email. The user can use this feature for single interviews and one interviewer, but what if you have a more complex interview setup? - **Compatibility with all calendar providers** One of the most common roadblocks when organizing interviews through automation is calendar compatibility. There are so many calendar providers available through various digital platforms, and scheduling automation needs to talk to whichever one both the interviewer and candidate use. You can use the Greenhouse 'Candidate self schedule' offering with Google calendar or Office 365, but if you find you need a wider range of calendar integrations, Cronofy is the solution you need. We integrate with all calendar providers, including Google and Microsoft Exchange, to ensure the scheduling process is seamless for all. - **Candidate privacy** Recruiters are increasingly aware of privacy and how important it is to protect the candidate data they work with daily. This information is completely safe and secure within the Greenhouse platform for external users, and Cronofy can enhance internal privacy. By selecting the *'Make calendar events private'* tick box, a candidate's availability is private to the interviewer, ensuring no colleagues can see this information. Read our data privacy policy [here](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy). ## What are the benefits of integrating Cronofy with Greenhouse? Using the Greenhouse platform with Cronofy scheduling enhancements could just get you ahead of the competition in the war for talent. So how exactly can it make a difference to your recruitment process? - **Improves recruiting efficiency** Cronofy enables teams to spend less time scheduling and more time interviewing candidates. Skipping the workarounds using Greenhouse's native scheduling capabilities, recruiters can focus on more strategic tasks like onboarding or pipeline generation. - **Improves the candidate experience** With so many businesses looking to hire and job vacancies at a high, competition in the job market is fierce. The candidate experience means everything, and the hiring process is the first point of contact. Cronofy’s self-serve scheduling links make the candidate feel respected and appreciated - their time is precious. - **Speeds up time-to-hire** Recruiters have to beat the competition with their speed-to-hire. They need to progress the hiring process from application, to interview, to job offer at a fast enough pace to keep the candidate's interest piqued. With Cronofy, there’s no time-wasting back-and-forth or interview scheduling delays, meaning you’re more likely to retain the best talent and find the perfect match for your role. - **Eliminates back-and-forth** This is an inevitable part of manual scheduling: emails back and forth trying to arrange the best time and date for everyone to meet. This situation is made even more messy when taking a panel of interviewers into account. Cronofy automatically finds the best times depending on everyone’s calendar and leaves the candidate to choose from the options. - **All in one place** There’s no need to switch tabs away from Greenhouse - Cronofy enables advanced the interview scheduling is native within the platform. All information and updates are synced between Greenhouse, the candidate record, and Cronofy for full visibility. ## Scheduling Interviews ## How do you schedule interviews in Greenhouse with Cronofy? Now that you know what Greenhouse is used for and how Cronofy can enhance its existing interview scheduling capabilities, we’ll show you step-by-step how you can quickly and easily schedule interviews in Greenhouse. **Step 1** First, ensure your interview plan is set up correctly in Greenhouse. This is where you can store the information about the role and the different stages of the interviewing process. You can find this in the *"Interview Plan"* section of Greenhouse, within the *‘Job Setup’* tab. You can also assign a pool or panel of default interviewers in this section. Greenhouse has visibility of their calendars, so an interviewer will be selected depending on the time the candidate chooses. **Step 2** Once this has been checked over, you can click on the *‘Candidates’ *tab. Here you’ll find all your candidate details, including which role they’re applying for and what stage they are in the hiring process. When you’re ready to move the candidate to the interviewing stage, select the *‘Move stage’ *button. From here, you can select which stage you’d like to move the candidate to. Cronofy has been set up to listen to recruitment stage changes in Greenhouse. As soon as the candidate is moved, the automatic email saved in your Cronofy account will be sent to them, complete with a personalized, self-serving scheduling link. You'll see the email sent if you click on the activity feed. **Step 3** When the candidate clicks on this link, they’ll be directed to a branded booking page with proposed interview times and dates that reflect when the interviewer is available. Putting the power in their hands, the candidate can choose a time that suits them best. Once the candidate confirms a time, it will automatically populate their own and the interviewer's calendars, regardless of what calendar provider they use. This information will also be updated in Greenhouse. Congratulations, you’ve just scheduled your first interview using the Cronofy capabilities in Greenhouse! You can use the same process throughout the different interview stages, setting up correlating automatic emails and assigning specific interviewers. ### Schedule interviews in Greenhouse ## How can I set up the Cronofy integration with Greenhouse? Cronofy’s automated interview scheduling features can be embedded seamlessly into your existing hiring workflows within Greenhouse. To get started, your Cronofy admin sets up scheduling rules and triggers so they’re ready to roll out and use in your hiring workflows. Here’s a quick overview of what you can personalize for your hiring process. First, you set up your Greenhouse scheduling triggers in the *‘Integrations’* section of your Cronofy account. These triggers listen in to any changes to the candidate’s status in Greenhouse – for example being moved from the application to the phone interview stage – and communicate automatically with Cronofy, to initiate the triggers you’ve created. You can design triggers for each stage of the hiring process by clicking *‘Create New Trigger'.* Everything happens automatically once these are set up, offering a consistent and efficient hiring experience for candidates and recruiters. Once you’ve clicked on a specific trigger, you can set up interviewer pools with specific rules. These rules allow you to define which calendar or group of calendars’ availability you use. For example, if the initial screening call can be carried out by anyone on your recruitment team, you can group them, choose only one from the pool to be required ‘available’, and the candidate choose a time that works best for them. Further along in the process, a panel interview for a particular role may require certain people to be mandatory and a few to be optional. It’s important to protect candidates' data privacy, which is why we offer a tick box that allows you to make any calendar event and interviews that are created, private to only you and them - others can’t view their personal details on the event. There’s an *‘Email Template’* section, where you can upload the email copy you’d like to go out to your candidate automatically once they’ve moved onto another stage of the hiring process. This comes complete with a self-scheduling link that you can create in the *‘Scheduler’ *section of your Cronofy account. Once you’ve set up your scheduling rules, you’re ready to log into Greenhouse and start guiding your candidates through the recruitment process! Cronofy's automation in Greenhouse can reduce your time-to-schedule and allow you focus on high-value tasks. Interested in unleashing the scheduling power of Cronofy in your Greenhouse ATS? [Book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) with one of our experts to see Cronofy in action! [Speak with a scheduling expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # SaaS Tools for Startups As a SaaS company, it should come as no surprise that we use a range of SaaS tools to help us achieve our goals. From sales to marketing to software development, we all rely on tools to make our lives easier. Finding the right tool is a process of trial and error – we've experimented with many over the years. Some of those we found less effective as teams scaled while others we still use now. But we wouldn't have found tools that we love and use daily without this process. As a SaaS company, it should come as no surprise that we use a range of SaaS tools to help us achieve our goals. From sales to marketing to software development, we all rely on tools to make our lives easier. Finding the right tool is a process of trial and error – we've experimented with many over the years. Some of those we found less effective as teams scaled while others we still use now. But we wouldn't have found tools that we love and use daily without this process. As a SaaS company, it should come as no surprise that we use a range of SaaS tools to help us achieve our goals. From sales to marketing to software development, we all rely on tools to make our lives easier. Finding the right tool is a process of trial and error – we've experimented with many over the years. Some of those we found less effective as teams scaled while others we still use now. But we wouldn't have found tools that we love and use daily without this process. In this post we talk to CEO Adam Bird, Marketing Manager Jeremy Bourhis, Account Executive Tomas Kuzmickas, Support Manager Karl Bagci, and Senior Developer Tom Hazledine on what tools they use and love. ### What SaaS tools do you use on a regular basis? What makes them so invaluable to you? **Adam Bird:** With the current setup at Cronofy, [Hubspot](http://hubspot.com/), [Slack](https://slack.com/), [Notion](https://www.notion.so/), and [Zoom](http://zoom.us/) are probably the SaaS tools I use the most. Information, communication and collaboration are the foundation upon which a semi distributed company like ours is built. Notion is a relatively new addition to that list and has allowed us to consolidate several other tools. Tools like [Trello](https://trello.com/), Word, and Excel have either gone completely or seen their use dramatically drop. We've even pulled back from using a dedicated ATS as it gives us everything we need to run a hiring flow at the scale we're at, including dedicated job sites. ‍**Jeremy:** Like many marketers I use Hubspot everyday. Several times a day in fact. Hubspot is where we keep all the information about our clients and prospects. It's easy to fall into an "Hubspot hole" sometimes with all the valuable information presented on contact timelines. Hubspot is embedded into everything that I do. It is integrated with our social media and paid marketing channels. We send marketing and sales emails from Hubspot and build all the automation workflows we need to save time and be more efficient. Having all these tools consolidated into one is something very important in a startup where resources and time count more than in any other type of business! Another tool that I find incredibly useful when working on our website is CrazyEgg. It's a clever heatmap solution that allows us to see how our visitors use our website. Where they click and even where they stop scrolling. There is a wealth of filtering options too. We don't always have the necessary traffic to run A/B tests on each page of our website so being able to look at these snapshots enables us to still make data-based decisions. ‍**Tomas: **[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/) - finding relevant contacts within prospect organizations. [Crunchbase](https://www.crunchbase.com/) - finding startups that have recently received funding or have lots of mindshare. They also display key information on businesses such as yearly revenue, total amount of money raised / funding status (e.g. if it's IPO'd and where), broadly accurate monthly visitors and 3 key competitors. Hubspot is key for tracking deals and the functionality of tracking email opens is very useful. Notion is great for organizing internal articles and collaborating on cross-team projects. ‍**Karl:** Being able to communicate with our customer base is absolutely key. Tools which enable us do that are invaluable to the Operations team here at Cronofy. Namely, Zendesk and StatusPage. [Zendesk](https://www.zendesk.com/) is critical in our day-to-day communication with customers, allowing us to solve customer queries quickly and efficiently. [StatusPage](https://www.zendesk.com/) is brilliant in its simplicity and power. We don't have to use StatusPage frequently (thankfully), but when we do need to use it, it's usually when something is not working as expected and the pressure is on. StatusPage allows us to quickly maintain transparency with our customer base and get the right information to the people who want it. ‍**Tom:** My most frequently used SaaS tools are pretty utilitarian, but I'd be lost without them. [1Password](https://1password.com/) enforces password discipline, and more importantly keeps passwords out of my head (where I'd forget them or - even worse - reuse them 😱). If a file isn't suitable for versioning with GIT, it goes into Dropbox, meaning I can access all the things all the time in all the places. My inner-geek also loves a good spreadsheet, so Google Sheets is never too far from my fingers. Need an algorithm for creating an optimal wedding table plan? I've got you covered 😉 ### What's your favorite tool and why? **Adam Bird:** Notion is probably my favourite but I've already talked about that so I'm going to call out Zendesk here. We've recently moved back to Zendesk for ticketing after a support tool journey that took us from there to Intercom (interesting but didn't really match our workflow), Hubspot (their service offering is just dreadful) and back to Zendesk. Returning after a couple of years and not a lot has changed on the face of it. Which is is a really good thing. They have nailed what you need to run a support desk and not lost that as they've grown. 👏to them. ‍**Jeremy:** I've found that I often need to build flowcharts either as part of the marketing planning process or even to use in client calls. A tool I have been using – and loving – in order to do this is [Whimsical](https://whimsical.com/). Whimsical is ideal to create flowcharts, mind maps and even wireframes. It is extremely easy to use thanks to a very straightforward drag-and-drop system. Styling is really easy too which means it's easier to focus on the idea behind the chart instead of trying to find the right color or icon. ‍**Tomas:** I'd say LinkedIn, as it grants me the ability to find key decision makers for progressing deals and is one of my two channels for outbound activity (the other being emails). The Sales Navigator tool also tracks new executive hires within a company, such as new CTOs, CPOs etc, joining the business. ‍**Karl:** Right now it's Notion. Everything about this platform (and the company) excites me. Right now - Notion makes it easy for me manage content I want to share with my team. I can format it in a way which makes it attractive and easy to read. There are some really smart features too - like smart page linking, embedding of pages and an array of keyboard shortcuts. It generally just makes my life easier. Even better than that though is the fact that new features are constantly being added and there is a [healthy pipeline of features](https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba8b46c) heading our way, too! Another thing I like about Notion is that they seem to have a great working culture, which aligns really nicely with ours [here at Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/about/), too. ‍**Tom:** While I spend most of my time in a code editor, I'm always excited every time I get to open any design software. While [Figma](https://www.figma.com/) is great for collaborating with other designers and [Adobe XD](https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/xd.html) has been making great strides lately, my favourite design tool is still Sketch. The prototyping features are so intuitive, and the app makes sharing work with non-designer colleagues an absolute breeze. ### What tools don't we use that you'd like to adopt or would recommend to people? **Adam Bird:** I've started using [QuarterOne](https://www.quarterone.com/) as a sales reporting tool. I like a lot about Hubspot as a CRM but the reporting is really lacking. Especially if you want to compare points in time. For example, what has changed in the sales pipeline between two dates and this needs investigation. i also like the pipeline close visualisation which can be grouped by many factors. It's a new product and I know the team have big plans for it but it does seem to plug a big gap in Hubspot's reporting. ‍**Jeremy:** Landing pages are key to driving conversions. They also need to be consistently experimented and optimized. This can be challenging without a dedicated in-house team of designers and web developers. At Cronofy we are lucky to have the technical resources we need to update our landing pages but if we didn't we would use Unbounce to easily create, edit, and test new landing pages. ‍**Tomas: **[SimilarWeb](https://www.similarweb.com/) for sales sounds very compelling in terms of sourcing new leads based on web analytics across 80M sites. ‍**Karl:** Outside of work I've recently taken up drawing on my iPad Pro. I've been using a tool called [Procreate](https://procreate.art/). I might be late to the party here - but this tool is great! The first thing it did for me, was smooth the lines in my drawings, making them look a bit more polished (I need all of the help I can get). Procreate lets me import files into it - while still feeling like drawing using a pen and paper. Also, there are a bunch of hand gestures you can use for shortcuts which just make things that much more slick. It's a super neat app. ‍**Tom:** Due to the nature of the work we do, we don't have to worry too much about backing up our computers at Cronofy. All our code lives in cloud-based GIT repositories, and important work documents are stored in Dropbox or Notion. Outside of work, however, a remote backup is one of the first things I install on any computer I use. I treat my archive of mp3s in the same way I treat my vinyl collection, and I'd be devastated if I lost any of it. For my own peace of mind, I use Backblaze to backup all my personal computers. ## Conclusion Have we mentioned that we love Notion? It's our most widely used – and clearly most loved – tool of them all. It allows us to collaborate remotely and cross-team. Hubspot is a great all-rounder too, streamlining things for teams in almost every department. Much like Notion, it helps to connect activities done by different teams so that, for example, marketing can send an email campaign on behalf of sales and everyone can track the results. As a remote team, [collaborative tools](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/team-collaboration-tools/) are key to a successful working environment. The easier it is for teams to work together, the more likely they will be to do so. --- # Cronofy Partners with Whereby for Integrated Video Calls and Streamlined Scheduling Whereby and Cronofy are now partners, delivering high performance, secure APIs and tooling for product teams and developers. See how video conferencing and event scheduling work with Cronofy and Whereby. Cronofy has partnered with Whereby to further accelerate scheduling and video conferencing capabilities for product builders. Our shared vision of creating secure, scalable and flexible solutions for developers and product teams, is now set in motion. We’re excited to share that we've now officially partnered with [Whereby](https://whereby.com/?utm_source=cronofy&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=cronofy-announcement) to further accelerate the development of applications for developers and teams. With a shared vision of building easy to integrate, secure, and flexible solutions for product builders, we’re excited to align our efforts with Whereby to support high performance teams. Earlier in August we [launched the integration with Whereby’s video API](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/cronofy-launches-whereby-api). We’ve since seen the power and value of combining Cronofy scheduling infrastructure with Whereby’s video conferencing— speeding up product development of mission critical features in modern applications. > The integration between Cronofy and Whereby has made event creation for our application a seamless process across multiple users. It's been very easy to implement, and provides a great user experience — [Ben Siegel](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminnsiegel328/), Founder and Chief Community Officer at [The CyberNest](https://thecybernest.com/) ## **Partnering for best in class** By [integrating](https://www.cronofy.com/integrations/whereby) Whereby’s flexible video conferencing API with Cronofy’s robust scheduling tools, this collaboration allows product teams to deliver video call capabilities and scheduling into their SaaS platform or product much faster. Developers can create branded, scalable experiences beyond standard conferencing tools, while maintaining top-tier security and compliance with GDPR and HIPAA standards. Cronofy and Whereby are ideal for industries like Telehealth that require secure, reliable solutions for complex scheduling and reliable communication needs. What started as an API integration only, can now be used across all Cronofy products allowing teams using our [Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) to select Whereby as a video conferencing solution. ## **Getting started** You can check out how to connect your Cronofy and Whereby accounts in a few clicks and enjoy the benefits of the implementation in [this simple guide](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api-alpha/whereby/). If you’re an existing Whereby customer, they’ve put together this [getting started tutorial](https://docs.whereby.com/whereby-101/create-your-video/meeting-scheduling-with-cronofy/?utm_source=cronofy&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=cronofy-announcement) on their end. We invite interested teams to fill out the form below to get started today. ### Docplanner Group uses full calendar sync to power its SaaS healthcare solution Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. Case Study --- ### Talking telehealth and healthcare convenience with Dr. Lisa Koonin Dr. Koonin worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before founding her consultancy. We spoke with her about our Healthcare Convenience Report. Blog Post 2021-06-29T11:00:00.000Z --- ### Revolutionizing digital healthcare support with Tidepool Tidepool are committed to helping all people with insulin-requiring diabetes safely achieve great outcomes through more accessible, actionable, and meaningful diabetes data. Case Study --- # Appointment scheduling for real estate tech Streamline how prospective buyers book time to meet with real estate agents with Cronofy's scheduling and calendar APIs. Learn more ## Add Smart Scheduling to Your Real Estate Software ## Book in real-time Real estate agents can connect their calendars to your real estate software with Cronofy. Clients can then book viewings based on their real-time availability. Whenever changes are made, everyone can be notified as soon as it happens. Should an appointment need to be rescheduled, the viewing slot will reopen in real time, allowing someone else to book it instead. For open houses, your customers could create time slots that automatically close when enough people have chosen it. This stops too many people turning up at one time. ## Generate booking links [Real-Time Scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/real-time-scheduling/) allows estate agents to generate a booking link – based on their real-time availability – that they can send to interested viewers. The length of time for viewings can be adjusted to reflect the size and interest in a property, and because it updates in real-time, there’s no danger of any double-bookings. Scheduling links can also be added directly to online property profiles on real estate listing websites. Potential buyers can book their viewing in seconds without having to send an email or request a phone call. ## Add a booking interface to your software Provide your users with a booking interface where their customers can schedule appointments with our Slot Picker. It’s a [JavaScript UI element](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/) that you can add to your software quickly and easily. Estate agents can indicate when they’re available for viewings with Availability Rules. Any rules chose will be reflected in the booking interface, meaning that estate agents won’t find themselves double-booked and can keep times that they need open available. ## Know where to go When potential buyers are unfamiliar with an area, it can make them late if they get lost, messing up estate agents’ schedules. With Cronofy’s [geolocation feature](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/), location details can be added to a calendar event to make getting to a viewing super easy. With maps just a click away on any smartphone, it’s never been easier to find where to go. Notifications can also be set up to be sent when it’s time to leave, based on the user’s location and current traffic. --- # Scheduler Pricing Scheduler Pricing Pay for active users, not empty seats Our billing model automatically ensures you're not charged for unused tools. Seats are dynamically assigned based on your team's actual usage, and you only pay for the seats that were actively used during the month. [View API Pricing](https://youtu.be/ohKLouGUlQg) ## Scheduler pricing plans See [cronofy.com/pricing](/pricing) for full details. Developer? Building with our API? If you're building an integration for your SaaS product with our [API](/developer), you need our API Pricing. [View API Pricing](/api-pricing) ## Build scheduling features with our API Trusted by developers to schedule hundreds of millions of events, Cronofy's scheduling platform offers two API modes built upon the same high-performance, reliable scheduling infrastructure. [See API pricing](https://www.cronofy.com/api-pricing) [Explore features](https://www.cronofy.com/developer) ## Choose the plan that works for you ## Scheduler pricing plans See [cronofy.com/pricing](/pricing) for full details. ## Request Pricing Information --- # Candidate Expectations Report 2025: Early Access 12,000 candidates, 7 countries; what have we learned about their expectations, frustrations, and preferences in this year's Candidate Expectations Report? ## Candidate Expectations: What should you be focusing on in 2025? 7,000 candidates, 7 countries; what have we learned about their expectations, frustrations, and preferences? We look to answer the questions recruiters and hiring businesses are asking: What do candidates want and what frustrates them? How long are they willing to wait during the hiring process? How do they use and view AI? Sign up below to get the scoop on our upcoming 2025 report. [See last year's findings](#form-4b9f2ced-36aa-4005-9864-940e43e93b34) ## Join the waitlist to get an exclusive copy before others --- # Workday interview scheduling Automate interview scheduling in Workday without switching tools. Cronofy helps recruiters move faster, eliminate manual coordination and free up hours for more important work. ## Workday Doesn’t Schedule Interviews, Cronofy Fixes That Get live interviewer availability and schedule interviews right inside Workday Recruiting. Seamlessly integrates with your configuration and automatically updates interview tasks in Workday. [Speak to a Specialist](#form-c69a8400-10ec-4ca4-8da2-fc92eb6f198c) [See Demo](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-workday?preview=true&dataset=production#fd75af8e5ef8) ## Your Solution to Manual Scheduling in Workday No Need to Change How You Work **Gets Live Interviewer Availability** **Auto-updates Confirmed Interviews** **Works With Your Existing Configuration** **Dedicated Support Team** **Enterprise-Grade Data Protection** ## Book more interviews daily Unlock more availability from interviewers without time-consuming back-and-forth. Cronofy gives you the tools to schedule interviews faster and more efficiently so you can move candidates forward and reduce time spent in the interview stage. ## See ROI in days, not months Save salary dollars on recruiting admin from day one. With Cronofy, you can instantly solve manual scheduling for any interview use-case and unlock more capabilities as you go. No need to wait six months for a complex rollout. ## Intuitive to use, powerful under the hood Any Cronofy product you’ll use is designed to be intuitive, with all the complexity hidden away in our powerful temporal grid. Connect to the calendars and conferencing your organisation use with the right level of access, one by one or at an enterprise level. Check real-time availability no matter the number of participants. Stay secure, compliant and in your data jurisdiction of choice. > We're able to move candidates through hiring much quicker – we've shaved a week off the processes we were previously running. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ## Enhance the interviewing experience Impress candidates with a personalized booking experience and give your team a process they can trust. With Cronofy, recruiters no longer need to switch tools, compare calendars or double-check invites, and hiring managers aren't pulled into scheduling admin. ## Built for global hiring Coordinate interviews confidently across time zones and localize the scheduling experience for candidates with support for 17 languages. You no longer need to worry about booking interviewers outside their working hours or dealing with no-shows caused by time zone confusion. ## Keep hiring data in sync Reflect candidate progress instantly in Workday without double entry or manual status updates. Cronofy delivers reliable, streamlined reporting so your hiring data stays in one place and your team stays aligned. Zero mapping errors. ## Schedule from wherever you work Go beyond your ATS and schedule from where your team works and collaborates already, such as Teams, Office, and Slack. [Discover the Cronofy Scheduling Agent](/scheduling-agent) ## Turn Scheduling Into a Hiring Advantage Keep candidates engaged and give hiring managers confidence in the process. Embrace the scheduling partner that shifts recruiter conversations from chasing calendars to building relationships. --- # Schedule Meetings in Slack with our Slack Calendar Connector Our Slack Calendar Connector is used by companies big and small to track their upcoming meetings. With our new Slack Meet command, it makes organizing your meetings even easier. Using it, you can schedule meetings from directly in Slack. You can easily schedule meetings in Slack in a matter of minutes. Our Slack Calendar Connector is used by companies big and small to track their upcoming meetings. With our new Slack Meet command, it makes organizing your meetings even easier. Using it, you can schedule meetings from directly in Slack. You can easily schedule meetings in Slack in a matter of minutes. Our [Slack Calendar Connector](https://www.cronofy.com/calendar-connectors/slack-calendar-connector/) is used by companies big and small to track their upcoming meetings. With our new Slack Meet command, it makes organizing your meetings even easier. Using it, you can schedule meetings from directly in Slack. Schedule meetings in Slack in minutes [Connect my calendar](https://www.cronofy.com/how-automated-scheduling-and-calendar-sync-can-transform-hr/) To schedule a meeting, type in the following: */cronofy meet @sarah tomorrow 10:30 for coffee* Or, if you want it to find a time for you, type something like: */cronofy meet @sarah tuesday for Project Titan Review* You can specify a particular date, or use a broader term like 'next Wednesday'. Our NLP (natural language processor) uses AI and machine learning to find out how you use language – the more you use it, the more intuitive it gets. Before you hit send, you can double check how everything looks. Then, when you're happy, hit send. The recipient will be offered a list of times to choose from. Once they’ve chosen, it’ll be added to both your calendars. It’s that quick and simple. If they don’t use the Slack Calendar Connector, they’ll receive an email with a booking link. It even works for people outside of your workspace – just use their email address instead. They’ll receive a notification within Slack if they use the Calendar Connector, or an email with a booking link if they don’t. Whether you’re scheduling meetings with clients or coworkers, take the hassle out of booking meetings. Schedule them in seconds in Slack. Schedule meetings in Slack in minutes [Connect my calendar](https://www.cronofy.com/how-automated-scheduling-and-calendar-sync-can-transform-hr/) --- # Best scheduling alternative to Nylas Cronofy provides everything you need to build intuitive, scalable scheduling that drives engagement and retention for your application. ## Stop building for the next version. With Cronofy, you get years of compatibility - not constant migrations. Stable, scalable scheduling and meeting capture that frees your team from rework and migrations, with expert support guiding you from day one. [Build with us](https://www.cronofy.com/nylas-alternative#ba5081e4f809c93342e8b02a39a8ba1a) [See the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/getting-started/) ### Why did Smindle move from Nylas to Cronofy? Duration: 01:10 > Our developers found Nylas, and the API documentation looked good. The pricing was very cheap, so we went with it, because we thought — whatever, it doesn’t matter. But then we noticed that it does matter. The verification process was a nightmare. There were a number of weird things, and we had to give Nylas ownership of our Google project so they could verify it. It was a major liability, even if it’s just one project. We checked Cronofy out again, and it was all plug and play. — Jouko Koskinen, CEO, Smindle ## Cronofy vs. Nylas With Cronofy you partner with the team that’s been solving scheduling’s toughest challenges for over a decade. Our APIs deliver both stability and scale - supported by a 99.99% uptime SLA and technical experts on every plan. Cronofy API vs Nylas API - Fully white-labeled solution - Advanced scheduling features - Rate limits for stability and scale - Cross-domain availability queries - Long-term API stability - Scheduling-first engineering focus - 99.99% uptime SLA on every plan - Expert support on every plan - Global data residency controls - Enterprise-grade compliance on every plan ## Ready to build? Create a free sandbox and connect up to 20 accounts, or get hands-on guidance from our expert team and build your integration alongside people who’ve seen every scheduling use case. Build on your own [Build with us](https://www.cronofy.com/nylas-alternative#ba5081e4f809c93342e8b02a39a8ba1a) ## Efficient by design and reliable at scale Nylas points to “higher rate limits” as proof of scale, but if your architecture forces you to make more calls just to get the basics done, it's not scaling - it's inefficiency. Cronofy was built to do more with fewer calls, cutting latency and error handling so your scheduling layer stays reliable at scale. Our standard limits (50/sec, 500/min) comfortably support thousands of users, and already powers platforms serving millions across healthcare, recruitment, and education. If your use case needs more, we’ll work with your team to optimise your integration and extend limits where it makes sense. That’s how we deliver true scalability, and why we confidently back it with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. ## Support before, during, and after the integration When you engage with Cronofy you won’t be stuck speaking to an SDR - you’ll get help from a dedicated technical advisor who support teams building products just like yours to plan, architect, and validate your integration. When you’re building scheduling into your product, it’s the iceberg under the surface, like edge cases, calendar inconsistencies and availability logic that shift timelines and put your roadmap behind. With Cronofy, you’ll receive full support to help you map your integration, avoid costly missteps, and accelerate time to value. ## Global compliance built-in Cronofy is built for compliance-first teams. We’re fully GDPR and HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. Unlike Nylas, compliance isn’t gated or upsold - every customer gets the same protections, no matter the plan. You also get control over data residency. As an EU-based provider with six regional data centers, we help you meet strict hosting requirements across healthcare, recruitment and education so you can serve global users with confidence. ## Already using Nylas? We’ve helped dozens of teams migrate from Nylas without the pain of forced rebuilds or downtime. Book a call with our team to assess your current setup and design the right migration path. [Chat with us](https://www.cronofy.com/nylas-alternative#ba5081e4f809c93342e8b02a39a8ba1a) > Cronofy provided exceptional support throughout our transition from Nylas. Their tech support is prompt, their documentation is thorough, and their assistance during the migration process was top-notch. As a result, our users are highly satisfied with the improvements we’ve been able to deliver since the migration. — Brent Totty, Senior Product Manager, Kajabi ## FAQs **Q: Is Cronofy more reliable than Nylas?** A: Our Sync Engine caches availability internally across all connected calendars, which means stable scheduling for your users - even when external providers hit issues. It’s why we guarantee 99.99% uptime to every customer, on every plan. Nylas' reliability depends on third-party calendar APIs like Google or Microsoft, and if those services are slow or go down, your users feel it. **Q: Does Cronofy provide a faster booking experience for users?** A: Nylas’ v3 API introduced a domain-specific model, meaning availability queries are restricted to within an organisation. If you need to check calendars across different companies or domains - something that’s common across healthcare, recruitment, and education platforms - you’re stuck making multiple external API calls. Cronofy’s approach has no such restrictions. You only need to make one API call across all domains, meaning faster performance, less load, and a noticeably better experience for your users. **Q: How many Calendar API versions have Nylas deprecated?** A: Nylas has already deprecated two API versions, and v3 is now the standard. Every migration costs time, burns engineering resources, and risks breaking critical scheduling features - only to maintain the status quo. When choosing a scheduling partner, stability isn’t optional, it’s critical. It frees up your time to invest in new capabilities instead of maintaining existing ones. Cronofy has supported our v1 API for over a decade, continuously enhancing it with backward-compatible improvements. Our users have never needed to plan for rework, rebuilds, or rushed updates. **Q: Which solution was truly built for scheduling?** A: Nylas started as an email API company, with scheduling later released as an add-on. Cronofy is different, and our expert engineering team lives and breathes scheduling so you don’t have to. Cronofy has focused exclusively on scheduling since it was founded in 2014, providing the APIs, infrastructure, and UI components product teams need to build world-class scheduling experiences and get them in the hands of your users as quickly as possible. ## Trusted to power scheduling at scale ## Build with the experts After submitting the form, you'll be able to book time with a member of our team. In a 30 minute call, we'll walk through your specific use case, show relevant API flows and integration examples, and answer any technical or product questions you have. --- # Docplanner Group uses full calendar sync to power its SaaS healthcare solution Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. > Cronofy's Calendar API manages to be both very powerful and easy to work with. We were able to build two-way calendar sync in our application in a few weeks. The implementation itself was straightforward and their support team was quick to help with any questions we had. — Albert Armengol, Co-Founder & CEO, Doctoralia Success for Docplanner **Appointments scheduled in under a minute** Patients and healthcare providers can book, reschedule, and synchronize appointments in real-time, achieving effortless scheduling in moments **Reduced administrative workload** Healthcare staff save hours previously spent managing calendars and handling phone bookings, allowing them to focus on patient care **Enhanced patient experience** Patients enjoy convenient self-service booking options, avoiding double bookings and benefiting from reminders that reduce no-shows and cancellations ## The Problem: # Serving millions of healthcare professionals to manage their time efficiently Learn how [Docplanner](https://www.docplanner.com/), the world’s largest healthcare marketplace with more than 20 million monthly users across eight countries, built an advanced SaaS solution to help doctors manage their time and communicate with their patients more efficiently. See how Cronofy empowered their revolutionary calendar interface where doctors can view and manage their schedules. ## The Challenge: # Reflecting real-time schedules for perfectly orchestrated appointment booking The Docplanner platform allows doctors to manage their schedules. Patients can also book appointments online via the doctor’s profile, if they choose to set this up. They can also send text messages to their patients, store patient records, and schedule SMS campaigns. For the online medical appointment booking feature to work and to prevent double-bookings, the slot picker presented on the doctors’ profiles needs to reflect the doctor’s schedule in real-time. The team at Docplanner was also aware that the feature needed to work with the calendar services widely used by Spanish doctors: Google Calendar, but also Office 365 and Outlook.com. Building robust two-way calendar sync features that work with all major calendar services is no easy feat. It would have taken months for Docplanner’s developers to build full calendar sync, pushing back other important work. This is where Cronofy came in with a **[Unified Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api)** that enables two-way, real-time calendar sync between SaaS applications and all major calendar services. ## The Solution: # Full real-time visibility of availability for great doctor-patient experiences Docplanner uses the Cronofy Calendar API to build great scheduling experiences within their software for doctors and patients alike. When they set up their Docplanner account, doctors have the option to authorize Cronofy to connect to their personal or professional calendar. Their Docplanner platform will then show all the events they have in their calendars and use this information to display their availability when patients are looking to book appointments online. This gives patients the power of self-service appointment booking, with the real-time sync avoiding double bookings for an even more reliable experience. Events that are added via Docplanner – like training or a day off – can also be added to their Google, Apple, Office365, Outlook.com, or Exchange calendar. Users always have an accurate and up-to-date view of their calendar. # Build full calendar sync into your SaaS platform and save development time Want to easily connect to the calendars of your users to build great scheduling features into your application? Try Cronofy's Calendar API — if you're a developer, [sign up for free](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) and start building straight away. If you’re a product owner or just generally interested in learning more about the Cronofy API and its features, get in touch below. ## Speak to a technical specialist ### Cronofy Partners with Whereby for Integrated Video Calls and Streamlined Scheduling Cronofy has partnered with Whereby to further accelerate scheduling and video conferencing capabilities for product builders. Our shared vision of creating secure, scalable and flexible solutions for developers and product teams, is now set in motion. Blog Post 2024-09-24T10:31:00.000Z --- ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### Embedded Scheduling for Product Teams BambooHR have recently gone live as the first partner of our new Embedded Scheduler. Their customers can now install Cronofy into their BambooHR instance and get full access to multi-person scheduling linked in real-time to their and their colleagues’ calendars. Blog Post 2023-11-02T06:45:00.000Z --- # Best scheduling alternative to Cal.com Considering Cal.com alternatives? Use Cronofy's calendar and scheduling APIs and SDKs for GCal, Outlook, Apple and Microsoft calendar integrations, integrate today. ## A powerful, flexible scheduling alternative to Cal.com Choosing the right partner for your scheduling software is a big decision. Over 180,000 businesses globally rely on Cronofy's scheduling platform and calendar APIs to facilitate their meeting, appointment, and interview scheduling. [Create developer account](https://docs.cronofy.com/) [Technical consultation](/book-a-demo-api) Best-in-class scheduling **Specialization ** Unlike Cal.com, Cronofy's specializes in calendar synchronization and scheduling for teams. Cronofy is the most capable, high performance solution in the market **99.99% SLA** No pricing or service discrimination based on plan or team size, scheduling reliability guaranteed for all customers, regardless of pricing tier **Support** We have a no-ghosting policy to ensure first class, responsive support whether you’re an active customer or just trying us out, that's our promise **Pricing** We're here for the long run and scale with you. Transparent, tiered, fair pricing plans for businesses of all sizes across various industries Scheduling Expertise ## Enterprise Scheduling Specialists Cronofy is the go-to solution for developers and product teams embedding powerful, reliable, and secure scheduling features into their applications. With a decade of experience, we've refined our platform to meet the complex needs of scaling businesses across industries. [See Use Cases](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) Robust APIs ## APIs Built for Developers, by Developers Our Calendar and Scheduling APIs offer unmatched flexibility and customization. Built on a stable V1 that has stood the test of time, developers can rely on our API for consistent performance and seamless integration. [View API docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/) Lasting Partnership ## Committed to Long-Term Partnerships We're committed to building lasting partnerships, focusing on your long-term success rather than short-term gains. Our consultative approach ensures we understand and meet your evolving needs. [Customer Success Stories](/case-studies) > Cronofy is the most valuable partner we have. The best part about the integration is that the API and the system is very stable and the support is just fantastic. — Addy Kapur, Founder and CEO, TimeTap Data Sovereignty ## Global Data Centers with Local Compliance With six data centers worldwide, we ensure data remains local and compliant with regional regulations. We adhere to GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and are ready to sign DPAs and BAAs on request. [View Data Centers](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/data-centers/) Responsive Support ## Exceptional Support, no Exceptions Our team of scheduling experts and engineers provides first-class support to all customers, regardless of their plan. We're dedicated to your success from day one and beyond. [Technical Support](https://docs.cronofy.com/support/) Compliance and Trust ## Enterprise-Grade Security Cronofy is audited yearly by independent external auditors to maintain ISO27001, ISO27018, and SOC2 certifications. Our commitment to security is embedded in every aspect of how we work. [View Privacy & Security](/privacy) Scalable ## Fair and Transparent Pricing Our pricing model is designed to grow with your business, offering transparent and affordable packages for startups and bespoke solutions for enterprise requirements. [See API Pricing](/api-pricing) Unmatched Uptime ## 99.99% Reliability We offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee, backed by a public status page with a history dating back to 2015. Our commitment to transparency ensures you're always informed about our service status. [View Status Page](https://status.cronofy.com/) > Working with the Cronofy team has been great, we were able to deliver exciting new scheduling features based on the real-time availability of our users in less than a month. Our users have taken full advantage of the new features, reducing their administrative tasks considerably and allowing them to offer a better candidate experience. — Erik Andersson, CEO & Co-founder, Teamtailor [Book technical consultation](/book-a-demo-api) Create developer account --- # Why Universities Need to Connect Students with Businesses When I was a student in the late 2000s, several of my friends had to do placements or sandwich years. They received no guidance or advice on how to find somewhere from their universities. They were told to find somewhere, or fail. No exceptions. When I was a student in the late 2000s, several of my friends had to do placements or sandwich years. They received no guidance or advice on how to find somewhere from their universities. They were told to find somewhere, or fail. No exceptions. When I was a student in the late 2000s, several of my friends had to do placements or sandwich years. They received no guidance or advice on how to find somewhere from their universities. They were told to find somewhere, or fail. No exceptions. I’ve spoken to many others who had to do sandwich years since then, and most of them experienced the same lack of guidance from their university. Our student years are where we find ourselves. Many of us meet friends – or even partners – for life. We learn what our strengths are, and what we need to improve on. The more guidance we receive during this time, the faster we’ll grow and the better the chances we’ll have. One of the best ways to grow is with a mentor. Spending time with someone who’s been in the same or a similar situation to yours means that you can learn from their successes and failures. If a person or place doesn’t help us to learn or grow, it can leave us feeling disheartened. We can lose enthusiasm for our chosen career or industry, and end up going in a completely different direction. Finding the right person or place, on the other hand, means you’ll thrive. You’ll feel inspired. It won’t feel like work. You’ll get paid to do something that you love. This means you’ll work harder and get further. And you’ll be happier, because you’re doing something that matters to you. ## Why connect students with businesses? Students are often left to find connections themselves – as demonstrated above – but when you’re just starting out in your career, you don’t know where to look. You need someone to at least point you in the right direction. According to the Harvard Business Review, [two thirds of graduates struggle to launch their careers](https://hbr.org/2016/05/two-thirds-of-college-grads-struggle-to-launch-their-careers). Offering students the opportunity to connect with businesses helps to prevent this from happening. The hardest part of job seeking is getting your foot in the door. When you help students to get past this, they’re happier in their student lives and go on to become better prepared for the real world. Two thirds of graduates struggle to launch their careers This preparation for the real world makes a huge difference. It helps to prevent graduates from becoming unemployed or falling into jobs completely unrelated to their area of study when they graduate. In 2013 (the most recent statistics we could find), 73% of graduates worked in a job unrelated to their major. Some of this is bound to be because studying something can put you off your chosen field, or because you find something that you love more, but for many people – particularly those that study more creative subjects – it can be tough to know where to begin. Once you’ve taken those key first steps, the rest of the staircase, while still steep, is a lot easier to climb. ## What’s in it for universities? While there’s no doubt that connecting students to businesses is beneficial to them, why does it matter to the universities? Forging these relationships is often a costly and time-consuming process. Why should they make the investment? It’s a university’s job to serve their students. Students are as much customers as they are students. If they’re not happy with the service that they receive, they’re fully within their right to make a complaint or to take their money elsewhere. During my time at university, I saw many people leave because they weren’t happy with the way they were being taught, or with the university itself. It’s important that students learn autonomy and independence at university, but there’s a big difference between teaching them these skills and giving them no guidance. Offering graduate programs helps universities to stand out from their competitors Universities are businesses. Their culture is a huge part of the experience they offer to students and potential students. These cultures are influenced by the dean right down to the teachers and the people serving lunch. In order to foster the right culture, it’s the job of everyone involved to create a supportive, welcoming atmosphere that always strives to keep learning. It shouldn’t be a case of severing ties as soon as someone graduates. Offering graduate programs helps universities to stand out from their competitors. It also gives them a proven track record of employability. Presenting future students with evidence about what past students have achieved – in the form of statistics or testimonials, for example – makes courses and universities more desirable because they act as proof that they can deliver on their promises. This means universities will attract more students and can charge more for the education that they provide. ## What about businesses? There’s a [talent shortage](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/save-time-with-real-time-scheduling). You know it, I know it. This makes it more difficult for businesses to find the right person for a role, and increases the time to hire. This has a huge knock-on effect on productivity and makes the hiring process more expensive. By forming relationships with students early on, businesses can speed up the hiring process and make better-informed decisions. This creates a better experience for candidates, and means businesses are more likely to hire the best candidates. They can go on to create long-term relationships, too. Some students who take part in internships during their time at university can return to the business as a paid employee when they graduate. Because they’ve worked with the business before, they’re already familiar with the work environment and the people within the team. This streamlines the onboarding process and saves the business money. When businesses are connected to universities, they have a ready-made pool of talent filled with exactly the type of people that they need. Working with universities, they can guide students to develop the skills that they need to form a partnership. Teachers can also use this relationship to better tailor the course to the industry, and always keep informed of the latest trends. ## Conclusion Whether you’re a business, university, or student, there are numerous positives to connecting students and businesses. It makes everyone’s work lives happier and more productive, saves the inevitable ‘what now?’ that most graduates face, and gives universities an advantage over their competitors. --- # #HRTechConf Recap: The Future of Talent Acquisition in a World of AI, Automation, and Data Cronofy Product Marketing Manager shares her perspective on the future of talent acquisition with insights from speakers at the 2024 HRTech Conference. Cronofy’s takeaways from HRTech 2024 Conference on navigating the AI buzz and how interview scheduling automation is transforming HR. Under the desert sun and amidst the famous Vegas buzz, HR professionals once again gathered at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center at the 2024 HRTech Conference. Sprawling across the expo hall were countless exhibitors and visitors alike chatting away, grabbing lunch, or searching for the next session to attend. On display was a diverse range of HR solutions by both early-stage companies and incumbents. As I reflect on the discussions at the conference, one theme emerged that's impossible to ignore: the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation on the future of talent acquisition. [Visier](https://www.visier.com/), the global leader in people analytics, and [SmartRecruiters](https://www.smartrecruiters.com/), a leader in enterprise talent acquisition and [Cronofy partner](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-smartrecruiters), led one particularly interesting session. This session emphasized the role of AI and data in delivering the next generation of talent insights. A major takeaway? Teams need to educate themselves on AI and automation by understanding what these tools can offer beyond the bells and whistles. But, importantly, they must also recognize that talent acquisition needs to remain human-centered, especially where human insight and interaction make the most significant impact. ## **We Can't Avoid AI, But We Can Be Responsible With It** AI is changing how we source and hire, but to do it right, teams need to know how to implement AI responsibly by gathering the right data and partnering with vendors who provide responsible AI solutions. Regardless of the tooling, the speakers advised HR leaders to be mindful of how AI is used to deliver desired experiences by telling a compelling story with data, and to take action based on need. ## **The Role of Interview Scheduling in Shaping HR's Future** It may seem like a small piece of the talent acquisition puzzle, but interview scheduling significantly impacts important metrics like [candidate experience](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#98114601989a), time-to-hire and overall recruiting efficiency. Adam Bird, CEO and Co-founder of Cronofy - a provider of embedded scheduling for high-performance hiring teams - shared some key findings from [Cronofy's research](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024) surveying 12,000 candidates across six countries on the most significant frustrations candidates face. One critical insight from the report is that candidates complained about their lack of control over the hiring process, highlighting a clear example of where AI and automation can make a meaningful difference. Adam Bird emphasized letting machines do what machines do best—automate repetitive tasks like interview scheduling efficiently, giving candidates the control they're asking for, and making their experience more seamless and engaging. ## **Human-Centric Hiring Still Matters** Despite the excitement around AI and automation, it's important to remember that recruitment should remain human at its core. Candidates, for example, [still want a human-centered hiring experience](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#aa10d76e3fc1), and in the words of Jonathan Rejholec - Principal Product Manager at BambooHR, HR professionals are inherently "people-people." As much as AI and automation can enhance efficiency, recruiters and talent acquisition teams still want to focus on building relationships, assessing culture fit, and ensuring candidates have a good experience regardless of the hiring process outcome. ## **So, What Does the Future of Talent Acquisition Look Like?** It's a world where AI and automation will continue to play an increasingly significant role. In this future, the winners have figured out the balancing act—leveraging technology where it makes the most sense while ensuring that human touch remains at the heart of recruitment. Solutions like Cronofy, which empower candidates to take control of scheduling, demonstrate how even minor process improvements can make a real difference. What steps will your team take to be on the right side of history, and how will you ensure that your recruitment processes reflect this balance? [Book a call with a scheduling expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Interview scheduling automation for hiring teams Automate scheduling processes and workflows and hire candidates faster. Scheduling tools for talent acquisition and recruiting operations. Learn how. ## Scheduling automation for recruiting operations Cronofy's interview scheduling software turns recruiting coordination from a headache into a smooth, candidate-friendly experience. No more double bookings. No more scheduling conflicts. Just seamless scheduling workflows that make both interviewers and candidates happy. [Why Cronofy?](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/use-cases/interview-scheduling#82f212e3b7e67892e2e97475d3de4dfe) [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) **Compliant** With GDPR compliance, multiple data hosting locations and regular audits, Cronofy is a privacy first provider. **Dedicated Support** With a 95% customer satisfaction score, TA teams are supported every step of the way through their scheduling automation journey. **Hire at Scale** Trusted by the best hiring teams, Cronofy has processed over 1 Billion scheduling requests. **99.99% SLA** Scheduling you can trust with reliability guaranteed for all customers, regardless of pricing tier. Combined Availability ## Screening interviews or multi-person panels Schedule any interview with Cronofy's synced availability slots from your connected team calendars. Everyone's availability in one place for your team to schedule and hire efficiently. [Combined Availability ](/scheduler/combined-team-availability) Integrated Workflow ## Schedule from your ATS in a few clicks Our [ATS integrations](https://www.cronofy.com/ats-scheduling-integration-partners) and browser extension make it easy to share scheduling links with candidates. Leverage our scheduling templates to quickly create bespoke links for your common interview formats. [Scheduling Links](/scheduler/scheduling-links) > Within months of going live with Cronofy, what took us 6 days to schedule an interview, now has a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise Reserved Slots ## Book over reserved times in an interviewer's calendar Getting interviewers to maintain good calendar hygiene can be tricky. So our reserved slots feature allows you to schedule interviews during periods they reserve for you. ## Speak to a interview scheduling specialist Scheduling for recruiting operations leaders ### Accelerate scheduling productivity for recruiting teams What upgrades were made to the Cronofy Scheduler in 2024 to support recruitment teams, and what should you look out for in 2025? Read on to discover the powerful scheduling features that helped teams hire desired talent, faster. Blog Post 2025-01-29T13:55:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Are interview scheduling delays costing you top talent? Your time-to-schedule isn’t just a metric for coordinators, it’s now a critical differentiator in winning top talent. But why are teams still stuck with interview availability bottlenecks? Read on until the end to see how to solve this conundrum and empower both recruiters and interviewers with one process, and join an upcoming live session to learn more. Blog Post 2025-02-05T12:28:58.234Z ## FAQs **Q: Can interviews be rescheduled?** A: Yes. Both candidates and interviewers can reschedule an interview by tapping the "reschedule" link in their calendar invite. Coordinators can also reschedule events by going to their scheduler dashboard. **Q: Can I mark events as private? ** A: Yes. You can set individual events as private or enforce private events at an organization level. Ideal for situations where privacy and data control is paramount. **Q: Can you support organizations with multiple domains?** A: Yes. You can invite anyone to join you on Cronofy. Our domain sign-up controls allow you to restrict access to specific email domains. You can also use Enterprise Connect to automatically sync accounts from your domains. **Q: Can you schedule multiple interviews at once? ** A: Yes. You can schedule a sequence of events with one booking link. It's perfect for latter stages where candidates may have multiple interviews with different stakeholders. **Q: Can you limit the number of interviews per interviewer? ** A: Yes. You can create selection rules to limit the number of interviews each interviewer is assigned. You can also set buffer times before and after to allow interviewers time to prepare and capture feedback afterwards. --- # Why your ATS loses value every time you send candidates to another tool Third-party scheduling tools add friction to your ATS. Discover how embedded scheduling boosts candidate experience, retention, and product value. In a market where experience is everything, platforms that rely on bolt-ons risk falling behind. The future belongs to ATS providers who build seamless, end-to-end workflows. The purpose of an ATS is to streamline the hiring process and make life easier for both candidates and recruiters, reducing time to hire and filling more roles for your customers. Modern ATS platforms are under pressure to deliver exactly that, and it’s easy to see why bolt-ons seem like a good compromise. Customer requests are constant, competition is fierce, and speed to market really matters. But fast fixes can slow you down later. You get your feature to market faster, it takes less engineering effort, and you free up your roadmap to work on features that set your platform apart. But that quick fix might be costing you customers. When core actions like scheduling an interview exist outside of your platform, your users feel the friction. Every extra click or opened tab weakens the perceived value of your ATS, and over time, that silent friction starts showing up in metrics that matter most. Workarounds are driving candidate drop off ![41% of candidates leave a recruitment process because of interview scheduling]() [41% of candidates](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#2aa8cd783f98) drop out of the recruitment process when it takes too long to schedule an interview. Every time a candidate leaves your ATS to schedule via a third party link like Calendly or Chili Piper, the risk of abandonment increases. 50% of candidates also say they will not recommend or engage with a brand again if they’ve had a frustrating interview booking experience. When it comes to scheduling complex, multi-person panel interviews, the experience falls apart even more. The result? Delays and frustrations for the recruiters trying to stitch different platforms together. For your customers, the experience of losing candidates leads to frustration, and that frustration is associated with your product, and not the external tool you sent them to. **Impact:** Lower recruiter satisfaction and longer time-to-hire, leading to account churn and shrinking MRR. Fragmented experiences reduce your platforms stickiness When your users rely on tools outside of your platform, they start to form habits outside of your platform, too. Your users learn to switch between tools, and you lose visibility into key user actions, like scheduling an interview. This not only starts to undermine the value of your product and reduce the use of key features of your platform, but leaves you out of the loop when it comes to key metrics like time-to-schedule and time-to-interview. When users are forced to use workarounds, the likelihood of them switching to incumbent competitors offering all-in-one solutions increases. On the other hand, some teams are opting for less feature-heavy ATSes if they find it difficult to justify the cost of a platform they can’t have an end-to-end hiring experience in. **Impact:** Reduced daily active user minutes and lower feature utilisation, meaning customers are less likely to stay loyal to your platform when it comes to renewal. Technical debt and increased engineering time What seemed like an easy fix at the time can lead to the very thing you were trying to prevent — increased engineering time. Over time, each external workaround needs maintenance, version updates, and custom workaround that fit your product’s evolving architecture and user workflows. **Impact:** Not only does that add to ongoing technical debt, every hour spent maintaining workarounds is an hour not spent building what makes your platform unique. Build embedded experiences, not workarounds The fastest growing HR Tech platforms aren’t patching workarounds, they’re building seamless embedded experiences that feel native to their users. The best part? They’re opting for APIs that are easy and fast to integrate, leaving them to focus on developing features that actually differentiate them. That’s exactly what Business Draft did. When they realised that their existing scheduling add-ons were slowing their users down, they embedded Cronofy’s scheduling API directly into their ATS. Instead of sending users to external tools, scheduling became part of their core workflow. They didn’t just solve a UX issue, they made scheduling a differentiator and strengthened their customer satisfaction and retention in the process. The results: - 70% reduction in administrative tasks for their users - Massive reduction in no-show rates thanks to in-text rescheduling - No more back-and-forth phone calls for recruiters booking in screening calls Embedded scheduling isn’t just a feature. It’s fast becoming the standard expectation across HR Tech platforms, so don’t get left behind. Learn how they did it [here](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/conversational-ATS-schedules-interviews). ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # Announcing our new payment plan for the Cronofy Scheduler We've created a value-driven payment plan for the Scheduler – only pay for it when you use it We've created a value-driven payment plan for the Scheduler – only pay for it when you use it We're happy to share that going forward, we'll only charge Cronofy Scheduler users if they use the tool to book meetings. Cronofy is the scheduling platform for business. While conventional scheduling tools are focused on booking external meetings with third parties, Cronofy’s approach considers scheduling at a more holistic level. The whole purpose of a scheduling tool is to book meetings. These tools only become valuable at the stage when a user schedules an interview, sets up a support session, or books a sales call. Up to that point, any fees paid for the tool are just overhead – users are spending money on a tool that isn't delivering value yet. It feels distinctly old-fashioned to pay a license fee for software, just so it's available to use if and when you need it. With our new payment plan, there’s no charge for an account or a personal booking page – we'll only charge you if someone actually books a time. If more than one person books a time with you in a month, there’s no extra charge; there's just one set monthly fee for using your account. ### Our mission In a world of SaaS subscription services, where monthly recurring revenue is the overarching measure of success, this seems like a crazy step. However, when you look at our mission, it makes sense. Cronofy’s goal is to schedule everything for everyone. If you’re paying a monthly subscription for a scheduling tool, you need to be sure that you’re using it every month. This makes sense for a salesperson; a steady stream of meetings is crucial for hitting quota. But not everyone needs a scheduling tool every day, or even every month. For example, when it comes to recruitment, managers aren’t hiring all of the time. If you’re a Recruitment Coordinator, buying licenses for hiring managers to book interviews when they’re only hiring for three months of the year, you’re not getting value for your investment. In order to save them time booking and give candidates a great experience, you either have to swallow the fees for the remainder of the year or carefully move licenses around to different users. This issue is amplified for recruitment agencies, with multiple clients all hiring at different times. With a value-based pricing model like Cronofy’s, you only pay for the client when you’ve started delivering vetted candidates. Once the role has been filled you don’t need to do anything, you just don’t pay for that client's account, but you still have it ready to go when their next vacancy opens. It’s not just the recruitment industry that uses scheduling regularly – it's a requirement for many companies, just not a permanent one. For example Project Managers need to liaise with external suppliers, and Engineers need to be pulled into occasional customer support requests. These roles benefit from streamlined and efficient scheduling, even if it's not needed at all times of the year. These are the people we want to provide more value to with the Scheduler. ‍ ### The future of SaaS This pay-for-value approach to pricing is not only fair, I believe that it’s also the future for Software as a Service. Service providers like Cronofy, who have deep understanding of user behavior, should use this knowledge to ensure that as many people can benefit from their services as possible. Inflexible set monthly license fees don't consider the nuances of business operations. Powering the scheduling of hundreds of applications used by tens of thousands of companies has given us a deep insight into how people get value from scheduling tools. We’ve seen how doctors, therapists, coaches, interviewers, real-estate agents, consultants, support professionals and countless other professions have engaged with scheduling and gained value from it. We’ve already used this insight to provide active usage-based pricing to some of our high-volume API customers. We've worked closely with them to identify what their customers value and how we can deliver the service in a way that benefits them. Now, as we use the Scheduler to bring world-class scheduling to even more people, we’ve harnessed this insight to deliver our innovative, forward-looking pricing model that focuses on charging for value not rent. There is now no financial barrier to anyone signing up for a Cronofy account – it’s ready for you to use when you need it. *Want to learn more about our new Scheduler payment plans? Check out **[all the details here](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing/scheduler-plans)** to find the right one for your business needs.* --- # Supporting Neurodiverse Candidates: How to Hire Inclusively Is your current hiring process unintentionally alienating a large pool of high-quality candidates? We asked 1100 neurodiverse candidates worldwide to tell us about their struggles in interviewing. Read on to find more about why neurodiversity matters and what steps you can take to create a more inclusive recruitment process. Is your current hiring process unintentionally alienating a large pool of high-quality candidates? We asked 1100 neurodiverse candidates worldwide to tell us about their struggles in interviewing. Read on to find more about why neurodiversity matters and what steps you can take to create a more inclusive recruitment process. Neurodiversity is a topic that has gained traction in the last couple of years. Now, as recruiters are focusing on improving Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, teams are looking into how their current hiring practices are impacting this specific demographic. Let's dive into some of the most common questions. ## **What is neurodiversity, and why does it matter?** Neurodiversity encompasses a range of neurological differences, including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and more. These differences are now recognized as unique ways of experiencing the world rather than deficits. Embracing neurodiversity means acknowledging that these diverse cognitive abilities can bring valuable skills and perspectives to the workplace, such as enhanced creativity, exceptional attention to detail, and innovative problem-solving. It recognizes that individuals with neurological differences bring unique strengths, such as visual thinking, pattern recognition, and creative problem-solving, to the table. This inclusive approach challenges the outdated notion of neurodivergence as a disorder, highlighting instead the strengths and advantages that these individuals can offer in professional settings. ## **What are the challenges neurodiverse candidates face?** It’s possible that your current hiring process does not account for the specific needs of neurodiverse candidates, even if you offer reasonable adjustments. Here’s what 1100 neurodiverse candidates we surveyed for our annual Candidate Expectations Report had to say about their key struggles: ### **More communication barriers:** While neurotypical candidates often find standard interview processes straightforward, neurodiverse applicants may struggle with traditional interview formats and ambiguous questions. Our data shows that neurodiverse candidates named clarity as the most important thing to them in recruiting (at [37%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa)). ### **Preference to schedule their own interviews:** While both neurotypical and neurodiverse candidates generally appreciate scheduling autonomy, the latter group finds it especially helpful for reducing anxiety. According to our report, [58%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) of neurodiverse candidates prefer self-scheduling, compared to [53%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) globally. [56%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) of neurodiverse candidates also report higher stress levels due to drawn-out processes and have left the process due to slow scheduling times. ## **Valuing inclusivity:** While neurotypical applicants might not be as affected by inclusivity practices, neurodiverse candidates place a higher importance on clarity and inclusivity. Since they are more impacted by a lack of inclusivity, [10%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) rated this factor as a top consideration in the hiring process, which is [3%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) higher than the global average. ## **What can recruiters do to support the neurodiverse demographic?** ### **Review your interview formats** Traditional interviews can be challenging for neurodiverse candidates. Over [30%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) reported frustration with unclear interview questions. Using clear and structured questions and considering alternatives such as skills-based assessments or work samples can help reduce this frustration. ### **Implement self-scheduling tools** Since [58%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) of neurodiverse candidates prefer to self-schedule, consider integrating a self-booking scheduling tool in your hiring process. Search for a tool that is easy to use, allowing them to choose their own interview slots. This will reduce anxiety and give applicants control over their time. ### **Communicate your interview process clearly** Being clear in your communication helps all candidates, but especially the neurodiverse group, to prepare effectively. This helps reduce uncertainty and anxiety. [34%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) of the neurodiverse group cited lack of responsiveness as a major frustration. You can alleviate this frustration by clearly outlining the interview process, explicitly stating expected timelines, and providing preparation guidelines in advance. ### **Train your interviewers to be aware of good interview practice** When interviewers are aware of and can accommodate neurodiverse candidates’ needs, it helps boost candidate experience. To ensure this is the case, offer training sessions on neurodiversity and inclusive interview practices. Understanding the unique strengths and challenges of these candidates fosters a more supportive interview environment. ### **Foster an inclusive culture** Ensuring your company’s culture promotes inclusivity not only enhances its reputation but also attracts diverse talent. Highlight your commitment to inclusivity in job postings and during interviews, and be ready to provide examples. In addition to attracting a broader range of talent, this approach also enhances employee satisfaction and retention. We asked Licensed Psychologist and candidate psychology expert Malin F. Moezzi how organizations can better support neurodiverse candidates. Here's what she had to say: ### How can you better support neurodiverse candidates in the hiring process? Duration: 2:27 Embracing neurodiversity in the recruiting process is not only a matter of inclusivity, but also a strategic advantage. By creating a hiring process that is inclusive by accommodating neurological differences, companies can attract talent that drives innovation, productivity, and creativity. For more insights, read the full** ****[Candidate Expectations Report](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024)**** **or take some time to **[speak with our team of experts](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic)** to see how our scheduling tools can help create a more inclusive hiring process. ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience Recruitment What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- # Automated Interview Scheduling Report You could save your customers up to 95% of their interview scheduling time by adding automated interview scheduling to your software. That means they have more time to spend shortlisting, conducting interviews, and offering feedback to candidates. It also means they can hire much, much faster. Even if their hiring process involves complicated multi-part interviews. Your team, meanwhile, spend less time building and maintaining complicated scheduling features and calendar connections. Discover how adding automated interview scheduling to your software could benefit you and your customers. Download our interview scheduling report today! You could save your customers up to 95% of their interview scheduling time by adding automated interview scheduling to your software. That means they have more time to spend shortlisting, conducting interviews, and offering feedback to candidates. It also means they can hire much, much faster. Even if their hiring process involves complicated multi-part interviews. Your team, meanwhile, spend less time building and maintaining complicated scheduling features and calendar connections. Discover how adding automated interview scheduling to your software could benefit you and your customers. Download our interview scheduling report today! You could save your customers up to 95% of their interview scheduling time by adding automated interview scheduling to your software. That means they have more time to spend shortlisting, conducting interviews, and offering feedback to candidates. It also means they can hire much, *much* faster. Even if their hiring process involves complicated [multi-part interviews](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-organize-multi-part-interviews-in-minutes/). Your team, meanwhile, spend less time building and maintaining complicated scheduling features and calendar connections. Discover how adding automated interview scheduling to your software could benefit you and your customers. Download our interview scheduling report today! ### Download the interview scheduling report [Download the report](https://ln.cronofy.com/interviewschedulingreport) --- # Embedded Scheduling and Recordings for HR Tech Platforms | Cronofy Let recruiters schedule interviews, capture recordings, and generate notes with Cronofy's scheduling and meeting infrastructure. Fill roles faster with scheduling automation and power AI features with meeting data. ## Embed scheduling, recording, and AI intelligence into your ATS Let recruiters schedule interviews, capture recordings, and generate notes with Cronofy's scheduling and meeting infrastructure. Fill roles faster with scheduling automation and power AI features with meeting data. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/hr-tech#e48fdf6b30a5) [Talk to a human](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/hr-tech#e48fdf6b30a5) ## Schedule and capture every interview automatically Manual scheduling, third-party tools, and brittle integrations all introduce friction. Candidates drop off, recruiters lose time, and your platform’s experience suffers. Cronofy embeds scheduling, recording, and transcription to keep recruiters on your platform at every step. ## Let recruiters book interviews in seconds Hiring slows down when recruiters chase availability, manage timezones and handle reminders and rescheduling manually. Cronofy automates interview scheduling for your users. Build custom booking flows with our API, or use our MCP server for agentic workflows. Interviews get booked faster and recruiters stay focused on sourcing candidates, not scheduling time. [Learn more](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/) ## Capture interviews and provide AI summaries Meeting Agents automatically record and transcribe interviews scheduled through your platform. No extra tools required. Use that data to power AI features like candidate scoring, automated feedback summaries, and skills matching. [Learn more](https://status.cronofy.com/) > Implementing Cronofy was painless – they provide a simple and clear API that allowed me to have the integration live to customers in less than one month. — Drew Zader, Senior Software Engineer, Handshake ## Integrate Cronofy your way Pick what fits your needs, or combine approaches as you scale. ### White-label API For teams who need complete flexibility. Build custom workflows and UX with our API, designed for deep integrations where every detail matters. --- ### Embedded Scheduler For teams who want to launch even faster, drop booking links into your product with a pre-built UI and minimal setup. --- ### AI-native Scheduling For AI-powered apps. Let agents handle scheduling through our MCP server. Perfect for conversational interfaces and agentic workflows. > What I love about Cronofy is that it just works and requires close to zero maintenance from our side. — Robert Szabo, Product Lead, Harver ## Trusted by leading HR Tech platforms See how top teams use Cronofy to streamline scheduling, accelerate hiring, and improve product retention. ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### Pinpoint streamlines interview experiences with real-time scheduling Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. Case Study --- ### How Business Draft’s conversational ATS schedules candidate interviews with Cronofy’s White-Label API Business Draft is a modern applicant tracking system (ATS) that’s helping teams hire better talent, faster. We speak to CEO Ty Peck to hear how they’re delivering superior candidate and talent team experience with simplicity and text message communication at the core. Case Study Time to value ## Ship meeting capabilities in weeks Building in-house means months lost to timezone logic, conferencing setup, and calendar edge cases. Cronofy's pre-built meeting and scheduling infrastructure gets you live faster. Skip the maintenance and focus on what sets your product apart. Differentiate your product ## Deliver the experience your users now expect Your users want faster workflows and visibility. Competitors are already embedding agentic scheduling and AI-powered meeting capture. Cronofy helps you keep pace. Automate interview scheduling, capture meeting data, and trigger next steps, all without users leaving your platform. Boost stickiness ## Make your ATS the place where work gets done Broken scheduling pushes recruiters back to email. Missing notes push them to third-party tools. Every gap in your platform becomes a churn risk. Cronofy embeds reliable meeting workflows into your ATS, reducing drop-off, boosting adoption, and keeping users in flow. ## See Cronofy in action After submitting the form, you'll be able to book time with a member of our team. In a 30 minute call, we'll walk through your specific use case, show relevant API flows and integration examples, and answer any technical or product questions you have. --- # Cronofy launches Whereby API integration to deliver seamless scheduling and integrated video calls in one package Cronofy is integrating with Whereby's public API to bring users robust scheduling capabilities and customizable video conferencing in one streamlined offering. Read on to see how this is defining the future of meeting creation, and how you can get started today. Cronofy is integrating with Whereby's public API to bring users robust scheduling capabilities and customizable video conferencing in one streamlined offering. Read on to see how this is defining the future of meeting creation, and how you can get started today. Scheduling and video calls go hand in hand. This is why Cronofy is excited to announce our integration with Whereby’s public API to pair customizable video conferencing with dependable scheduling infrastructure. **[The integration](https://www.cronofy.com/integrations/whereby)** will deliver value to businesses across a variety of industries by combining two world leading API-first providers in meeting scheduling and video call creation. ## **Combining flexibility with scale** By putting customization and reliability at the forefront, the integration enables product teams to accelerate the delivery of scheduling and video calling capabilities through one streamlined offering. Combined with Cronofy’s capabilities to schedule even the most complex of meetings, Whereby’s API allows integration into any platform, meaning users have far more choice than the standard conferencing tools, and can build an experience that fits their exact needs. ## **Prioritizing security at the core** Bringing together a best-in-class tech stack, the integration of the two APIs will serve organizations in industries looking to balance complex scheduling needs with video conferencing, such as telehealth. Security, GDPR and HIPAA compliance are natural focuses of the offering from both privacy-first European companies, especially as Cronofy customers can choose where their data is stored. ## **Defining the future of meeting creation** With the first phase live, we’re excited to be welcoming developers and product teams to take advantage of the integration, and to help shape its future with their feedback. You can check out how to connect your Cronofy and Whereby accounts in a few clicks and enjoy the benefits of the implementation **[in this simple guide](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api-alpha/whereby/)**. We invite interested teams to reach out to **[support@cronofy.com](mailto:support@cronofy.com)** to get started today. ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- ### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Recruitment Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- # Flawless real-time mentorship program management with PeopleGrove Innovative online mentorship platform PeopleGrove helps universities, communities, and companies build great mentorship programs. Innovative online mentorship platform PeopleGrove helps universities, communities, and companies build great mentorship programs. **Innovative online mentorship platform ****[PeopleGrove](https://www.peoplegrove.com/)**** helps universities, communities, and companies build great mentorship programs.** When you are a student it can be daunting to make the jump into a full-time job, or to know for certain which career path best suits you and how to successfully get there. PeopleGrove can be used to put students in contact with inspirational career coaches and mentors who can give them insight and advice. ‍ Other use cases can include building a network of alumni, launching a job board or setting up corporate training programs. The platform’s interface allows students to filter mentors based on several criteria like their area of expertise. Mentors can also indicate if they have time to take on more students or are only available for a one-off conversation. ## The Challenge [Mentorship programs](https://www.peoplegrove.com/career-success) are amazing but they rely on knowing the availability of people with busy lives and schedules. PeopleGrove has built a sleek interface that allows users to find the mentors they want to contact, indicate which type of advice they are looking for – from CV reviews to more personal conversations – and what is their preferred way of communicating. One challenge they needed to solve was offering their users a simple booking process to avoid getting in a situation where every mentoring session would involve several back and forth emails just to find a time that works for both participants. ## The Solution The team at PeopleGrove identified the need to connect the calendars of their users with their platform to push events to calendars when mentorship sessions are booked. ‍ They thought about building an integration with Google Calendar but that would have only covered about 70% of their users. Many companies or universities use other services like Outlook. They needed a Calendar API that would help them connect to all calendar services which is what led them to choose Cronofy to build their calendar sync features. PeopleGrove has created a seamless [availability solution](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) by leveraging the Cronofy API to build an even better booking flow. Instead of simply proposing a time and date to their mentors, students can access the real-time availability of these mentors, see which days are opened in their calendars and then select a time slot. The invitation will immediately be sent to the mentor’s calendar. This automated and immediate process replaces the usual exchanges of emails — 3 on average — and the mentors don’t have to juggle with answering several invitations. It also helps avoid double-bookings! If the meeting needs to be rescheduled the platform also offers an easy messaging tool. You can see exactly how the booking flow looks in the video below: This a great example of how calendar integration can help make an already fantastic product more appealing. And it only took a week for the developers at PeopleGrove to build this real-time booking process. > Integration with Cronofy was uneventful (in a good way). They have a well-documented API, easy to use examples, and excellent support. Additionally, with the help of Cronofy logs, we were able to debug issues much faster. Cronofy saved us a lot a time, which would have otherwise wasted by integrating different APIs. — Nitin Hayaran, Back-end Engineer, PeopleGrove ### Build real-time Calendar sync into your booking flows and improve the user experience If you want to easily connect to the calendars of your users to build great scheduling features then give the Cronofy Calendar API a go. If you are a developer, [sign up for free](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) and start building straight away. If you’re a product owner or just generally interested in learning more about the Cronofy API and its features, please get in touch via the form below. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # SmartRecruiters interview scheduling Schedule streamlined interviews from inside SmartRecruiters with Cronofy. Book a demo today! ## Find interviewer availability without leaving SmartRecruiters Display available interviewer slots and generate booking links for candidates—all from within your SmartRecruiters workflow. Streamline candidate scheduling and improve time-to-hire. [Book 1:1 demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) [Go to SmartRecruiters marketplace](https://marketplace.smartrecruiters.com/partners/cronofy) Schedule any interview inside SmartRecruiters > We're able to move candidates through hiring much quicker – we've shaved a week off the processes we were previously running. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise **Rotate interviewers with pools** **Set up panel or team interviews** **Override blocked calendar slots** **Book multiple interviews in one stage** Scheduling with Cronofy in SmartRecruiters SmartRecruiters vs Cronofy for SmartRecruiters - 1-to-1 - Panel - Override interviewer "busy" times - Allow private events - Add candidate profile and interview kit to interviewers' invite ## Schedule panels and multiple interviews in one stage No more painful workarounds or back and forth to find interviewer availability. Without leaving SmartRecruiters, combine availability from different interviewers or from a pool of interviewers. [Watch video demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9-v3CSa4Yk) ## Manage interviewer workloads Ensure your team is not overburdened with candidate assessments by adding pre-defined daily and weekly interview limits for each team member. Cronofy automatically assigns interviews within these limits keeping your hiring team enthusiastic throughout the hiring process. [See how to rotate interviewers](https://youtu.be/piMTxz_363g?si=2iPfEuOId14IPVL0&t=374) ## Learn more about interview scheduling in SmartRecruiters ## Control scheduling pipeline Track and manage your scheduled interviews in one place. View and edit who gets added to interviews, who can cancel and reschedule, and know precisely when key events are happening. Automate routine scheduling tasks and workflows with templates that can be changed anytime. [See how to track interviews](https://youtu.be/TmmRisdUwLg) ## Process screening in bulk Personalized booking links are sent from preset email templates when moving a group of applicants to the screening stage, all from within SmartRecruiters. Focus your time on finding the best talent, not time consuming scheduling tasks. [Learn more](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/smartrecruiters/automation/how-it-works) ## Schedule candidates globally Avoid timezone mixups and reach the best candidates worldwide. Cronofy presents time slots in the candidate's timezone, eliminating confusion and missed connections. [See pricing](/pricing) Streamline Interview Scheduling in SmartRecruiters [Book 1:1 demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Opaque IDs At Cronofy we expose opaque IDs from our API, a strategy we gratuitously copied from Stripe. So what is an opaque ID? At Cronofy we expose opaque IDs from our API, a strategy we gratuitously copied from Stripe. So what is an opaque ID? At Cronofy we expose opaque IDs from our API, a strategy we gratuitously copied from Stripe. ## A what ID? What is an opaque ID? It’s an ID that rather than just being an unique identifier includes information about what the ID represents. For example, rather than just returning a profile’s ID as 12345, we return it as pro_12345. Similarly for a calendar belonging to that profile, rather than returning 67890 we return cal_12345_67890. We do this because for a few bytes of overhead we think it makes our API easier to learn. An ID in isolation be it in documentation, in a response, or stored in a database is much more meaningful. ## Improved understanding Opaque IDs make it easier to understand and translate examples to your application. When the example using a cal_ ID, it’s obvious you should be providing one of your own cal_ IDs in the same place. It makes it easier for us to spot errors in support cases as we don’t have to lookup what each ID refers in order to fully understand an example request. This saves time for us as the provider and for you as the consumer, it’s a win-win situation. ## Coupling related values Composite opaque IDs like cal_12345_67890 also make things simpler for the consumer as rather than providing two pieces of data they pass one. Rather than a URL structure like: **/v1/profiles/{PROFILE_ID}/calendars/{CALENDAR_ID}/events** We have: **/v1/calendars/{CALENDAR_ID}/events** This is because the profile information is embedded within the ID. That simplification again surfaces for more efficient support as it’s much easier to copy and paste one value into a search dialog than two. A customer will always provide a composite ID as one value, whereas if it is two separate pieces of information they may well be spread out in their correspondence. Hopefully this is an interesting peek behind the decisions we’ve made at Cronofy. If you have any questions about our API or suggestions about how we can improve it, please get in touch with us via [support@cronofy.com](mailto:support@cronofy.com). ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # White label Scheduling API ## Integrate fully customizable scheduling for your users Cronofy’s white-label API end points and UI elements give you the power to create fully customizable scheduling features embedded into your application. Even for the most complex, multi-person, multi-stage processes. [Get started](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) [Talk to a human](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) > We chose Cronofy because they prioritized security and data protection, were transparent on pricing, and had high-quality, clear documentation. — Tobias Tiedgen, CEO, d.vinci Availability API ## White-labeled scheduling control at scale Create custom scheduling experiences, unifying calendar availability across multiple calendar providers. The Cronofy Availability API powers the scheduling of hundreds of B2B SaaS apps and marketplaces, and has done for years. You get buffer times, scheduling quotas, multi-part meetings and a host of other capabilities that we've built to serve the most demanding scheduling use cases. [Explore Availability API](/developer/availability-api) [Read developer docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/) Calendar API ## Reliable, real-time calendar synchronization The foundation of Cronofy's service is our calendar sync engine for handling the complexity of different calendar providers. You get the confidence of reliable, real-time updates. So you can focus on building the features that make your product different. Every plan comes with a **99.99% uptime guarantee** so you know that you can rely on us. [Explore Calendar API](/developer/calendar-api) [Read developer docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/calendars-events/) UI Elements ## Fast-track development and customization Cronofy's suite of UI Elements are designed to be embedded directly into your application. They provide you with pre-built UI to do things like selecting a slot, managing working hours and reviewing team availability. They don't use iframes but instead sit directly in the DOM of your web app. Meaning that you can easily customize the styling to create your own, white-label experience. Supporting over 18 languages. [Read the UI Elements docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## Track accepts and declines with smart ICS attachments Smart Invites from Cronofy give you complete tracking of your ICS attachments and they get auto added to people's calendars. [Explore Smart Invites](/developer/smart-ics-invites) > Cronofy’s documentation, sample apps and support is excellent and has enabled a fast and painless calendar integration. — David Wennergren, CTO & Co-founder, Teamtailor ## We're independently certified, GDPR & HIPAA compliant Calendars can contain both personally and commercially sensitive data. Anyone processing that data needs to be operating with the highest level of security and privacy controls. Cronofy has taken this a stage further. Our unique sync engine acts as a secure proxy between your application and your customer's calendar data. You choose the level of access that you need. For example we can mask everything except the free busy information needed to make scheduling decisions, yet still allow your app to create bookings and have full edit control over just those events. [Learn more about security privacy](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy) ## Host your users' data in the right region for them Cronofy operates six independent data centers so you can choose the location that meets your customers' needs. We believe that data security and location controls should be available to anyone so you can operate in one or all six on any of our API pricing plans for no extra charge. [Read the Data Center docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/data-centers/) Create a developer account and start scheduling No credit card required [Start integrating](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) [Speak to a specialist](/book-a-demo-api) --- # How to effectively manage a digital transformation project We spoke to Matt Such, Vice President of Operational Excellence at coaching business MDA Leadership, to find out more about the role of digital transformation projects and how to effectively manage them. We spoke to Matt Such, Vice President of Operational Excellence at coaching business MDA Leadership, to find out more about the role of digital transformation projects and how to effectively manage them. As the business world continues to adopt new innovative ways of working, digital transformation is becoming an increasingly important part of business management. Companies are using technology to stay competitive and maximize efficiency, especially in saturated industries. We spoke to [Matt Such](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewsuch/), Vice President of Operational Excellence at coaching business [MDA Leadership](https://mdaleadership.com/), to find out more about the role of digital transformation projects and how to effectively manage them. He joined the company to pinpoint the main areas that the business needed to digitize, with [scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) being his first port of call. ‍ ‍ ### What is digital transformation? ‍ Digital transformation is a broad term. It's all about improving existing business processes with the help of technology, literally transforming the way a process has been done, often changing it from manual to digital. This is done to improve factors like accuracy, accountability, and precision in order to boost the efficiency and agility of an organization. It’s becoming more important to digitize processes in order to stay competitive, regardless of the industry you’re in. Business leaders are recognizing the value in digital transformation and prioritizing it in their business future plans; [research from Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/870924/worldwide-digital-transformation-market-size/) states that global investment in digital transformation is expected to almost double between the years 2022, from $1.8 trillion and 2025 to $2.8 trillion. With all of this work to digitize, it’s crucial to have effective management of digital transformation projects to ensure they’re a success. However managing these projects is complex and time-consuming. Planning is key, so before a business embarks on any digital transformation they need to have an expert project manager to take the helm. ‍ ‍ ### Why is digital transformation so important? In the modern age, everything is turning digital. The simple truth is that companies that create and implement a digital transformation plan see higher revenues, increased performance, and better customer retention. [Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021 report](https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/technology/technology-trends-2021) found that the top ten percent of companies leading tech innovation achieve two to three times the revenue growth compared with their competitors. Digitizing isn’t just about staying competitive, it’s about improving your employees’ day-to-day lives and subsequently morale within the team. They can be more efficient and do the higher-value tasks that benefit the business instead of wasting too much time on admin. This is the reasoning behind why Matt chose to implement Cronofy’s scheduling platform to replace the existing manual scheduling process. “We have 50 staff working for our organization, and a big chunk of that number, around 20%, is dedicated solely to scheduling meetings. Whether this be interviews, coaching sessions, feedback sessions, business simulations, the coaching industry is based upon scheduling meetings between consultants and clients. That was hundreds of hours of effort a month.” With business and demand for their services growing quickly, it was hard for the staff to keep up and easily find people’s availability. Scheduling became a pain point. Digital transformation often comes about due to a stressful, inefficient process and business growth, becoming unsustainable as the business scales. ‍ ‍ ### Digital transformation challenges With any business change there will be challenges along the way – transforming embedded business processes can naturally prove tricky to navigate. ‍ #### People being resistant to change Going digital can be daunting for a lot of teams. In MDA Leadership’s case, a lot of the employees had worked there for many years and were used to a certain way of working. Because of this, it was crucial for Matt to address and dispel any anxieties before fully implementing the new scheduling processes. “We have many staff members that have been here for long periods of time – sometimes it’s the only place they’ve ever worked,” Matt explained. “Naturally they met the new scheduling process with some trepidation. Moving away from the way things have been done for the last 40 years and installing technology on top of that is a lot to take in. For me, it was all about getting people comfortable with the technology. We did a pilot test with a select few employees and presented the results back to the whole team, so they could see exactly how it would benefit them.” ‍ #### Getting the board bought in The people in your business with the buying power also have to buy into the digital transformation process and support the work and changes that need to be made. These changes may at first have an impact on productivity due to time spent training and generally changing from one system to another, but once fully implemented will greatly improve team efficiency. This needs to be consistently communicated to the board and backed up with concrete figures to ensure confidence in your decisions. ‍ #### System migration It can prove to be a logistical nightmare changing over from a deeply ingrained process and getting a new one set up for the company. There needs to be careful planning and strategy before any implementation takes place to avoid any risk of a meltdown. Business productivity needs to continue even in these times of upheaval, so any way of making the implementation as quick and painless as possible is beneficial. Having a step-by-step roll-out planned ‍ ‍ ### How to be an effective manager during a digital transformation #### Identify business needs Any digital leader who doesn't talk and listen to the people within the business to identify key requirements first is setting themselves up for digital transformation failure. Matt prioritized scheduling due to talking extensively with team members and identifying what they needed to make their days more productive. “I chose scheduling as the first major project for two main reasons. Firstly, it will reduce the burden on that dedicated group to schedule all of these meetings and give them some space to be able to do the other things that the firm needs them to do. “It’s also about giving a better experience to our clients. MDA is pretty white glove and we prioritize the customer experience, so a back and forth several times just to get one meeting scheduled didn’t match that approach.” ‍ #### Open communication The shift to digital can be jarring, especially to those who are so used to a certain way of working. Communication is key in digital transformation. Presentations, regular meetings, emails and one-to-one sessions can all help keep your team in the know and help them feel at ease with the change. Hone in on their existing pain points and explain how the new process will solve these problems. “The consultants were worried that clients would have too much power over their calendars if we implemented automated scheduling,” Matt said. “ This anxiety is why it was so important for us to communicate and explain to everyone how the new processes would work so they would actually use the new technology.” ‍ #### Train everyone Staff don’t just need to know the why but the how when changing a process. If a new technology is implemented and people are expected to use it without adequate training, this could lead to all kinds of problems from team morale to business efficiency. Dedicate the time to train all members of the team in how to use the new systems and ensure they feel comfortable using it. Although this impacts productivity in the short-term, it safeguards the effectiveness of your digital transformation in the long-term. ‍ #### Keep customer experience in mind Technology is just the starting point of digital transformation. It’s all about finding ways to use systems and services to meet new customer demands. This was the case for MDA Leadership, as smooth and easy scheduling for clients, on their terms, made them feel their time was respected and they didn’t have to put effort into back-and-forth emailing. This was especially crucial considering MDA Leadership deals mostly with C-Suite and Executive-level business leaders who are generally strapped for time. “The inevitability of working with executives a lot is that they need to reschedule. And when that happens, that process starts all over again. So it was a high level of effort just to get that piece of the business done, not just for the consultant but for the client. Automated scheduling was an obvious solution to improve their experience from the start of working with us.” ‍ ‍ ### Conclusion Naturally as digital innovation continues to be created, businesses will continue to change and adapt. It’s becoming an unavoidable part of business management – to stay competitive, digital transformation needs to be embraced. It’s important to manage this change in a way that will benefit your customers, business, and people the most. Although a daunting undertaking, having the right plans in place and a dedicated digital transformation leader will help make the shift as smooth as possible. --- # Change reviews: a guide As we grow our development team, a lot more thought has to go into our development process. Retrospectives are the fundamental pillar of a strong product development process and change reviews are one of the first things that would be introduced assuming a starting point of flailing around blindly. As we grow our development team, a lot more thought has to go into our development process. Retrospectives are the fundamental pillar of a strong product development process and change reviews are one of the first things that would be introduced assuming a starting point of flailing around blindly. As we grow our development team, a lot more thought has to go into our development process. Retrospectives are the fundamental pillar of a strong product development process and change reviews are one of the first things that would be introduced assuming a starting point of flailing around blindly. This is because change reviews attempt to answer several extremely important questions: - What change is being made? - Does the change satisfy the requirement that prompted it? - Does the change introduce bugs? - Is the change made proportionate? - Is the change made in a “good” way? Having these questions asked before a change is able to be released shakes out other practices elsewhere in the process. ### What has changed? In order to know what change is being made, you need some sort of version control and change management process. A simple branching strategy such as “stable master” with changes made on short-lived branches is usually sufficient for most projects. ### Is the requirement satisfied? In order to know if the change satisfies the requirement that prompted it, the requirement needs to be sufficiently understood by the person requesting the change and the person making it. It should also be sufficiently documented for a third party to be able to verify that it is satisfied. From this you make good strides towards a definition of done. ### Have bugs been introduced? In order to know if the change introduces bugs, testing needs to be performed, potentially for the whole system but at least for those parts affected by the change. This is time consuming and so, assuming starting from nothing, automated testing would be introduced to relieve most of the testing burden. In turn, the details of the change should be sufficiently tested so that the do not need to be manually verified in future. Running these tests can take time so once a retrospective identified this as a cause of pain, a build server would be introduced to run the tests automatically before the change review takes place. ### Is the change proportionate? Sometimes whether the change made is proportionate is clear-cut. For example, if a text change request results in a change of tooling, it is likely disproportionate. Why does this matter? Every change is an opportunity for bugs to be introduced, therefore changes should be as focussed as possible to minimise the risk. It also frees up time for making more changes if each change is made is the minimum viable change. It made seem like this will lead to an inertia for potentially inefficient tools. However, this is where the retrospectives come into play again. If something is a constant source of pain, this will be raised in a retrospective and the change of tool will become a requested change itself. Refactorings are often a grey area for proportionate changes. For example, extracting a base class or introducing a strategy pattern can look like a much bigger change than it is. It is then up to the person making the change and the person reviewing it to come to an agreement about whether it is proportionate or not. I’ll give some tips on this later. ### Is the change “good”? The hardest part of this is defining what “good” means. There are often many ways to make a change and sometimes it’s subjective which is the best way. Then there is the style of the change. Is the intent of the code clear? Are the tests sufficient and understandable? Is the code easy to change in the future if needed? Does the code look like it is part of the code base? To avoid endless arguments for each change over whether tabs or spaces should be used, your curly braces should be on the same line or a different one, whether optional syntax should be included or not, etc, etc, etc, you will end up defining coding standards. But beware, this is fraught with danger too as all the little arguments come to a head as everyone will realise this is the final chance they have to get their way. The best way to avoid this conflict is to appeal to authority. If your language has a defined standard use that, if there is a large company that has published their standard use that. If you have to define it yourself, then try and define one that would have the least impact on your existing code base so that all the small arguments of the past become the basis of the standard. Once a standard has been defined, it should be enforced. Any IDEs should be configured to produce standard-compliant code. If a code formatter exists, it should be used to format the code as part of the build process. Failing that linting tools should be added to the build process. Once standards are in place you want to avoid people having to spend time to enforce them. ## Tips and tricks ### Being a good reviewer When reviewing a change you need to be acutely aware that you are reviewing someone’s work. There’s at least a little bit of themselves in it and so they are going to have the tendency to take criticism of it personally. The language you use plays a key part in mitigating this problem, whether it be in person or via text, but particularly if via text as there is no tone or body language to accompany it. It is important to demonstrate respect for the individual and to critique the change, not the person who made it. For a simple example, rather than “you made a typo”, say “this word is misspelled”. Try to frame criticism as a suggestion of an improvement rather than a fix for something that is wrong. Also, make sure not to dress your opinion up as fact. For example, rather than “this should use the strategy pattern”, say “I think it would be more clear if this used the strategy pattern”. Don’t forget to point out things you found particularly interesting or good. For example, if a library method is used that you’re not familiar with, thank them for making you aware of it. A little praise sprinkled in with the criticism can make the whole process more pleasant for everyone. Feedback should be given from a high level before delving into the nitty gritty. For example, if the requirement is not satisfied by the change there is little point continuing to review down to stylistic points if satisfying the requirement will mean significant change to what is being reviewed. Only once the requirement is satisfied, without introducing bugs, and in a proportionate manner is it worth nitpicking on the details of the change. Remember that as the reviewer, you are now equally responsible for the change in all aspects, its quality, its maintenance, and in the short term, getting it released. Therefore, you need to prioritise reviewing changes, particularly those you have already reviewed, over starting a new change. ### Being a good reviewee Respect also plays a large part in being a good reviewee, first and foremost in respect for the reviewer’s time. Before submitting a change for review you should be as confident as possible that it will pass the review with flying colours. To do this, attempt to imagine that someone else had made the change and review it yourself. Go through the questions and made sure there is a positive answer to them all. If there isn’t, then make the necessary alterations before submitting the change for review. If any collateral is required to understand or review the change, provide that along with the change. However, if the collateral is considerable, consider whether it should be part of the change itself in the form of documentation, additional tests, or similar. Much like the reviewer, you should be careful in your use of language. Delivering criticism can be as hard as receiving it so if rejecting it, explain why you disagree. Don’t forget that you are now both responsible for the change so they are committed to it as well. Having your work critiqued by someone can be a bitter pill to take, but the improvement in the changes made is more than worth it. How do you ensure you are making the correct changes? --- # The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. ## **Why should you audit your process regularly?** Regular audits of your recruitment process are crucial to stay competitive. Overlooked gaps can lead to missed opportunities, bad hires, and wasted resources. This guide, packed with insights, will help you spot and fix weak points in your strategies. ## **Common gaps in recruitment processes** Typical weaknesses can be found at various stages of recruitment, such as: - **Sourcing:** Inefficient strategies can limit your candidate pool, leading to missed opportunities. Additionally, failing to engage with passive candidates can mean missing out on top talent. Poor communication during this stage can deter potential applicants and negatively impact the candidate experience. - **Interviewing:** Poorly structured interviews can lead to inconsistent assessments and biased hiring decisions. Drawn-out interview processes result in [higher drop-out rates](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#7f33b1a9e36c) as candidates lose interest or receive other offers. Additionally, not using technology to speed up scheduling and feedback can create delays and frustration for candidates, negatively impacting their experience and perception of the company. - **Onboarding:** Ineffective onboarding programs can hinder new hires’ integration and productivity. A lack of continuous support and feedback can leave new employees feeling disengaged. ## **Addressing DEI Gaps** **Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)** are essential for a well-rounded recruitment strategy. Identifying DEI gaps improves the candidate experience and enhances organizational culture. Audit your job descriptions, sourcing methods, and interview processes for bias to ensure fairness. Focusing on DEI goes beyond ticking boxes; it enhances the overall candidate experience. Increasing transparency and communication and ensuring respectful interactions create a more inclusive environment. For example, more clarity improves the experience for everyone, not just neurodiverse candidates. Clearly outlining the interview process and sharing questions in advance can help all candidates feel more prepared and valued. With this in mind, let's dive into how to begin auditing your current process. ## **Identifying your recruitment gaps in six steps:** ### **1. Map Out the Candidate Journey: ** Understanding the candidate’s perspective helps identify pain points and areas for improvement, ensuring a smoother and more positive candidate experience. Create a detailed map of the candidate journey, covering every stage from the initial application to the final hiring decision. Tip: You can use tools like Miro, Whimsical, and Visio to help you visualize this process (or just a simple pen and paper works).  ### **2. Analyze Internal Processes: ** This detailed analysis helps identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks, providing a clear picture of where improvements can be made. Document every phase of your recruitment, from job descriptions to onboarding. Track the time spent and identify bottlenecks. Evaluate current tools to find improvement areas. ### **3. Utilize Quantitative Data: ** Quantitative data provides objective insights into your recruitment process, helping to measure success and identify areas for enhancement. Key metrics for evaluating effectiveness include: - **Time-to-Hire:** Measures the efficiency of your hiring process, from the moment a candidate enters the pipeline - **Time-to-schedule**: Time it takes to schedule an interview - **Time-to-Fill:** Indicates how long it takes to fill a position from the moment it opens. Tools such as [Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) can provide these metrics to help you benchmark against industry standards. ### **4. Collect Qualitative Data: ** Qualitative data complements quantitative metrics, offering a fuller picture of the candidate experience and internal processes. Here are a few qualitative assessment techniques to consider: - **Surveys:** Collect insights on the candidate experience and hiring process. - **Interview analysis:** Understand the effectiveness of interview stages. - **Focus groups:** Gain in-depth insights from specific groups. - **Glassdoor reviews:** Monitor public candidate feedback. ### **5. Engage Recruiters & Hiring Managers: ** Getting buy-in from the team is important. Engaging these stakeholders ensures that insights and improvements are practical and directly applicable to the recruitment process. ### **6. Monitor the Competition and Industry Standards: ** Staying informed about industry standards helps you benchmark your processes and adopt best practices to stay competitive. Keep a close watch on industry trends and best practices by monitoring your competitors. Analyze job postings, employer branding efforts, and industry benchmarks to identify areas where your recruitment process can be improved. Adopt innovative practices and timely automation to stay ahead. ## **Your next steps** Analyzing where the gaps in your recruitment process lie will deliver significant long-term benefits, both to your team and candidates. Regular audits keep you competitive, boost efficiency, and enhance the candidate experience. Identifying and addressing gaps, particularly in interview scheduling, is crucial. Tools like Cronofy can streamline this process; companies like Agreena were able to save **[5 hours per week](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/agreena-recruiters-panel-interview-scheduling)**, per recruiter. Take a proactive approach to refining your recruitment strategy, and you’ll attract and retain top talent more effectively. **[Download](https://www.cronofy.com/recruitment-audit-guide-registration?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=6-step-guide&utm_campaign=content)** your recruitment audit checklist, and take some time to **[speak with us](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic)**** **to see how you can take the next step in supercharging your recruitment process. ### Is It Time to Change Your Recruitment Game Plan? Recruitment Timing is key in recruitment. Knowing when and how to update your hiring strategy can make all the difference in attracting top talent and staying competitive. Read on to find out how to make the most of times of change in your company, including leadership shifts, team restructuring, and more. --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience Recruitment What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- # Balancing Automation & Human Touch | HRTech Europe Discover AI's impact on recruitment and get practical advice on how HR leaders can leverage automation effectively while keeping the human element front and center. ## Watch the Replay ### Balancing Automation & Human Touch Duration: 18:40 Well, can everyone hear me? Fantastic. Lovely to see you all. Thanks for coming. Today, I want to talk to you about automation, efficiency, AI. And I guess kind of, why am I talking about this? Well, I'm old enough to have seen many, many generations of AI. I'm old enough to remember expert systems and machine learning, or maths, as most of us call it, but I think it's really important to understand how AI fits the new landscape and how it exists with the other other tools we have. So my name is Adam Bird, co founder and CEO of Cronofy. I'm one of those rare CEOs that can actually code, so I know the tech, although I would probably know enough to be dangerous rather than useful as far as my team are concerned. And just public service announcement, if you want to talk about any aspects of what we discussed or what I'm sharing today, we have pastries over at the stand afterwards, it's just that way. You can't miss it. The colors are like this. So let's get going. Cronofy is actually a technology provider to lots of software companies. So you've ever done any kind of scheduling on the internet, there's a good chance that Cronofy is the technology that's powering that under the hood. Now you'll see something you recognize, GoDaddy, Indeed. You book an interview on Indeed, Cronofy powers that, now with that, we ended up being quite well represented in interview scheduling, because interview scheduling is a complicated scheduling operation, kind of. Who knew, really? And so over 70 applicant tracking systems are using Cronofy to power their scheduling, which gave us a really interesting insight into the challenges and the flexibility required, and how there are many scheduling operations which are simple and repeatable, with the recruitment, it gets very complicated, very, very quickly. And then what we saw were, whilst these technology teams could build a certain amount of capabilities with our technology, recruiters were being underserved, so we built our own integrations into a series of the leading applicant tracking systems to really prove what was possible. So we've worked very closely with product managers of recruitment software and the recruiters directly to deeply understand the challenges around interview scheduling. So that's kind of who we are, why we're in the space. So why are we talking today? Applications per hire tripled in the last three years, so we run an annual survey. Last year was 12,000 candidates, where anyone who'd been in for any interview, we talked to them across seven different countries, you know, France, Netherlands, Germany, UK, America, Canada, Spain, another one. And what we're seeing is the kind of the use of AI in general. There's a there's kind of a shift in the market where recruiters are drowning in applications, and so people are trying to look at ways they can optimize their flow, because candidates are saying, well, you know what? This technology exists. Let me start using it now. The stats I have here are from our survey in 2024 which is like the first half of 2024 we're just kicking off our 2025 survey right now, just finalizing the questions that we're going to be answering. So one thing you can do is that you can kind of register for early access to the 2025 survey. But we're really seeing some interesting trends. So as of about probably nine months ago, candidates were already using chatGPT, Perplexity, etc, to improve and essentially apply at scale to roles, which, of course, creates more jobs for recruiters, and they're increasingly using tools to mass apply as well. You know, if you can kind of tailor your CV at the same time, why not just mass apply? And you know, you've got nothing to lose, but what, what's been seen in that, and this is what we're looking at in so again, 2024 data, is waiting times for that first interview has gone up considerably, and it's a real symptom of recruiters drowning in the work. Now, yes, we want to get the great candidates in really, really quickly, but candidates aren't being got in. And what one of the challenges with moving candidates through a process is if they wait too long, they disengage. So 37% of candidates in our survey last year said they would disengage with roles after a month or more. Now what that means is, if you don't get to those candidates quickly, they're essentially going to your competitors. They're going to those roles. That's it. Is the kind of role of rule of the market, I guess, really, and what we're trying to do is, or what I hope you will learn today is looking look for opportunities to improve that without losing that human touch, because a massive 81% of candidates said a human touch is important, which, yeah, come on, guys, you're using technology to mass apply and you know, but you want us to treat you like a human candidate's kind of candidate? Yeah, I'm a father of children. Anyway, actually, most people have parents of children. That's how it works. But anyway, we'll skip over that. And that's the problem. We talked about the kind of delays in interview scheduling. We talked about kind of all aspects of it, when you're drowning in just processing the applications and trying to get people through the process, then there isn't time for that human touch. So but there is technology out there, and if you kind of listen to lots of the vendors here, they're all going to solve your problems, they're all going to give you this time. What I'd like to do is not necessarily propose a particular AI tool or technology that you should be using, but I think talk in more general terms about how you think about composing your workflows and composing your capabilities. So how do you cope with three times more work, and fundamentally, you can't hire this away. Gone are the days, I think, where people would basically hire a bunch of coordinators out in outsourcing the Philippines or wherever, to just go through the process and try and get people through. That doesn't scale and that doesn't work. So that's kind of, that's what I think, where we are in the market that we're trying to cope with increased kind of workload from candidates. We're trying to find the best candidates for our company. And there's lots of tools out there. Now I'm here to break it to you that AI is not magic, it's just software. That's all it is. But there's two words that come up quite a lot when we talk about software. There's deterministic and probabilistic, and they're horrible words, but basically deterministic software is software as we know it. It's kind of, it's the same answer every time, whereas probabilistic, it's kind of, your chat GPT, your kind of, LLMs, it looks like the right answer. And I deliberately chose those words. It looks like the right answer. It's not necessarily. It's not right. Doesn't know it's right. It just looks like it's right. So deterministic software is software as we know it, same inputs, same outputs. You can predict it. So we use this for commission calculations for finding out whether interviewers are available, for scoring multiple choice. This is why multiple choice exists. It's because software can't interpret or deterministic software can't interpret an answer. So therefore you need to have a kind of multiple choice or fixed answer questionnaires in order to do that. Now probabilistic software is different, same inputs, you get the different outputs, but it's probably correct, and that's all around that's what training is all about, is trying to get to a point where it's probably correct and it's really, really good for conversational interactions, interpreting free text answers against a framework and summarizing free text, but remember, it's probably correct. So you've got these, this new type of component in your workflow. So pre AI, we had humans and deterministic software. With AI, we've got humans deterministic software and probabilistic software. That's the only thing that's changed. The AI is not replacing anything. It's just another bit of tooling in our in our tool set. Now this software, probabilistic software, makes mistakes by design, but then so do humans. Humans already made mistakes in many ways. That's how we've evolved. The reason humans are have kind of succeeded, as it were, as the just the apex species on the planet, is because we make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes turn out to be a new way of doing things. And so our business workflows already cope with those mistakes. There's already the checks and balances. There's already processes, processes to follow, and a company's risk appetite is what decides how they control those mistakes, those chances or mistakes. So if you're doing kind of consumer customer service doesn't really matter. The Jeopardy isn't great. If you're processing mortgage applications, Jeopardy is quite high, because a mistake could take down the company. So what I would encourage you to do is, if you're starting to look at kind of implementing AI tools into your workflows, and I would absolutely encourage you to do that, treat them like humans. Treat them like they make mistakes. And think about the checks and balances you need within your workflows in order to protect against those mistakes. It is just software, but it's software that you cannot completely trust. But what's different about this software to humans is you can hire it for an hour a week, 1000 hours a week, 10,000 hours a week, doesn't really matter. It only really does one thing, application, assessment, compensation, interactions, it will be very good at doing one thing. It doesn't have any human HR challenges. It's not going to take a sickie, it's not going to come in drunk is not going to break the photocopy at the Christmas party, but mistakes are inevitable. You have to be able to understand that these mistakes are going to happen, and so it's up to you to think about your workflows. If you had an intern doing this process, what would you do in order to check that work was happening? So let's talk through an example for recruiting. So I've got to go on this perfectly kind of wonderful flow that's going to get all the way to first interview for candidates. So firstly, an AI agent is going to process a job application and decide whether a candidate should be contacted. So based on whether it's a CV, the application, letter, internet research, it's going to work out whether or not this candidate should transition to that next stage, and then another AI agent is going to contact the candidate by text or voice to ask them a series of screening questions. So services like Scotty AI or Hubert do have do this kind of process where they'll actually kind of interact with the candidate and allow them to kind of speak or chat in kind of natural language to assess their fit. If they pass the screen at that point, then they can hand off to a scheduling tool to schedule that first interview, and then scheduling tool hands back into the workflow just to kind of tidy up with the candidate. So massively scalable, you've got four different agents, three, probabilistic, one, deterministic, running this process. But at each of those stages, you're going to want to check the efficacy of that and make sure that these things are working. Because again, think of it like you've got three interns and some software, and you want to make sure that intern is doing the right job. So you'll be looking at individual step conversions. Are too many people getting through to the next stage? Are too few? Are candidates dropping off the process? Are they kind of bouncing off because it's not human enough? Have you kind of missed out on an opportunity to inject a human aspect to the process. Are you kind of reducing your time to schedule any candidate experience you're doing? What's the feedback on the process? Now, with our surveys, we always ask candidates' appetite for automation. And actually candidates have a strong appetite for automation within the scheduling flow. They don't want their time wasted. So it's not the slide, but it's about 38% I think, of candidates want some kind of automation with various aspects of their flow. They recognize that this process should be automated. I just want to take a slight diversion to talk about scheduling and AI. Now our view, my view, is that scheduling is not suitable for a probabilistic engine. And this really comes down to the kind of scope of the frame of reference for these processes. So if you think about answering questions, the frame of reference is quite tight, quite small. There are kind of right or wrong answers. You've got a kind of small kind of body of knowledge. Whereas, if you're deciding whether or not a calendar event should be booked over, the frame of reference is incredibly large. The information is not in the calendar. It could well be just in people's minds. They know that that meeting is more important, because this is a partner relationship that they've been working on for many, many years. And the LLM or other system can never be have a chance of knowing that no, not even neuralink wherever that's going, it's going to give us that chance. And the problem is, getting it wrong is high risk. So this is where having predictable rules and heuristics, controls around offer times, availability, interview pools are all something that people need to set up the rules so they can predict the outcome, so therefore they can trust what's happening and they're not rescheduling candidates or last minute booking. This is a message from our sponsors, because, hey, this is what we do. So something we've been working on very closely is dealing with busy calendars. How do you allow recruiters to, or essentially hiring managers, to mark time in their calendar where they can be booked over? So something we call interview times. So a typical flow of this is hiring manager speaks to the recruiting team. I want this person to start in three months. Okay, that's great. What's your availability for interviewing week six, seven and eight? Mark that in their calendar and but allow them to change that. And importantly, what we're doing there is we're putting something in their block, in their calendar, the hiring manager can then choose to move that but importantly, they're reminded of that commitment, and that's what's really important, because life does change. You know, a meeting with a client, a meeting with a exec, whatever it is, these things can happen, but the hiring manager gets reminded that they've made that commitment, and then they can move the block around, but still make sure they make enough time for interviewing, because they've got to get that candidate in. Now, we've been doing a lot of work with Wise, Mark at Wise. Super keen on automation, super keen on kind of optimizing the flow. You know, one of the things we did with the scheduling is we reduced this, the scheduling, the time to schedule an interview, from six days to 90 minutes by taking a different approach. So they're now conducting the interviews and the time it used to take them to schedule the interviews. So you can imagine the kind of commensurate kind of impact on time to hire. So this is by judicious application of kind of automation or task of tools to solve these problems. They just picked a very, very small problem, worked on that, and now that's part of their flow. And then we kind of work on the other things. And what's great is candidates love it. So at the time Wise, have just going live with a candidate experience tool. But before they did that, candidates were emailing in saying, this is brilliant. Now that is no one praises people, least of all candidates, so that that's that's quite an impact. And really, what they're finding is the key thing is it's making space for more human in their flow, because they don't have to think about the kind of the mundane, the repeatable tasks, the recruiters are now almost treating it like being a master check in the work of apprentice. I talk about this idea of imagine you've got an intern doing this work for you. You're going to check that they're still doing the right thing. You're going to check that they're going to optimize you're going to look over their shoulder and make sure that process is effective, but also allows you to provide more personal touch points. You can reach out to candidates, you can check in with candidates, you can automate a reminder, but allow the candidates to call in. But also those people can upskill as well, so they become less of a sort of admin person for the hiring manager, more of a talent partner. And I think that's a real change that they're seeing. And another nice testimonial, basically, one of our coordinators, using our tool is now spending her time developing her career, because she's not having to spend the time chasing up candidates. So that's it. I would really, really encourage you to leverage automation. But the goal here is not just to make things more effective. It's to deliver more humanity to the recruitment process, because, as I said back on the previous slide, that's how you can differentiate. That's how you can kind of lock candidates into the process. Just over 80% of candidates said a human touch is important to them, and if you're one of the few recruitment teams that can do that, you get so much more license with your your candidates. So thank you for your time. Pastries.let's talk! [Download Presentation Slides](https://cdn.sanity.io/files/ygfbhkqr/production/ffeddc3c5b101fcf98488762396e2fbfdff28532.pdf) [2025 Candidate Expectations Report](https://www.cronofy.com/2025-candidate-report-early-access) ## Key Takeaways #### **AI's Impact on Recruitment Efficiency** - Applications per hire have tripled over the past three years, and candidates increasingly use AI tools (like ChatGPT and Perplexity) to apply to multiple jobs, creating more work for recruiters. - AI is essential in streamlining recruitment, from application screening to interview scheduling. **** #### **Human Touch + AI/Automation = Better Recruitment** - 81% of candidates believe that a human touch is crucial during recruitment. Automating repetitive tasks is great, but human interaction is key to maintaining engagement and building candidate relationships. - AI/automation should be seen as an assistant, not a replacement. By treating it like a team member, recruiters can avoid mistakes and optimize their workflows. **** #### **Beyond Buzzwords, How to Identify the Right Tool ** - Deterministic tools handle predictable tasks, while probabilistic tools are best for complex, conversational tasks. Understanding the distinction helps recruiters choose the right AI tools for different stages of the recruitment process. Not all processes need - or can be highly efficient with - AI; some only need automation. - AI can streamline applications, screen candidates, and even schedule interviews, but recruiters need to monitor and refine the system to avoid mistakes and ensure effectiveness. Tools that support existing workflows - rather than replace them - should be encouraged. **** #### **Automating Interview Scheduling** - Scheduling with AI is tricky, but when done right, it can save recruiters valuable time. Predictable rules are essential for minimizing the risk of scheduling errors. - Cronofy’s best-in-class solution has helped companies like Wise automate scheduling without sacrificing quality or reliability. #### **Impact on Candidate Experience** - Automation, when implemented thoughtfully, can improve candidate experience by reducing wait times and offering more convenience. - Wise’s positive candidate feedback demonstrates the value of combining automation with personal engagement. ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Are interview scheduling delays costing you top talent? Your time-to-schedule isn’t just a metric for coordinators, it’s now a critical differentiator in winning top talent. But why are teams still stuck with interview availability bottlenecks? Read on until the end to see how to solve this conundrum and empower both recruiters and interviewers with one process, and join an upcoming live session to learn more. Blog Post 2025-02-05T12:28:58.234Z --- ### Maximize Interviewer Availability for Competitive Hiring Scheduling delays cost you top talent. Discover how Cronofy’s new features help reduce availability bottlenecks and enable you to plan interviews smarter. Blog Post 2025-02-28T10:11:15.976Z --- # Candidate Expectations and Preferences What candidates expect and want from the hiring process in 2024. Read the report and improve your hiring experience. Exclusive insight on what candidates expect and want from the hiring process. Now in its 4th year, the Candidate Expectations report is back on a scale greater than ever before. This year, we surveyed 12,000 candidates on their loves, hates, and hopes in recruiting across the UK, France, Germany, USA, Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands. We seek to unpack these findings. As the increasingly competitive market reckons with the pendulum swinging away from favoring candidates, jobseekers are getting increasingly jaded with lackluster recruitment experiences. Long wait times to schedule, ghosting, and a lack of communication are placing a larger mental burden on candidates than in any previous year. There has been a dramatic shift from last year when it comes to time taken to schedule first interviews, as more candidates ready themselves for waits of a month or more. First impressions still matter, and they certainly last—it’s taking longer for candidates to drop out of recruitment processes, but their levels of dissatisfaction over communication could mean that they’re carrying this resentment to their roles. In turn, this has knock-on effects on the quality of hire and their time to productivity. Let's look at what the data is saying about candidate behavior. ## At what point do candidates leave interview processes? 42% reported to leaving the recruitment process when it takes too long to schedule an interview, down from 49% last year, signalling that candidates feel less secure in the job market, and have grown more used to frustrations in interviewing. Despite this, those less likely to recommend or engage with an employer in future based on frustrating interview scheduling are still 13% more likely to drop out of the recruitment process—a higher jump than in previous years. ## Fewer people are leaving the recruitment process because they were frustrated with the time it took to schedule an interview ## But the drop out rate is higher with those less likely to recommend or engage with an employer in future, based on frustrating interview scheduling ## What does a company’s hiring process say about its people? First impressions last. A company’s people are its window into the business, and how they’re treated matters—candidates are looking at this closely when making their decisions. 38% feel that well-managed hiring processes show that companies care about their staff, and a further 33% perceive it to mean a company has a good culture or ethos. 61% of interviewees feel that recruitment should shift its focus more on the candidate as an individual, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach that puts the company first. **Learning:** Candidates expect companies to know them after they’ve put in the time in getting to know the company. 67% agree that they’d be annoyed if they had to repeatedly fill in their details to arrange interviews if they’d previously communicated with the recruiter. Want to improve candidate experience? Your search ends here. Get access to more exclusive insights and resources to improve how you hire. [Subscribe Now](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-experience-newsletter) ## Candidates seek real-time connections with recruiters The top method of preferred communication for candidates was email. As the number of job interview rounds increased, interviewees showed an increasing preference to scheduling next stages to be face-to-face, signalling the value of being able to make plans in real time as email chains drag on. They were also keen to reduce the possibility of ghosting. UK (29%), Canada (31%), and US (22%) were the most likely to have online stages in the recruitment process. Just 16% of Spain list their preferred communication method as email. Face to face (39%) and telephone (28%) facilitate greater speed and connection. Globally for candidates, the preferred way to schedule interviews is through email. But email can sometimes feel like snail mail when there’s too much back and forth, so it’s no surprise that candidates across many geographies prefer face-to-face scheduling. They simply want to be able to schedule instantaneously with the latest availability. Rather than solely relying on manual face-to-face and telephone methods, this suggests there's a significant opportunity for recruiters to implement an automated scheduling tool that takes delays and manual work out of the equation. ![Preferred method of communication between candidates and recruiters in US and EU]() Everyone knows hiring processes take time, but how much of that time is used meaningfully, and how do candidates feel when that isn’t the case? ## Email is the primary tool used by recruiters and employers when communicating with candidates ## Are you a recruiter? No more spending two hours to book a thirty minute call. Learn how you could streamline your day with scheduling automation: [Smarter scheduling for recruiters](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies) ## The psychological impact of long interview processes Global worker stress levels have been at a consistent record high, with [44% reporting](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/547283/workplace-trends-leaders-watch-2024.aspx) to experience stress for a large part of their day. This impact on wellbeing is being echoed throughout the recruiting process. ![Chart illustrating negative consequences of a long interview process]() As the nation who ranks human touch in recruiting as the highest priority in recruiting (42%), France was the most stressed by slow interview processes, with almost half (49%) of candidates reporting increased levels of stress due to tedious processes—long times between touch points put developing relationships at risk. ## France was the most stressed by slow interview processes, with **49%** of candidates reporting increased levels of stress due to tedious processes ## When do delays get too much? When asked at what point they would disengage from an interview scheduling process or form a negative impression of the company, this year’s results showed candidates are **more used to longer waiting times **than in previous years. A higher proportion (36%) of candidates in 2024 would disengage at the one-month mark, up 12% from last year. 12% of candidates would do so at the 1-week point, less than half of the previous year. This speaks to the tougher current market for candidates in general. ## More people would wait one month or more before disengaging from an interview scheduling process, with the number of people waiting for one week falling significantly ## The importance of a clean slate when starting new roles Quality of hire is one of the most important metrics when making decisions on placements, so it’s no wonder hiring processes are getting longer as TA teams try to make the right choice. This inevitably becomes more frustrating—is this fair to candidates, even if they end up accepting the role because they have fewer options? To reduce attrition and ensure engagement and faster time-to-productivity, new joiners shouldn’t carry resentment from an experience that made their time feel disrespected. Similarly, implementing a no-ghosting policy and a commitment to qualify candidates out in a timely way ensures that even those who haven’t had success don’t have a negative experience. In a crowded market, recruiters might think there’s always another candidate available, but the competition for the most skilled talent remains heated. Moving candidates through processes by scheduling efficiently and communicating throughout will reduce dropout rates and fill out roles more quickly. **Learning:** Those hiring do not need to choose between the best quality hire versus filling roles fast. By utilizing tools that save hours of time compared to manual scheduling, talent teams can move with efficiency and thoughtfulness, using the saved time for meaningful personal communication with the candidate instead. ## The impact of ghosting Ghosting is on everyone’s minds in TA—all candidates have experienced it, but no one wants to admit to having done it. What kind of impact does a lack of communication has on candidates? We posed this question to a psychologist consulting in organizational development to unpack. > In 2024, there are no excuses for ghosting candidates anymore, because there are multiple tools and systems to support you in giving feedback to candidates. You can use an ATS to schedule communications, there are assessment solutions that offer automated feedback on test results. In the recruiters defence, I think one reason for **ghosting is actually the good intention of wanting to give manual feedback**, yet only few of us have enough time to actually do it. — Malin Freiman Moezzi, Licensed Psychologist ### Why is candidate ghosting getting more prevalent in 2024? Duration: 02:49 > Instead of integrating automatic communication, they postpone manual feedback, and then often it ends up being overwhelming and **impossible to execute** because they don't have enough time. I don't think we should shy away from automated feedback, because it's an amazing support to keep close contact with candidates, especially in longer processes. The important thing here is to set clear expectations and give information beforehand regarding when and how you will communicate throughout the process. Make sure to give candidates a point of contact if any questions occur, because we also need to remember that the only thing worse than getting rejected is not getting any information at all. — Malin Freiman Moezzi, Licensed Psychologist ## How long do candidates expect to wait for a first interview? ![chart]() 21% expect to wait 2-6 days between applying for a job and scheduling the interview (before giving up on the process), 29% expect a week, and a further 34% expect 2-3 weeks. Only 5% expect scheduling to take a day or less—this is a significant opportunity for recruiters to give candidates an above average experience. In fact, 57% say they would prefer an **automated system that schedules interviews** rather than lengthy back-and-forth communication. For most (60%), the past few years has made the expectation that businesses would be automation-first a given. However, many candidates are still falling down the cracks and being ghosted. From the time they applied, just 9% of candidates were able to get a first interview scheduled in a day or less. Candidates value timely responses, and recruiters know the highest-skilled candidates get snapped up in a matter of weeks, not months. The largest proportion of candidates (31%) report the **first interview** took as long as **2-3 weeks** to schedule—light years when it comes to candidates who are actively searching for new roles and might already be mid-way through another process. Both the expected time-to-schedule and reported time-to-schedule show that 2024 is the worst year for candidates so far. **Learning:** Feeling respected and having your time valued matters. When faced with multiple offers, 70% of candidates would consider the smoothness of their recruitment process to be a key factor when making their decision on what role to pick. Candidates listed the most likely reason to be frustrated as a lack of responsiveness and poor communication (at 28%); it’s easy to see how the combination of respect and communication creates the pillars for a positive candidate experience. ## Creating inclusive processes for neurodiverse candidates With recruiters striving to improve in Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, drawn-out processes are leading neurodiverse candidates to feel higher levels of stress compared to other parts of the population, at 56%. They also report **lack of responsiveness **and **poor communication** to be the most frustrating part of the hiring process (34%), and were more likely than the global average to value clarity and inclusivity as the top considerations in the hiring process at 37% and 10% respectively (both 3% higher than global average). Neurodiverse candidates prefer to take charge of scheduling interview processes, and feel any difficulties relating to that more acutely. A larger majority than average (58% compared to global average of 53%) say they would prefer to schedule their own interviews through provided time slots. 56% said they have left recruitment processes because they were frustrated with the time it took to schedule an interview, compared to a global average of 42%. > The key to a good process is transparency and respectful communication. Our job isn’t just to assess but also to enable a situation for a candidate to show their competency — right now, we’re not even doing the bare minimum. No process will ever be 100% fair towards all candidates — hiring is biased towards extroverted behaviors, and we know that physical attributes affect the **bias of the recruiter**, and to that, add a layer of having an autism, anxiety, ADHD, or dyslexia diagnosis. We shouldn’t expect individual recruiters to be the expert here. Instead, we need to ensure there are recommendations and policies for how to take it into consideration when a candidate addresses that they have a hard time with the process. — Malin Freiman Moezzi, Licensed Psychologist > The neurodivergent path is wide with many different categories, and not everyone with the same diagnosis experiences the same challenges. This makes it difficult for one recruiter to take executive decisions on how to make exceptions. We should strive towards being more inclusive by using and **developing better tools**, which I know researchers are working on, but we’re not quite there to automate this process at scale yet. Give the right guidance and enough time for all candidates to prepare, establish an honest and respectful communication, and take this information under consideration during our assessments. — Malin Freiman Moezzi, Licensed Psychologist Recruitment processes may look inclusive on the surface by asking for reasonable adjustments, but talent teams should keep in mind that providing an experience that serves all candidates does not stop there. Consider whether your hiring processes reflect the environment you create internally to support neurodiverse staff. ![chart]() ## Negative emotions vary by role Those working in **creative roles** (Media, Marketing / Advertising / PR / Market research sectors), were far more likely to report more negative consequences due to slow interview processes. They were at the top of almost every category and much more inclined to suffer from problems regarding: stress levels (45%), anxiety levels (38%), feelings of frustration (39%), self-confidence (34%), productivity (22%), and anger levels (17%), all directly as a result of inefficient interviewing. ![Chart]() Recruiting for these functions usually involves creative task-based and panel interviews with multiple stages, suggesting candidates are likely to suffer as a consequence of slow communication and lack of feedback between rounds, particularly because their tasks are more likely to be creative and subjective. This should create impetus for recruiters to provide robust, timely feedback and quicker next steps. They were also the least resilient to stressors and the least likely to feel unaffected by slow processes, at a mere 11%. Lastly, they were the most likely to perceive this to be a lack of care towards candidates over any other sector, at 41%. ## Subjectivity in creative tasks demands feedback Is skills-based hiring a buzzword, or a genuine path forward? It’s a priority for 73% of recruiters according to [LinkedIn](https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/resources/future-of-recruiting). As organizations make the shift towards becoming skills-based, creative roles can tell us a lot about what hiring for other sectors might look like in the next few years. Candidates across levels of seniority are having to complete tasks for interviews, many for the first time, on both junior and senior ends of the scale. ![Chart]() **Learning:** Skills-based hiring is not inherently more objective. To ensure candidates are being judged fairly, talent teams should look to be transparent on what skills they are looking for in the interview. Communicate tasks with clarity, clear assessment criteria, and timelines—take a proactive and timely approach to scheduling and providing feedback will ensure candidates feel the time they gave up was valued. The most commonly frustrating part of the interview process was a lack of responsiveness/poor communication for 28% of candidates. Some regions feel this more keenly than others—the Netherlands reported this to be 38%. A lack of transparency was second on the list globally at 17%, but of particular importance to Spain, who were at 26%. ## Poor interviews pose dangers for brands Inefficient and insensitive hiring processes can have significant consequences on your brand perception, lasting way beyond the initial interview experience. Here’s what candidates had to say about what perception they’d have of a potential employer that had a slow or disorganized interview process: ## Time is more valuable above all else with candidates feeling a lack of respect when interviews are inefficient ## Candidate opinions on slow or disorganized processes When interviewed, candidate responses range from sympathetic to severe. Some give interviewers the benefit of the doubt, either because “they might be having a bad day” or that “their staff are overworked or otherwise too frazzled to go through things.” Others perceived it more personally to say: > I might presume it reflects the quality of my candidacy (could it mean I’m less qualified than I thought) > They consider their time more valuable than mine. > That they weren't trained properly that the individual is stressed and struggling. Or that they have a high turn over rate and they keep their applicants for later use and only called me in after so many didn't work out. > I would be worried that this type of disorganization is throughout the workplace. Some took it as an omen of things to come, with one candidate believing this signified that “there is a problem within the company that may affect my job later”. Another spoke frankly of the need to improve: “I honestly would think they are unorganized and need better management with scheduling interviews.” ## Candidates share experiences with peers or family Conversely, those who were moved through a process with automated scheduling are more likely to form positive perceptions of the company. “They respect both employees and applicants time,” one candidate said when asked what they would think of companies that use quick and efficient scheduling systems. It’s clear that high-performance organizations interview candidates more efficiently and mindfully, as they understand the **value of candidates’ time.** Whether a hiring experience was negative or positive, candidates are likely to share their experiences within their inner circles and on public-facing sites like Glassdoor, which other prospective candidates will research. Let’s dissect this further to see how positive experiences can be meaningful in shaping brand perception and candidate self-efficacy. ## How candidates view fast scheduling Candidates perceive an efficient hiring process to be the most significant sign of respect to themselves—44% think it means companies care about their recruitment process, 43% feel it shows care towards candidates, and for 41%, it symbolizes a respect to them as an individual. Over the years, candidates have grown more jaded with scheduling difficulties, yet for **62%**, the time taken and overall experience in interview scheduling forms perceptions of employers early on. ## Netherlands scores the highest with **71%** of candidates reporting the interviewing process and the time it takes to arrange it, affect their perception of an employer Almost half (48%) of candidates would be less likely to recommend or engage with an employer in the future if interview scheduling wasn’t up to par, and they wouldn't hesitate to tell their fellow jobseekers. This could have a significant impact on an employer's future talent pool, as well as on brand perception. **Learning:** Companies should aim to convey their organization’s principles through their recruitment process. By ensuring candidates are treated with respect, they can nurture positive relationships with candidates beyond the recruitment process, either setting them up to excel in their new role, or to continue to keep them in their professional networks. ![Chart]() ## Balancing human touch and automation Hiring teams are under increasing pressure to balance their workload and give candidates a personal experience, all whilst ensuring everybody gets a response. Automation has its place, but in the world of endless cover letters and automated responses, candidates often feel like they’re speaking into the ether. For** 81%**, having a **human touchpoint** and someone to contact during the recruitment process is vitally important. This has remained consistently high throughout the years and is unlikely to change soon. ## Which parts of the hiring process frustrate candidates most? How should recruiters strike the balance with technology and automation? First, let’s define what candidates are struggling with. ## Candidates seek better communication which hiring teams are struggling to deliver with their current workload, alongside issues of transparency and convoluted steps ## Ambiguity around Generative AI Candidates are experimenting with automation themselves, as many are using generative AI to streamline previously manual processes. **56%** of candidates have already used generative AI in their application in some form—21% to optimize their CVs, 21% to tailor CVs to job descriptions, 20% for creating supporting content like cover letters, and 15% to mass apply to different roles. They're not alone. [45%](https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/resources/future-of-recruiting) of recruiters also report using generative AI on automate tasks to focus on more fulfilling work. Whilst many institutions are tightening rules on the use of generative AI, recruitment’s view on it remains inconsistent, leaving some candidates working manually, and some speeding ahead with automation. ## Of the 56% experimenting with AI candidates are focusing on streamlining manual steps to speed up their time-to-application, alongside casting a wider net of applications in light of increased competition **Learning:** Although filtering for AI-based mass applications and establishing a stance on the use of AI takes time, companies can control the quality and clarity of their assessment criteria to ensure that candidates who progress to the interview stage have the appropriate skillset required for the role. ## Where do candidates want to see more automation? Among areas where candidates want to see more automation to speed up the hiring process, interview scheduling emerges at the top at 37%. ## Automation earlier on in the process is where candidates feel there is the most need to solve their pain points, compared to the post-interview stage > This year’s results show that candidates prioritize human interaction throughout the hiring process, despite advances in tech and automation. Whilst automation is a positive step for companies, they should still prioritize integrating human touch points throughout the process to ensure a positive candidate experience. With a lack of responsiveness being the top reason why candidates are frustrated, it’s clear that getting the right automation tools in TA teams’ workflows to free up more time for personal communication could open up a lot of opportunity. — Darren Bush, Global TA Lead at Ericsson | Podcast Host at TA Tech Unboxed ## Do candidates, or TA teams hold the scheduling power? When it comes to scheduling, candidates walk a tightrope of balance. Looking into interview scheduling in more depth, over half of candidates would prefer to have interview time slots provided to choose a time that suits them. The UK is the most independent of countries surveyed, with **62%** preferring to select their own interview times. Whilst over half of all candidates across geographies prefer being able to choose their own time within a scheduling interface, 40% said they’d rather have an interview arranged on their behalf through a back-and-forth via phone or email. **Learning:** Candidates may be concerned about seeming unavailable or inflexible, so they prefer to cede scheduling power to the interviewers. As most companies do not use scheduling tools that factor in candidate availability, both candidates and recruiters feel like there is no choice but to settle for back-and-forth email chains. Rather than candidates having to rearrange their calendars to accommodate the recruiter, what candidates desire is simple—they just want times that suit them. - **Personalization at scale:** Candidates are keen to see more automation throughout the recruitment process, but not at the price of human touch. Getting personalized feedback and having someone to contact throughout humanizes their hiring journey. - **Candidate empathy:** The combination of a competitive market and an inherent power imbalance of interview scheduling means candidates are conscious of seeming unavailable, meaning they’re more likely to put up with scheduling delays than ever before. - **Hiring hesitancy:** Making the wrong hire is costly, and the pressure to get it right is leading to longer processes. Recruiters no longer need to choose between hiring fast or hiring well—by reclaiming hours per week back from manual scheduling, they can spend that time making considered decisions all while ensuring that candidates do not drop out of the recruitment process over delays. - **Respecting candidates time:** Despite the current macroeconomic climate, candidates don’t have infinite patience, and they want their time to feel respected. Almost half won’t hesitate to leave a recruitment process if they feel it’s taking too long to schedule an interview. - **Brand consequences:** Candidate experience links directly to engagement, as half of candidates would be less likely to recommend a company or engage with it based on frustrating interview scheduling. Any experience, good or bad, could have an amplified effect on your brand image if a candidate chooses to share it on communities like Glassdoor. > We've had candidates provide unprompted feedback on how easy and smooth the scheduling of interviews was. We’ve never had that before. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise Although there is some regional variation, one thing stands true. Hiring is a microcosm of the current economic situation—competition for jobs remains fierce. As applicants per job increase, leaner hiring teams are having to do more with less time, leading us to see longer response times and increasingly frequent ghosting that plagues candidate experience. These findings present a significant opportunity to do better, and to take stock of whether you’re using all the tools at your disposal. To succeed in attracting top candidates, talent teams could focus on higher value tasks, such as preparing interviews that allow candidates to show their individual skillsets, and giving the personalized feedback they deserve. When it comes to interviewing, it’s time to relegate back-and-forth emailing to find suitable times and shifting the rescheduling burden to automation tools. ## What does scheduling success look like? Integrating with 70+ leading ATS providers, **Cronofy** powers scheduling for over 180,000 companies globally. Discover how Cronofy users were able to streamline their interview processes with scheduling tools. [See success stories](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies) --- # Two-way calendar sync helps Dubsado's users save time and grow their business Dubsado is a one-of-a-kind business management platform designed to cut out the busywork for entrepreneurs. Dubsado is a one-of-a-kind business management platform designed to cut out the busywork for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs juggle with promoting their business, conducting administrative tasks, and doing client work. Administrative tasks eat into entrepreneurs’ precious time, making it harder to provide high-quality services to clients. Dubsado exists to take away some of the pains that come with managing a business. Users save time and can focus on their work and growing their business. ## The Challenge The team at [Dubsado](https://www.dubsado.com/) is fully committed to helping their users grow and run their businesses more efficiently by offering them new features that make their lives easier. They identified that booking appointments was a big pain point for their users. Entrepreneurs often have to jump between personal and professional commitments. They waste a lot of valuable time switching between their calendars and business management platforms. It also increases the risk of double-booking and missed appointments. Entrepreneurs need to see all their commitments – both professional and personal – in one place. That’s why the team at Dubsado decided to work on adding a real-time calendar sync feature to their platform. They looked into how they could allow their users to sync their personal calendars to their calendar interface and simplify the appointment booking process. Dubsado wanted the solution to work for all their users, no matter what calendar service they use to manage their schedules. But building individual connections to every calendar service provider takes months of development time. The maintenance of those connections is ongoing for developers too. That’s why they reached out to Cronofy. At Cronofy, we fully understand the pains of building individual connections with all major calendar providers and we exist to make scheduling easier for everyone. The Cronofy Unified Calendar API works with Google, Apple, Outlook.com, Office 365, and Microsoft Exchange. We take care of all the maintenance too. With Cronofy you can add two-way calendar sync to your products 90% faster. ## The Solution When setting up, users are prompted to choose the calendar they need to sync. Once an event is created or edited in [Dubsado](https://www.dubsado.com/features/calendar-integration), the changes are automatically reflected in the synced calendar and vice versa. Everything is updated in real-time. The risk of users missing appointments because they’ve double-booked themselves is gone. > Most Dubsado users have a multitude of events on their calendar and Cronofy allows them to easily manage all of their important dates in one place. With Cronofy, our users can easily manage all of their events across multiple devices. With this, Cronofy has allowed our platform to be the starting point and center point for our users to organize their calendar efficiently. — Blake Hunter, Marketing Specialist, Dubsado But Dubsado’s developers didn’t stop there. The calendar data provided via the Cronofy integration is used to power their online scheduler. This tool displays the real-time availability of users’ calendars. Dubsado’s users use the online scheduler to share their availability with prospects and clients. The online scheduler can be embedded directly on their websites or shared via email as a link. It offers a slick interface that displays available time slots. This helps users to save further time they’d otherwise have spent making calls and sending emails to book appointments. Their clients, meanwhile, have the power to self-book appointments online in a few clicks and choose the slot that best suits them. Everyone wins! With the help of the [Cronofy Unified Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/), Dubsado has built – quickly and securely – two-way calendar sync that helps their users grow their business. This has helped them attract more clients and increase revenue. ## Give your users the power to sync their calendars to your software with the Cronofy Unified Calendar API No matter what calendar service provider you need to integrate your software with, the [Cronofy Unified Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/) can help. You can offer your users streamlined scheduling solutions that work with every major calendar provider in a fraction of the time. ## Continue reading ### Customer Stories and Insights --- ### Calendar API --- # How to Create a Recruitment Outreach Strategy Founder of QuickMail.io, Jeremy Chatelaine, shares his actionable recruitment outreach strategy to help recruiters have more conversations with qualified candidates. Building a recruitment outreach process means you can reach out to the best candidates on the market, start conversations with them, and refer them to your clients with ease. But, where do you get started? In this guide, you’ll learn why you need to be running outreach rather than waiting for candidates to apply, and the six main steps involved when creating your own outreach process. Let’s dive in. ‍ ## What is Recruitment Outreach? Recruitment outreach is the process of identifying and contacting candidates who look like a perfect fit for the roles that you’re hiring for. It’s typically done over email, but other channels, such as LinkedIn outreach can also work. ‍ ## What are the Benefits of Building a Recruitment Outreach Strategy? ### 1. Contact Passive Candidates The first major benefit to recruitment outreach is that you can use it to engage with passive candidates. In the US, this makes up [over two-thirds of candidates](https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/infographic-passive-candidates-who-are-they-us), so it’s a demographic worth targeting.‍ *Source:* *[INFOGRAPHIC: 37% of US workers are passive candidates. Who are they? - Workable](https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/infographic-passive-candidates-who-are-they-us)* ‍ Passive candidates aren’t actively looking for a role, so they won’t apply to open positions. As a recruiter, it’s your job to reach out to the best passive candidates and start a conversation. It’s a powerful way to get high-quality candidates for every role, and it means you’re never sitting back waiting for the perfect person to apply, but instead, are being proactive and bringing the best people to your role. ‍ ### 2. Build a Candidate Network As a recruiter, you need a strong network of candidates. When a company asks you to fill a role, you can start by identifying the best-fit people in your existing network, and if there’s a fit, you could have people back to your client within days. And, what’s the best way to build your network? Cold outreach. You can run an ongoing [cold email campaign](https://quickmail.io/cold-email) where you reach out to a small selection of people in your industry to introduce yourself and learn about them. As you build trust with people, candidates will directly reach out to you when they’re looking for a new job, and you’ll be able to go to your clients and let them know, increasing the odds of them hiring from your network. It’s a powerful way to level up as a recruiter. ‍ ### 3. Fill Roles Faster Than the Competition If you want clients to use your services again and again, there needs to be a benefit to them. The biggest reason someone will keep using your services is if you can deliver them high-quality candidates faster than other recruiters can. Having a recruitment outreach system in place means your clients won’t need to wait for qualified candidates to arrive at their job listings. Instead, you can run your outreach, build a list of qualified candidates, and put them in touch with the hiring manager. ‍ ## How to Run a Recruitment Outreach Process ### 1. Build Your Candidate List First, you need to identify the right candidates to reach out to based on the role you’re hiring for. The first place to start is LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s upgraded Recruiter and Sales Navigator plans make identifying people matching your requirements easy. For example, you could filter by people who: - Are currently a Head of Growth or Head of Marketing - Work in the IT and software industries - Are based in a major city in the US LinkedIn will then show you people who match those criteria. You can save each potential candidate to lists so you stay organized, and when your list is ready, you can either [export their emails from LinkedIn](https://evaboot.com/blog/how-to-get-emails-from-linkedin-sales-navigator), or use a standalone email-finding tool. If you see a high-potential candidate at this stage, you might even consider sending them a connection request and introductory message to break the ice. You can use a [LinkedIn-based CRM](https://blog.salesflare.com/best-linkedin-crm-integrations) to keep track of your responses. If someone doesn’t respond, you can move on to the next step. ‍ ### 2. Write Your Email Templates Once you have a list of potential candidates you want to contact, you’ll need a compelling email template. This step is key because if you can quickly prove why your role is an ideal fit for their unique skills, you’ll get far more replies than if you sent a generic email template out to every candidate on your list. To help your emails stand out, you need to add personalization. This can be as simple as calling everyone by their name, referencing something about their current role, or mentioning that you were impressed by one of their projects. The key is that it must be unique to them, and couldn’t be sent to anyone else. All good recruitment outreach platforms will let you add personalization to your email templates. These will automatically populate based on the information from your prospect list, making it easy to personalize your messages at scale. Next, you need to build trust. The easiest way to do this is by adding social proof to your outreach template. For example, you could highlight how many other candidates that you’ve placed or [share a testimonial](http://trustmary.com/testimonials) that someone who you recently placed at a company left for you. Finally, you’ll need a call-to-action (CTA). Your CTA will guide the next steps of the interaction, so it’s important to think it through. If you have a CTA that’s hard to respond to, it will drastically reduce your reply rate. On the other hand, if it’s simple and designed to start a conversation, such as a [polite meeting invite](https://savvycal.com/articles/meeting-invite-templates/) or a simple question, they’ll be happy to respond. For example, these CTAs are all excellent options: - Do you have 15 minutes for an intro call this week? - Can I send you the full job description? - Are you open to opportunities like this at the moment? The goal is to start a conversation with a candidate, and all of these will help you do that. ‍ ### 3. Schedule Your Email Campaign Sending your outreach emails manually will take hours. To speed up your recruitment process without compromising on personalization, you’ll need to use [cold email sequence software](https://quickmail.io/email-sequence-software). These tools let you: - Write one template with attributes and send personalized emails to multiple recipients at once - Automatically follow up with people who don’t reply - Track your key metrics such as open rate and reply rate For example, you can use QuickMail to set up a campaign with multiple different email steps and touchpoints. Once your campaign is ready, you’ll choose when to send it, and your outreach will be sent on autopilot. ‍ ### 4. Add Follow-Up Emails to Get More Replies Even if a candidate you contact is a perfect fit, they won’t always reply at first. Unfortunately, some candidates will ignore your first email, assuming you’ve sent hundreds of other candidates the same template. To prove that you care about the relationship and that you think they’re a perfect fit for the role, you need to add at least one follow-up email to your campaign. [55% of replies](https://quickmail.io/cold-email-statistics) to outreach come from a follow-up step, so it’s vital. In your follow-up email, you’ll need to: - Re-iterate why you’re reaching out - Mention why they’re uniquely qualified - Change your CTA to see if a lower or higher-commitment ask would work You can easily add a follow-up email step in any cold email tool. For example, in QuickMail, you’ll add a ‘Wait’ step after your first email, and choose your delay. In most cases, 3-5 days is enough. After that, you’ll add a new email step, and write your follow-up template. It’s a powerful way to get more replies to your campaigns and have more conversations with qualified candidates. ‍ ### 5. Set Up Meetings with Candidates and Employers Once you have a reply from a candidate, it’s time to get them set up with your client so they can learn more about the role and start the interview process. Before you book any meetings, make sure you have your contracts in place so that if a candidate gets hired, you get your commissions for placing them. When your client and potential candidates are ready, you can use a scheduling platform like [Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) to arrange a time to meet that works for all parties. It makes the meeting scheduling process simple, as you can coordinate group meetings and invite external attendees to the meeting. The links you send can be auto-populated with data on each person, which removes potential blockers to arranging a meeting. You can also integrate it with your calendars to automatically check availability, and link it to your meeting or [calling tools](https://www.cloudtalk.io/blog/how-to-start-a-virtual-call-center/). This ensures that you’re not wasting time and can help your clients hire the best people without unnecessary delays in the process. ‍ ### 6. Track Your Results and KPIs Over time, you’ll start to understand whether or not your process is working. But, it’s important to track your key recruitment outreach metrics and overall KPIs. This shows you if your campaigns are successful, or if there’s room to improve. Here are some key metrics to track: ‍ - **Reply rate to email campaigns**: Your reply rate shows you how good your email templates are, as well as how well-targeted your candidate list is. Aim for 10-20% at a minimum. If you see a reply rate that’s below that, or, if your replies are mostly negative, you’ll need to make changes to your emails. ‍ - **Email-to-meeting booking rate**: This metric shows you how well you’re converting candidates who reply into hiring opportunities. You can use tools like Cronofy to streamline the meeting booking process and improve this metric. ‍ - **Candidate placement rate:** This metric helps you understand how effectively you place candidates. It’s a reflection of how targeted your candidates lists are, how well you’re engaging candidates, and how many of your candidates your clients are hiring. It’s important to track because you can use it as social proof when pitching to new clients to show how effective your services are. ‍ - **Candidate attrition rate:** This metric tells you how often candidates that you place are leaving their new jobs within a certain timeframe. If it’s too high, it’s a signal to improve your candidate prospecting process to identify people who are a better fit for the roles that you’re filling. Of course, you can track more metrics than those we’ve looked above, but starting with these four will give you a strong foundation to understand the effectiveness of your recruitment outreach process. ‍ ## In Summary Creating a recruitment outreach process means you can consistently identify and start conversations with high-potential candidates. Once you’ve started a conversation, you can start to make introductions to your clients and move the recruitment process forwards. Building an outbound process means you don’t have to wait for the right candidates to come to you – instead, you’re proactively identifying the best person for every role. If you follow the process we’ve outlined, you’ll be on your way to growing your candidate pipeline and successfully filling more roles. Building a recruitment outreach process means you can reach out to the best candidates on the market, start conversations with them, and refer them to your clients with ease. ‍ *Jeremy is the founder of QuickMail.io, a SaaS company that enables personal one-to-one conversations at scale through automation – for outbound outreach, inbound leads, trial/onboarding, customer communication, and more. Before founding QuickMail, he worked for more than 15 years as a developer in the video game industry and in finance.* --- # Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. [8×8](https://www.8x8.com/) is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. In recent years, 8×8 acquired several companies in order to add to their offering of professional solutions. One such acquisition happened in October 2018 when they acquired Jitsi, from Atlassian. This open source video conferencing project then led to the creation of 8×8 Video Meetings. 8×8 Video Meetings offers a completely free (it doesn’t even require an account) video conferencing solution with HD video and audio, screen sharing, encryption, desktop sharing, remote control, mobile and meeting room support. As well as generally everything that modern businesses and remote workers expect from their meeting tools. ## The Challenge When meetings are added to people’s calendars the probabilities of someone not turning up are greatly diminished. This is what really differentiates meetings from calls that often interrupt and disturb someone’s day. A meeting is a negotiated time that is agreed upon because it is supposed to work for everyone that needs to attend, however these negotiations can often be time consuming and the back-and-forth needed to arrange them is frustratingly poor use of people’s time. 8×8 Video Meetings’ mission is to propose the best possible meeting experience to the users of their platform. In order to do this they wanted to allow meetings to be added automatically to the calendars of the organizers. The team at 8×8 are experts in UX and video but had no desire or time to also become calendar specialists. The complexity involved in integrating and maintaining connections with multiple calendar APIs was something they hoped an external provider would solve for them. Handling meeting rooms represented another challenge. A meeting without a meeting room is a complicated affair – especially in an open space environment. Most businesses already allocate calendars to meeting rooms to allow them to be booked and the 8×8 Meetings team wanted to connect these calendars to offer a seamless booking experience – without forcing the organizer to juggle between people and rooms’ availabilities. Finally, 8×8 Video Meetings wanted a solution that would answer any data security concern that their clients – from all across the world – might have. This is why they were looking for a HIPAA and GDPR compliant partner who took this matter seriously and had a view to add more security certifications going forward. The team at 8×8 had been working with Cronofy before. As the project took off at 8×8 they naturally turned to Cronofy again to solve their calendar connectivity challenge and deliver integrated scheduling to their users. Cronofy is **HIPAA and GDPR compliant** and recently **SOC 2 attested**. ## The Solution 8×8 Video Meetings propose calendar sync as a feature to every new user who signs-up to use their video conferencing tool. No matter what calendar service they use they can connect their calendar to 8×8 Video Meetings and see all their commitments in one place. The [real-time calendar sync](#) means that when a user books a meeting through the 8×8 Meetings applications, the meeting is automatically added to their calendars. Here is what the authorization looks like when a user first creates an 8×8 Meetings account. First the user is prompted to sync their calendar to their personal meeting space. The user then selects which calendar service provider they are using. A simple authorization and voilà, the calendar is connected and sync will happen in real-time. The user is in absolute control and can revoke access or change the synced calendar from their admin controls. According to Emil Ivov – Head of Product for Video Collaboration at 8×8 – the adoption rate of the calendar sync is high with a “**substantial majority of users**” choosing to sync their calendars. But the integration doesn’t stop there. Most video conferences – especially in a business context, when more than two people are involved – require a meeting room to be booked. Ideally at the same time as when the meeting itself is being booked – to avoid needless admin burden. 8×8 Video Meetings team is leveraging Cronofy’s Enterprise Connect solution to do just that and plug into meeting rooms’ calendars. Enterprise Connect allows the IT team on the client’s side to authorize access to a subset of calendars on their domain. No manual or individual authorization is required and access is managed by the IT team. This technology can also be used to manage other resources that have calendars assigned to them such as video conferencing equipment. When a user books a meeting they can add a free meeting room to the booking with a simple click, making the process much more efficient and saving precious time that could be better spent on less menial administrative tasks. The future of the collaboration between 8×8 and Cronofy is bright. Upcoming projects are planned to hand more of the scheduling flow over to Cronofy as 8×8 Video Meetings continue to embed great scheduling into their native interface. No matter what calendar service provider you need to integrate your software with, [Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/) can help. You can offer your users streamlined scheduling solutions that work with every major calendar provider in a fraction of the time. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # Workday Calendly Interview Scheduling Alternative ## Still scheduling candidates with Calendly? We've got a tool actually built for hiring teams. Let's face it - you've probably heard complaints from candidates and hiring managers when using Calendly for hiring, but scheduling shouldn't have to be a disconnected experience from your Workday ATS. Now, you can get live interviewer availability and schedule complex, multi-person interviews without switching tools. Here's how Cronofy is built for teams hiring in Workday. [Speak to a Specialist](#form-c69a8400-10ec-4ca4-8da2-fc92eb6f198c) A Disconnected Interview Process is Costing More Than You Think ## Inefficient Scheduling is Stretching Time-to-Fill High-quality candidates move fast. But right now, your team is stitching Calendly and Workday together, doubling up on your scheduling work, and spending far too long just to get interviews booked. All that admin time means less focus on sourcing, engaging and closing top talent. ## Recruiters are Overwhelmed With Busywork You are asking more of your team, but without the right tools, they are running in circles. Calendar Tetris, less productive conversations with hiring teams, and last-minute changes that mean starting from scratch. All these chip away at productivity and morale. It's time to help them do more with less. ## Why is Cronofy a better fit for hiring teams? Cronofy vs Calendly - 1-to-1 - Personalized scheduling links - Advanced rescheduling - Schedule any meeting on behalf of others - Override busy calendars - Real-time availability for group meetings - Multi-domain branding - Add breaks between working hours - Track all meeting status - Browser extensions - Enterprise integrations - Send separate invites - Panel - Combined panels and dynamic pools - Allow private events - Sequences (back-to-back interviews) - Auto-schedule when candidate changes process stage - Buffer times around interviews - Rotate interviewers from a pool - Add candidate profile and interview kit to interviewers' invite Ready to try a tool made for hiring teams? Unlock huge efficiency gains without overhauling your stack. Explore how our Workday integration helps you speed up hiring. [See it in Action](#form-c69a8400-10ec-4ca4-8da2-fc92eb6f198c) Streamline Interviews Without Leaving Workday **Seamless Bi-directional Sync** **Pre-Matched Interviewer Availability** **Flexible for any Hiring Workflow** **Dedicated Support Team** **Enterprise-Grade Data Protection** ## Book More Interviews Daily Unlock more availability from interviewers without time-consuming back-and-forth. Cronofy gives you the tools to schedule interviews faster and more efficiently so you can move candidates forward and reduce time spent in the interview stage. ## Enhance the Interviewing Experience Impress candidates with a personalized booking experience and give your team a process they can trust. With Cronofy, recruiters no longer need to switch tools, compare calendars or double-check invites, and hiring managers aren't pulled into scheduling admin. ## See ROI in Days, not Months Save salary dollars on recruiting admin from day one. With Cronofy, you can instantly solve manual scheduling for any interview use-case and unlock more capabilities as you go. No need to wait six months for a complex rollout. ## Keep Hiring Data in Sync Reflect candidate progress instantly in Workday without double entry or manual status updates. Cronofy delivers reliable, streamlined reporting so your hiring data stays in one place and your team stays aligned. Zero mapping errors. ## Built for Global Hiring Coordinate interviews confidently across time zones and localize the scheduling experience for candidates with support for 17 languages. You no longer need to worry about booking interviewers outside their working hours or dealing with no-shows caused by time zone confusion. > We're able to move candidates through hiring much quicker – we've shaved a week off the processes we were previously running. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ## Turn Scheduling Into a Hiring Advantage Keep candidates engaged and give hiring managers confidence in the process. Embrace the scheduling partner that shifts recruiter conversations from chasing calendars to building relationships. --- # 3 effective ways to use Cronofy Scheduler Our new tool, the Scheduler is live! It allows you to create invitation links that display your real-time availability to people you want to meet with. Our new tool, the Scheduler is live! It allows you to create invitation links that display your real-time availability to people you want to meet with. Our new tool, the **[Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/)** is live! It allows you to create invitation links that display your real-time availability to people you want to meet with. The invitee only has to choose a time that works for them, they don’t need to enter their name or the topic for the meeting. We believe that’s the organizer’s job in order to deliver a more personalized scheduling experience. The scheduler is also launched with a companion browser extension, currently available on Chrome, that works with key software like Hubspot, Gmail, Salesforce and Zendesk. This means that you can create an invitation link and send it to a contact from the same browser tab! Once you’ve created your Cronofy account you can link multiple calendars to the Scheduler in order to cross reference your availability automatically and reflect this in the time slots you offer to any invitee. Ideal if you want to ensure that personal and professional commitments do not clash! After a contact has clicked on the personalized invitation link sent to them, they will only see the time slots made available and won’t access any information about other events in your calendar. We’ve intentionally designed our Scheduler to be versatile and have a diverse number of uses and applications. Here we call out some of the key use cases and how the Scheduler can be used for each. ## **Using the Scheduler for sales meetings** The great thing about how the Scheduler works is that it takes away any reliance on the potential customer to fill out forms. In terms of experience it’s a positive one that creates a good brand impression when booking in a sales call or demo. These types of meetings are likely to be an early touch point in the sales cycle. The built-in video conferencing integrations are great for flexibility – demo sessions often require screen sharing and video can also offer an extra dimension of personalization. A Scheduler meeting request is personalized with a prospect’s details already, and once they click the link they are able to choose a time that fits with their schedule as well as the Cronofy sender’s availability. There’s no back and forth over email and no need to hassle prospects or risk approaching them at times when they aren’t free with phone tennis style interactions. Our integration with both Hubspot and Gmail through the Chrome browser extension saves time for the organizer by automatically populating the invite setup screen with the prospect’s details – both parties benefit from a slicker and more efficient flow and the likelihood of any human error is hugely reduced. Getting the spelling of names and companies right, for example, is vital for a great first impression in any sales process. Many sales professionals have busy schedules and the Scheduler’s availability rules and process recognizes this. Each invitation link is single use allowing controlled rather than unlimited calendar access when a potential customer picks a meeting slot. A real strength of the Scheduler is in situations where professionals are regularly required to meet with others outside their immediate organization. These types of relationship and the meetings that accompany them usually mean that access to diaries and availability cannot be shared without a security compromise. The Scheduler allows both parties to securely determine a time that suits them without full access to each other’s diaries being required. These advantages would also apply to more specialized sales roles such as real estate or partnerships and any CRM based business. ‍ ## **Using the Scheduler for customer support** It’s common for those working in Support roles to need to set up meetings with customers. This is particularly necessary when an issue becomes more complicated and needs detailed explanation or to provide a higher level of service than pure web chat or email can provide. Often a demo is required or customer frustration levels demand a different type of attention. The Scheduler makes setting up these interactions simple! The single use invitation link also means that access to the calendar is maintained with none of the security issues based on revealing even free and busy information. The meeting invitation can only be used once, and this is great for busy Support employees or Developers who want to ensure that access to their calendars is not continuous – meetings can only be initiated on a case-by-case basis. Using our browser integration with Zendesk means that invitation links can be set up in just a few clicks, automatically populated with the customer’s details. The fact that the customer is able to choose a slot that works for them and also matches the calendar availability of the sender means that this can be done easily and efficiently with no tiresome back and forth. The process is proactive and gives a great impression of both the brand and their customer service. A better experience for all! These examples could also be applicable to Customer Success or Onboarding roles. ‍ ## **Using the Scheduler for hiring** At Cronofy we have experience in working with businesses in the HR Tech sector to improve their scheduling offering. We already partner with many software businesses who provide services and support to businesses for hiring and recruitment through our [API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/). Now any business can offer a quicker and more streamlined interview scheduling flow. The Scheduler has been specifically designed to improve the hiring process by saving recruiters and hiring managers time, whilst also creating an excellent candidate experience at the forefront of this. For the hiring manager or recruiter, the removal of any back and forth through the real-time availability slot picker is ideal. It means that the candidate benefits as they are able to pick an interview time slot easily, without further onerous data entry (of which there is usually already quite a lot in any application process!) and the time is guaranteed to suit all parties. The single use invitation link also ensures that candidates don’t have access to your calendar and therefore control and security is maintained. Job applicants won’t be able to tell when you’re free or busy to hassle for application progress updates for example. However, if they need to cancel or rearrange an interview, it’s simple to do by just cancelling in their calendars which will trigger a notification which acts as a nudge for a recruiter to reach out. These are just a few of the Scheduler use cases that we’ve seen used successfully by our customers so far. We’ll continue to add to and update this blog post as new features are added to the tool and as additional examples of great scheduling use cases are fed back by our users. Like what you see? **[Sign up for your Cronofy account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/scheduler?utm_source=Use_Cases&utm_medium=Blog_Post&utm_campaign=scheduler_marketing)**** **to get started with personalized scheduling today! --- # Are interview scheduling delays costing you top talent? Your time-to-schedule isn’t just a metric for coordinators, it’s now a critical differentiator in winning top talent. But why are teams still stuck with interview availability bottlenecks? Read on until the end to see how to solve this conundrum and empower both recruiters and interviewers with one process, and join an upcoming live session to learn more. Your time-to-schedule isn’t just a metric for coordinators, it’s now a critical differentiator in winning top talent. But why are teams still stuck with interview availability bottlenecks? Read on until the end to see how to solve this conundrum and empower both recruiters and interviewers with one process, and join an upcoming live session to learn more. ## Time-to-schedule is the new time-to-hire The data doesn't lie. According to Cronofy’s latest Candidate Expectations Report, [42% of candidates](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ae57a23ff9d5) reported leaving the recruitment process when it took too long to schedule an interview. Your scheduling speed isn’t just a metric for coordinators, it’s now a critical differentiator in winning top talent. But what can you do when waiting for free calendar slots is slowing you down? ## Interviewers aren’t being difficult, they're being productive Recruiters often get frustrated from calendar-blocking tactics by interviewers. Likewise, interviewers struggle with frequent interruptions from recruiters about availability, but finding adequate capacity for interviews boils down to establishing a trust system between both parties. Forcing a top-down process as an attempt to change interviewers’ behaviour only show promise in the short-term, further causing friction in the process and people involved. Recognize that interviewers have primary responsibilities to fill and build a process that respects their productivity while enabling hiring success. ## Recruiters aren’t the problem Even the best recruiters can’t fix poor calendar hygiene culture. Becoming calendar administrators is not what they signed up for. Every hour your recruiter spends navigating calendars is a missed opportunity to build relationships with hiring managers, or keep candidates engaged. In fact, [81% of candidates](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ee8a80c782fc) say they want more personal touch from recruiters, but where can they find the time if they're busy managing calendars? This misallocation of resource impacts your overall hiring experience. The solution isn’t asking recruiters to get better with calendar management — it’s building systems and processes that eliminate the need for manual coordination altogether. ## Your next steps to unlocking more availability - **Introduce availability status checkpoints to minimize adhoc check-ins:** Go beyond one-off availability discussions in kickoff meetings, establish a routine where interviewers proactively update their calendars/availability status every 48 hours. Highlight that doing this avoids them being ambushed with unexpected invites and constant recruiter interruptions. - **Identify next best alternatives early on:** Don’t wait for schedules to fall through to start scrambling for the next available person. Create interviewer pools that are 3 times your typical need ensuring you never lose momentum from a single conflict. - **Discover capacity gaps before they become critical:** Use historical data to identify bottlenecks early on. In practice, if each candidate goes through 3 interview stages, you need at least 3 interview slots per candidate. But you must account for buffers especially with panel interviews where you need 2 or more people to be free at the same time. Spending time to identify where you are likely to get stuck before a process begins can save you headaches and delays down the line. Learn how TA teams are [leveraging automation to identify availability bottlenecks](https://www.cronofy.com/webinars/how-to-reduce-interview-scheduling-delays-and-speed-up-hiring) in their interview process today. - **Optimize interviewer experience to get buy-in from busy interviewers:** You are likely to find more capacity with busy interviewers when they see their participation as strategic and beyond duty. Use tools like Cronofy’s [Interview Times](https://www.cronofy.com/webinars/how-to-reduce-interview-scheduling-delays-and-speed-up-hiring) to lock-in and maintain interview blocks that protect their productivity throughout hiring cycles, and where possible, use data to demonstrate why their participation is critical. Success in this year's hiring landscape will belong to companies that can eliminate scheduling bottlenecks and build scalable processes that work for recruiters, interviewers, and candidates. If you're ready for change, we've got the session for you. Want to learn best practice on managing interviewer availability from leading global teams? Watch the replay of this webinar. You'll get the latest on redefining interviewer availability management, allowing you to dramatically reduce time-to-hire without sacrificing hiring quality or burning out your team. [Watch this session](https://www.cronofy.com/webinars/how-to-reduce-interview-scheduling-delays-and-speed-up-hiring) --- # 5 Benefits of Coaching in the Workplace Coaching in the workplace is something that more and more companies are investing in. This may involve connecting employees to other colleagues within the company, or with external coaches or mentors who can help them develop their skills. Previously, coaching was only offered to executive-level employees. Now, businesses are increasingly investing in coaching for employees at every stage of their career. There are lots of benefits of coaching and mentorship for mentors and mentees, but what are the benefits to the company that they work for? How does it help them in the short and long-term? Coaching in the workplace is something that more and more companies are investing in. This may involve connecting employees to other colleagues within the company, or with external coaches or mentors who can help them develop their skills. Previously, coaching was only offered to executive-level employees. Now, businesses are increasingly investing in coaching for employees at every stage of their career. There are lots of benefits of coaching and mentorship for mentors and mentees, but what are the benefits to the company that they work for? How does it help them in the short and long-term? Coaching in the workplace is something that more and more companies are investing in. This may involve connecting employees to other colleagues within the company, or with external coaches or mentors who can help them develop their skills. Previously, coaching was only offered to executive-level employees. Now, businesses are increasingly investing in coaching for employees at every stage of their career. There are lots of [benefits of coaching and mentorship for mentors](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/benefits-of-mentorship-for-mentors/) and mentees, but what are the benefits to the company that they work for? How does it help them in the short and long-term? ## 1. Re-engaging employees In just the first 10 years after graduation, we'll [change jobs an average of four times](https://www.ft.com/content/0151d2fe-868a-11e7-8bb1-5ba57d47eff7). For many of us, these jobs will be completely different roles in different industries. Employees leave companies when they feel something is no longer the right fit for them, either because they don’t want to work in that industry anymore or they’re not happy in their role. Coaching helps employees to segue into working for a different part of the business. For example, a software tester becoming a software developer, or a marketing person moving into product. This means that companies retain their best employees and the soft skills that they possess. Companies also benefit from not having to onboard and train someone new in how their product or service works. It can take new employees up to eight months to reach full productivity. Moving an employee from one department to another means that businesses save on this training time. Innermobility gives employees a new perspective on the business and their role within it, which can be just what they need to become re-engaged. ## 2. Employees are more productive Disengaged employees often feel unsupported, under-appreciated, or otherwise not part of the team. They may also feel that the department that they work in doesn't fit their career goals anymore, which means they're less interested in what they work on and therefore less likely to give it their all. This leads to lower productivity levels and unhappy employees. Offering them a way to develop their skills in a way that benefits them both inside and outside of the business is one way that companies can show their employees that they appreciate them taking their time to work for them and not for a competitor. When companies invest in their employees’ wellbeing, the employees are proven to feel happier and more appreciated. This makes a huge difference to an employee's productivity levels in the short and long-term. ## 3. It improves employees’ soft skills Soft skills are an important part of any business. They also help employees to succeed in their career, both in the short and long term. Employees can learn soft skills organically, or they can consciously study them to improve faster. Sometimes an employee's knowledge of a particular soft skills can become outdated, such as with the latest presentation trends. Studying them is another way that they can brush up on their skills. Some soft skills coaching can help employees to improve: - Written communication - Verbal communication - Public speaking - Team work - Problem solving - Creativity Offering employees the chance to improve their soft skills benefits them and the business long-term. It plugs gaps in their knowledge and can completely change the way that they interact with those around them. Marketplaces such as [Gloat](https://www.gloat.com/) connect employees with people who have the soft skills that they want to learn. Sometimes these are in-house coaches, other times they’re external. Either way, the employee learns the skills they need to progress further in their career. ## 4. Recruitment costs go down It costs an average of [$4,000 to hire an employee](https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/faq-recruitment-budget-metrics). The more senior the employee, the higher this cost is. The more money businesses spend on hiring, the less they have to invest in other things. Coaching employees helps them to develop their skills, making them less likely to look externally for career development. When businesses invest more in this type of development, they can foster stronger relationships with their employees. This results in happier employees and higher retention rates. ## 5. It creates a more positive working environment Our working environment can make a huge difference to our productivity. More positive work environments lead to happier employees and greater productivity. This leads to more positive feedback both in-person and online, which boosts a company’s employer brand. The positive working environment that’s created through coaching and [mentorship facilities](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/mentorship-scheduling/) creates a reciprocal relationship with hiring and retention that is invaluable to companies. The stronger the employer brand, the faster it is to attract, hire, and retain talent. Employees, meanwhile, are happier in their roles, therefore they’re more likely to stay. ## Conclusion Training in the workplace isn’t just about health and safety presentations anymore. It’s about providing employees with tailored coaching and mentorship packages that can help them to progress in their careers, whether that’s for the company or for someone else later on. It isn’t just about building employees’ skills in their current role, either. Some employees may want to stay working for a company but change roles. Re-training employees through one-on-one coaching offers them a solution to this problem. It demonstrates to employees how appreciated they are, and how much the business wants to retain them. Want to find out more about the benefits of coaching? Check out our [Veterati case study](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/mentorship-scheduling-veterati/). --- # How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. Hint: automated scheduling might help you along. Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. Hint: automated scheduling might help you along. Ever feel like your recruitment process is stuck in a never-ending loop of emails and missed opportunities? You’re not alone. Many companies struggle with the inefficiencies of traditional interview scheduling, which can frustrate candidates and delay hiring decisions. But what if there was a way to streamline this process and enhance the candidate experience at the same time? By leveraging automating interview scheduling, companies can create a smoother, more agile hiring process that respects candidates’ time and improves overall operational efficiency. Here are the key ways automation in interview scheduling can transform your hiring process: ## **1. Enhancing Candidate Experience** Candidates today highly value the ability to schedule their own interviews, as it respects their time and minimizes friction. According to this year’s Candidate Expectations Report, [**over half of candidates**](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024)** prefer an automated system for scheduling interviews**, allowing them to select time slots that fit their availability. ### **Why is this important?** This autonomy is crucial for creating a positive initial impression and ensuring a smooth recruitment process – **[38%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ce11bd8a1a27)** of candidates feel well-managed hiring processes show companies care about staff, and a further** ****[33%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ce11bd8a1a27)**** **link this to good culture and ethos. On the other hand, a complex or lengthy scheduling process can deter even the most interested candidates. ### **Impact on Candidate Experience:** - **Positive First Impressions**: Automated scheduling respects candidates’ time, leading to a positive initial interaction with your company. - **Reduced Frustration**: Eliminates the back-and-forth of scheduling emails, reducing candidate frustration and dropout rates. ### **What you can do:** Implement an automated scheduling system that integrates with your ATS. Allow candidates to self-schedule interviews to enhance their experience and reduce the time you spend manually scheduling. ## **2. Reducing Time-to-Hire** Time-to-hire is a critical metric for TA teams, reflecting both operational efficiency and the ability to quickly secure top talent in a competitive market. Interview scheduling software automates the coordination of interviews, drastically reducing the back-and-forth communication required. By facilitating quicker scheduling, teams can move candidates faster through interview stages and make hiring decisions in an agile way, effectively reducing the overall time-to-hire. This acceleration is critical in a competitive market where top candidates are often off the market in a matter of weeks. ### **Impact on Time-to-Hire:** - **Faster Decision-Making**: Quicker scheduling leads to faster progression through the recruitment pipeline. - **Competitive Advantage**: Securing top talent before competitors can. ### **What you can do:** Use scheduling tools that sync with recruiters’ and interviewers’ calendars to find the earliest available slots and minimize delays. ## **3. Minimizing No-Show Rates** Automated scheduling systems can send reminders to both candidates and interviewers, significantly reducing the chances of no-shows. Alongside this, easy rescheduling options significantly reduce the likelihood of candidates missing their interviews. Interview scheduling software can send automated notifications to both candidates and interviewers as the interview date approaches, ensuring that everyone is reminded of the upcoming commitment. This feature decreases no-show rates and helps keep the recruitment process moving smoothly. ### **Impact on Recruitment Efficiency:** - **Lower No-Show Rates**: Consistent reminders ensure that candidates and interviewers remember their commitments. - **Time Savings**: Reduces the time wasted on rescheduling missed interviews. ### **What you can do:** Choose a scheduling tool that includes automated reminders and easy rescheduling options to maintain momentum in the hiring process. ## **4. Gathering Valuable Data Insights** Automated scheduling systems provide valuable data on candidate preferences, interview timings, interviewer availability, and no-show rates. Analyzing this data helps optimize recruitment strategies and understand scheduling throughout your organization. By leveraging these insights, TA teams can continually enhance their operations, making data-informed adjustments to meet their evolving needs. ### **Impact on Recruitment Strategy:** - **Identify Bottlenecks**: Data insights can highlight areas where the process slows down. - **Enhance Efficiency**: Use data to refine and improve scheduling practices continuously. ### **What you can do:** Review the data collected from your scheduling system regularly to identify trends and make informed adjustments to your recruitment process. KPIs such as time-to-schedule, time-to-hire, and time saved will help you measure whether your process is in line with your business goals ([**Discover more**](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/rethinking-recruitment-kpis-what-metrics-truly-matter)** **about how to find the right metrics for you). ## **5. Freeing up Time for Meaningful Human Interaction** Automation in recruitment is a powerful tool for enhancing efficiency, but it often raises concerns about maintaining personal connections. Many often think automation could lead to less human interaction. However, the essence of automation in recruitment is not to replace human roles but to augment them, freeing up recruiters to engage in more meaningful conversations and focus on candidates most likely to be a good fit. By leveraging automated scheduling tools, recruiters are relieved from the administrative burden of scheduling, allowing for deeper, impactful candidate interactions. This approach ensures that automation and human touch complement each other. This is particularly valuable in high-volume hiring scenarios where personal interaction in later stages becomes pivotal. Moreover, the right tool will be user-friendly for everyone on the team, including those who are not tech-savvy, ensuring seamless adoption and implementation. While automation improves efficiency, candidates still value human interaction. For [**81%**](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ee8a80c782fc) of candidates,** having a human touchpoint during the recruitment process is essential.** ### **Impact on Candidate Perception:** - **Personalized Experience**: Balancing automation with personal communication enhances candidate satisfaction. - **Improved Engagement**: Ensures candidates feel valued and engaged throughout the process. ### **What you can do:** Automate repetitive tasks but ensure there are opportunities for personal interactions. Use the time saved through automation to focus on meaningful candidate engagements. Look for tools with an interface that is easy to use for the entire team as well as candidates to maximize adoption rates across the board. ## **Top takeaways:** Implementing automated interview scheduling can revolutionize your recruitment process. By respecting candidates’ time, reducing no-show rates, and providing valuable data insights, automation enhances efficiency and candidate experience. However, balancing automation with personal interaction remains crucial to maintaining the human touch candidates want. You can learn more about what candidates want from hiring in 2024 in our [**Candidate Expectations report**](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024). Say goodbye to scheduling headaches and focus on improving your candidate experience. Explore Cronofy’s scheduling solutions and** **[**start improving your time-to-hire today**](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic)**.** ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience Recruitment What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. --- ### Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What Metrics Truly Matter Recruitment In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. But are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Talent Acquisition experts Stephanie Baysinger, Mary-Kay Baldino, and José Manuel Delgado Garcia share their thoughts. --- # How to improve your remote hiring process in 2024 How can remote-first or hybrid companies improve important key metrics like time-to-hire and candidate NPS score in 2024? We have some tips for you. The recruitment process is spiraling out, and it’s worse with virtual recruiting. Cronofy’s Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, shares his nuggets on how remote-first and hybrid companies can gain back control of their process. **Too long, too complicated, too disjointed.** That’s the general sentiment of candidates across the interweb on the current trend in recruitment. What’s worse is that candidates hold remote-first or hybrid companies to a much higher expectation in the recruitment process, *“all my interviews will be virtual so I expect this to be faster.”* On the other end of the recruitment process is a swamped recruiter dealing with an overwhelming number of candidates applying per role given the scarcity of remote roles versus candidates seeking remote opportunities. Top that with no face-to-face interaction and it’s an unmitigated disaster. But, if you scour the internet for any information about remote roles or virtual hiring, it's mostly advice tailored to job candidates and not so much anything out there that helps recruiters and hiring managers improve the candidate experience whilst making sure only the best candidates fill these roles. We are fixing that. Cronofy operates as a remote-first company and, in its 9 years of existence, has steadily grown to serve over 180,000 companies and processed over 1 billion events. Behind these achievements are people who make it their life's work, and beneath the people layer lies a wealth of knowledge in building and optimizing an efficient recruitment process to attract and hire the right people. So what can remote-first companies, or companies that are adopting a virtual recruitment process, do to improve their candidate experience? [Mark Harbottle](https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mark-harbottle), shares some thoughts. ### Reframe your perspective on virtual recruitment. Surprise surprise, regardless of role or seniority, you can move candidates through a virtual recruitment process via Zoom and email without compromising the candidate experience or the quality of candidates. It’s important to start here because, post-pandemic, and despite an increased openness to hybrid work, a virtual recruitment process is still largely considered a bug and not a feature. That said, we'd be remiss to not acknowledge that it's often easier to build a relationship in person. Visiting an office, seeing the work environment, and meeting potential colleagues can be valuable. However, this process can be slower due to scheduling and commuting times. Remote interviews on the other hand can be more convenient fitting into a lunch break or a short meeting slot. > **The main difference between remote and onsite recruitment is the speed at which relationships are built.** Embracing this challenge encourages finding creative ways to build rapport with candidates in a remote setting. Cronofy’s approach? Transparency. Candidates have the opportunity to talk to anyone on the team, from finance and marketing to HR and even our newest team member. This shows candidates that we welcome them to learn about Cronofy, and by the time a candidate receives a job offer from Cronofy, the relationship between both parties is likely already at its highest point. This also increases the likelihood of qualified candidates accepting our offers. ### **Move fast, break red tape.** *“We need to involve 4 people from Marketing and Sales on the panel, at least two VPs for the culture interviews, and the CEO for the final stage.”* If that sounds like what happens at your company, then you are familiar with problems like clashing schedules, calendar (un)availability, last-minute cancellations, etc. All of which lead to delays throughout the process. And if you are wondering how this impacts your candidate experience, I have some stats for you. [Our findings](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2023) from surveying 6500 candidates in 2023 show that: 1. 40% would expect it to take no longer than 6 days after applying for a job to arrange an interview. 1. 49% left the recruitment process when it took too long to schedule an interview. > **Think of it as a stack of cards: your time-to-schedule affects your time-to-hire, which in turn affects your candidate experience.** Needless to say, speed is your friend. Good candidates are in high demand, you lose them when you waste time. You also miss important KPIs like the cNPS score, when you move slowly. Here are some tips to help: - Streamline your recruitment process and optimize for speed. - Where multiple stakeholders are involved, use SLAs to keep teams accountable. - Have backups, and backups of backups for interviewers. - See the next point below. ### **Eliminate ambiguity.** *“How long will it take to hear back?”* and a plethora of questions candidates have to ask but don’t get answers to. According to our [2023 Candidates’ Expectations report](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2023), 41% of candidates say lack of communication is the most frustrating part of the recruitment process. We get it, there’s so much to do and many candidates to attend to. But it’s not okay to keep candidates in the dark. To you, not communicating with every candidate is a trivial problem but to each candidate; they have to upload a resume, manually enter their CV onto your website, take time off work to attend interviews, and maybe fill out a paper application during the interview process. No one wants to put in all that effort and wonder what the next steps are or if to expect feedback from you. > **Candidates keep scores too.** Every interaction, every additional touchpoint, or the lack thereof shapes the candidate’s view about the company and their decision for or against working with your company. Mark says at Cronofy it goes back to being transparent. - We share this [page](https://docs.cronofy.com/interviewing-with-us/) with candidates right after they apply. We detail the process, assessment criteria, dress code, etc. We also cover accessibility and cater to specific needs for interviews. - We let candidates know when we'll get back to them. - We list salaries, knowing more suitable candidates will apply if they know the salary upfront. - In our job ads, we provide information about the role's location, benefits, and why we're hiring. - We never change our minds about a job during the hiring process. - We send rejection emails. A generic rejection is better than none at all. In summary, we prioritize clear communication and positive experiences for all job applicants at Cronofy. It takes effort and dedication, but it's worth it to maintain our reputation and help people grow in their careers. > **We want anyone to feel like they could work at Cronofy, but only a select few actually can.** ### **Automate.** It’s 2024. You can free up your time to do more productive work as a recruiter if you automate some tasks. Tasks you can automate: - Sending emails acknowledging candidate applications. - Sending rejection emails. - [Scheduling any type of interview.](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/use-cases/interview-scheduling) There are many more but doing these 3 things speeds up your process, allowing you to focus on quality engagements with candidates, which improves their experience. Cronofy’s approach includes personal touches, constant updates and communication, and [efficient scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams). > **We can only build rapport with the right candidates when we are not spending time emailing back and forth to schedule interviews.** ### **Don’t over-automate.** One of the biggest challenges recruiters face today is an overwhelming number of tools they have to learn how to use. Where’s the time for that? Here are some signs you are over-automating: - When it completely strips off human interaction e.g. over-reliance on keyword-based automated CV screening. - When it slows down, rather than speeds up, the process. - When you depend on, rather than collaborate with, technology to get things done. A good example is AI assessments void of human context for certain skills, leaving room for inherent biases in AI functions. > **The happy medium is automation with some control.** Now to the elephant in the room. ### How do you ensure you still get quality candidates without compromising for lack of in-person interactions? Cronofy focuses on what candidates can bring to the table rather than what they lack. By having more people meet the candidates virtually and focusing on their potential contributions, the Cronofy team maintains high-quality hires while streamlining the process. To reduce any potential bias, interviewers are required to fill out an evaluation form with six questions and rate their answers on a scale of one to five. If there ever was a situation where five excellent candidates were interviewed and they couldn't decide between them, the evaluation forms help us make a fair decision. The evaluation form is also introduced later in the process so more people are likely to reach the final stage. The key is having diverse decision-makers and clear, equal processes at the end. > **It's important to get more people into the hiring funnel in the first place.** **Mark’s final thoughts** Recruitment is hard for some teams because; - They're too busy or not automating the right things. - They are using the wrong tools. - They're not transparent enough. Face-to-face meetings are still important but a virtual recruitment process has its benefits like faster hiring times, but with remote recruiting, you need to rely on technology and clear communication to make it work effectively. Broadly speaking, remote work requires more trust with candidates and we need to find ways to build that trust, starting with the recruitment process. Having the right tools in place is important for creating a positive experience and building trust early on. Finally, hiring managers and stakeholders should trust that recruiters are making good assessments. ### **TL:DR** Here’s how to make your virtual recruitment process more efficient. 1. Find creative ways to shorten the process without compromising on quality. It’s a bad look on the recruiters first when the process is too long. 1. The recruitment process should not take more than 2 months per candidate, 3 if you stretch it. 1. Automate, but keep human interaction. 1. Define a role properly before advertising it. 1. Don’t change the job requirements mid-process. 1. Manage expectations - internally and externally. 1. You lose good candidates when you intentionally design your process to be clunky. 1. Optimize for attraction versus elimination. A deliberate attempt to discourage bad candidates also discourages the best-qualified ones. 1. Your recruitment process must align with your values. 1. Eliminate ambiguity. Candidates should have questions, but not about the process. **Want to automate your interview scheduling?** [Learn more](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) about how Cronofy works or see how you can use Cronofy within [BambooHR](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/bamboohr/), [Greenhouse](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/greenhouse/), or [Lever](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/lever/). ### See how Cronofy helps recruitment teams automate interview scheduling --- ### Compare Cronofy and Goodtime --- ### See how Cronofy protects your data --- # Product Q&A: Build vs Buy Lessons for Talent Acquisition with Jobylon’s CPO Every platform team faces the same questions eventually: build a key roadmap feature yourself, or bring in a vendor to do it? It's one of the most consequential decisions a product leader makes, and most frameworks for thinking about it ignore the messy reality of what happens after you make your choice. Cronofy’s CEO and co-founder Adam Bird sat down with Alex Tidgård, CPO at Jobylon, to talk through how he approaches build vs buy, what he learned the hard way, and why scheduling was a clear case for buying. Every team faces the same question eventually: build a key roadmap feature yourself, or bring in a vendor to do it? Most frameworks for thinking through this consequential decision ignore the messy reality of what happens after product leaders make their choice. Cronofy’s CEO and co-founder Adam Bird sat down with Alex Tidgård, CPO at Jobylon, to talk through how he approaches build vs buy, what he learned the hard way, and why scheduling was a clear case for buying. ## Why buying doesn’t need to mean compromising on native experience [Jobylon’s](https://www.jobylon.com/) product team has built a talent acquisition suite used by HR teams in over 80 countries to attract, manage, and hire candidates. Scheduling is central to what they do, which makes it an obvious candidate for building the functionality in-house. Alex sees it differently. “Scheduling as a thing is very complicated. If you talk to a hundred different customers, they're gonna have very different views on what scheduling should be.” He describes the edge cases that multiply fast: group interviews, optional attendees, capacity rules. ### Why did Jobylon choose to white-label Cronofy for candidate scheduling over building in-house? Duration: 01:06 The point is not that scheduling is impossible to build. It's that building it well requires constant, focused attention. "Cronofy has built a company focusing on that specific problem. This is what you're doing all the time - fixing a very real and difficult problem for users. For us to even attempt that I think is silly, to be honest. Then we would spend all our time on becoming Cronofy 2.0.” For Jobylon, the decision was to white-label rather than build in-house, so that the scheduling function has a native look and feel within their platform. "It’s our self-scheduling function. It's based on Cronofy, but we don't really expose it. And it works really, really well. It really elevates what we can bring to our customers.” But Alex is clear that white-labeling is a solid option with consequences, not a shortcut. For scheduling, white-labeling made sense because there's too much UI involved for a simple button integration to work. For partners like assessment providers, it's enough to surface the right data on both sides of the integration. The choice between the two models is worth thinking through before you commit. ## Buying regrets: API deprecation and roadmap dependency Whilst not building every feature in-house frees teams up to move faster, buying comes with consequences Alex has experienced firsthand. ### What do you do when you’re forced to migrate your API by a vendor? Duration: 01:21 When Adam raises the topic about situations where other vendors have deprecated APIs, Alex is candid. "We have that situation now going on, where by a certain date, this will not work anymore. So you have until this day to fix it. " A hard deadline at least makes prioritisation easy, but it creates pressure across a team already managing integrations with multiple systems. “It’s a constant worry and struggle.” Wanting to provide backward compatibility to their customers is also the reason why Cronofy’s API is still on V1 a decade on. It's a problem that extends beyond any single integration. When vendors change their APIs without warning, every connected system becomes a liability. “When they tell us they changed their API, I’m like, oh no!” Alex reaches for a metaphor that sticks: "It's like the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you've painted it, you need to repaint it. Terrible situation to be in." ### How does Jobylon approach build vs buy decisions commercially? Duration: 01:56 ## The challenges of integrating with a native look and feel Vetting whether a solution will feel native to your platform is where most teams underinvest. "One thing we've learned the hard way is that you really need to test out the system you want to buy. There are two very different things about seeing it work within their constraints, and seeing it work within your system, for your users." A good demo is not a proof of fit. ### What are the biggest risks when making build vs buy decisions? Duration: 01:56 Then there's roadmap dependency. “You can become slaves to their roadmap,” explains Alex. “If we need a specific feature and they tell us they can only do that in four to six months, that can be an issue.” Jobylon's customers are opinionated and vocal. When a feature they need sits months out on a vendor's timeline, there is no shortcut. "You don't always have the same amount of control, which can be difficult." ## Why customer-vendor relationships should feel like partnerships Alex is direct about how Jobylon approaches vendor relationships: every buy decision should feel like a partnership, not a transaction. When forced to migrate APIs, or if a customer escalates a feature request, the quality of the relationship with a vendor determines how well a product team can navigate it. "You're making a very radical decision,” he explains. “You're simply taking something and putting it in your product. It should be someone that you trust, that you want to see going forward.” ### Why is a partnership with your software vendor important? Duration: 00:41 "Every time we integrate, we want to go into it with a partnership situation. Same with Cronofy. We feel really close with you. We feel like we can go into customer meetings with you to help people adopt the product. Some people might say it’s a transactional thing, but I don’t think so. A partnership is so much more valuable.” Alex's conclusion is that when buying, teams need to go in knowing what they're committing to long-term, not just what they're getting today. ## Carving out roadmap time for developing differentiating features Choosing a partner to handle their scheduling on an infrastructure level means Jobylon's product team can focus on what actually differentiates their platform: the hiring experience itself. For Alex, that means being deliberate about where AI fits into their roadmap in 2026. Recruitment is classed as a high-risk territory under the EU AI act, so any partner using LLMs for scoring or decision-making needs to provide systems to describe why certain scores were given to certain candidates. Jobylon’s core customers are enterprise companies who have strict compliance requirements, so it’s vital that the product adheres to these needs. "I think people sprinkle AI on top of a human built process a lot of times and then expect crazy outcomes. What we've been trying to do is actually really think about it as a tool, and see where it fits into our process, and how we can use it differently to build a system that really utilises AI instead of building on top of it." ### How is Jobylon building valuable Talent Acquisition experiences with AI? Duration: 00:41 That kind of space to build intelligent new features only opens up when your team isn't tied up maintaining scheduling logic across hundreds of edge cases and absorbing API changes from calendar providers. ## Watch the full conversation with Alex and Adam here: ### Talent Acquisition Build vs Buy Lessons with Jobylon’s CPO Duration: 35:52 Want to see how Cronofy’s temporal infrastructure could power scheduling and meeting features inside a talent acquisition platform? [Learn more](/home) ### 5 ways SaaS platforms can use meeting data to power AI features Meeting data rarely flows into SaaS platforms - users rely on standalone notetakers, and the insights end up elsewhere. When transcripts, recordings, and summaries flow directly into your product, they let you build AI features that weren't possible before. Here are five ways to put that data to work. Blog Post 2026-02-11T13:43:31.851Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # Accessible healthcare scheduling systems with Cronofy Access to healthcare for patients that have mobility issues, cognitive issues, or that aren’t available during traditional working hours can be tough. This means patients often miss out on vital care. But they shouldn’t have to. Ensuring calendars are synchronised allows for better access to healthcare for patients with mobility issues, cognitive issues, or that aren’t available during traditional working hours. Access to healthcare for patients that have mobility issues, cognitive issues, or that aren’t available during traditional working hours can be tough. This means patients often miss out on vital care. But they shouldn’t have to. Healthcare scheduling systems make it a faster, easier process for patients to book and cancel appointments. When scheduling systems work like online marketplaces, customers can book appointments with someone who has the skillset they need at their own convenience. Healthcare professionals, meanwhile, can benefit from more flexible working hours and more control over the money that they earn. They can sign up, fill in their profile, indicate their skills, where they can visit, and when. Patients can then book appointments with nurses, carers, physiotherapists, and other healthcare practitioners based on their availability and location. It’s a simple, fast, and versatile process. It can take up to 18 weeks to [get an appointment on the NHS](https://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/appointment-booking/Pages/nhs-waiting-times.aspx) for non-urgent treatment. Allowing patients the ability to choose their healthcare provider and give them the option to book their own appointment means they can get their health issues dealt with faster. This is particularly useful for patients who may need last-minute and/or out-of-hours care. When two-way calendar sync is added to these marketplaces, nurses, carers, physiotherapists, and other healthcare practitioners can organize their time in a more efficient way. Let’s take a deeper look. ## Benefits for patients Not every patient is able to make it to the hospital or a doctor’s office for treatment. That means long waits until someone is available to come to them. But even if their need for care isn’t urgent, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to get their health problems fixed ASAP. Online healthcare marketplaces mean that patients can be seen faster. The location of treatment is more flexible, as are the times when treatment can be provided. Patients can be treated at home, or visit a private healthcare facility. Should they need out-of-hours treatment, this can be arranged more easily too. Using this model, patients aren’t tied to a specific healthcare company or professional – they have the flexibility to choose someone that fits their needs. This means that even if the person they usually see is unavailable, they don’t have to miss out on their treatment. Those who need regular care can have recurring appointments set up so that a healthcare professional always sees them on a set day/time. Additional services can then be added in around this to suit their needs. Because carers, nurses, etc can visit their homes, patients also save money. They don’t need to worry about costly public – or private – transport options, or the difficulties that can come from travelling when ill. This puts patients more at ease and can help with their recovery. At-home carers who may need help to look after their loved one can also book extra support this way, even at the last minute. This allows them to have some recovery time for themselves, safe in the knowledge that their loved one is still receiving the best care possible. Booking appointments is also faster. Patients don’t need to pace around while they’re on hold, or email and anxiously wait for a reply. All they need to do is connect to the website, pick their time slot, and they’re done. Appointments can then be pushed to patients’ calendars right away. Should anything change – such as a nurse or carer becoming unavailable – this can be updated in their calendar, too. Appointment reminders – or notifications of any changes – can also be sent via their calendar, which is a cheaper alternative to text message reminders. This ensures patients don’t double-book themselves or forget to cancel their appointment if they don’t need it any more. ## Benefits for healthcare practitioners Unlike with traditional healthcare models, online marketplaces mean that professionals have more control over their schedules. If they can’t work from 3-4pm because they’re picking the kids up from school, they can block that time off as unavailable. They’ll then never appear as available to potential patients at that time. When the marketplace syncs with their calendar, patients won’t be offered appointments when the professional’s schedule is full. That means there’s no risk of them being double-booked, whether that’s with two patients or a family commitment and a work commitment. Buffer periods can also be added in to ensure that healthcare practitioners have plenty of time to travel between patients. This prevents two appointments at opposite ends of a city from being too close together and making the practitioner behind for the rest of the day. [Geolocation](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/) data can even be added to calendar events, informing them of how much time it will take to get to their next patient based on real-time traffic and travel data. Online marketplaces are also a way for healthcare professionals to grow their client list. Without needing to invest in any marketing, they have a list of hundreds of potential new customers as soon as their account is created. For any professionals looking to earn some extra money, allowing them to work flexibly during evenings and weekends gives them the chance to do so while tapping into skills that they already have. ## Benefits for healthcare marketplaces Cancellations don’t have to results in missed appointments or visits when healthcare scheduling systems use real-time calendar sync. Instead, the newly opened time slot can immediately appear as available to patients looking for a healthcare professional. This increases the chances of someone else booking that slot, even if the cancellation is made at the last minute. Businesses and healthcare practitioners then don’t miss out on revenue because of last-minute cancellations. Schedules are less likely to have vacant bookings, meaning that healthcare marketplaces can benefit from more commission. Value-adding features such as real-time updates create a more positive experience for users. They’re happier with the service that they receive, making them more likely to share it with their network. This helps the business to grow faster – after all, there’s no more powerful endorsement than word-of-mouth. When calendar sync is added using a [unified calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/), it involves minimal maintenance and set up. Once the integration is built, that’s it. There’s no ongoing maintenance to worry about. ## Conclusion Calendar sync is used in many ways by the healthcare industry to provide a better quality of patient care. Marketplaces are just one example of how they can do this. It’s a faster, more cost-effective way of booking appointments. Regardless of a patient’s needs, they can find someone to fit their situation in just a few clicks. Healthcare practitioners can benefit from more flexible working hours. It can work in tandem with a traditional healthcare role to boost their income, or they can offer their services privately. They’re in full control of how and when they help patients. Marketplaces, meanwhile, get a percentage of each transaction that’s made. Should they use a unified calendar API to implement their calendar sync, they don’t have to worry about ongoing maintenance, either. They can then use this time saved to add more features to the software. They’ll then attract more customers and create a higher level of customer satisfaction. To find out more about how calendar sync can help with online healthcare appointment bookings, check out our [Zesty case study](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/healthcare-scheduling-zesty/). --- # Schedule meetings instantly wherever you work Stop switching between calendars or chasing availability. The Cronofy Scheduling Agent handles coordination across attendees and timezones, booking meetings automatically in Slack, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office. ## Schedule meetings instantly, from wherever you work Stop switching between calendars or chasing availability. The Cronofy Scheduling Agent handles coordination across attendees and timezones, booking meetings automatically. [Get a demo](#form-829ed116-324e-48cd-9731-a588ba8553c8) ## Unlock tangible AI productivity gains Scheduling time gets messy quickly, with teams coordinating across email, chat, and calendars to find a time that works across multiple attendees and timezones. The Cronofy Scheduling Agent combines real-time availability with AI to understand your scheduling requests and propose meeting times that work, right in the place you’re already working in: Teams, Outlook and Slack. ### In Teams --- ### In Office --- ### In Slack ### Cronofy Scheduling Agent in Microsoft Teams Duration: 01:40 ## Schedule where you already work Schedule meetings without ever leaving Slack or Teams. @mention colleagues directly, choose from suggested times, and confirm in one reply. ## Automate even complex or urgent meetings Schedule single, multi-person, or panel events across timezones even if it needs to happen soon. Send invitees personalized links and let them book time into your calendar based on real-time availability. ## Enable self-serve scheduling for all invitees Let invitees self-schedule, inside and outside of Teams, Outlook and Slack. Cut unnecessary waiting times over availability and back-and-forth emails. ## One View Across Your Organization Let your organization find availability and schedule instantly in Slack, Office or Teams. Transform productivity for your Talent team by automating interview scheduling from their Applicant Tracking System. Allow your AI agents to coordinate the right workflow without struggling with time. All unified by the Cronofy temporal grid that keeps your agents, systems and teams on the same tempo. > We're able to move candidates through hiring much quicker – we've shaved a week off the processes we were previously running. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ## Transform your organization --- # Top workplace automation trends for 2022 So what are the top workplace automation trends to look out for in 2022? We asked the experts to share their thoughts with us. So what are the top workplace automation trends to look out for in 2022? We asked the experts to share their thoughts with us. Automation has been top of the business agenda this year, and that looks set to continue in 2022. In response to the pandemic and subsequent shift to remote or hybrid working, organizations ramped up their efforts to adopt more automation as they realized it was critical to address these new challenges. This shift has changed the post-COVID hiring landscape; the World Economic Forum predicts that AI and [automation will create 97 million new jobs by 2025](https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020/digest). However, there will also be a change to people's existing roles, with automation increasingly being used to speed up repetitive time-consuming tasks. ‍ Whether you're looking to save time, increase productivity and operational efficiency, or create a slicker experience for your prospects, customers and team, automation holds the key. ‍ ## Self-service automation Our Scheduler allows our customers to create their own [self-serve scheduling links](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler), so we know the value of having the power to make things happen yourself. Our technology is designed to get rid of the infuriating back-and-forth that is all too common, be it emails or phone calls. Self-service automation looks set to grow within industries across the board in 2022. ‍ “Customers will expect a more seamless experience at scale in 2022,” says David Bitton, Co-Founder and CMO of [DoorLoop](https://www.doorloop.com/). “AI-powered self-service solutions will be at the forefront, allowing customers to get what they want while improving operational efficiency. Look for advancements in self-service kiosks, scheduling, and self-check-ins and check-outs. “Employee self-service entails resolving challenges encountered by both HR and the employees they assist. Employees may send, review, and open requests for leaves or time off more efficiently with self-service automation. In 2022, advancements in self-service payroll integrations will provide numerous benefits to enterprises. Employees can use it to enter vital information such as working hours, withholding information, and personal details, reducing the burden on HR and the chance of errors. Employees can also access vital documents and their payroll history, which helps speed up the process anytime such information is required.” ‍ ## Space Usage Automation Although there’s been a widespread shift to remote working, many prefer to work on a hybrid basis. It’s important to organize the correct setup for those employees, which can be a logistical nightmare. Automation can support these efforts to create a safer workspace. “Many employers have shifted to hybrid and remote-first work models, and this change in how we think about the physical workplace creates a host of new challenges and opportunities,” says Sarah Schultz, Strategy & Communications Lead at [OfficeTogether](http://www.officetogether.com/). “Whether it's scheduling in-person meetings, tracking health checks and vaccine statuses, keeping tabs on colleagues' time zones or collaboration days, or reserving a desk or room for your office visit, in 2022, employers will turn to space usage automation tools to better power their hybrid offices. “Rather than burden the office manager or people team with additional Google Forms or Excel tracking, companies will be eager to turn to SaaS solutions that ease their return to the office task list and minimize the number of hiccups that might occur as folks get back to working in-person.” ‍ ‍ ## Chatbots continue to grow in popularity Consumers and clients now more than ever want answers quickly – any way to speed up your processes will improve your customer experience. We’ve already seen the power Chatbots have to help your website users find the quickest solution, and they will continue to be adopted by more companies, becoming commonplace. “The automation feature I’m seeing implemented on most websites is the chatbot,” says Sam Spratt, CEO at [BlueChip Financial.](https://www.spotloan.com/) “It doesn’t replace customer service representatives, but it cuts down on their work significantly. Setting up a chatbot is a win-win: customers no longer have to be put on hold on the phone for hours to find out basic information, and your customer service reps can manage their workload more efficiently, dedicating their time to customers with queries that need to be answered by a human. This saves time and money, and it’s been extremely successful so far, so I expect to see it more and more for all sorts of companies. Virtually any sort of website can have a chatbot at a customers’ disposal to answer their questions.” ‍ ## Applicant Tracking Systems We've been pioneers of hiring automation for many years at Cronofy, having worked with [HR software and recruiters](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases-industries/recruitment) to help them automate low-value tasks like scheduling and save time. The experts agree that automation in this area will only continue to rise as the pressure on the job market increases. "My number one prediction for workplace automation in 2022 is that automation for the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding process will take off," says Kyle MacDonald, Director of Operations at [Force by Mojio](https://forcebymojio.com/). "The high turnover across industries (dubbed the "Great Resignation") has created a need for HR departments and hiring managers to be more efficient in their hiring processes. "I expect to see more ATS software employed to narrow down candidates from the initial batch of applicants, automated scheduling and email alerts for planning interviews, and automated tech skills testing. This has the additional benefit of reducing burnout within HR departments that are already navigating many challenges in the world after COVID." [DOWNLOAD THE REPORT](https://info.cronofy.com/hubfs/Candidate_Expectations_Report_2021.pdf) ## Workforce management automation The pandemic has brought considerable logistical obstacles to many businesses' doorsteps. Those who are able have turned to remote and hybrid working models, and it looks like the change to the working landscape is permanent. This shift is forcing business leaders to change their approach in the way they manage their team and their productivity; automation can be beneficial to making this transition as easy as possible. “As remote and hybrid work setups are here to stay, there will be growth in the usage of workforce management apps,” says Sam Dobel, Co-Founder and CEO of [SINC Workforce](https://sinc.business/). “These automation tools will help boost business operational efficiency. It will be easier for leaders to do time-tracking and payroll, and it will be easier for employees to reach out to their supervisors and collaborate with their colleagues.” Dobel also mentions the ongoing issue of contact-tracing when checking in to a workplace. “AI, such as facial recognition, and other interactive experiences, will continue to shape the future of the workplace as they can aid in automating contact-tracing and foster a touch-free workplace or contactless transactions.” ‍ ## Semantic Automation Even the Developers who are creating these new automated products will be able to save time in their days with Semantic Automation. “Up until now, we’ve seen automation developers tell robots what to do step-by-step,” says Perry Zheng, CEO and Founder of [Cash Flow Portal.](https://www.cashflowportal.com/features/lp/real-estate-investor-portal) “This is where semantic automation steps in; it lets developers move away from a rule-based approach. “Semantic software robots will be able to observe activities and begin emulating them without being provided step-by-step instructions. They’ll recognize the process, understand what data is required, and know where and how to get it. This means that business users can initiate automation development by simply asking robots to perform a task. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to claim that semantic automation has the potential to revolutionize the business industry by freeing up developers’ and business owners’ time considerably.” ## Process intelligence With the rise in automated products within the workplace comes the need to monitor their effectiveness. “A process intelligence system would closely monitor these automated processes,” says Elisa Bender, co-Founder of [Revenue Geeks](https://revenuegeeks.com/). “Process intelligence allows you to add layers of data and intelligence to view the ongoing health of various processes. As remote and hybrid working models dominate the workplace, monitoring the staff and their productivity levels across the board is crucial. “This automation would remove ambiguity regarding staffing needs, budgeting, and monitoring how successful your strategy has been in the long run.” ‍ ## Create-your-own automation The scale and variety of new automation that could be implemented across a business has the potential to put a strain on your technical team. This is why some forms of automation are being made on low-code or no-code platforms, making them simpler to use and replicate by non-technical members of the team “The real trend for 2022 is in employee development. This means giving non-technical staff the tools they need to create their own automations,” says Nate Tsang, Founder and CEO of [WallStreet Zen](https://www.wallstreetzen.com/). “Historically companies have needed skilled automation experts to implement workflows into their business. While that's still true, the real work is in setting up automation technology, then letting staff build the actual workflows themselves. Low-code and no-code tools have reached such a state that they're usable by non-technical staff with training and oversight from an expert. “This has several advantages. For one, you need less involvement from IT once staff are trained, allowing them to focus on their technical backlog instead. But the biggest advantage is in productivity. Having staff actually building new automations is simply more effective. They know where the slack is, they know what the routine tasks are, and they're actually seeing the benefits of implementing automation. As low-code and no-code platforms continue to improve, we'll see more of this kind of development expand to more areas of any business.” ‍ ‍ ## Shift from CRM to CDP and RPA At Cronofy, we’ve noticed that more SMEs are realizing the value of automated scheduling and how it can contribute to their business growth. “More small and medium businesses that were resistant to try out automation will slowly start investing and embracing key automation software to simplify their back-end processes, improve the productivity of their workforce, increase efficiency, and to get to market faster,” says Gigi J.K., CEO of [Virtina.](https://virtina.com/) “Manual tasks like inputting, sorting, and cleaning data will be left to software with built-in AI, such as a customer data platform that can analyze different aspects of the buyers and create a 360 degree unified profile with minimal human intervention. “Instead of using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, more businesses will shift to the new-age practice of utilizing CDP for analytics and customer insights. Robotic Processing Automation (RPA) will take over; recruitment and customer support will see a proliferation of workflows that operate independently of any manual entry. Large Enterprises in various industry verticals have already shunned over-reliance on manual operations that were prone to errors and redundancy.” It’s clear that automation is at the center of improvement plans for the workplace in 2022, across all industries and departments. Would you like to suggest any workplace automation trends for 2022 to add to our list? Get in touch at [marketing@cronofy.com](#) and let us know! --- # How to Solve the Exchange Calendar Integration Issue Integrating applications with Google Calendar is important, but that doesn’t cater to everyone. Many businesses still use Microsoft products, but they’re often unsure as to whether they use Office 365, Outlook, or Exchange. Most people say they get their emails from Outlook, but this can mean several things: they use Outlook.com, they use Exchange with Outlook as their email client, or they use Exchange on Office 365 with Outlook as their email client. Integrating applications with Google Calendar is important, but that doesn’t cater to everyone. Many businesses still use Microsoft products, but they’re often unsure as to whether they use Office 365, Outlook, or Exchange. Most people say they get their emails from Outlook, but this can mean several things: they use Outlook.com, they use Exchange with Outlook as their email client, or they use Exchange on Office 365 with Outlook as their email client. Integrating applications with Google Calendar is important, but that doesn’t cater to everyone. Many businesses still use Microsoft products, but they’re often unsure as to whether they use Office 365, Outlook, or Exchange. Most people say they get their emails from Outlook, but this can mean several things: they use Outlook.com, they use Exchange with Outlook as their email client, or they use Exchange on Office 365 with Outlook as their email client. In the last decade alone, Microsoft released over 127 versions of Exchange. That’s 127 versions of hosted and on-premises versions of Exchange that developers must spend time connecting to, instead of working on building new features and adding extra value to your customers. In many cases, users don’t know who hosts their Exchange server, which can create further problems for developers. When applications only connect to the latest or most recent versions of Exchange, clients using older versions won’t be able to benefit from the same features. This leads to communication breakdowns and a loss in productivity because employees can’t do their tasks as quickly as they could with better integration. There’s the option of ICS feeds, but these can take up to 24 hours to update. This means that if an employee can’t make a meeting because they’re ill, attendees may not find out until after the meeting is over. ## The solution Cronofy can solve all of these issues. It integrates with all versions of all calendar services. We have numerous ways to find out where the Exchange server is hosted, including Microsoft-recommended ways and investigating last-known servers. Our Calendar API means that developers no longer need to allocate valuable time to integrating with each version of Exchange – once Cronofy is integrated into your solution, we handle all the connections and maintenance. This means that developers don’t need to spend time maintaining the connections to Microsoft’s Calendar API and can focus on building smart scheduling features into your software instead. Integrating Cronofy into your application also means that there’s no delay between a user updating a calendar event and it updating in your application. Everything updates in real-time, meaning that if a staff member isn’t well, they can update the HR system and their line manager will be automatically notified. ## How to protect users’ privacy Building calendar sync that works for everyone no matter what calendar service they use opens up many possibilities. However, calendars also host sensitive, sometimes personal, information, and it’s an organization’s responsibility to ensure that the privacy of their employees is respected. Enterprise Connect not only allows for every employee within an organization to be Calendar Connected in one go, but also makes this problem easier to control. Every user’s information is stored securely on our servers, using OAuth to ensure information is accessible while still protected. Securing and monitoring information is far easier when there’s only one gateway to monitor and not several thousand. Using Cronofy, developers can feel confident they’re building secure, easy-to-maintain integrations that work for everyone. ## Try it for yourself Discover how easy it is to get started with the Cronofy Calendar API. [Create your free account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) today. ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # Introducing Flexible Scheduling Templates for Any Hiring Workflow Discover Cronofy's latest scheduling templates that let recruiters assign interviewers and enhancements that enable easier interviewer replacement. From flexible template options that let recruiters assign interviewers later, to labeled interviewer pools for confident replacement, and faster candidate data entry for teams working outside an ATS, we've made it even easier for recruiting teams to scale structured interviews and streamline everyday scheduling. Cronofy templates are a powerful way for recruiting leaders to enable fast, consistent scheduling across their organization. Now, we are making templates even more adaptable to interviewer selection needs across hiring stages. Recruiting admins can now build templates that pre-assign specific individuals, enable selection from an interviewer pool, or leave host options open for manual entry by the recruiter, all while keeping the interview setup standardized and consistent. Alongside this major upgrade, we’ve also made enhancements that enable recruiters to: - Identify which pool interviewers originate from for easy replacement - Add candidates to scheduling requests by simply pasting their details in any text format Let’s explore these updates! ## Give Recruiters Control Over Interviewers They Schedule With Flexible Templates Templates have now been upgraded to naturally adapt to a wider range of interview use cases, allowing individual, pool, or manual host assignment without sacrificing consistency in interview setups. As a recruiting leader, you want interviews to follow a consistent structure without locking your team into rigid choices that lead to workarounds, delays, or errors. Until now, templates required selecting an interviewer pool at creation, limiting how flexibly they could be reused across roles, teams, or hiring stages. Now, with more flexible templates, you can keep the essentials such as titles, descriptions, and candidate-facing instructions consistent, while leaving the interviewer field open. Your team stays aligned on what the interview entails, even if the person conducting it changes. Take hiring manager interviews, for example. If they typically happen in person, you can build a template that pre-fills the title, invite message, and location, and let recruiters assign the hiring manager when it’s time to schedule. The same applies to virtual interviews, screening calls, or any other type of interview with standard information. By creating specific templates for each scenario, your team can deliver a consistent candidate experience while staying agile behind the scenes. [See how to create templates](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/templates) ## See Which Pool an Interviewer Belongs to and Swap Them Confidently When Plans Change Interviewers selected from a pool are now clearly labeled in a scheduled request, so if you ever need to replace them, you know exactly where to look. Using interviewer pools helps teams move fast since you are not waiting for one specific person to have free time. But if a selected interviewer needs to be replaced, it’s just as important to know what pool they were selected from. Without context on how the original interviewer was chosen, finding someone equally qualified becomes a time drain. That’s why we’ve made pool labels visible in every scheduled request. If an interviewer drops out, you have enough context to quickly find a replacement. **This update ensures:** - Recruiters can swiftly and confidently replace interviewers with like-for-like options, even without deep knowledge of team structures or interviewer expertise. - TA leaders and hiring managers can rest assured that interview quality stays high and is aligned with role expectations. [See how to create pools in Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/creating-groups#d3bcc54c5ad4) ## Automatically Reformat Candidate Details in One Step Cronofy users who schedule interviews outside an ATS can now paste full candidate details in any order when creating a scheduling request. Whether from a spreadsheet, a PDF file, or an email signature, you no longer need to separately copy a candidate’s first name, last name, and email into your request; Cronofy automatically parses and fills the details correctly in the attendee field. For teams that manage job applications, sourcing, or scheduling without an Applicant Tracking System, candidate information comes from everywhere and rarely in a neat, predictable format. Sometimes, it’s a Google sheet populated by a form; other times, it’s a name and email copied straight from LinkedIn. This update ensures that wherever you pull candidate details from, you can send scheduling requests faster without first rearranging these details or double-checking which value goes where. It’s also a huge time saver for days when you have to schedule multiple candidates in quick succession. ## Easily Find Information You Need and Make Admin Changes Faster Whether you are configuring your interview workflows for the first time or managing scheduling across multiple organizations, we’ve now made it easier for you to navigate your settings in Cronofy. Managing members, scheduling controls and admin tools are now grouped in their own tabs so you can make updates faster. ## Unlock Smoother Interview Scheduling for Your Team We are continuing to expand what’s possible with the Cronofy Scheduler so recruitment teams can book interviews in fewer steps and get back to work that matters. Already using Cronofy? Start creating or updating templates that give recruiters control over who they schedule. New to Cronofy? Explore how modern teams eliminate manual scheduling and delight candidates from day one. [Speak to a Scheduling Expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### Switching interview scheduling tools? Here’s what you need to know Your recruitment process is only as strong as the tools behind it. Explore what makes a vendor stand out and how to navigate the switch without hurting your reputation at work. Blog Post 2024-09-16T08:00:00.000Z --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- ### Recruiting Brainfood - Candidate psychology in the hiring process Psychology perspective on the candidate experience for recruiters. Webinar 2024-03-27T10:00:00.000Z --- # The Cronofy Status Page We’re strong believers in being transparent and keeping you in the loop, which is why we have a live status page at https://status.cronofy.com/. We’re strong believers in being transparent and keeping you in the loop, which is why we have a live status page at https://status.cronofy.com/. We’re strong believers in being transparent and keeping you in the loop, which is why we have a live status page at [https://status.cronofy.com/](https://status.cronofy.com/). It’s rare that there’s a problem with Cronofy, but if there is, the status page is your first port of call for the latest information. ![All systems operational]() ![Cronofy]() ## What’s on the Cronofy status page? We list any current issues that could be affecting your service, as well updates on these incidents, and details of past problems. Everything is clearly timed and dated for your convenience. ### Incident overviews Key messages are clearly presented in alert boxes to give you an overview of the most important information. ### Current operational statuses On the page we also list the various aspects of our service along with their current operational status. These are helpfully color-coded for at-a-glance viewing: ![Major calendar providers]() ### System metrics You can also see system metrics, such as daily, weekly and monthly uptime for both app and API. ### Choose your own subscription for Cronofy system status incidents Our system status page is your system status page. We know that you need to receive updates in a way that makes sense for your business, so you can choose to subscribe by email, Twitter or RSS to be notified when anything changes. You also have the option of subscribing to a specific incident (click ‘Subscribe’ on the alert box for that incident), or for all incidents (use the ‘Subscribe’ button at the top of the page). ![Some calendars unresponsive]() ### Further help If you have a question about our status page or how we inform you of downtime, please [let us know](mailto:support@cronofy.com). We’d love to hear any feedback you have about how we inform you of downtime and the details we provide too. If you’re unsure of whether a particular issue is affecting you, or if you would like further information, please email [support@cronofy.com](mailto:support@cronofy.com) and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. --- # Why we've built the Cronofy Scheduler The new Cronofy Scheduler is an end user application built on top of our API and the next step on our mission of scheduling everything for everyone. The new Cronofy Scheduler is an end user application built on top of our API and the next step on our mission of scheduling everything for everyone. The new Cronofy Scheduler represents the next step on our mission of scheduling everything for everyone. It’s an end user application built on top of the same API and UI Elements that our integration customers continue to rely on, it gives more people the opportunity to benefit from Cronofy’s world-class scheduling platform. We’ve become direct consumers of our own services which is continuously driving improvements that all of our customers benefit from. Features like [conferencing services](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/conferencing-services/) and [free select mode in our availability viewer](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/availability-viewer/#param-config.mode) were both delivered as a direct result of building the Scheduler ‍ ### World-class scheduling platform Cronofy has been at the forefront of scheduling for many years now as the underlying technology infrastructure powering scheduling in a range of applications. Our API is relied on by [GoDaddy](https://uk.godaddy.com/help/add-online-appointments-section-27307) customers to take bookings online, [Personio](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/interview-scheduling-personio/) users to schedule interviews or university counsellors who use [Handshake](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/handshake-student-engagement/) to manage their time. They and hundreds of other SaaS vendors mean that tens of thousands of companies around the world rely on Cronofy’s scheduling platform. This has put us in a unique position. No one has worked with as many product teams, and in turn, end-users on understanding and delivering scheduling capabilities across as many different sectors. We’ve learnt a lot, and have distilled that learning into not just the world’s most powerful scheduling platform but now into a tool that can be embedded into more peoples’ workflows. ### Show you care The focus of the Scheduler is simple. It is a software tool for people who care about the impression they give to others and for whom the compromise of having to keep their calendar permanently open just isn’t an option. - A support agent knows who the customer is, so an anonymous booking link where the customer has to do all of the work is just rude. They need to show that they care. A permanent link that allows the customer to book in again and circumvent support channels is untenable. - A recruiter who absolutely has to make the best impression on a top candidate can’t have them book in and fill out their details again. They also need to make sure that they only offer times to the candidate that the three members of the interview panel are available. - An executive assistant or marketing manager wants to be able to book in their CEO for podcast appearances. They need to do this in a way that avoids the email back and forth but protects the CEO’s calendar. These, and many others, are the important and valuable scheduling workflows that power modern business. Add in the requirement where location can be virtual and face-to-face interactions have to be considered and planned in carefully and scheduling is becoming the number one digital transformation focus of organizations. ‍ ### Protect your calendar We’re also in a world where data privacy and security is, rightly, a key concern of us all. GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and many other regulations are requiring that organizations only work with vendors who can attest to having processes and systems in place that put protecting people’s personal information at the very heart of how they operate. For legal and security teams to approve the use of these tools, they have to be able to turn to accreditations like SOC2 and ISO27001. The Cronofy platform has been built from the ground up with [data privacy and security at its core](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/). Our API customers already rely on us to enable calendar connectivity to some of the world’s most data sensitive organizations. The Scheduler leverages exactly this same focus and capability to ensure that everyone’s scheduling workflows are fully protected. ‍ ### Made for the apps you use For us to have a proper impact on business productivity we have to, as well as these hygiene requirements, focus deeply on the user experience and seamlessly fit into how people go about their working lives. The Scheduler isn’t just a separate tool you use, it’s an add-in for Outlook, it’s a button in Gmail or Zendesk, it’s a browser extension that works with Hubspot. It’s embedding scheduling in a way we’ve been doing for years with our API customers. It supports and enhances experiences and works seamlessly alongside any other scheduling service you’re using. It uses your current context to allow you to generate a personalized scheduling link with just two clicks, but gives you the power to tailor what you offer when you need to. Permanent, anonymous booking links have their place. But when you want to show you care about the person you’re scheduling with and/or need to protect your calendar, the Cronofy Scheduler is a necessary tool in your scheduling arsenal. [Try it for free](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/scheduler) and save everyone time. --- # Scheduling for Legal Tech ## Scheduling for Legal Tech > As a new product to the market we wanted to make sure we had all the features our users needed. Calendars are a key component in that. Using technology that handles all the processing and already has the expertise to integrate with all major calendars has been a night and day difference to us. — Gabriela Cubeiro, Co-Founder and CEO, CASEpeer ## Add online booking to your legal CRM or marketplace - Real-time, two-way calendar sync that works with all major calendar services - No ongoing maintenance - Give lawyers more time to spend on billable hours by reducing the 48% of time that they spend on admin tasks - Get up and running in days, not months ## Flexible scheduling solutions - Customizable [UI Elements](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/) that you can add to your software in any combination - Create calendars for rooms and resources - Organize meetings around the availability of up to 10 people, rooms, and resources at the same time - Send [trackable calendar invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/), ideal for ensuring that all attendees have appointments in their calendar, even if they aren’t calendar synced ## Simple scheduling for your users - Reduce how long it takes to schedule an appointment by up to 95% - Easy cancellation and rescheduling - Canceled appointments automatically reopen for someone else to book - No risk of double-booking appointments ## Schedule meetings around lawyers' availability - Lawyers can choose the times they want to be available for meetings - Admin staff can schedule lawyers’ meetings for them based on their real-time availability - Present availability as a calendar view, so clients can book appointments based on lawyers’ schedules - Lawyers and their assistants can see what’s coming up on their schedule from within the application ## Secure, two-way calendar sync - Built with privacy and security in mind - Access users’ free/busy data, instead of all or nothing - Works with past, present, and future versions of [Google](https://www.cronofy.com/google-calendar-api/), [Apple](https://www.cronofy.com/google-calendar-api/), [Outlook.com](https://www.cronofy.com/outlook-com-calendar-api/), [Office 365](https://www.cronofy.com/office-365-calendar-api/), and [Exchange](https://www.cronofy.com/exchange-calendar-api/) calendars with no extra work required on your end - GDPR and HIPAA compliant --- # Leveraging Efficient, Effective Feedback An important mechanism for maximizing your own impact is getting feedback from your peers. Many heads are better than one, but soliciting feedback can be a drain on everyone’s time if not done effectively. We cover two key tenants for effective feedback. An important mechanism for maximizing your own impact is getting feedback from your peers. Many heads are better than one, but soliciting feedback can be a drain on everyone’s time if not done effectively. We cover two key tenants for effective feedback. An important mechanism for maximizing your own impact is getting feedback from your peers. Many heads are better than one, but soliciting feedback can be a drain on everyone’s time if not done effectively. The key tenants for effective feedback are: 1. Receive it as early as possible 1. Be specific about what feedback you need ## Early, frequent feedback Given the choice, request feedback as early as possible. Given two approaches, choose the one that enables feedback sooner. The reason for feedback is to correct course. The earlier you request feedback, the less time you will spend veering off course meaning your time is used more effectively overall. Let’s look at the alternative: asking for feedback once, towards the end of a task. In a perfect world, that would be the most effective time approach because you’ll definitely have done exactly what was expected...However, most of us work in the real world where knowledge isn’t perfect and the act of delivery brings new context and can inform what it is that we’re aiming for. Therefore multiple check ins allows for further discovery and alignment on what's necessary. More, smaller, course corrections lead to the same result. Though I’d argue a likely better result, on average in less time. Take the diagram below as an example, with the area between each line and the “perfect” path being representative of time spent on misaligned effort. The blue line (above) with multiple points of feedback, is necessarily pulled back towards the perfect path at each point of feedback. The orange line (below) takes the “big bang” feedback approach and spends more time veering off-track, and more time to get back on target. An analogy might be writing something and sharing bullet points, the first few paragraphs, an initial draft, and a final version. There might be minor edits at each stage, but significant changes in course at each step are effectively minor edits. If you take the approach of getting feedback at the final version, worst-case scenario is that you may require a complete rewrite. ## Request specific feedback In order to maximize the return on the feedback you receive – from time invested by the other party, to how relevant the feedback is – you need to be specific about what feedback you want. If you're not specific, you risk getting involved in a lot of [bikeshedding](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding), which isn't a productive use of time for either party. To carry on the analogy, don’t ask a broad question such as: - What do you think of this? - Do you like it? This is highly likely to get response like “it needs more cowbell”, and “can it pop a bit more?”. Instead, ask something specific like: - Does this fit the narrative you’re expecting? - Do you think this conveys the value to product owners? - I think we’re missing a statistic, can you think of a relevant one? These will garner stronger opinions – which you’re free to ignore of course – and be much more actionable. Either way that means they’ll either help direct you toward a better path, or give you more conviction that the one you're already on is correct. --- # Schedule interviews inside BambooHR Cronofy is the only integrated interview scheduling solution in BambooHR enabling recruitment teams schedule any interview in minutes with less admin. ## Schedule interviews inside BambooHR An interview scheduler for recruiters to easily send candidates self-scheduling links, all from inside BambooHR. Spend less time manually coordinating interviews and more time sourcing great talent. [Book 1:1 demo](Speak to a specialist) [Get trial](https://www.bamboohr.com/integrations/listings/cronofy?utm_source=cronofy) ## Improve your time-to-hire **Schedule for hiring managers** **Book into blocked calendars** **Track interview status** **Rotate interviewers** > Even if I’m busy, and it needs to be done right now, scheduling with Cronofy in BambooHR literally takes 30 seconds and you’re done. — Tanya Towner, Human Resources Coordinator, Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA) ## Schedule for other interviewers in a few clicks From hiring manager interviews to panels, you no longer need to chase your hiring team for available times to schedule interviews for them. Cronofy works for you, automatically generating self-scheduling links for candidates with free meeting slots from your hiring team's calendars. [See how this works](https://youtu.be/9cYrvm7iB5A?si=xROvBJadCgWFf5G9) ## Take back control of your day Book multiple candidates into screening calls and other interviews without spending hours on the phone requesting their free time. Cronofy empowers your candidates to schedule and reschedule any interview without interrupting your day. [See candidate experience](https://youtu.be/piMTxz_363g?si=1O4VY2XMIRlwvEVi&t=108) ### Schedule any interview in minutes ## Eliminate long email chains and scheduling errors Schedule interviews with speed so you don't miss out on quality candidates. Cronofy is BambooHR's elite interview scheduling partner, helping hiring teams move candidates through the hiring process faster. [Install Cronofy in BambooHR](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/bamboohr/#setting-up-the-bamboohr-integration) ## I want to learn more > We see thousands of interviews being scheduled through the integration. That equates to hours and hours being saved for organizations. — Jonny Rejholec, Principal Product Manager, BambooHR ## Add interview scheduling to BambooHR [Book 1:1 demo ](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) [Get your trial](https://www.bamboohr.com/integrations/listings/cronofy?utm_source=cronofy) --- # Embed GDPR, HIPAA-compliant scheduling into your telehealth application Modern practitioner and patient scheduling. We enable scheduling, teams deliver care. ## Embed GDPR, HIPAA-compliant scheduling into your telehealth application Modern practitioner and patient scheduling. [Learn More](#form-c6848e89-7d9f-4a9b-ac19-ab7632fc4f6b) ## Reliable Appointment Scheduling ## Patient & Practitioner Experiences Enhance the experience with full control over availability and appointment buffers for practitioners and seamless booking for patients, all within your platform. ## Avoid Double Bookings Unified calendar management connects multiple calendar providers of your practitioners with real-time updates to prevent scheduling conflicts. ## Secure Integrations Connect with existing systems like EHRs, CRMs, and communication platforms to enhance operational efficiency. ## Schedule your Telehealth demo > With Cronofy we were able to offer seamless scheduling experiences to our doctors and patients alike. Our online appointment booking feature helps patients get the care they need quicker while doctors are seeing an increase in their activity. They also spend less time on administrative tasks and have more time to dedicate to their patients. — Albert Armengol, Co-founder, Docplanner ## Plug and Play Scheduling Capabilities - Unified Calendar API for all calendar providers - Real-time calendar synchronization - Scheduling and Availability APIs - UI elements and webhooks - Dedicated support - 99.99% uptime > We loved that Cronofy take a strong HIPAA compliant view towards everything like we do. The Private Events feature that Cronofy added saves us lots of time, because we're dealing with someone's personal health information (PHI). By hiding those details from the calendar, we didn't worry about sharing our calendars for internal meetings - it's always going to be compliant. — Nick Riggall, User and Regulatory Operations Lead, Tidepool ### Docplanner Group uses full calendar sync to power its SaaS healthcare solution Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. Case Study --- ### Revolutionizing digital healthcare support with Tidepool Tidepool are committed to helping all people with insulin-requiring diabetes safely achieve great outcomes through more accessible, actionable, and meaningful diabetes data. Case Study --- ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- # An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how wellness platform Heal.me delivered appointment scheduling to patients and practitioners with Cronofy's calendar sync API for telehealth. Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. > It was either going to take us stopping everything that we were doing to build a significantly more robust calendar integration, or to find someone that can do this for us. When we came across Cronofy, we realised we’ve been looking for something like this. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer, Heal.me Success for Heal.me **HIPAA compliance faster** Obtaining compliance without having to incur legal expenses **No need to migrate as you grow** Fair pricing model ensures startups continue using API long-term **More time for developers** Team now focusing on delivering key features, not squashing calendar bugs ## The problem: # Delivering reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale Heal.me is a health and wellness platform based in Austin, Texas, with a mission to advance a new model of healthcare that is holistic, personalized, and proactive. Accurate calendars and streamlined appointment booking lie at the core of the company’s goal to connect users with vetted practitioners nearby or online. We speak with Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer at Heal.me, to hear the story of how discovering Cronofy’s API for calendar synchronization changed their organizational philosophy from building everything in-house and allowed their busy engineering team to focus on creating unparalleled user experience. “We wanted to get more reliability in our [calendar synchronization](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api),” Chad explains the challenge his team was faced with. “We had some weird edge cases that were acting unexpectedly, and we wanted to increase the number of calendar services that we were synchronizing with.” To Heal.me, building a reliable calendar offering was critical to the core product. “We have over 4,000 people on our network. We’re also a small team of a few developers building the product. When you have these calendar synchronization issues popping up all over the place, having to continuously deal with them becomes not only annoying, but distracts us from our core product.” > I came across Cronofy’s calendar synchronization API and thought—this is wild, we’re trying to do all of this ourselves, when there’s a tool that does this for us. – Chad Agate, CTO, Heal.me ## The solution: # Finding a HIPAA-compliant calendar sync solution without incurring the legal costs After conducting interviews with churned power users, Heal.me came to the conclusion that solving these rogue calendar issues had to be at the top of their agenda. “It was either going to take us stopping everything that we were doing to build a significantly more robust calendar integration, or to find someone that can do this for us. When we came across Cronofy, we realised we’ve been looking for something like this.” Building in-house had been the strategy up until that point, but delivering this feature looked to be a challenge. > What appeared to be simple for scheduling was in fact very complex. We built something ourselves that worked most of the time, but when it came to those edge cases and maintenance, we realised that building it ourselves was a poor use of our time. – Chad Agate, CTO, Heal.me The sensitive nature of the data Heal.me processes means HIPAA compliance and [data security](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy) was non-negotiable for the team. “Our primary customers are holistic care practitioners who deal with patients. To service this market, we have to maintain all of these different policies about how we’re handling their data. We thought, can we get HIPAA compliance faster, without having to incur all of the legal expenses?” Being able to leverage Cronofy’s expertise and compliance instantly allowed Heal.me to move faster. “The fact that Cronofy was HIPAA compliant, and that we can get a HIPAA BAA (Business Associate Agreement) thanks to this was a huge bonus.” > Wasting time on calendar bugs becomes an annoyance when we have critical features that we need to build and get out. It makes sense to hand this over to somebody that specializes in it, rather than hire fifteen developers to focus on all the calendar integrations. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer at Heal.me ## The result: # A scalable pricing model that has shaped how Heal.me solves engineering challenges No longer having to spend time on time-draining calendar bug squashing has freed up the team to focus on delivering new and improved features. “Calendar bugs are no longer a headache for us. If there’s a serious issue with the calendar sync, we could just ask you guys to deal with it. As a small startup, that’s a huge relief.” Saving development times on new integrations was a significant benefit, too. > A lot of our users were looking for iCal, iCloud, and Outlook support. Getting that right out of the box without needing to develop it ourselves was incredibly handy. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer at Heal.me “Before, we were building everything internally. Now, we’ve shifted to keeping our engineering resources focused on the work that matters most to the end user,” speaks Chad on the change this project has brought to the leadership team. > I don’t think people were aware that this kind of thing was possible in the past. It’s allowing us to move faster by integrating these API services that take care of a lot of the compliance, security, and reliability needed for our service. It just makes sense. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer at Heal.me “When we saw that there were big players using the Cronofy API, it looked like it was going to work, but that it was going to cost a fortune,” explains Chad on concerns about long-term pricing when it comes to most APIs. “I was expecting a pricing model that would get us to an MVP, but that there would be no way to scale with it.” Scaling with the [startup discount](https://www.cronofy.com/api-pricing) enabled Heal.me to service their calendar synchronization with Cronofy on a long-term basis. > I was shocked to see that this was a doable solution, and that we weren’t going to need to integrate the API and then migrate later down the line. The way that Cronofy’s pricing is structured makes sense for startups to keep using it, instead of having to rip out a piece of infrastructure. There are a lot of tools that you build on which become incredibly expensive, and it’s a huge pain to migrate. Cronofy is different. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer at Heal.me After the launch of the project, Heal.me is now focusing on scaling their practice management application. “We’ve become a product-led organization,” shares Chad. The company continues to focus their engineering resources on user experiences that matter most, all while delivering appointment scheduling they can rely on. ## Speak to a specialist ### Pinpoint streamlines interview experiences with real-time scheduling Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. Case Study --- ### How Calendar Sync Can Transform Patient Scheduling Software Going to the hospital or doctor’s office is a stressful experience for patients. Worries about health and concerns about getting the right support is enough to make anyone nervous. Making it hard to book or change appointment only add more stress. And even after the appointments has taken place, patients can need help with their treatment or require follow-ups appointments. Blog Post 2018-01-25T12:16:00.000Z --- ### Docplanner Group uses full calendar sync to power its SaaS healthcare solution Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. Case Study --- # Voicemod recruiters are scaling up their interview scheduling with Cronofy Discover how the Voicemod recruitment team has transformed their interview scheduling process in Lever and is saving 5 hours a week per recruiter The Voicemod recruitment team transformed their interview scheduling in Lever and gained more control over their hiring process. ### Background Voicemod is a software development company focused on AI voice changing. The company was founded in 2014 by Jaime, Fernando, and Juan Bosch with headquarters in Valencia, Spain. They had a vision to enable everyone to express themselves through sound. They built expressive and immersive audio tools, making it easy to create unique sonic identities and enable interactions with personalized sounds. Today, more than 40 million gamers and streamers are creating their sonic identities and turning regular voice chat sessions into full-blown spectacles using our revolutionary audio tools. They have a fully-remote working model, with a team of over 100 employees working for them across the globe. ### Problem Voicemod was undergoing a period of increased hiring. Their business was scaling up, and hiring between 10-15 people per quarter. As their Talent Acquisition (TA) team only consisted of three members, this was becoming unsustainable, especially considering the number of applications tech roles typically receive. For a long time, the team had done things manually – a lot of back-and-forth between themselves, hiring managers and candidates, looking at calendars and trying to find the best time for everyone. Interview scheduling was draining a lot of time – the team wanted to change this. They began by implementing an ATS, Lever, to relieve some of the administrative burden. This helped in numerous ways, but interview scheduling remained a problem. The native scheduling function within Lever was fine for one-to-one interview scheduling. But they quickly discovered the issues for more complex, multi-person scenarios like booking panel interviews. It would end up going back to a manual, back-and-forth process of checking calendars, which is what they had wanted to move away from. One of the other recurring issues was with rescheduling. Whenever a candidate needed to reschedule, they didn’t have the option to change the meeting time themselves as the link was only one-use. Many times they would come to the TA team to tell them they needed to reschedule. The team had to go through the process of finding a new time all over again. It was frustrating and time-consuming, as well as damaging to the candidate experience. ### Solution The team explored some alternative scheduling automation platforms before discovering Cronofy. Other providers were too expensive, not robust enough, and needed a considerable commitment as they couldn’t try the tools beforehand. They weren’t sure how much they would use the tool at that stage, or if they would like using it. They needed something lightweight, straightforward and simple for everyone to use. Cronofy ticked all the boxes. When Cronofy was presented to João, he could see straight away how simple it was to use – everything made sense. Voicemod loved that Cronofy was scaleable to their hiring needs, being able to adapt to the fluctuating workload. It was important that the scheduling tool they chose integrated with Lever, as they needed integration to make the process as efficient as possible. They saw how seamlessly Cronofy worked within Lever; they could set up an interview without leaving the platform, even for complex multi-person use cases. Another deciding factor was our [Pay As You Go payment model](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing). Voicemod can pay per user and so only pay what they need, rather than having to commit to an expensive annual subscription without even knowing if they like the product.‍ ### Results The Voicemod team is happy with how simple the tool is to use, and integrates so seamlessly into their Lever platform. Everything is done within Lever, no need to open a new tab – the candidate’s information is auto-filled into the scheduling request. Thanks to Cronofy, rescheduling isn’t an issue anymore. The candidate has the power to reschedule themselves depending on the interviewer’s availability, and instantly updates everyone's calendars. Saving a lot of time and hassle for the TA team, as well as improving the candidate experience which was an important factor to the Voicemod team. The Voicemod team has regular catch-ups with the Cronofy Customer Support and Success teams, to make sure they’re getting the most out of the tool. If they have any questions or difficulties, they can reach out and get a fast response, typically within 24 hours. They’ve also been able to feed back and put forward ideas for new features and improvements, which Cronofy has been receptive to. Since the Voicemod TA team has started using Cronofy, scheduling interviews is no longer a burden. It takes seconds to set up even complex, multi-person interviews, instead of the hours it was taking previously. The scheduling process is efficient and seamless for everyone involved. ### Case studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # Cronofy vs Recall.ai for Meeting Recording API and Intelligence Product teams use Cronofy to record, transcribe, and summarise meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, turning them into structured data their product can build on. Unlike Recall.ai, Cronofy also handles scheduling, availability, and post-meeting workflows in a single integration. ## Looking for a meeting recording API that also handles scheduling? Product teams use Cronofy to record, transcribe, and summarise meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, turning them into structured data their product can build on. Recall.ai attaches a bot to a calendar invite. Cronofy owns the whole workflow: scheduling, availability, recording, and what happens after the meeting ends, all in a single integration. [Build with us](https://www.cronofy.com/cronofy-vs-recall-ai#ba5081e4f809c93342e8b02a39a8ba1a) [See the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/getting-started/) ## Cronofy vs. Recall.ai capabilities Cronofy has spent over a decade solving the hardest parts of meeting workflows. That temporal infrastructure sits under Meeting Agents, with a 99.99% uptime SLA and technical experts available on every plan. ## Cronofy Meeting Agents vs Recall.ai (PAYG) Cronofy Meeting Agents vs Recall.ai (PAYG) - Number of free trial hours - Price per hour - Uptime guarantee - Recording storage - AI-generated summaries - Scheduling infrastructure - Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams - Audio and video recording - Transcription - Speaker attribution and diarization - Ad hoc and scheduled join - Join attached to calendar event - Custom agent name and image - GDPR compliant - CCPA compliant - HIPAA compliant - SOC2 attested - ISO27001 - ISO27018 - ISO27701 - Data centers - Local data processing in all regions - Data retention - Subprocessors for recording and transcription - Training of AI models using transcription data - Add candidate profile and interview kit to interviewers' invite ## Ready to try for free? Create an account for 24 hours of free recording. No credit card, no commitment. See what your product can build on, or get hands-on guidance from our expert team and build your integration alongside people who've seen every meeting workflow. Build on your own [Build with us](https://www.cronofy.com/cronofy-vs-recall-ai#ba5081e4f809c93342e8b02a39a8ba1a) ## Infrastructure and data residency Cronofy runs the entire meeting capture workflow on its own infrastructure. No third-party subprocessors. Meeting data is processed and stored in your selected region only, across six dedicated data centers in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Singapore for every plan. Recall.ai offers three regions across the US, EU, and Asia for all plans. APAC data routes to the US or EU for processing. Per their privacy policy, all personal data is processed in the United States. With Cronofy, compliance is built in, not added on. Every customer gets GDPR compliance, HIPAA, SOC 2, CCPA, and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 as standard. Cronofy retains all meeting data for seven days. Recall.ai's default retention is indefinite, with the option to configure or delete via API. ## FAQs **Q: Does Cronofy use any subprocessors for meeting recording or transcription?** A: No. Cronofy does not use any subprocessors for recording or transcription. No customer data leaves Cronofy's infrastructure at any point in the process. **Q: What ISO certifications do Cronofy and Recall.ai hold?** A: Cronofy is certified to ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018. ISO 27701 covers data privacy management. ISO 27018 covers protection of personal data in the cloud. Recall.ai holds ISO 27001 but not 27701 or 27018. **Q: How long do Cronofy and Recall.ai retain meeting data?** A: Cronofy stores all meeting data for 7 days as standard. Recall.ai retains audio and video for 7 days but transcription data for 42 days. Their default retention policy is indefinite unless deletion is requested via API. **Q: What is the most GDPR-compliant way to record and transcribe meetings via API?** A: Cronofy Meeting Agents run on Cronofy's EU-based infrastructure with no subprocessors. No customer data leaves Cronofy's own infrastructure. GDPR compliance is standard on every plan, with all recording and transcription processed only in your selected region across six dedicated data centres. Recall.ai offers three regions and routes Japan transcription to the US. Per their privacy policy, all personal data is processed in the United States. **Q: How do I connect meeting recordings back to calendar events and attendee data automatically?** A: With Cronofy, transcripts and summaries are tied to the calendar event and scheduling context from the start. With Recall.ai, linking recording data back to calendar and attendee context is something you build yourself. **Q: How do I add meeting recording and scheduling to my application without building two separate integrations?** A: Cronofy handles both through a single API. Calendar sync, availability, scheduling, and meeting capture in one layer. Recall.ai handles recording only, so you would need to build or buy the scheduling side separately. **Q: What is the difference between a meeting recording API and temporal infrastructure?** A: A meeting recording API records and transcribes what happens in a meeting. Temporal infrastructure schedules the meeting, records it, and triggers what happens next. Recall.ai is the former. Cronofy is the latter, with meeting capture available as a standalone product or as part of a broader workflow. **Q: Is Recall.ai HIPAA compliant?** A: Not on their PAYG plan. Recall.ai's HIPAA compliance BAA applies to their enterprise plan only. Cronofy is HIPAA compliant on every plan. ## Trusted to power meeting workflows at scale ## Build with the experts After submitting the form, you'll be able to book time with a member of our team. In a 30 minute call, we'll walk through your specific use case, show relevant API flows and integration examples, and answer any technical or product questions you have. --- # FAQs | Cronofy Answers to common questions about Cronofy - the temporal infrastructure for scheduling and meeting workflows. Covers the API, Meeting Agents, MCP server, data storage, pricing, and more. # Frequently Asked Questions ## The Service **Q: What does Cronofy do?** A: Cronofy provides real-time and secure two-way calendar-sync so that software and applications can connect with their users’ calendars no matter what calendar service they use. **Q: How does Cronofy work?** A: You integrate once with the Cronofy API, and Cronofy manages authorization, calendar synchronization, availability queries, scheduling logic, and - when using Meeting Agents - recording and transcription. You focus on building your product’s UI and business logic, while Cronofy handles connections to calendar providers, conferencing platforms, and the underlying data infrastructure. **Q: Which calendar services does Cronofy support?** A: Apple, Google, Microsoft Exchange (including on-premise), Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft Outlook.com. **Q: Do I need to connect to different calendar services?** A: No, Cronofy supports applications that sit between the various calendar services and provides access to all or some of the five major calendar services that we connect to. **Q: Do I need to enable each calendar service?** A: No. Cronofy’s APIs automatically give you access to the five calendar services. **Q: What is required to integrate my application with Cronofy?** A: You set the rules and must provide the UI for your application. You need to integrate our authentication process and use our API to retrieve calendar data. Cronofy is responsible for ensuring the application receives the calendar data. **Q: How do I control the level of access I have to my users' calendars?** A: You can control the level of access, meaning you can get all the calendar data or only free/busy information. **Q: How long does integration with Cronofy take?** A: It depends on the complexity of your product workflow and the UI design work. We offer off the shelf UI with Real-Time Scheduling and a simple integration with Smart Invites. ## Connecting users' calendars **Q: How do users connect to Cronofy?** A: Your users are directed to an authentication page managed by Cronofy. We use OAuth2 to control access and security. **Q: What does the user authentication process look like?** A: Users are required to select the calendar they want to authorize Cronofy to access (eg. Apple, Google, Outlook.com etc) and provide their credentials. **Q: Can we white label the authentication process?** A: Yes, we allow customization of UI elements. You can add your logo to the header for example. ## Data Storage **Q: Do you store users’ calendar information?** A: We store all calendar information including event details, but not their contacts. **Q: Where is your data hosted?** A: Either USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia or Singapore. They are run on completely separate instances with no data transfer between the data centers. **Q: Where is your data processing managed?** A: We will hold your calendar data in the region of your choice. You can choose between the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia or Singapore. **Q: Are you GDPR compliant?** A: Yes. Cronofy is GDPR compliant, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 attested, and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. All data is processed within your selected region - Cronofy has no third-party subprocessors for meeting data. Full details are at our [Privacy and Security hub](/privacy). ## Testing **Q: Can I test Cronofy?** A: Yes, you can sign up for a free developer account. We provide a feature-rich sandbox environment. **Q: Are there any limitations?** A: You are limited to 20 users for the duration of your tests. **Q: How do I activate my application?** A: Please contact us and provide us with your client ID and redirect URLs. ## Pricing and Billing **Q: How does your pricing work?** A: API pricing is based on the features you use and the number of connected users per month. Meeting Agents are priced separately based on monthly usage hours, with the first 24 hours free. Full pricing details are on our [API pricing page](/api-pricing). **Q: What constitutes a user?** A: A user is an individual – customer or end-user – who has granted your application access to their calendars. We only recognize them as a user once they have completed the authorization process and connected to Cronofy. A single user can have several calendars synced through Cronofy. **Q: Is it a license model?** A: No, it’s an activation model. We only recognize users when they are connected with Cronofy. Billing for the user stops when they are no longer active. **Q: What happens if I go over my included user limit?** A: We automatically bill you for the additional users at the end of the month. Our team is always on-hand if you want to see which plan best fits your usage. **Q: How is payment managed?** A: You can pay monthly by credit or debit card. Annual plans can be invoiced. Contact our team to discuss the right plan for your usage, or visit the [API pricing page](/api-pricing) for details. **Q: How can I upgrade my plan?** A: Please contact our support team and we will be happy to assist. ## Technical Support **Q: Where can I get further support?** A: Full documentation is available at [docs.cronofy.com](https://docs.cronofy.com). For questions not covered there, contact our support team directly. We also offer technical review meetings for customers on relevant plans. **Q: Can you do the integration for us?** A: No, our objective is to build the APIs for you or your integration partner to complete the integration. However, if you are looking for an integration partner we can advise. **Q: Do you offer technical review meetings?** A: We offer technical review meetings for customers on our Emerging Plan and above. Everything else is handled via online support tickets **Q: How do I connect users with Exchange?** A: First, Exchange Web Services must be activated. Then the user can connect their calendar through our authentication process. ## About Cronofy **Q: Where are you based?** A: We are based in London and Nottingham in the UK. We also have an office in Amsterdam and New York. We support customers across the globe with a large representation from North America and Europe. **Q: What types of businesses use Cronofy?** A: We support hundreds of cloud-based applications, ranging from online booking software and employee scheduling tools through to meeting tools and smart building technology. These customers vary in size from startups to established blue chip companies. ## Other Common Questions **Q: Does Cronofy work with different time zones?** A: Yes. However, your application needs to identify the time zone of your customers. **Q: How does Cronofy treat tentative calendar events?** A: In terms of free/busy the recipient is seen as unavailable. This information can also be read from the user's calendar as its actual value. **Q: How do we set user working hours?** A: The Availability Rules feature lets you define the windows of time a person or resource - such as a meeting room - is considered available. You can set working hours, exclude days off, and apply buffer rules. These are then applied automatically when performing availability queries or scheduling meetings through the API. See the [documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com) for full details. ## Meeting Agents **Q: What are Meeting Agents?** A: Meeting Agents are the meeting intelligence layer of Cronofy's temporal infrastructure. They give your product a single API to capture recordings, generate speaker-attributed transcripts, and produce AI summaries from Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams - with no third-party bots or external transcription services. Everything runs on Cronofy's own infrastructure, within your chosen data region. **Q: How do I get started with Meeting Agents?** A: Create a free developer account - your account includes 24 free hours of meeting recording for testing. Review the [Meeting Agents documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/) to get started, or [speak to our team](/book-a-demo-api) if you want to walk through your use case first. **Q: How are Meeting Agents deployed?** A: There are two approaches. - **Standalone**: dispatch an agent to any meeting ad-hoc using a join URL, or schedule it to join at a specific time. - **Fully integrated**: attach a Meeting Agent directly to a calendar event when scheduling via Cronofy - if the meeting is updated or rescheduled, the agent stays aligned automatically. **Q: Which conferencing platforms do Meeting Agents support?** A: Meeting Agents currently support **Zoom**, **Google Meet**, and **Microsoft Teams**. **Q: What languages are supported for transcription?** A: Over 30 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, and more. See the full list in the [Meeting Agents documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/). **Q: Where is meeting data stored and processed?** A: You choose the region. Cronofy operates six data centers - in Australia, Canada, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All recording, transcription, and processing happens exclusively within your selected region. Cronofy has no third-party subprocessors for meeting data; transcription models are self-hosted on Cronofy's own infrastructure. **Q: Can Meeting Agents be white-labeled?** A: Yes. The name and avatar displayed by the Meeting Agent are fully configurable to match your product. **Q: Can users opt out of being recorded?** A: Yes. You control when Meeting Agents are dispatched. End users can also accept or decline an agent joining a call. You define the recording behavior; Cronofy provides the infrastructure. **Q: How is Meeting Agents pricing structured?** A: Pricing is based on monthly usage hours, inclusive of recording, transcription, and processing. The first 24 hours are free. After that: $0.79/hour up to 4,000 hours/month, $0.69/hour from 4,001-8,000 hours, $0.59/hour from 8,001-16,000 hours, with custom pricing above that. A minimum monthly commitment of $99 applies when using the standalone Meeting Agent API. Full details on the [API pricing page](/api-pricing). ## MCP Server and AI Agents **Q: Does Cronofy support AI agent workflows?** A: Yes. Cronofy provides an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets AI agents access calendar availability, schedule meetings, and work with meeting data without requiring human input at each step. It's designed for teams building agentic workflows where the AI needs to act on scheduling and meeting context autonomously. **Q: How does the Cronofy MCP server work?** A: The Cronofy MCP server exposes scheduling and availability data to AI agents via the MCP protocol. An agent can query availability, create or update meetings, and retrieve meeting outcomes - using Cronofy as the connection layer to users' actual calendars and conferencing tools. Documentation is available at [docs.cronofy.com](https://docs.cronofy.com). Do you have more questions about Cronofy? If we haven't answered your question, don't hesitate to get in touch. [Contact our team](/contact) --- # HR Tech Vegas | September 16-18, 2025 We’re bringing our scheduling solutions to HR Tech Vegas 2025. See how leading companies use Cronofy to improve time-to-fill, keep top candidates engaged, and create a seamless interviewing experience. We’re bringing our scheduling solutions to HR Tech Vegas 2025. See how leading companies use Cronofy to improve time-to-fill, keep top candidates engaged, and create a seamless interviewing experience. ## We're heading to HR Tech Vegas 2025! From September 16–18, Cronofy will be at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, joining thousands of HR and Talent Acquisition professionals exploring the future of work. Our team will be on the ground throughout the event, ready to connect, share insights, and demo how we’re transforming scheduling for recruiters, HR teams, and candidates. Come say hi to the Cronofy crew and see our solutions in action. ## Our Solutions At Cronofy, we believe scheduling should never be the bottleneck in hiring. Whether you’re running high-volume recruitment, executive searches, or building HR tech solutions, our products are designed to save you time, reduce drop-off, and create a smooth experience for everyone. ## Scheduler for Workday Built directly into Workday, our Scheduler makes it effortless for recruiters to book interviews without the back-and-forth. You’ll be able to: - Sync availability across hiring managers instantly - Empower candidates to self-schedule at their convenience - Accelerate hiring while keeping everything inside Workday [Explore](/interview-scheduling-in-workday) ## Scheduler for Paycor For teams using Paycor, our Scheduler unlocks frictionless scheduling that keeps candidates engaged. With just a few clicks, you can: - Book interviews directly from within Paycor - Ensure fair, fast, and transparent scheduling for candidates - Free up recruiter time so you can focus on building relationships [Explore](/interview-scheduling-in-paycor) ## Plus many more ATS' View our full list of ATS integrations. [ATS Marketplace](/ats-scheduling-integration-partners) ## Cronofy API It’s not just recruiters and HR teams that rely on Cronofy. Our scheduling infrastructure powers some of the world’s leading HR tech platforms like TeamTailor, Indeed, and Personio. By integrating our API, they’re able to accelerate time to market and launch new interview scheduling features faster. With our API, HR Tech platforms can: - Embed scheduling automation directly into their existing product workflows. - Deliver a better candidate experience with self-scheduling capabilities. - Scale with infrastructure proven to support millions of interviews with 99.99% uptime. [Explore](/developer) > Given our growth and market focus, we need the right people in the right roles, at the right time. It’s critical our talent team focuses on recruiting the right people, not doing the administrative part of scheduling interviews. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ![Cronofy Team]() ## In a rush? Pre-book your time to speak with us. --- # How to develop ideas for hackathons We’re currently preparing for Hack24 as both sponsors and participants, so we decided to write a mini-series of blog posts to sit alongside it. The first post in this set is 'How to prepare for a hack event', so don’t forget to check that out if you missed it the first time around! In the meantime, here are our top tips for finding inspiration for hackathons. We’re currently preparing for Hack24 as both sponsors and participants, so we decided to write a mini-series of blog posts to sit alongside it. The first post in this set is 'How to prepare for a hack event', so don’t forget to check that out if you missed it the first time around! In the meantime, here are our top tips for finding inspiration for hackathons. Here are our top tips for finding inspiration for hackathons. ## 1. Create a pool If you don’t have one already, build a pool of resources to spark inspiration. This can be as simple as a list of interesting scripts, extensions and plugins, software, APIs, repos, etc., and comes in useful for all kinds of things beyond hacks. Ideally you want to grow your pool slowly over time, rather than trying to find things you can force into it. However, if you’re looking to build one in a short space of time, going through your installs, tweets, browser history and bookmarks will do the job in a pinch. From here you can create a shortlist of tools and ideas for this particular hack. If everyone in your hack team does this, set aside some time to go through them together and build a strong idea. Don’t be fixated on taking existing concepts literally – think about how different adaptations and combinations would work for different problems and audiences, and work from there. ## 2. Take inspiration from the media Visit tech news sites or use a feed reader? Have a scroll through and make a note of new products, services and ideas that catch your interest or are repeatedly written about at the moment. Keep a look out for negatives (your own opinion or the media’s) – how could you fix something or do it better? ## 3. Streamline your interests and tone Eliminate formats you’re not interested in (bots, apps, websites, games, data mapping, mining, visualisation etc.) which will help get you closer to a working idea of what you want to do in seconds. Same goes for the tone you’re trying to invoke – will your hack be clever? Interesting? Funny? Helpful? All those things? ## 4. Find a problem to solve What’s annoyed you recently? What have you heard other people complain about? What frustrates you in your day job? These are all good places to start for inspiration. ## 5. Bridge a gap When two or more services are used together, there can often be missing pieces or a gap. How could you develop the relationship between these things to increase value? This can be applied in all kinds of ways, from increasing efficiency between social media channels and blogs, to cross-device analytics and user tracking, to building a solid relationship between an app or plugin and a website. ## 6. Take advantage of trends What’s popular in the industry at the moment, and how can you simplify that into a day or weekend hack? Don’t forget to consider timeless topics that are always in the spotlight, such as security, accessibility, and time management. ## 7. Update something Look around you. How could you update an everyday item or service to make it smarter? To keep it efficient enough for a short hack, think about adding or changing just one feature. ## 8. Work back from your audience Thinking of the audience or niche first can help you create ideas that genuinely solve problems. If you have a brief/challenge in mind, consider adding types of people or roles into the mix. For example, what could improve the day of a doctor, or a stay-at-home parent, or a small business owner? Stick to groups and roles you already have some familiarity with for best results. Putting an existing product or service in a different context can produce very different ideas, for example recreating a common business tool for charities, or taking something global and making it more locally applicable. ## 9. Add a third party What tools, add-ons, connectors, integrations and plugins do you already love? What software do you use that would benefit from an extra feature? Adding a third party into the mix, such as Slack, Evernote or Zendesk can kickstart your thinking. Check out our [integrations](https://www.cronofy.com/integrations) for inspiration. ## 10. Go through available hack information Find examples of previous hacks for the competition (especially winning ones), take a look at all the documentation, suggestions, and examples provided by challenge setters, and pay close attention to set criteria. Make sure you aren’t doing something that’s already been presented at that hack or to that company before. ## 11. Draw inspiration from current and past hacks If you’ve been to a hackathon before, reflect on what worked and what didn’t – both for your team and others. There are thousands of great hack videos and outlines online too, plus sites like [TopCoder](https://www.topcoder.com/) who run events regularly. ‍ *How do you find inspiration for hack event ideas? Tweet us* *[@cronofy](https://www.twitter.com/cronofy)* *with your tips!* --- # How time-to-schedule is impacting your time-to-hire You've heard of time-to-hire as one of the most widely used metrics in the recruitment industry. But do you measure your time-to-schedule? It could be having a detrimental effect on your hiring. You've heard of time-to-hire as one of the most widely used metrics in the recruitment industry. But do you measure your time-to-schedule? It could be having a detrimental effect on your hiring. In the fast-paced world of talent acquisition, organizations are constantly striving to streamline their hiring processes to secure top-tier talent efficiently. One often underestimated aspect of this process is the time it takes to schedule interviews. The way interviews are scheduled can significantly impact the overall time-to-hire, a key metric that measures the duration from posting a job to the moment a candidate accepts an offer. In this article, we'll explore the various ways in which interview scheduling influences time-to-hire and discuss strategies to optimize this crucial aspect of the hiring process. **The Domino Effect:** Interview scheduling acts as a linchpin in the recruitment timeline, affecting subsequent stages of the hiring process. Delays in scheduling can create a domino effect, extending the overall time-to-hire. When interviews are postponed, it not only prolongs the time a position remains vacant but also leads to increased candidate dropouts, as top talent may accept offers elsewhere during the waiting period. **Competitive Advantage:** In a competitive job market, where top candidates are often fielding multiple job offers, time is of the essence. Organizations that can swiftly schedule and conduct interviews have a distinct advantage in securing high-caliber candidates before their competitors. A lengthy and convoluted interview scheduling process may result in losing out on exceptional talent to more agile and responsive competitors. **Candidate Experience:** The interview process serves as a window into an organization's culture and values. A smooth and efficient interview scheduling experience contributes positively to the candidate's perception of the company. Conversely, a cumbersome and slow process may create frustration and dissatisfaction, potentially leading candidates to withdraw from the hiring process altogether. A poor candidate experience not only impacts the current hiring effort but can also tarnish the organization's employer brand, making it more challenging to attract top talent in the future. **Strategies for Optimizing Interview Scheduling:** *Automated Scheduling Tools:* - Implementing automated scheduling tools can significantly reduce the time spent coordinating interview times. These tools allow recruiters and hiring managers to share their availability, enabling candidates to choose a time slot that fits their schedule. This streamlines the process and minimizes back-and-forth communication. *Centralized Communication Platforms:* - Utilizing centralized communication platforms can enhance collaboration between hiring teams. These platforms enable real-time communication, reducing delays caused by miscommunication or the need for multiple rounds of coordination. *Transparent and Efficient Communication:* - Clearly communicate the expected timeline for the interview process to candidates. Keeping candidates informed about the progress and promptly addressing any scheduling issues demonstrates organizational professionalism and commitment. *Predefined Interview Panels:* - Establishing predefined interview panels with set schedules can expedite the process. This ensures that interviewers are available and ready, minimizing delays caused by conflicting schedules. *Flexibility and Adaptability:* - Maintain a degree of flexibility in the interview scheduling process. Unexpected challenges may arise, and being adaptable can help mitigate delays. Consider alternative interview formats, such as virtual interviews, to overcome scheduling constraints. **Conclusion:** Interview scheduling is a critical component of the overall hiring process, with a direct impact on time-to-hire and the quality of the candidate experience. By implementing efficient scheduling strategies and leveraging technology, organizations can minimize delays, secure top talent, and enhance their competitiveness in the talent market. In an era where agility and responsiveness are key, optimizing interview scheduling is a strategic move that can positively influence the entire recruitment lifecycle. > Adding candidate self-scheduling with Cronofy reduced our client's time to hire from 17 days down to just 11. — Darren Ellicot, Global Head of Partnerships, hackajob ### Interview Scheduling: Candidate expectations, frustrations, and preferences --- ### Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What Metrics Truly Matter --- # CalDAV and the Cronofy API Something we’re asked from time-to-time is why we didn’t use the standards of CalDAV and iCalendar, instead going for a custom HTTP+JSON API. CalDAV and iCalendar are great, of the APIs and formats we integrate with they are probably the best. Something we’re asked from time-to-time is why we didn’t use the standards of CalDAV and iCalendar, instead going for a custom HTTP+JSON API. CalDAV and iCalendar are great, of the APIs and formats we integrate with they are probably the best. Something we’re asked from time-to-time is why we didn’t use the standards of CalDAV and iCalendar, instead going for a custom HTTP+JSON API. CalDAV and iCalendar are great, of the APIs and formats we integrate with they are probably the best. From our point of view the only feature it is lacking is change notifications. However, as Boromir put it: ![One does not simply implement caldav]() ## The problem with CalDAV CalDAV is great, it makes it possible to do all sort of things, and therein lies the problem. As we support multiple calendar providers, we often have to simplify things to support the lowest common denominator. CalDAV is essentially the highest common denominator of calendar providers and so if we were to expose a CalDAV interface to our service, then there would often be a lossy translation of concepts, or we’d have to support a subset of CalDAV which would be more confusing than not supporting CalDAV at all. ## The problem with iCalendar Hand-in-hand with CalDAV comes iCalendar, so much so that many people use the two interchangeably. Similarly to CalDAV, iCalendar is the highest common denominator of calendar serialization formats, with every attribute you would expect to find, and the ability to define custom ones. Therefore, the problem with iCalendar is similar to the problem with CalDAV: when using iCalendar there’s an expectation as to what that means. To implement a subset of iCalendar would likely be as confusing as not using it at all. A second problem with iCalendar is that it isn’t a format that most developers are used to. Though it is an elegant format, it’s not the sort of format you can easily pick up and implement yourself. There’s correct wrapping of long lines to deal with, escaping of attributes and other fun things like that. The sort of thing that developers have become accustomed to not worrying about when using formats like XML and JSON. ## Decisions must be made In the very beginning we had to chose one protocol and one serialization format as supporting and developing more would not be a sensible use of time. There’s often open source libraries to encapsulate the details of CalDAV and iCalendar in your language of choice but that’s often a hurdle too far for companies and we have to maximise our reach. Therefore, it became a choice between JSON and XML, and JSON won out because whilst XML has its merits, it is still tainted with the taste of SOAP. We looked at other APIs out there and decided to go with vanilla HTTP as it is simple and commonly understood. However, we did not throw the baby out with the bath water. Whilst we did not implement CalDAV and iCalendar, we have used them to influence our API, benefitting from the knowledge and expertise engrained into them to make better choices for our API. Of course all decisions are temporary. Just because we’re not CalDAV and iCalendar doesn’t mean we’re never going to support them. Through content negotiation we could add support for CalDAV and iCalendar in the future if it makes sense and the demand is present. However, so far at least, the design of our API has not been a problem for our clients, quite the contrary. By choosing protocols that developers are already experienced with we’ve been able to dramatically reduce the development effort and time for them to deliver calendar sync features to their customers. ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # What's New in Cronofy? Cronofy deepens its ATS integrations with Placeholders, now enables flexible event editing for recruiters and German language support. These enhancements will improve productivity, scheduling at scale and global team collaboration. Read on to learn how Cronofy is streamlining scheduling with these updates. Cronofy deepens its ATS integrations with Placeholders, now enables flexible event editing for recruiters and German language support. These enhancements will improve productivity, scheduling at scale and global team collaboration. Read on to learn how Cronofy is streamlining scheduling with these updates. We’ve been upgrading the Cronofy Scheduler over the past few months, and I’m thrilled to share a series of updates that will transform the way you schedule interviews. These enhancements will help you schedule at scale, reschedule interviews for others, and now support an additional language. Plus, there’s a fresh new look! Read on to learn more. ## Introducing Placeholders: schedule with speed and accuracy Now, you can add candidate and job information from your applicant tracking system to an event description with Cronofy placeholders. When you have multiple interviews to schedule at once, copying and pasting job titles or other details from your ATS into email templates can be tedious, time consuming and prone to errors. Placeholders enable smart data entry in your scheduling requests when offering availability to candidates by dynamically adding information from your ATS to any interview invite. **Now you can:** - Personalize information for every candidate without the risk of mix-ups - Provide interviewers with instant access to candidate profiles and scorecards using [Separate Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/send-separate-calendar-invites-to-different-participants-in-a-single-meeting). - Re-use scheduling requests templates to bulk-schedule candidates. No matter the number of interviews you need to schedule in a day, you can be confident that every candidate will receive only the details for their interview and not those of another previously sent request. Placeholders are currently available to use with [SmartRecruiters](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-smartrecruiters), [Lever](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-lever) and [Greenhouse](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-greenhouse) ATS via the Cronofy browser extension. ## Edit interview dates or times, even when you are not an attendee Recruiters and coordinators can now update interview dates and times on anyone’s behalf from the Cronofy dashboard. Your perfectly planned day can fall apart when an interviewer needs to move a scheduled interview. You may need the interviewer to adjust the event in their calendar or you have to create a new event from scratch. This update changes that. **Now you can:** - Reschedule interviews on behalf of anyone in your organization, right from your dashboard - Update times and dates for a scheduled interview even if you are not an attendee of the meeting - Easily handle last minute changes without starting from scratch or involving multiple team members. We are not stopping here, more edit options are coming soon, including changing an event title and updating a calendar description. Look out for that! ## The Scheduler dashboard is now available in German Cronofy is now more accessible to German-speaking users! German-speaking team members on your team can now schedule events with Cronofy in their native language. This feature instantly upgrades their experience, enabling scheduling efficiency without language barriers. Read [this guide ](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/get-started#23f0962b38c714a5750bef910fdb9080)to set this up in your account. ## The Request Details page now has a new look! We’ve given the Request Details page a sleek makeover, providing instant access to scheduling links and other crucial information. With the redesigned page, you can easily locate and share essential interview details like booking or conferencing links in moments, impressing candidates with your responsiveness and keeping hiring teams in the loop without slowing down the recruitment process. ## Your next steps to streamlined scheduling These features are available to all Cronofy customers. For more questions or assistance, reach out via [support@cronofy.com](mailto:support@cronofy.com). **New to Cronofy?** Speak with a scheduling expert on our team to see how Cronofy can help improve your recruiting efficiency. [Book a Demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Corporate Travel Management ## Corporate Travel Management ## Preparation is key Corporate travel management tools are complex. Everything from hotel reservations to flights, trains, taxis, and more must be communicated to clients in a simple and effective way. Syncing users’ calendars to your corporate travel management software can make a real difference. Updates can be pushed out to clients in real-time, meaning that they always have the most up-to-date information on their most used device: their mobile. ## Share the latest information Offering a calendar integration feature means clients don’t even need to add travel times to their calendar. Flight times and taxi bookings can be automatically added to their schedule, and any updates are communicated as they happen. There’s no more risk of a client forgetting to add something to their calendar. Should flights be delayed or a train get cancelled, the latest information can be shared to clients via their calendar. This means the latest information won’t get lost in a wave of emails and clients always stay informed. ## Add rich details to calendar events Corporate travel often involves several clients in the same booking. Each calendar can be updated simultaneously, making the need to email multiple clients obsolete. Nobody misses out on important information. With our [geolocation](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/) feature, location details can be added to calendar events. This means clients can leave when they need to, factoring in things like traffic and weather. ## Get everyone calendar connected With our [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/) feature, an entire company can be linked to a corporate travel management software. There’s no need to authorize new employees – they’re automatically added to the software. Even those who haven’t traveled previously are already connected and don’t need to worry about missing out. --- # Availability API ## Query real-time availability from your application Power your white-label scheduling flows with the world's most capable and reliable availability infrastructure. Get started [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/) > Finding a reliable partner like Cronofy has allowed our team to focus on solving video conferencing challenges without having to worry about solving calendaring and scheduling issues as well. — Emil Ivov, VP of Product, 8x8 ## Combine the availability of multiple people The way that we've designed the Cronofy Availability API it is as simple to find the times for multiple people as it is for one person. Picking one person from a pool is simple. Your app decides who is suitable, Cronofy tells you who is available. But, it doesn't stop there. You can build queries that work with multiple groups, with different availability hours and in different timezones. You can schedule a series of back to back meetings with multiple people. All with one call to the most power Availability API endpoint on the market. [Read the Availability API docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/) ## Embed real-time slot selection Integrate real-time slot selection into your application. Cronofy's high availability calendar sync engine ensures your user's only see times that are actually available. Our customizable date time picker has been built to be embedded in your application so you're in complete control of the look and feel. No iframes just a seamless experience. Need even more control? Our Availability API can be called directly to allow you to carefully craft the experience. [Read the Date Time Picker docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/date-time-picker/) ## Let us handle working hours management Scheduling is not just about tracking when people are free in their calendar, it's also about when they want to be available. Giving your users control over their working hours is crucial to drive adoption of scheduling features. Combining Cronofy's Managed Availability and Availability Rules UI element, you can deliver the controls your users need without lots of dev work. [Read about Managed Availability](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/managed-availability/) Get a free developer account and start exploring No credit card required Get your free account [Speak to a specialist](/book-a-demo-api) --- # HR Tech Trends for 2020 In 2020, HR tech tools are going to become even more embedded into the lives of employers and employees alike. Their mission will continue to be providing the best possible talent experience. In 2020, HR tech tools are going to become even more embedded into the lives of employers and employees alike. Their mission will continue to be providing the best possible talent experience. In 2020, HR tech tools are going to become even more embedded into the lives of employers and employees alike. Their mission will continue to be providing the best possible talent experience. HR tech isn’t just about automating repetitive tasks and saving money anymore, though. It’s capable of much more than that. It allows you to solve bigger business challenges and improve performance. One of the biggest issues employees face is arduous, repetitive tasks. 40% of workers say they spend at least a [quarter of their work week on them](https://www.smartsheet.com/content-center/product-news/automation/workers-waste-quarter-work-week-manual-repetitive-tasks). This [costs the US economy $1.8 trillion every year](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-businesses-wasting-up-to-18-trillion-annually-on-repetitive-employee-tasks-samanage-survey-says-300224177.html). Reducing repetitive tasks helps to improve employee mental health, which then improves their productivity in the workplace. Learning management solutions (LMS) are one way that businesses currently achieve this. They often include internal training systems that employees can work through in their own time. Coaching and mentorship is another way to achieve this. Previously used mostly by top-level executives, it’s now being embraced at every stage of an employee’s journey. Skills marketplaces are a faster way for employees to connect with the right coach or mentor. These re-engage disengaged employees with coaching, upskilling, and reskilling. VR and AR can also be used to train employees and have been used to roaring success. That’s not all, though. Let’s take a deeper dive into 2020’s upcoming HR tech trends and what they mean for you… ## Skills marketplaces Developing employees’ skills is the best way to keep them engaged. It prevents them from becoming disengaged by encouraging career progression and opening up internal opportunities. They’re then more likely to stay. There are several ways that companies can do this: coaching and mentorship is one of them. This can come from internal or external experts in the field they’re looking to learn about. Skills marketplaces connect employees with the right person to train them. Much like vendor marketplaces, they connect users who’d like to learn something new with users who can teach them. The users – in this case, employees – can search for people who have the skills they’d like to learn. They can then connect with a potential mentor or coach via the platform. The whole process makes it faster and easier for employees to connect with qualified experts. Connecting them faster means they can start learning sooner and therefore benefiting your business sooner, too. Skills marketplaces can be set up internally to connect employees with their colleagues within the business. For smaller companies or those looking to offer networking opportunities too, they can use external marketplaces such as Gloat. These offer the same features but a wider range of people that employees can learn from. Employees can find the right person to train them based on the requirements they need, or line managers can choose for them. According to [Josh Bersin](https://joshbersin.com/2019/08/hr-technology-2020-disruption-ahead/), “It can cost as much as 6 times more to hire from the outside than to build from within.” It therefore makes sense for businesses to do as much as possible to keep their current employees over hiring new ones. Retaining employees saves them the stress of job hunting and you the stress of hiring. It also ensures that they’re happier and more fulfilled, and that they have a better quality of life. However, only 43% of companies offer employees the chance to learn from others. That number is up 35% from 2018, but there’s still a long way to go. ## Artificial intelligence (AI) AI has been becoming increasingly common over the last few years, and it’s set to keep growing in 2020.New employees often have lots of questions about the company, their role, and the product. AI can be used to answer these questions. It can then learn from the feedback that employees give on its answer. This ensures it’s always improving so that it can provide the best answers to employees. It can also be used to streamline admin tasks such as booking meetings. 90% of employees claim that they’re stuck with boring or repetitive tasks that [could be automated](https://www.information-age.com/productivity-pains-90-workers-repetitive-tasks-123468116/). These simple tasks cost the US economy billions every year. The more that’s invested in streamlining them, the more time employees get back and the more you could save. AI’s smarter analytics can also be used to track employee engagement. This helps you to find out which employees are disengaged. It can then use this information to predict who might become disengaged in the future, helping you to prevent it. The same insights can be used in exit interviews to look for patterns. If a particular team has a lot of employees leaving, for example, it can look for reasons why this might happen. You can then use these learnings to improve the team. ## Employee feedback surveys Employee feedback is crucial to helping you grow. It helps you to spot what you’re doing right and where you need to improve. You can also keep track of employee satisfaction and engagement – key metrics when it comes to the talent experience. Employee feedback software helps you to do this more effectively. You can automatically send out employee feedback surveys based on how long someone has been at the company, or at set intervals throughout the year. AI analyzes the information within the survey to look for patterns. You can then act on the information it provides, such as offering more remote working options if that’s what many employees want, or rewarding line managers that have been praised for their performance. To further discuss an employee’s answers, you could offer them the chance to book a call or meeting with a HR representative at the end. This is particularly useful if the answers are kept to multiple choice or short responses. While this means more people are likely to fill in the survey, it makes it difficult for employees that want to go into more detail to do so. They may also have issues that they would prefer to discuss in person. A meeting is therefore the perfect way to talk about these things. Allowing employees to book the meeting at the end of the survey means that they’ll book it while it’s at the front of their mind. If the survey software is linked to a HR representative’s calendar, it means that employees can book calls in real time without the risk of anything being double-booked. It reduces the barriers to speaking to someone who can help them with their issue meaning it’s more likely to be dealt with. ## Chatbots Chatbots are becoming more and more common. They’re a big part of [recruitment tech](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/recruitment-tech/), but why stop there? They can be a huge help at every stage of an employee’s journey. For example, they’re the perfect tool to answer an employee’s questions during onboarding. This helps to fill in gaps in the onboarding process. It also saves line managers time, getting new hires up to speed faster. They could even be useful for long-term employees who need a quick answer to a simple question. Chatbots are also useful for training refresher courses. Information and questions can be sent via the chatbot, allowing employees to complete the training in their own time. As natural language processors becoming more advanced, questions won’t have to rely on multiple choices, either: employees will be able to give in-depth answers that can be interpreted using AI. The biggest thing that chatbots can be used for is to streamline admin processes. For example, it could be used to book paid time off from with the HR software employees use every day. ## Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) VR makes employees that work remotely feel more engaged and part of the team, which is important for remote-first companies. However, this technology is both niche and expensive. When done well, though, it can make a huge difference. Anything conducted via VR is more immersive. Training conducted in this way allows an employee to experience the situation first-hand, instead of via video or written accounts like they would in traditional training. They’re therefore more likely to act how they would when faced with a situation in real life, for instance if a customer service representative had to deal with a difficult customer. It can also help employees to prepare for difficult situations. Walmart have done this with huge success. [Walmart thanked VR training](https://fortune.com/2019/08/20/walmart-ceo-vr-training-helped-save-lives-in-el-paso-shooting/) for how its employees handled a shooter in El Paso last summer. Employees had not just studied how to deal with a situation like that, they’d experienced it in a familiar environment using VR. Because of this, managers and employees knew where they needed to be, what they needed to do, and believe that lives were saved because of this. Verizon have used the same software to prepare employees for what to do during a robbery. While neither of these scenarios are things we’d like to think about, they do happen. Employees and customers have a greater chance of survival if they’ve been prepared for what to do in an emergency like an active shooting. VR can also be used to train employees remotely. This reduces the distance between people, ensuring remote employees are more engaged.AR is a cheaper alternative to VR and therefore more accessible, particularly as more of us adopt smartphones with AR functionality. Much like VR, it can be used for training staff in different scenarios. It isn’t as immersive as VR, but it still provides greater visualization and immersion than traditional training methods. It could be used to train interior designers or architects to visualize how something will look based on their specifications. It’s also valuable for office managers looking to rearrange the space to make the most of the space that they have. ## Wellbeing technologies As companies look to retain top talent, looking after them will become increasingly important. Employees want to know that they’re valued parts of the company, and protecting their health and wellbeing is a key way to do this. It also ensures that they’re happier and healthier, and therefore more productive in their role. According to [HR Grapevine](https://www.hrgrapevine.com/content/article/2019-11-21-why-this-billion-dollar-firm-has-invested-in-so-many-mental-health-champions): "2018 research from Accenture revealed that nine in ten workers have been touched by mental health challenges – whether this is directly or indirectly – while 66% have personally experienced mental health challenges. There is also empirical evidence to indicate the widespread prevalence of mental health. With modern day ‘always on’ cultures and 24/7 communication causing an increase in work-related stress for today’s workforces, employers must ensure that staff are given the right support and tools to help floss out their anxieties and improve their employee experience whilst at work. "Employee wellbeing goes much further than providing basic healthcare to your employees. It covers things like mental health, financial health, stress reduction, and employee engagement platforms. The more you do to benefit your employees’ health, the bigger the difference it can make to your business. Users of Virgin Pulse, the biggest employee engagement platform on the market, have found that using the software increases employee productivity by 65% and reduces compensation claims by 29%. The difference tools like this make can’t be understated. Wellbeing technologies also help companies to attract and retain more diverse employees. Employees with mental health issues are more likely to get help because it’s more accessible to them. Disabled employees know that their healthcare issues will be looked after, regardless of how complicated they may be. Investing in these new forms of healthcare demonstrates to prospective candidates that you’re invested in your employees and there to help them. Over time, you can attract and retain more diverse employees, creating a happier and more productive workforce. It’s been proven in the past that businesses that are more diverse are also more profitable. It should therefore be a no-brainer that it’s worth investing in employees’ wellbeing. ## Collaborative tools As more and more of us work remotely, collaborative tools that allow teams to stay in touch with each other will become more and more important. This goes a step beyond what Slack or even Zoom enables us to do. It’s things like several people editing a document at the same time, such as with Notion. It’s treating everything that happens with a remote-first mindset to ensure that wherever someone is based, they feel like a part of the team. Connecting the software you use helps with team collaboration. For instance, connecting Slack to Zoom so that Zoom meetings can be scheduled from within Slack. Simple things like this can save employees small amounts of time that add up over the year to big savings. All-in-one workspaces help employees to keep everything in one place while making it as easy as possible for them to collaborate with their team members. Tools like Notion take what Google Docs can do to the next level. It’s easy to design tables, Kanban boards, and more, all from the same interface. The navigation is also easier as you don’t need to leave the tool and come back into it to find the document you’re looking for. Tools like this also have more advanced search options, making it easier to find documents and files quickly. ## Conclusion Better connecting to employees so that you understand their needs inside and outside of the workplace will be key in 2020. The closer the relationship you foster with your employees, the more you’ll be able to help them. You can find out what they want and need from you by using employee surveys and analyzing the data from it with AI. Some of what you can do includes better employee healthcare, remote working options, and better training options. All these things offer a better talent experience, helping you to retain employees of all levels. The more value you offer your employees, the more likely they are to stay. Upskilling and reskilling employees keeps them engaged and helps you to retain employees and their soft skills. This saves you money on hiring, allowing you to invest it in other areas of the business instead. Good employee experience doesn't just help with retaining talent, though. It can also be used to attract talent. The better the employee experience, the higher the ratings on sites like Glassdoor will be and the more applications you’ll receive when you hire. This means you get more people to choose from and a higher quality of candidates. The person you choose will then go on to become a valued part of the team who will hopefully stay for a long time. The steps you put into place to protect your employees’ wellbeing are crucial to attracting and retaining that talent, though. A poor talent experience will mean they’ll leave and go to your competitor, putting you at a disadvantage. Every piece of technology you invest in – or don’t invest in – reflects how you want your employees to feel. It has an impact on their productivity levels, their skills, and their overall wellbeing. It’s therefore crucial that you choose the right piece of technology for your company not just for now, but for in the future, too. --- # Join Cronofy at the BambooHR virtual summit Cronofy is the only integrated interview scheduling solution in BambooHR. Come hang out with us at the summit for a chat on how you can automate scheduling for your team. ## Supercharge your BambooHR ATS Now you can spend less time coordinating interviews and move candidates faster through the hiring process with BambooHR's elite interview scheduling partner. [Talk to a specialist ](#form-6abe99dd-e8c7-443d-b56f-61d5a9ecfae4) [Try free for 2 weeks](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/bamboohr/#setting-up-the-bamboohr-integration) ## Reduce your time-to-hire **Schedule interviews for hiring managers** **Book into blocked calendars** **Schedule panel interviews** **Rotate interviewers** ## Schedule interviews inside your ATS From screening calls to hiring manager interviews and even loops, you can schedule any interview right inside your BambooHR account. You no longer need to request a candidate's ability, simply allow them self-schedule into meetings with your team using a booking link. [Talk to a specialist](#form-6abe99dd-e8c7-443d-b56f-61d5a9ecfae4) ## One booking link, multiple rounds of interviews Now, you can allow candidates to book themselves into multi-part interviews in one go. No need to chase interviewers for free times, Cronofy automatically generates a booking link with their free slots in real-time for your candidate. [Request early access](#form-6abe99dd-e8c7-443d-b56f-61d5a9ecfae4) ### Schedule any interview in minutes ## Got questions? ## Talk to a product specialist to see how you can reduce time-to-hire with Cronofy inside BambooHR --- # The future of events: Q & A with Alex Patriquin, CEO of Circa We caught up with Alex Patriquin, the CEO of virtual and in-person event marketing platform, and Cronofy partner, Circa. We caught up with Alex Patriquin, the CEO of virtual and in-person event marketing platform, and Cronofy partner, Circa. *We caught up with Alex Patriquin, the CEO of virtual and in-person event marketing platform, and Cronofy partner, **[Circa](https://www.circa.co/blog/circa-update-calendar-integration-rsvp-status?utm_source=Circa&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=future-of-events&utm_term=1-4-2021)**. Alex is someone in a unique and expert position to comment on the new and evolving events landscape. His company has also been on a journey of their own adjusting to the new normal this year!* #### **Hi, Alex, great to chat with you. Would you like to begin by just introducing Circa and what your company does?** **‍***Alex* (Circa): Circa is an event marketing management platform, designed to help marketers track and record return on investment (ROI) for virtual, hybrid or in-person events. Our customers are larger enterprises, Salesforce and Honda for example. They often host hundreds, even thousands of events in a normal year and Circa provides the platform to run all of them. The calendar, the budget and the ROI. We like to think about event calendars as a digital marketing channel – which is a pretty fresh approach. ‍ #### ‍**I know you’ve been on an incredible journey this year – the event landscape was turned upside down in March when the pandemic took hold. Can you walk me through it?** Before COVID, Circa had a different name and a different mission. We were EventGeek and did in-person event logistics. We were founded in 2016 and over the course of the four years between founding and COVID, we did about 240,000 events on our platform. Primarily to big enterprise businesses with large numbers of events, ranging from hosted conferences to sponsorship, speaking engagements and exhibits. With COVID, we’ve changed a lot, not just our name. We have really evolved our platform to be more focused on using events like digital marketing and less so on all the in-person logistics, like travel and shipments. In terms of the general landscape, we’re kind of leading the way a little bit. It’s been a fast but necessary transition. If you think about pivoting since March and managing to relaunch in August – that’s the timeline in which the transformation happened. Now we do both virtual and in-person events! ‍ #### ‍**In terms of the competitive landscape and other companies and professionals in the events space, are people adjusting quickly enough? What does the future hold?** **‍**Yeah, it’s a great question. I think the landscape is still evolving. A lot of event marketers (and I’ll speak to event marketers specifically since that’s really what we know), when they’re in that corporate world, they are doing events as a marketing channel. A lot of event marketers have experimented with virtual events this year. And as we look into 2021, they’re setting up experience or hybrid events. The results are really great in some ways, and not quite the same as in-person in other ways. For example, they’ve got greater reach than they had before and greater engagement but in some ways there are impacts of not being able to meet in person. That’s kind of the big question. When we do have a vaccine and whenever we’re able to get back together in person the really big question is, how much are in-person events going to be digitized? To what extent will we continue to do virtual events? How will they have a role in the event calendar and event marketing portfolio? Those were questions that we helped to answer, and we’ve definitely seen strong traction since our relaunch. Both from existing customers, utilizing our different platform and new customers, coming in to ask those questions and get answers from our platform. We’re really excited about the future because we do think it’s an opportunity for event marketing across the board, to catch up with digital marketing. The latter being so efficient and trackable – it’s grown year after year for decades. Whereas event marketing, I think, has been stuck in the stone age in terms of digital transformation, and this is a great leap forward for it. ‍ #### ‍**You're really seeing it as a channel of its own now, a marketing channel. Let’s explore that further, this idea that events are perceived as periodical or sporadic perhaps, for a lot of companies.** I think there are a lot of event management professionals who have thought about events as a one-off. Happening one by one, without a more cohesive, holistic approach. They may have a big user conference they might go to, a lot of trade shows where they’ve set up exhibits or a sponsorship, but there hasn’t been a connected strategy. For example, seeing the events calendar as kind of a customer journey. How to best move a prospect from digital marketing to a live event, engagement, back again, and then ultimately to a sales meeting. That’s the kind of customer journey that we’re now able to track and help our customers to map out. This is because we are able to have a lot more reliability and accuracy in the tracking. If the event was in person, you might have somebody just swinging by an exhibit booth. They’ll maybe drop off a business card and chat with the sales rep for five minutes. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that happened if you were looking at the analytics from an in-person event. If you’re lucky, there’s a very determined event marketer who tries to grab everything in a spreadsheet and then does their best to upload it into the CRM. But in most cases, those spreadsheets are incomplete, and the event marketing team is just too busy producing the event to worry about the tracking. The data doesn’t get captured. In a virtual event environment, it can be automatically captured because it’s all running in the browser. We’re able to use data signals like that, to bring a lot more reliability and accuracy and to measuring the ROI of the events portfolio. ‍ #### ‍**Do you have any predictions, any other predictions for 2021 and beyond?** I’ve seen some statistics that [97% of marketers think hybrid events will become more prominent in the future](https://blog.bizzabo.com/future-of-event-marketing-stats) and [73% of marketers will do their first hybrid event in 2021](https://meetingspotlight.com/article/stats-73-event-planners-will-run-hybrid-event-2020). Which is a little scary. Hybrid events are new and they’re difficult. It’s almost like putting on two events in one. You’ve got people dialling in virtually and then people there in person as well. There’s actually quite a lot of difference in terms of what experience is needed and the extra workload. The teams that produce the in-person events don’t necessarily have those event technology, live streaming production skills. They can bring in agencies, but ultimately, they want to be planning and strategically thinking through their events calendar from the beginning with that insight. It’s a big challenge, but it’s also very exciting because it does mean we could take advantage of the benefits of virtual and the benefits of in-person at the same time, at least theoretically. Some of the enterprises we’re talking to are questioning whether they host a hybrid event – as in one single event – or if it’s a hybrid calendar where there is an in-person event. Then maybe a few days before or after there’s a virtual version – so it’s best of both *‍* #### *‍***That sounds like a viable and good option. It could work better because you kind of focus on one type at a time, but actually you get all the benefits and the global reach** Certainly it’s simpler to produce that way. I think we'll see more companies thinking about a hybrid events calendar, versus a single hybrid event. ‍ #### ‍**Well, as you've mentioned calendars, perhaps now's a good time to kind of talk a bit more about the role of scheduling and calendars in virtual events and obviously our partnership together** **‍**Calendars, I believe are really the foundation of a successful events program. As I’ve said, enterprise scale companies tend to have thousands of different events, but their focus is often on a huge end user event. The leaders in the market of event management technology have really focused on this “bigger is better” idea and getting more registrations and more ticket fees that come from that. As we enter this new world of virtual and hybrid events everything should be connected now. It’s no longer about just one-off and “bigger is better” but more about a customer journey. And that customer journey from an events perspective happens on a calendar. For us at Circa, the foundation is really event calendars and that’s the most popular activity that we see on our platform. Thousands of sales reps look up the events that are happening in their territory or region and search around dates. I believe that it is a really important paradigm shift from thinking of events as singular activities. Event technology is shifting focus to think about events as connected customer journeys, with more of a calendar focus. **‍** #### **So if I understand, the idea is to be able to dip in and out of more events instead. Attending an event in person is a big deal. You have to get hotels, plan the timeout of your day - sometimes even a whole week out of the office. Whereas actually in this new world or landscape, you’ve got more flexibility. I know that there's an online, three-day product marketing event coming up. I just added to my calendar the sessions that I wanted to tune into, and I'll see where I am on the day, but hopefully I'll get to attend some of them** Exactly, and you might go to that product marketing event in January or revisit it in March. It’s not as time bound anymore. And it's not as much of a one-off experience, but more of a continuous journey that you could even come back to. ‍ #### ‍**How do Cronofy, calendar sync and scheduling fit into that? I know that you've got some ideas of how we could support you in the physical events, but you've also got ideas about helping with virtual?** I think as the event marketing teams are looking to 2021 and beyond, they are looking at calendars as kind of the foundation for planning their programs and for experimenting with hybrid. That’s where Cronofy comes in. Looking at the availability of team members to execute an event, where it fits on a calendar in terms of other commitments as well, like competitor partner events and then confirming that people are actually available. Getting on their calendar to present or to plan attendance. All of that, as well as scheduling one-on-one meetings during a hybrid event is based on calendars and we use Cronofy to automate our connection to people’s calendars. At the end of the day there’s two certainties in life: death and taxes. Both are really about time. It’s money. And we only have so much of it. Calendars are how we measure our time, for our personal lives, but also for our professional roles. It’s really the ultimate source of truth in the single record for people as they work and live. It’s essential to be on the calendar to make something happen. And to have that insight to plan for something to happen, Cronofy handles all the complexity of working with a Microsoft Outlook or Google calendar and makes it very easy for us to have that kind of facile back and forth interaction between individual’s calendar and the company’s plans. ‍ #### ‍**So with Circa’s clients, it's enhancing their experience of working with you as well as potentially the attendees at the event, it's improving their experience as well. There's a chain of efficiency that our partnership with you enables?** Absolutely. For an attendee, who's looking to have a meeting with a sales rep or who's looking to put an agenda on their calendar directly. Having that connection automated to their calendar instead of them having to manually send emails back and forth for scheduling or copying data from events to their calendar, which is clunky. Cronofy makes all of that seamless. With in-person, there are lots of moving parts to coordinate and temporary meeting rooms or theatres – it was great to find a solution that could manage all of that complexity for us. ‍ #### ‍**That’s fantastic. I know I find it frustrating adding event sessions manually. Often it doesn’t work the first time either. If calendars are synced and it’s seamless based on just choosing the sessions you’re interested in that would transform the process and save time.Finally, have you seen anything in terms of technology adoption and changes in it over this past year?** Well video is a big one. We can’t be in person, so we need live streaming and a replaced solution. I think that that’s really the key thing with virtual. Then there’s a lot of experimentation happening around matchmaking and meetings and exhibit booths. It’s not really possible to virtually walk a trade show floor yet. And this is one area where anything virtual doesn’t quite have the same impact. When you walk down a trade show aisle, you have to spend at least five to 10 seconds in that trade shows exhibit booths sphere. Even if you’re just walking through it. With the virtual event exhibit booth, it can be a nanosecond. You just could click and leave. So matchmaking I think is really important between attendees and exhibitors and even attendees and attendees. That’s based on kind of an interest graph, but it’s also based on availability. And some tools are experimenting with integrating calendars to streamline the availability part of that equation. And that’s been nice. I haven’t seen it done really well yet, but I think it’s kind of a no brainer of something that will need to develop even further. At some point we’ll have kind of a calendar passport when we go to one event and we simply just provide our availability. You wouldn’t have to go back and forth over email at all. A tool like Cronofy can play a big role in that. Another thing is polling. It’s something that’s been under-utilized at in-person events for a long time. You have people who may already be on their phones and not paying attention when you asked them to bring up the polling landing page after. We’ve heard the most effective way to get survey responses after an in-person session or an event is to have staff just stand there with a handful of t-shirts in one hand and a survey and ask for quick poll responses. With virtual, in the moment polling is such a seamless thing and there’s such a low friction to attendees just clicking a response on a window that’s popped up in front of them. We’ve definitely seen increasing conversion rates on polls that happen at real time virtual events. You can also look at time spent in session, ideally in an active window assessment. And the kind of influence that the event may have had on achieving goals and becoming a sales opportunity, then converting into a customer. Those I think are the big ones but there’s lots of experimentation going on for tracking. All that engagement online – it’s so much more trackable. It definitely becomes part of the marketing conversion funnel and is much easier to attribute. This opens up lots of opportunities for marketers. That’s something we’re really championing at Circa and the idea of mapping event attendance using the calendar is something we’re pursuing a patent for – it’s really exciting, the relationship between calendars and events has a bright future! ### **About Circa** **‍**[Circa](https://www.circa.co/?utm_source=Circa&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=future-of-events&utm_term=1-4-2021) is the B2B event marketing platform for transitioning in-person event and meeting programs to virtual, with a focus on customer engagement, and events as central to the customer experience. Circa adds virtual event measurement capabilities, ensuring that enterprise marketing and sales teams can adapt existing event programs effectively and unify engagement data across all their events, whether they are hosting or sponsoring an event, and whether events are in-person, virtual or hybrid. --- # What Skills Do Today’s Tech Leaders Value Most? This is a guest post by Maddie Davis from Enlightened Digital. Today’s job market pushes professionals to market themselves in the best possible light to demonstrate their most valuable assets to employers. Because workforce demands constantly evolve across every industry, it can be difficult to know which skills you should focus on developing and highlighting for potential employers. Nevertheless, there are a few tried and true skills that have always proven beneficial, particularly in the technology industry. Let’s see what some of the world’s top tech executives have had to say about four critical skills, so that we can better understand why they’re so highly valued. This is a guest post by Maddie Davis from Enlightened Digital. Today’s job market pushes professionals to market themselves in the best possible light to demonstrate their most valuable assets to employers. Because workforce demands constantly evolve across every industry, it can be difficult to know which skills you should focus on developing and highlighting for potential employers. Nevertheless, there are a few tried and true skills that have always proven beneficial, particularly in the technology industry. Let’s see what some of the world’s top tech executives have had to say about four critical skills, so that we can better understand why they’re so highly valued. *This is a guest post by Maddie Davis from **[Enlightened Digital](https://www.enlightened-digital.com)**.*‍ Today’s job market pushes professionals to market themselves in the best possible light to demonstrate their most valuable assets to employers. Because workforce demands constantly evolve across every industry, it can be difficult to know which skills you should focus on developing and highlighting for potential employers. Nevertheless, there are a few tried and true skills that have always proven beneficial, particularly in the technology industry. Let’s see what some of the world’s top tech executives have had to say about four critical skills, so that we can better understand why they’re so highly valued. ## Communication Top-performing leaders understand that strong communication skills are the key to lasting success. Confidently speaking up for yourself, and expressing yourself clearly and concisely, will make it easier for others to recognize you as an authority. Alphabet CEO Larry Page promotes this skill throughout his company by hosting frequent “TGIF” employee conference calls. These calls give employees a chance to discuss ongoing company objectives, action items, update the status of previous discussions and gain insight into what the executive staff is doing. Strong communication skills are important at every stage of your career, whether you’re an entry-level employee or a C-suite executive. According to [SHRM's 2016 Job Satisfaction and Engagement Survey](https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/Documents/2016-Employee-Job-Satisfaction-and-Engagement-Report.pdf), 48% of employees considered frequent communication between employees and senior leadership to be crucial to their ability to stay engaged. Collaboration is the cornerstone of a productive workforce, so keep improving your communication abilities! ## Management There is a vast difference between people who view their job as a paycheck and those who view it as a core part of their lives, particularly in management roles. According to Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, “Sub-par managers will yield nothing but sub-par results.” Hurd explains that it’s essential for managers to “understand how their teams must engage inside and outside the company to deliver maximum value, and stay focused on making that strategy come alive for customers and prospects.” This skill is built on a genuine passion for your position and requires an ability to see beyond your daily objectives. Insureon CEO Ted Devine has a similar view. He claims, “there is a huge difference between people who really want to help the company improve and those who treat it like a job.” This difference should be an assessment factor when identifying talent. Balancing skill and will is essential in forming a strong workforce. With engaged management comes a more satisfied team. 65% of employees trust their CEOs more after hearing their success stories, and 70% reported that they trusted their CEO more after knowing the obstacles they’ve overcome. This sort of transparency can only be developed through honesty and openness. Whether you’re on the executive team or in a mid-level position, sharing and engaging with others can be incredibly valuable in building confidence and turbocharging your professional growth. ## Curiosity Regardless of your industry, you’ll probably agree that your work process is continuously changing. To stay relevant, a willingness to adapt and explore new methods and opportunities is essential. Manta CEO John Swanciger emphasizes the value of curiosity in identifying valuable employees, stating that the curious are the ones who “ask good questions and search for creative ways to accomplish tasks...They seek out knowledge from different parts of the business and apply what they learn to their daily responsibilities.” Maintaining a hunger for learning benefits not only you and your personal growth, but also adds tremendous value to the company you choose to work for. Business thrive on innovation. If you can provide that, it won’t go unnoticed. The desire to expand one’s abilities goes hand-in-hand with curiosity. Identifying your natural strengths and applying them to further excel in your role shows that you’re interested in growth. As Peanut CEO Michelle Kennedy puts it, “It’s no longer acceptable to say ‘that’s not my area, I do X.’” Versatility is one of today’s most valuable skills. This is not to say that specialization is no longer valuable, but understanding how to use your specialty to help other parts of your company can amplify your professional value. This is especially true in digitally-focused jobs; a [Deloitte study](https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/focus/human-capital-trends/2016/human-capital-trends-introduction.html) indicates that leadership roles now focus more on enabling “project-based” teamwork. Your specialization will mean more to your company if you can use it to solve a variety of problems. ## Work Ethic Success doesn’t come without hard work and motivation, which is why developing a strong work ethic can take you far. Most top top tech leaders exemplify this trait. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for example, often worked 12-hour days for weeks at a time in the early days of Amazon. Mark Cuban is also very open about the incredible amount of effort that went into building his success. On his blog, he writes about going seven years without a vacation and routinely staying up until 2 a.m. to read about new software when he first started his company. Finding something you love, and using that passion as motivation to achieve your personal best, will make you a standout in any profession. Professional success involves more than hard work and long hours – you also need to develop a proper work-life balance to avoid professional burnout. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg famously leaves work at 5:30 every evening to spend time with her family, but that doesn’t mean she slacks off. To balance her professional success with her family relationships, she starts her day at seven in the morning and returns to work once her kids are put to bed. The leaders we look up to today weren’t born to be CEOs or business titans – they worked hard to secure the powerful positions they hold today. This serves as a reminder that with the right skillset, determination and support, anything is possible. As the old saying goes, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. We encourage you to find your passion and build on it to grow into the best version of yourself, so you can achieve any goal you have in your sights. Maddie Davis is co-founder of [Enlightened Digital](https://enlightened-digital.com) and a tech-obsessed female from the Big Apple. She lives by building and re-designing websites, running marathons, and reading anything and everything on the NYT Best Sellers list. --- # Talking to David Smith about the perfect hiring process David is the UK’s top speaker on People Engagement and business performance. We spoke with him about our recent survey of 6,500 candidates. David is the UK’s top speaker on People Engagement and business performance. We spoke with him about our recent survey of 6,500 candidates. *[David Smith](http://www.davidsmith.uk.com)** is the UK’s number one speaker on People Engagement and business performance.* *‍*In light of our [recent survey of 6,500 candidates about their expectations](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/), we wanted to talk to him about our findings and more. Read on for the full conversation below. ### What was your initial reaction to the research? I think one of the things that particularly senior employers forget is that when you’re in a hiring process, you’ve got to spend a proportion of your time wooing people. Recruitment is partly about assessing whether people fit and whether they’re competent and so on, but the other half is attracting them. And part of the attraction is speed – the speed at which you respond to the first touch, the second touch, the third and so on. That’s particularly relevant if you have a process where a candidate is interviewing with a number of executives. If candidates need to see a certain number of people as part of the process, it’s got to be sleek and quick. Otherwise the good candidates quickly get frustrated and think, “Oh, this is just such a pain it’s taking too long” and off they go because the best people always have connections anyway. ‍ ### The wooing is clearly important – but how do you make that scalable? Well, I suppose at one time it was all about somebody who held the process for you within the organization. It may have been an HR person or a PA or some key person who linked everybody together and went and made sur people were available when they needed to. Today this process has to be electronic, hasn’t it. CVs are no longer on paper, they’re all online, the process is online and it simply has to work. One of the things that impressed me most recently is the whole vaccination process. Before it started, I thought to myself: this is going to be a nightmare. You won’t be able to get onto the site and when you do, it’ll crash and when you try and book it, it’ll throw you out. But it works absolutely perfectly. And I think you need a front end to the process that feels like your company culture – efficient, friendly, speedy. ‍ ### Why isn’t use of tech like this more common? Sometimes people reference the idea of not wanting to lose the “human touch”, what do you think of that? Let me make a comparison. After much resistance, I recently moved to Xero for accounting and actually it just works. What used to take me three hours of completely terrible jobs now takes 10 minutes. I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner. And I think the issue for executives is that I’m not sure that they’ve thought about how they can streamline some of this stuff. There’s an arrogance that says, well, we’re a great company, we have a great culture, a great image – so people must want to come work for us. But the part of your culture and your image is what the individual experiences. So if they experience a brick wall, they’re going to walk away and you might have a brilliant culture and be a brilliant company. But if your front end is not up to these standards, it’s not going to work. The human touch is what happens when the appointment has been booked, isn’t it? So if it’s easy to book those three or four sessions with the various executives, that’s what the human touch is. People have actually read your CV, they know who’s coming and they know what time you’re turning up. And there they are, ready to receive you, and they welcome you. That’s the human touch. I don’t think people expect you to have a phone call with them to book an appointment. That’s a waste of time. When people insist on speaking to you about everything: you know, they’ll say, when are you available? I’m available in the morning. No, I’m not available the morning I’m available in the afternoon. No, I’m not available. And on it goes and I’m sat thinking, “well, what you’re going to tell me in that conversation, I already know” – but you feel you’ve got to have a conversation. I think we could have dealt with this much quicker, and we could have had the proper conversation down the line, which is what we’re going to do anyway. So to me, I think streamlining a process and then being really human and friendly at the end when they get to the real interaction is what it should look like. ‍ ### What else is key to that “wooing”? Well, I think people have got to know at the start what the components are. When will they get an answer because most good candidates who are in the superstar bracket will be playing with two or three options. Sometimes there’s a sort of pseudo-confidentiality about the process, where we don’t tell the candidate that they’re one of three, or then down to the last two or it’s neck and neck. And why don’t we tell them that? Because it would be advantageous for them to know, when instead, during those days when they don’t hear anything, they think: what’s happening, what’s gone wrong? Have they lost interest in me? And that can be the day before you have another phone call that says: what about this? If there is some delay, the smart people find some way of filling it with something. So maybe it’s a visit to a site or place of production. Maybe it’s a visit to a key client or a customer. Keeping people warm is a crucial part of the process. You know, I used to regularly take people out for dinner because not many people do that. And when someone says: come and see us at the weekend and I’ll show you the area if they’re moving somewhere or let’s go out for dinner to a nice restaurant, it is a point of difference. And you’re behaving like a human being as opposed to an employer, If this was a friend of the family you would stretch yourself around to try and make it work. So to be human rather than professional is a subtle change of mindset. ‍ ### What else struck you from the research? I thought the difference between genders was interesting – because you’re basically saying that this affects women in the US even more. I can’t say I’ve noticed that before but it illustrates that there is a statistical difference. Therefore, if you’re in a situation where you are trying to redress your balance of employees, if your process is turning off a particular category of person then the message is writ larger, isn’t it. When I looked at the statistics and saw women in the US were more likely to kick out because of inconvenience, you begin to think, well, is it because they’re juggling with kids? Is it because they’re the one who picks them up from school rather than the father? I don’t know. I mean, there’s all sorts of mixtures nowadays of how that happens, but your recruitment process needs to say: if you need to work around the habits and routines of children, then we’ll work around that. So I think it’s about how is your recruitment process family friendly? I guess it’s not something that most employers would come out with, is it really, it’s not a natural sentence. One of the things that has come out of COVID is that so many more people have now revealed that they’ve had a break at lunch to eat with the family or they’ve dipped into homeschooling. Normal life has gone on alongside work life. And I’m hearing loud and clear that in the brave new world afterwards, there will be a hybrid model where there’ll be some working in an office and some not. There’ll be some home time and some not. And I think there’ll be some family flexibility time that wasn’t there before. The smart people are already all over it and realize it’s a point of difference. And I think it needs applying to the recruitment process too. ‍ ### And what about the differences between regions? I think there are real country differences that are about country culture. One of the best books I’ve ever read on countries is [Riding the Waves of Culture](https://uk.bookshop.org/books/riding-the-waves-of-culture-understanding-diversity-in-global-business/9781529346183), which graphs how people behave in different places. It’s hilariously funny, but so true. How you approach it depends whether you’re a global business or a national business. If you’re a global business then you have to perform to the standard of the highest expectations. If you’re purely recruiting domestically and I would build something that fits your own country. ‍ ### What else would you recommend to people looking to improve in this area? Well, I think one of the things that I would recommend any company is that the mindset must come from the CEO. The CEO needs to tell everyone: I expect that everybody who books an interview will not cancel. And if they do, I will want a personal report. So if you think about making this a fully computerized process, if somebody doesn’t carry through an interview, I would want a report on my desk. Because this elevates it to the point of “Hey, the CEO thinks this is important” because otherwise I think the mindset says that whatever’s urgent and important inside the business takes priority over hiring. Another one is that hiring is part of your brand. I think people see brand in terms of marketing, they see it in terms of culture, but they don’t always align it to how they hire. I think getting people to understand that hiring is part of your brand, I think is a key. What the research said to me was that people who jump out of the process because they are frustrated, will trash your brand verbally and say, “well, don’t apply to them because they were a pain in the…” We know that a bad story travels a lot faster than a good one. That’s just the nature of life. *We recently surveyed 6,500 candidates in the US, UK, France and Germany. **[Read our report](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/)** on how interview scheduling impacts candidate experience and a business’ ability to hire.* --- # Calendar Sync for Equipment Rental Software Make it easier for your customers to rent equipment using calendar sync. ## Calendar Sync for Equipment Rental Software Make it easier for your customers to rent equipment using calendar sync. ## Keep everything organized From camera equipment to record a big day, to a DJ deck for a party, to a digger for a building site, sometimes it makes more financial sense for customers to rent items instead of purchasing them. This is great for businesses that want to lend out these products, but it can be difficult for companies with a large inventory to keep track of where everything is 24/7. Rental equipment software can help to keep inventory organized, but when that software is calendar connected, it can save both companies and customers time and money. ## Prevent duplicate reservations When equipment rental software is calendar connected, customers can see if a product they need is in stock in real-time and reserve it online. They can then choose how long they need the item for. The item’s calendar is then updated straight away so there’s no risk of two customers reserving the same item. ## Make changes in real-time Should a customer need to cancel their reservation, software can be set up so that they can alter or delete it from their calendar service. The product will then become available straight away for someone else to reserve. This reduces the margin of manual error and means that there’s less chance of loss of business. Alternatively, if a customer needs the item for a little while longer, the software can be set up so that customers can extend how long they need the equipment for from their calendar service of choice. ## Give staff more time with customers Automating tasks such as inventory management means that staff have more time to spend dealing with customers and fixing any repairs. This creates a better customer experience and means customers are more likely to come back time and time again. --- # How Does Cronofy Work? Discover how Cronofy's Calendar API and Interview Scheduling tool revolutionize recruitment and streamline scheduling. Learn about our unified APIs, real-time availability, and intelligent sequencing features that save time and improve efficiency for businesses and recruiters alike. We want to give you more time to work on what's really important. That’s why we created our original calendar API, and that’s why we’re always developing new features for you to use. This guide will explain a bit more about how our products work together to help you build the best scheduling software for your users. That way, you can develop new features, attract new customers, and grow your business...all faster than if you'd built the integration yourself. Here's a quick look at the structure of our products and how they work. We want to give you more time to work on what's really important. That’s why we created our original calendar API, and that’s why we’re always developing new features for you to use. This guide will explain a bit more about how our products work together to help you build the best scheduling software for your users. That way, you can develop new features, attract new customers, and grow your business...all faster than if you'd built the integration yourself. Here's a quick look at the structure of our products and how they work with the major calendar services and your software: ## Calendar API Our [Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) is at the heart of what we do. It connects your software to the five largest calendar services – Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook.com, and Microsoft Exchange (including on-premise).If you were to build these integrations separately, it would be a costly and time-consuming process. You'd also have to maintain those connections and ensure your software works with past, present, and future versions of those calendar services. Before you know it, you’re drowning in calendar APIs and the sea is only getting deeper. We built our calendar API so that you don’t need to worry about all of that. It connects to all major calendar services. You work with one API, not five. Instead of it taking months to build calendar sync into your software, it takes weeks. Maybe even days. Not only that, but your software will appeal to a wider range of customers because of its ability to adapt to their favorite calendar software. ## Enterprise Connect [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/) gives real-time scheduling features to everyone within a team or organization. Instead of each person needing to authorize calendar connectivity individually, everyone is added automatically. This means that team members new and old can benefit from calendar sync right away. Your customer has full control over who is calendar connected and when. That means that if only the sales team needs calendar sync to organize their meetings, it’s quick and easy to set up. Should the marketing team need calendar sync at a later date, the administrator can add them just as easily. There's no need to rely on individuals to authorize calendar access. ## Data security and location (US or EU) You can choose between having your data hosted in the US or the EU. Both sites abide by even the strictest data security rules and are GDPR compliant. They also offer the same features and functionality. ## Availability API Our [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) builds on top of our real-time calendar sync. Each time a request is made to someone’s calendar, it searches for that person’s availability in real-time. This prevents any double-bookings and creates a far better user experience. When using our Availability API, you also have the option to add [buffers](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/buffers-availability-api/) around the times your software searches for. These ensure that there’s space between each calendar appointment. For instance, if you want to ensure that interviewers have half an hour to prepare before an interview, you can add this to the call to our Availability API. Buffers can be set for before and after an event. They won't appear as calendar events themselves, but any other events scheduled will work around them. ## Intelligent Sequencing [Intelligent Sequencing](https://www.cronofy.com/intelligent-sequencing/) is really where all of our components start to come together. It works out the best day and time for a series of events based on users’ schedules. This is perfect for organizing multi-part interviews. No matter how many people or parts are involved in that particular day, it will do all of the heavy lifting for your users. Say your customer wants to hold a multi-part interview that consists of a meeting with HR, a discussion with the team leader, then a discussion with the team. Once the interview panel's calendars are connected, the interview organizer selects the order in which these parts need to take place. We work out the rest. ## Real-Time Scheduling [Real-Time Scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/real-time-scheduling/) is a UI component that works with all of our other features to provide a simple scheduling experience. When you add it to your software, you can create a streamlined booking experience for everyone involved. While it was initially built with the HR market in mind, our customers have used it within booking solutions in healthcare, customer service, education, and much more. Say you have 10 interviews to schedule. You need to speak to the interview panel to find their availabilities, then reach out to each of the candidates to find which time best suits them. If you reach out to them all at the same time there’s always the risk of two candidates picking the same slot. Then the scheduling headache continues. Using Real-Time Scheduling, your customers can avoid all of that. Real-Time Scheduling plugs into your software. Once the calendars of the interview panel are connected to Cronofy, their work scheduling the interview is done. If they use Enterprise Connect, they don’t need to do a thing. Once the interview panel is connected, all the interview organizer needs to do is login and select the members of the panel. Real-Time Scheduling will then find times that work for every member of the panel and only offer those times. Should a member of the interview panel change, or a new appointment arrive in their calendar, it updates automatically. The hiring manager can then generate a booking link. They can send this booking link to as many candidates as they need to. It takes the same amount of time to schedule one interview as it does one hundred. Hiring managers and interview panelists are given more time to prepare for the interview itself. You can brand the Real-Time Scheduling plugin and the authorization page to match your design. This ensures that your branding is consistent while still offering your customers the power of Cronofy. ## Conclusion As our product is an API, this post suggests just a handful of the features you could add to your software. Whatever your scheduling needs are, we’re here to help. ‍[Get in touch](https://www.cronofy.com/learn-more/) to discuss your product's needs, or [try our API for yourself](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer). Discover how automated scheduling and calendar sync can transform HR. **[Download the white paper](https://www.cronofy.com/how-automated-scheduling-and-calendar-sync-can-transform-hr/)** --- # Interviewing Sara Benwell about first impressions in financial advice Sara is a freelance financial journalist who has written about financial advice. We spoke to her about our recent First Impressions report. Sara is a freelance financial journalist who has written about financial advice. We spoke to her about our recent First Impressions report. *[Sara Benwell](https://muckrack.com/sara-benwell/articles)** is a freelance financial journalist who has written about financial advice in publications from The Sun and Daily Mail to Pensions Age and Strategic Risk.* We spoke to her about our recent [First Impressions report](https://www.cronofy.com/firstimpressionsreport), looking at how financial advisors make an impact on potential clients before their first meeting. ### What’s your initial reaction to the findings? While some areas of the financial services industry have modernized, financial advice hasn’t done and seems locked in the past. Historically, there might have been good reasons for that because statistically, people who seek financial advice are likely to be older. However, I think that’s an argument that would have been fair enough 15 years ago and I don’t think it is now. I think most financial advisors would say that high up their priority list is to target more young people in their thirties and forties. There’s an over-reliance on face to face. There’s not enough technology. If you look at someone like Nutmeg, they’ve got their customer journey sorted. Even though they’re doing investment, which is extremely complex, they’ve managed to make that so simple and customer friendly. If I’m a person thinking about getting financial advice for the first time, and I go to a financial advisor’s website, I’m probably targeting one of their key services, triggered by a life event – for instance, seeking retirement planning at the age of 55. So why aren’t those services signposted across the top? Wingate’s site feels as if it is most geared towards consumers, with case studies, clear information about services and a focus on professional excellence. Most of the other websites were confusing, hard to navigate and drenched in jargon more suited to a B2B market. ‍ ### What do you think about the way the current perception of financial advice affects peoples’ decisions? I think financial advice is incredibly important. I’ve written umpteen articles about why financial advice can help people to manage and grow their assets and make strategic financial decisions. For instance, one of my regular arguments is the significant impacts taking advice can have on pension portfolios where the cost is usually far outweighed by the benefits. But the fact is that most people think that it’s expensive. They think that it’s for rich people. They think of the big scandals that have happened over the years, so they’re mistrustful of the industry as a whole. And then, even if they overcome all of those barriers, they come to a website that tells them virtually nothing. I think if you take the trust barrier as the key thing you’ve got to overcome, then advisers that want to grow their customer must: - Be upfront about what your costs are and how you charge. - Make a big point of your independence and back this up with facts and information. - Have good, obvious, upfront case studies that show the value of advice to real people and help build that trust. ‍ ### How do you see the relationship to new technology entering the market? The question that financial advisors need to ask themselves is: are we going to be the people who modernize, who make ourselves friendly and accessible, who explain what’s going on, who do all of this, or is a tech company going to come in and try to do it with things like robo-advisors? Tech companies have identified that financial services are multi-billion pound industries and have come up with solutions to try and carve out some of this revenue. For instance, robo-advice, pensions consolidators such as Pension Bee and challenger banks such as Starling and Monzo. If financial advisors don’t embrace technology, they will be next. Admittedly this might be a referral-heavy industry. But experience still matters – if somebody recommended three financial advisors to me, the firm that wins my business will be the one with the best customer journey. Those firms with murky websites, poor customer contact firms or long response times must be losing clients. If it’s not easy to book appointments, that’s crazy. As is that over-reliance on: “we’re a person to person company, therefore we don’t want to use technology.” They want one of their financial advisors to email you, but hang on a minute, they’ve got a huge group of IFAs (Independent Financial Advisors), all with different specialisms, how can they select the right one without understanding my needs and drivers. It seems obvious that a journey where you select what you are looking for and then are put in touch with the right adviser is key. ‍ ### How do you feel changing demographics is having an impact here? I’d put serious money on the fact that the average peak age for seeking financial advice is somewhere around 50 – between maybe 45 and 55, because that’s when peoples’ incomes peak. In maybe five year’s time, that demographic is going to be full of millennials. So think about that. Does your user experience have anything that would appeal to that audience and make them trust you with their money? Do I trust a company that doesn’t embrace technology to always be offering me the best solutions? More critically, if a firm can’t get customer journeys right – will I trust them to use technology in their own services to have the best full grasp of what’s available in the market? If I want to invest, I need to believe that an organisation is sophisticated enough to use basic technology to evaluate all the options available to me. *[Download our free report](https://www.cronofy.com/firstimpressionsreport)** for more information on the first impressions leading UK financial advisors make on their prospects.* --- # How to schedule interviews faster and supercharge your recruitment team’s performance In recruitment, speed means everything. Recruiters can't afford to waste time on scheduling for complex, multi-person interviews. Our Head of Talent Mark Harbottle shares his tips on how to make the process faster for high-performance recruitment teams, saving recruiters one day a week. Plus, see our new Lever integration in action, demonstrated by our Head of Sales! In recruitment, speed means everything. Recruiters can't afford to waste time on scheduling for complex, multi-person interviews. Our Head of Talent Mark Harbottle shares his tips on how to make the process faster for high-performance recruitment teams, saving recruiters one day a week. Plus, see our new Lever integration in action, demonstrated by our Head of Sales! What could your team achieve with 300 extra hours a year per recruiter? **20x ** faster interview scheduling **Cronofy + Lever ** Seamlessly add scheduling to your Lever platform **300 ** hours saved a year --- # 11 Office Tasks You Need to Automate We all have tasks at work that we don’t want to do. Sometimes we can bribe our co-workers with burritos to do them for us, and other times we have to suck it up and get on with things. But, for some things, there is a third option. You can always automate them. Failing to automate repetitive tasks can cost businesses as much as $13,000 per year per employee. That’s a whole lot of burritos. We all have tasks at work that we don’t want to do. Sometimes we can bribe our co-workers with burritos to do them for us, and other times we have to suck it up and get on with things. But, for some things, there is a third option. You can always automate them. Failing to automate repetitive tasks can cost businesses as much as $13,000 per year per employee. That’s a whole lot of burritos. We all have tasks at work that we don’t want to do. Sometimes we can bribe our co-workers with burritos to do them for us, and other times we have to suck it up and get on with things. But, for some things, there is a third option. You can always automate them. [Failing to automate repetitive tasks](https://hrtechweekly.com/2017/04/04/why-hr-pros-need-to-embrace-automation/) can cost businesses as much as $13,000 per year per employee. That’s a whole lot of burritos. Automating repetitive tasks, meanwhile, makes for happier employees and less [workplace stress](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/prevent-workplace-stress/). Here’s a look at some of the office tasks you can automate. ## Organizing meetings Meetings can be huge time sinks. It doesn’t take much to go off on a tangent that turns a ten-minute meeting into an hour-long one. While I can’t offer any advice on how to stop this from happening, I can offer you some advice on how to speed up the organizing of the meeting. Coordinating schedules can be a huge hassle. When it’s done using calendar sync, that hassle is taken away. The process is quick and seamless. Everything from booking to cancelling to rescheduling meetings can be done instantly. Everyone gets notified as soon as any changes occur. If your HR software uses [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/), even external attendees can be notified of any changes. Software can even be set up so that bookable rooms and resources can be reserved for your required meeting, and you can organize meetings around the availability of the equipment that you need. Now that’s a time-saver. ## Sending meeting reminders When a meeting is booked weeks or even months in advance, it’s easy to forget about it. That’s why adding appointments to your calendar is so important. It prevents double-bookings and means you have all your appointments in one place. Setting up meeting reminders means that you won’t be late even if there’s traffic – calendar services such as Apple Calendar can factor in traffic when sending you [time to leave notifications](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/). ## Booking paid time off Everyone loves time off. Booking it should be a seamless process. It should also be easy for staff who have time off to notify their colleagues about when they’re out of the office. Syncing paid time off management software to employees’ calendars allows managers to cross-reference who’s off and when. This helps them to make more informed decisions and ensure that there’s always someone around should there need to be. ## Reporting Reporting can be a tedious part of any job. Automating data entry makes it a faster and less tedious process. Excel macros, for example, can save employees from needing to enter the same information hundreds or even thousands of times. ## Replenishing supplies From stationery to ink cartridges, offices get through a lot of equipment. Getting hold of suppliers to reorder equipment can mean sitting on the phone twiddling your thumbs while you sit on hold. With modern technology you shouldn’t need to do this. Printers can connect to suppliers and automatically order new equipment when ink or toner is close to running out. Other supplies, such as pens and notebooks, can be set up as a subscription so that there’s always a fresh supply around the office. ## Hiring contractors From a broken toilet to a leaky roof, there’s always a need for contractors. The fastest way to find one is online. When contractors connect their calendars to a booking software, businesses can book someone in seconds. This appointment can then be added to the contractors’ calendar automatically. ## Paying bills Paying bills is necessary for any business. When it’s automated, not only do you not need to worry about it, but you can assure your suppliers that payment will come out on a particular date. This gives both you and them peace of mind. ## Signatures Signatures are difficult online. When you’re responsible for a large team or company, it can feel like you’re always signing this or that. If you need to email a contract to someone, you have to print the paperwork out, sign it, scan it back in, then email it across. This process isn’t necessary any more, though. Some programs now allow you to generate an e-signature that allows you to sign something electronically. You get to save some trees and it’s minimum effort. Perfect. ## Email responses Automated email responses can be used for many things. They’re handy to notify customers that you’re not ignoring your emails, you’re just topping up your tan in Cyprus; they can confirm that a customer has filled in a form on your website or signed up to your mailing list, or they can acknowledge a customer query about a particular topic. Customers appreciate that you’ve acknowledged their email – even if it’s an auto-response – and you can reply to their email properly when you have the relevant information to share with them, or you’ve finished topping up your tan. ## Collecting customer information It’s important to keep an up-to-date record of your customers’ details. It’s also important for a customer to not feel like they have to repeat the same information each time they speak to a different department. That’s why [CRMs](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/calendar-sync-crm/) are so useful – every team member has access to the latest customer information. They can also track the last time a customer was spoken to or contacted, and all of the previous points of contact you’ve had with the customer in question. ## Filtering candidates Applicant tracking systems (ATS) allow you to automate parts of the hiring process to make it easier, faster, and better-organized. One of the key ways an ATS can do this is by filtering candidates based on the requirements for the role. The ATS can be set up to search for keywords or phrases in a candidate’s CV, then filter out anyone that doesn’t match the criteria. The hiring manager then has a smaller pool of applicants to shortlist for interview. ## Conclusion These are just some of the office tasks you can automate to make your average day easier and more productive. While many of the office tasks that can be automated are often simple, they also tend to be repetitive and boring. Getting rid of them – or in the very least making them easier – makes for happier employees. Saving just a few minutes every day adds up over the course of a year. This makes a huge difference to an employees’ productivity, and therefore the business’s yearly outcome, too. What office tasks do you automate, and what difference has it made to your work life? Let us know on Twitter! ## How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? **[Find out in our interview scheduling survey](cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/)** ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # Cronofy awarded Best Support and High Performer in G2’s Winter 2022 Report The G2 Winter 2022 Report is live, and Cronofy has been awarded with five badges! The G2 Winter 2022 Report is live, and Cronofy has been awarded with five badges! G2 has recognized Cronofy as a High Performer for Calendar technology and Online Appointment Scheduling in their Winter 2022 report, as well as awarding us Best Support for our outstanding customer service! G2 is the technology industry’s most trusted source for customer reviews. The site uses information from peer-to-peer reviews and aggregates it to score business software products on The Grid. The four quadrants in a G2 Crowd Grid are Leaders, High Performers, Contenders and Niche. Every quarter, G2 ranks products by customer satisfaction based on user reviews and market presence based on market share, seller size, and social impact. G2 has awarded Cronofy with the following accolades: - **High Performer for Calendar technology (Small Business)** - **High Performer for Calendar technology (General)** - **High Performer for Online Appointment Scheduling (Small Business)** - **High Performer for Online Appointment Scheduling (General)** - **Best Quality of Support** Our CEO and Co-Founder, Adam Bird, had the following to say: > “We’re so proud of the reputation we’ve built in the few years we’ve been in business. The recognition we’ve earned from G2 in their winter report is a testament to our outstanding customer support and continual improvements to our products, which reflect how closely we listen to our customers and respect their feedback. G2 is the most respected reviews site in the tech industry, so we’re delighted to receive these accolades – it validates our hard work and innovative approach to our products and services.” Thank you to our customers for their feedback – we couldn’t have done it without you! You can download the [full Winter 2022 G2 report here.](https://research.g2.com/market-reports) --- # Talking to Hung Lee about candidate expectations Hung is Curator of Recruiting Brainfood, one of the most powerful HR and recruiting communities. We spoke with him about the findings of our recent survey. Hung is Curator of Recruiting Brainfood, one of the most powerful HR and recruiting communities. We spoke with him about the findings of our recent survey. *[Hung Lee](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunglee/)** is Curator of **[Recruiting Brainfood](https://www.recruitingbrainfood.com/)**, one of the most powerful HR, talent and recruiting communities in the world.* In light of our [recent survey of 6,500 candidates about their expectations](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/), we wanted to talk to him about our findings and more. Read on for the full conversation below. ### What were your initial thoughts about our findings? I have long believed that scheduling is a subterranean problem in recruiting and a real part of why people get annoyed – it’s hard work, it’s unnecessary, and it’s basically high effort, low value. It feels like: why is it so hard to do? So **it doesn’t surprise me that it has a huge impact on candidate experience.** Particularly interesting was the high rate of US women that drop out because of scheduling issues. As a group, they probably feel this most because of the additional domestic responsibilities that they may still take on. But even if women will feel it most, it affects everyone. The movement to remote working has revealed a lot of iniquities that people have always had to deal with. So for instance, the person that’s most able to be a “good candidate” is usually a single person living on their own, aged 25 to 28, without kids, without a partner — without any distractions. There’s going to be a new set of diversity challenges with remote working, but I think the overall case is that remote should really help. There are tons of people who were previously locked out of the workforce because of the need to be on premise. And that was felt disproportionately by people that were economically impoverished, physically challenged or had caregiving responsibilities. If you think about an old three round interview, that means three rounds of childcare organization, or three rounds of having to figure out where to put grandma. So when you do remote interviews, those responsibilities don’t go away — but the requirements to really change your lifestyle go down. ‍ ### What is your view on the results on human touch vs automation? Candidates like automation, but they also want a human touch – which seems like a paradox. But I think candidates don’t really care about what’s actually happening in the background, they just want to avoid a stressful ambiguous period of not knowing what’s going on. Most candidates know when they send an application, it’s not going to be answered automatically. And they also know they’re not going to convert every application into a job offer. A great part of why this information isn’t forthcoming is because of the lack of capacity from a human worker to give it to every candidate. Automation can remove a lot of that ambiguity and fill the gap, freeing staff to give a better human touch when there is more commitment later in the process. So I’m a believer that the human touch is significant when there’s already an investment from the candidate. If I’ve just spammed in an application and I get an automated response, fair enough. But if I put energy into a call with somebody, I’d probably expect some sort of reciprocal response, even if I’ve been rejected. When people say they want the human touch, they don’t want a fully automated experience but it’s likely based on where the candidate is in the process and they’re more likely to have hostility towards a non-human response when they feel that they’ve contributed more. ‍ ### So how does that extend throughout the process? We’re starting at a very low bar of expectations – and that gives plenty of space to improve the experience. Because it’s already at such a low bar, but we will make a mistake if we feel that every single interaction a candidate would make requires a human being and a human response. There’s good evidence to suggest that at the very early stages of the recruiting process, the candidate actually doesn’t want human interaction. And the candidate asks different types of questions to an automated service than they would do to human beings – often more direct and candid. If talking to a chatbot, they’d say things like “what’s the salary”, “do I need a visa?” They basically do the extraction of information in a much more straightforward way, with no requirements, small talk, no expenditure of energy. There’s also no sense that you’ll be jeopardising your application by asking whatever questions you want. So human beings don’t need to be at the beginning. We need to be much further back in the process, what candidates need as they go through is timeliness and transparency. And they’ll be satisfied with that. ‍ ### Where do businesses start designing the ultimate candidate experience? I’m very forgiving of companies that make errors, simply because when you have a vacancy it’s usually not “designed”. Someone’s left and you need to replace them, you get the role advertised and it’s like a complete chaos. So I think in that circumstance, it’s suboptimal, it’s not ideal, but it’s also forgivable. First thing for a framework is to analyse your own capacity before you go out. How many man hours are available for this recruitment? If it is zero, then your first thing to do is try and create that time before you go out and communicate. There’s some basic internal analysis before you go external. But one of the big things in recruiting generally is it feels like an external activity. You rush out and you talk to candidates and we bring people in and stuff. But oftentimes the most important conversations you’ll have is going to be internal. ‍ ### You studied anthropology. Tell us about what you learned there that you apply to recruitment and HR. What’s interesting in HR and recruiting is that we’re starting to scratch at the level of some anthropological understanding. Some of the concepts that have long been familiar in anthropology, social psychology, sociology are percolating into the world of work. We’re starting to use terms like workplace culture and values but to be honest with you, I can’t help but think we’re very immature playing around with these ideas in the corporate setting. I think we’re getting to the point where we’re going to embrace that a little bit more. So one thing we hopefully have learned from the agile movement generally, is not to fear the failure but rather fear the overdesign. ‍ ### What would be your top recommendations to anyone looking at the area of candidate experience? Implement a chat bot, no doubt. Because you want to give the person the ability to interrogate the factual information. I would also implement technology which allows a candidate to access where they are in process through self-serve. There’s no reason why that’s an email, they should just be able to log in and check where they’re at. I would implement a scheduling solution so they can choose the most appropriate timings I’d give them some choice as to how they are assessed. Meaning an ability to potentially vary the assessments as suits. And finally, something that really improves candidate experience is access to people who are not part of the recruiting process that are existing employees. *We recently surveyed 6,500 candidates in the US, UK, France and Germany. **[Read our report](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/)** on how interview scheduling impacts candidate experience and a business’ ability to hire.* --- # A new Cronofy report shows financial advisors failing at first impressions in responsiveness and scheduling Every service business relies on the charm of its people – but how good are financial advisors at making things easy for potential clients before meeting? Every service business relies on the charm of its people – but how good are financial advisors at making things easy for potential clients before meeting? Every service business relies on the charm and expertise of its people – but how good are financial advisors at standing out and making things easy for potential clients before that all important first meeting? [Download the full report](https://info.cronofy.com/hubfs/first-impression-report-2021.pdf) A new report from Cronofy reviewed the quality of those first moments across four key areas, and discovered that, while leaps have been made in content and design, there is low sophistication in the approach to scheduling and responsiveness. The overall effect: marketing that makes a strong promise but disappoints in the followup. Furthermore, a lack of technology is surely making the process both less satisfying and more laborious behind the scenes. [Download the full report for more findings](https://info.cronofy.com/hubfs/first-impression-report-2021.pdf) ### **Design – how easy is it to make contact and provide details?** **‍**Surprisingly, half of the FT Adviser top ten only supplied an email address and phone number to make contact. 60% provided some kind of form, but only two used that form in a more advanced way, explicitly asking what time would be good to speak. ‍ ### **Content – how does supporting content provide key info and distinct brand?** **‍**This was the second highest average, and yet 30% still didn’t even present basic details like pricing within easy reach. At the top level, use of video and strong visuals created the greatest distinction, but saw only four brands take home all the available marks. ‍ ### **Responsiveness – speed and quality of reply** **‍**Shockingly, 3 of the FT Adviser top 20 didn’t reply at all in two weeks, even after we chased the enquiry. None of the companies reviewed delivered an instant response (easy to implement with basic technology) and accordingly, none secured the full points for clear evidence of automation to allow advisors to focus on the human element. ‍ ### **Scheduling** **‍**This category revealed the greatest gap between the average level of performance and the standards at which advisors are operating. Only two advisors even suggested specific times for meeting (which would allow us to immediately confirm and schedule. Every other example either offered no times at all, or just possible dates. There was no evidence of using technology to immediately offer and confirm appointments (let alone building it into the website as self-service.) > **Cronofy Co-founder and CEO, Adam Bird describes the missed opportunity here:** “In a people business, it’s easy to think of tech as undermining the human touch. In fact, the opposite is true: it can make simple interactions like scheduling effortless and convenient for both sides, so your team can focus on making the best impression possible.” ‍ Financial journalist Sara Benwell commented on the findings [in an interview with Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/financial-advice-sarah-benwell-interview/): *“The question that financial advisors need to ask themselves is: are we going to be the people who modernize, or is a tech company going to come in and try and do it? This might be a referral-heavy industry but experience still matters – if somebody recommends three financial advisors, it would still be the best experience that wins.”* [In another interview](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/first-impression-jonathan-mcalister-interview/), Jonathan McAlister of Asset Planning Corporation added his thoughts: *“I was surprised at the lack of sophistication in responses and scheduling because you would think that’s one of the most important parts. When you enquire about working together and don’t get a response back, it quickly feels like maybe I’m not valuable to them.”* *“You always think: well, if I just give them a call and talk to them, that will be the quickest way to get it sorted. But in reality, they would rather have finite options presented to decide what works best. Being chased with phone or email tag that takes days is a good way to turn them off.”* [Download the full report](https://www.cronofy.com/firstimpressionsreport) for more information and advice on how leading financial advisors can make a better first impression. --- # Why Your Legal CRM Needs Two-Way Calendar Sync 84% of law firms want to increase their revenue during the next year. They also want to decrease their costs. How can these two factors work together? Employees lose an average of 520 hours a year to tasks that could be automated. These wasted hours are the perfect place for law firms to increase their revenue by working smarter, not harder. The more administrative tasks you automate, the more time you have to spend on billable hours and the more money you have the potential to make. 84% of law firms want to increase their revenue during the next year. They also want to decrease their costs. How can these two factors work together? Employees lose an average of 520 hours a year to tasks that could be automated. These wasted hours are the perfect place for law firms to increase their revenue by working smarter, not harder. The more administrative tasks you automate, the more time you have to spend on billable hours and the more money you have the potential to make. 84% of law firms want to increase their revenue during the next year. They also want to decrease their costs. How can these two factors work together? Employees lose an average of 520 hours a year to tasks that could be automated. These wasted hours are the perfect place for law firms to increase their revenue by working smarter, not harder. The more administrative tasks you automate, the more time you have to spend on billable hours and the more money you have the potential to make. Using a CRM that’s calendar synced is just one way to achieve this. Calendar sync means that any changes that happen in your CRM automatically sync to your calendar provider, and vice versa. ## No manual duplication Many legal firms still duplicate information manually between software and even handwritten schedules. Not only is this time-consuming, but it’s also open to errors. These errors can, at best, cause confusion. At worst, they can provide a poor customer experience and lead to a loss of revenue. When so much could go wrong, why are some firms still wasting time on manual duplication instead of providing a better customer experience and saving themselves time? When information automatically syncs between your CRM and your calendar, errors won’t happen. Nobody can forget to update a change of date in multiple locations. Since everything syncs in real-time, you won’t get caught out by double-bookings, either. ## Save time on admin tasks…and make more money Admin tasks take up 48% of lawyers’ time. This reduces the money that you can earn. It also reduces staff morale – after all, they signed up to help people, not to do admin. Automating tedious tasks increases employees’ engagement with a role. They’re then happier in their position and more likely to stay. This contentment with their position is also reflected in how they deal with customers, creating a better customer experience. Customers are then more likely to return, leave a higher NPS, and recommend your services to their network. When you save hours every week, it gives you more time for what really matters: client work. The more client work you do, the more people you can help. You also have more time to spend with current clients. Both of these factors mean that you can earn more revenue, helping you to grow your firm faster. ## Better customer experience 35% of appointments are scheduled out of hours. While that statistic doesn’t just apply to lawyers, it doesn’t mean that your clients don’t want this ability too. Failing to offer it means you’ll lose potential clients to your competitors that do offer out-of-hours bookings. Online booking is a faster process for everyone involved. Your firm spends less time and money on administrative and scheduling processes, while potential clients don’t need to find the time to make a phone call. They can book an appointment at their own convenience and pick a time that best suits them. You also don’t need to cross-check calendar information or different sources; everything is synced with your software to decrease the risk of information or appointments being duplicated. A better customer experience also means that your NPS and other review metrics will improve because clients will be happier with the service that they receive. It also means that, because of your improved reputation, you can charge clients more, further helping toward the goals of increasing revenue while decreasing costs. ## Conclusion When your CRM automatically syncs with your calendar, it removes the risk of errors. Everything syncs across in real time, so you’ll never find two clients booked in for the same time or an internal meeting overlapping with a personal appointment. Providing clients with online booking offers them a better customer experience, helping to increase referrals and positive reviews. Your staff, meanwhile, stop wasting so much time on admin and have more time to spend on providing customers with the best experience possible. --- # What is Pair Programming, and How Can You Benefit From it? Pair programming is a software development technique where two developers work together to write code. One common analogy is to imagine you’re a pilot. You’re in charge of the overall direction of the plane, while your copilot is responsible for the navigation and can offer tips along the way. Every so often, your copilot takes the reins for a while. Pair programming is a software development technique where two developers work together to write code. One common analogy is to imagine you’re a pilot. You’re in charge of the overall direction of the plane, while your copilot is responsible for the navigation and can offer tips along the way. Every so often, your copilot takes the reins for a while. Pair programming is a software development technique where two developers work together to write code. One common analogy is to imagine you’re a pilot. You’re in charge of the overall direction of the plane, while your copilot is responsible for the navigation and can offer tips along the way. Every so often, your copilot takes the reins for a while. With pair programming, two developers sit at the same desk – or screen share, as our remote-working developers do. The pilot writes the code (and is often referred to as ‘the driver’), while the copilot (‘the navigator’) reviews the code as it’s written. Every so often, the pair switches roles. [A recent study](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2333697_The_Costs_and_Benefits_of_Pair_Programming) found that pair programming “improves design quality, reduces defects, reduces staffing risk, enhances technical skills, improves team communications and is considered more enjoyable” than programming solo. Our small team of developers often pair program, especially when working on complex projects like launching a new product. ## Why we love pair programming at Cronofy **Everyone gets to learn** Sharing knowledge is an important part of self-development for every developer. When we teach a new skill, it helps reinforce our understanding of it while simultaneously helping someone else grow and acquire new knowledge. It’s a win-win situation. It doesn’t matter what we do or how senior we are – there is always someone who knows something that we don’t. Being paired means having the opportunity to share knowledge, allowing the company and its development team to grow faster together. **Code quality is better and there are fewer bugs** It often takes multiple iterations of a code before it’s ready to go live, which can easily turn a day’s worth of work into a week’s worth of work. When someone reviews code as it’s written, there’s less of a need for so many iterations – errors can be picked up on as the code is written instead. This means that there’s less for QAs to pick up on, less bugs to fix later on, and overall less work for everyone. Because of this, it reduces development costs and means that new products and features can be launched faster. **There’s less chance of programmer’s block** We’ve all had moments where we stare at a screen unsure what to write next, so we check Facebook or make a cup of tea. With pair programming, there’s less chance to get stuck because there’s always someone to troubleshoot with when you hit a wall. If you do, you’ll be able to bounce questions off each other and find a solution quicker. **It breaks up the pace** Staring at a computer screen writing code all day – no matter how much you enjoy it – can become lonely and repetitive. Switching up the pace can spark new ideas and stop the day from dragging. ## Potential roadblocks **It doesn’t work for everything or everyone** There will always be instances when working alone is more efficient than working with someone else. It’s important to use pair programming only when it’s worth doing and not for the sake of it. For example, at Cronofy, developers don’t pair up every day. They do it when they want to share knowledge or work on a new product. **People need their own space** When two people are squashed together in front of a laptop or monitor for days, things can get cozy. You both want to see the screen, but you don’t want to get too close. Instead of both hunching over the same laptop, you could use an external monitor, project the code onto a screen, or screen share. That way, you can both see what’s being written without things getting too cozy. You could even pair program remotely! **Management isn’t always keen** Sometimes the biggest roadblock you can face when it comes to pair programming can be from management. They don’t always understand why it’s more effective, or worse, they don’t believe in code reviews! When you encounter someone like this, it’s important to relay the facts to them. The more facts you can give them about pair programming’s effectiveness, the more likely you’ll be to win them over. **Egos can get in the way** Pair programming only works if you can both communicate how you feel and what direction you think your project needs to take next. If someone doesn’t communicate well, or believes they know best, the project can fall flat before you’ve even started. If you feel you’re working with someone who doesn’t communicate well, ask them to articulate their ideas in a different way. Keep asking questions until you feel that they’ve given you the details that you’re after. The more questions you ask, the more you’ll begin to understand where they’re coming from. If you can still ask ‘Why?’ or ‘How?’ to their suggestion, they haven’t given enough detail. It’s important to not let ego get in the way when pair programming. However, when one person has more knowledge than the other, this can be a side effect. If someone within the pair believes that their way is the best – and only – way, ask them to explain why. Try to reason with them and explain to them alternative points of view. If you feel it will help, bring in other members of the team that can contribute to the discussion. ## Conclusion Much like Marmite, pair programming isn’t for everyone. However, it’s becoming increasingly common in developer-led environments because of the many benefits that come with it. Having someone who can offer support and with whom you can brainstorm ideas with helps to prevent procrastination. It also helps get the job done quicker and more efficiently, and who doesn’t want that? Have you adopted pair programming into your development team? What works well for you, and how do you think things could be better? We’d love to hear how you feel over on [Twitter](https://x.com/cronofy)! ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Embedded Scheduling for Business Communications Users can book appointments, schedule interviews, and organize meetings all from within your software when you use Cronofy. ## Embedded Scheduling for Business Communications Users can book appointments, schedule interviews, and organize meetings all from within your software when you use Cronofy. > Cronofy’s documentation, sample apps and support is excellent and has enabled a fast and painless calendar integration. Not having to integrate with different calendar providers and having almost no maintenance to speak of has allowed us to focus on delivering scheduling solutions based on the real-time availability of our users quickly. — David Wennergren, CTO & Co-founder, Teamtailor ## Embedded scheduling for business communications - Schedule appointments from within chatbots, text messages, surveys, and more - Book follow up calls based on users’ [real-time availability](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) - Avoid double-bookings by syncing booked appointments to users’ calendars in real time - Provide a better scheduling experience for your users and their customers ## Examples of better scheduling - Patients can book appointments with doctors via a chatbot - Training sessions can be scheduled from within HR software - Team meetings can be booked around employees’ schedules - Customer satisfactions surveys can be sent via text message, then follow-up calls scheduled with a representative - [Interviews](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/interview-scheduling/) – of any kind – take up to 99% less time to organize - Connect students with mentors based on both their availabilities - Employees can schedule calls with HR after feedback surveys ## Embeddable UI elements - Provide scheduling without interrupting the flow of a conversation with the [Slot Picker](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/) - Show users which calendars they’ve synced – and allow them to connect and disconnect easily – with Calendar Sync - Let users choose their working hours with Availability Rules. Give them the chance to block out uninterrupted time for deep work and lunch breaks - Give users back their time – appointments can be [booked based on the availability](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) of multiple attendees and an available meeting room ## Real-time calendar sync - Sync to any combination of the five major calendar services: Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook.com, Office 365, and Exchange (even on-premise) - Work with past, present, and future versions of each calendar service - Users can sync as many calendars as they need to - Send trackable calendar invites to ensure someone has added an appointment to their calendar ## Speed up development time - Release new features faster - Say goodbye to ongoing maintenance - Spend more time building features, not troubleshooting - Rest assured that Cronofy is built with [privacy and security](https://www.cronofy.com/security-performance/) as a priority, not an afterthought - Connect to the calendars of an entire organization --- # Back to Basics: What is Software as a Service (SaaS)? Software as a Service (often referred to as SaaS) is a type of software that’s become popular with both businesses and consumers alike. Everything from email clients and calendars to payment services and booking systems can be classed as SaaS, depending on how it’s built. Software as a Service (often referred to as SaaS) is a type of software that’s become popular with both businesses and consumers alike. Everything from email clients and calendars to payment services and booking systems can be classed as SaaS, depending on how it’s built. Software as a Service (often referred to as SaaS) is a type of software that’s become popular with both businesses and consumers alike. Everything from email clients and calendars to payment services and booking systems can be classed as SaaS, depending on how it’s built. Cronofy is a SaaS startup that connects users’ calendars to software via APIs. But what does SaaS actually mean? Why are both businesses and consumers embracing this model over traditional package software? ## What is SaaS? SaaS is a form of cloud computing where everything a user needs is hosted in the cloud and made available to users via the internet. There are two other forms of cloud computing, which we’ll cover in a future blog post: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). SaaS has taken over both B2B and B2C solutions because of its ease of use, scalability, and accessibility. Twenty years ago, if you wanted the latest version of a product, you’d have to purchase it on a CD-Rom and install it onto your hard drive. Installation could take hours, and within a year or two your product risked being out-of-date. These days, if you want the latest version of a product you may not even need to install it onto your hard drive. You definitely won’t need a CD-Rom. ## Everything is hosted in the cloud Upgrading computer hardware is a costly investment, and it doesn’t take long for new hardware becomes obsolete. When companies use cloud-based software, they don’t need to worry about having the most powerful computers to run the latest software. SaaS products work on even the smallest of hard drives with the tiniest of RAM. The SaaS company are responsible for any maintenance, so there’s no waiting around for software updates to install – updates are pushed out for everyone at the same time. ## It’s more secure Hosting data in the cloud doesn’t mean compromising on data security. With a traditional model, there’s an entry point into the server for each of employee, but with SaaS, there’s one secure, unique entry point for all. ## It allows different products and services to connect Many SaaS products can connect to each other using APIs. Cronofy, for example, connects software to a user’s calendar using calendar APIs for Google Calendar, iCloud, Microsoft Office, and Exchange. If these products weren’t SaaS, this wouldn’t be possible. ## It’s accessible on multiple devices Because everything is hosted in the cloud, the product, and any information stored, are accessible on any device. A Buffer post can be added or edited on your work PC, your laptop on your way to a business meeting, or from your phone when you’re at home. They’ll all be sent out to your social media channels at the same time regardless of how they were added to your Buffer queue. Should your device fail, you won’t lose any data. You can pick up where you left off on a different device straight away. #### Sometimes products can be downloaded from the cloud In some – but not all – cases, products can be downloaded from the cloud and onto your hard drive so that it’s still accessible offline. Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are examples of this. #### Pricing is flexible SaaS pricing scales based on usage. How it’s worked out depends on the business model, but it can be based on the number of users or API calls. This means that pricing isn’t a one-size-fits-all model and is therefore as accessible for individuals and small companies as it is for big corporations. ## Conclusion As the digital world continues to grow, SaaS will continue to grow alongside IaaS and PaaS. Taking advantage of SaaS allows businesses to spend less time and money on server maintenance, and gives smaller businesses chance to use the best software for the job without the huge price tag that used to come along with it. ## Find out more about Cronofy Find out more about how the Cronofy API works. [Create your free account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) today! ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # Go from meeting chaos to automated processes Unified calendar availability and full meeting scheduling lifecycle powering 180,000+ companies to keep agents, systems and teams on the same tempo. ## Go from meeting chaos to automated processes in days, not months Unified calendar availability and full meeting scheduling lifecycle powering 180,000+ companies to keep agents, systems and teams on the same tempo. [Get a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/process-automation#2e90477c1e33) [Get started](/book-a-demo-api) ![Graphic displaying three of Cronofy's capabilities: Availability, full scheduling lifecycle and meeting intelligence being made possible by Cronofy's temporal infrastructure including Agents, Systems and Teams.]() Powering time for over 180,000 companies ## Give your current processes the gift of time Teams work in calendars, systems hold critical data, and AI agents are starting to take action - but none of them work on the same timeline. The result is manual operations, broken workflows and agents that can't reliable execute. Cronofy plugs into your existing systems such as your CRM or HR software so your AI agents and teams can automate availability control, full scheduling lifecycle and meeting intelligence without switching tools or learning new systems. ### For recruitment Automate candidate scheduling in Workday, Paycor, SAP SuccessFactors, SmartRecruiters and many more. --- ### For productivity Schedule meetings from where your teams work using our Scheduling Agent in Copilot, Claude, Slack or Teams, or our standalone Scheduler. --- ### For AI agents Control availability and leverage scheduling workflows natively for your AI agents using our MCP server and API. ## Remove time friction in your systems of record and agentic workflows Integrated experiences ## Stay within your systems of record Your teams and agents don’t care about timezones, calendar syncs, or rescheduling nightmares, they just want meetings to work. But when you build it yourself, you’re the one stuck explaining why a meeting disappeared or why the conferencing link is missing. With Cronofy, your users and agents can book any meeting in seconds. Let attendees self-book in their local time, and automatically sync invites, rescheduling, meeting room and conferencing details back to your systems of record. Natural language scheduling ## Schedule from wherever you work Go beyond your system of record and schedule from where your team works, such as Teams, Office, and Slack. [Discover our Scheduling Agent](/scheduling-agent) ## Achieve results quickly with our intuitive capabilities Multi-person scheduling ## Automate any meeting , no matter how complex Personal scheduling tools break beyond 1:1 calls. Cronofy works no matter how many people, timezones, or calendar providers tools are involved. Send personalized scheduling links, let attendees self-book in their local time, and sync everything back to your systems. No manual updates, no double entry. Great experience ## See ROI in Days, not Months Impress candidates, leads, or patients with a seamless booking process that results in more meetings booked sooner. Give your team an intuitive workflow they’ll actually use without requiring months of training. Agentic AI ## Deliver tangible productivity gains from Agentic AI You’ve seen your fair share of failed AI pilots: too complex, operating in silos, requiring more time to monitor or fix than it saved... Use our Scheduling Agent within Copilot, Claude, Teams or Slack. Or let your AI agents leverage our MCP server and API. Our temporal grid was designed to deliver simple and tangible gains, not fuzzy promises. ## Leverage our Temporal Grid ## Intuitive to use, powerful under the hood Any Cronofy product you’ll use is designed to be intuitive, with all the complexity hidden away in our powerful temporal grid. Connect to the calendars and conferencing your organisation use with the right level of access, one by one or at an enterprise level. Check real-time availability no matter the number of participants. Stay secure, compliant and in your data jurisdiction of choice. ## Start small, expand over time Cronofy is modular by design, offering a collection of intuitive products that plug into your existing systems, all connected through a shared temporal grid. Start with scheduling interviews in seconds, then improve team productivity across sales teams and beyond. Let your teams use our ready-to-use scheduling agent, or give your own AI agents the tools to handle availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence via our MCP server and API. > The versatility of Cronofy’s Scheduler is pretty remarkable. Multiple teams with very different needs can take advantage of Cronofy’s seamless interface and integration with our existing tools. I couldn’t imagine doing my job without it. — Christopher Snider, Community and Clinic Success Manager, Tidepool Consult with an expert ## See how Cronofy can fit into your process After submitting the form, you’ll be able to book time with a member of our team. In a 30-minute call, we’ll walk through your specific use case, show relevant workflow examples, and answer any technical or product questions. --- # What HR/TA Leaders Are Really Thinking About AI/Automation in Hiring Discover insights from HRTech Europe on the balance between efficiency and job security, with a focus on the role of AI/Automation in streamlining interview scheduling. Learn about the challenges and opportunities talent leaders face in an evolving hiring process. Cronofy's live voting exercise at HRTech Europe gathered HR/TA sentiment about AI and automation in the interview scheduling process. Read on to discover our findings, and insights from conversations with recruitment professionals. The conversation around AI/automation is no longer about "if" but "how" and "when." As we observed at the recently concluded HRTech Europe event, talent leaders are torn between efficiency and job security but overwhelmingly agree interview scheduling is one part of the hiring process that could benefit from AI/Automation. Overall, this exercise revealed nuanced perspectives, offering valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities facing talent teams in 2025. Let's explore these themes. ![TA-leader-at-HRTech-Europe-interacting-with-a-Cronofy-rep]() ## TA Leaders Want Change But Face Resistance > I know the importance of automation but my day is derailed because I end up spending so much time ticking the box on manual tasks. It's very difficult for people to change their behaviour and they are not used to exploring automation. This TA leader's candid admission reflects the frustration of many professionals trapped in busy work that could be automated. Yet, they are held back by organizational habits and resistance to change. This keeps them struggling between administrative tasks (like scheduling interviews) and strategic work. > I just joined the company and literally the only person handling all of HR. Interview scheduling shouldn't be the only thing I spend my time on, so I'm slowly building a case for why we need to automate certain processes. Where resources are limited, every investment faces scrutiny; for small teams and solo practitioners especially, the challenge often isn't implementing a new tool but convincing stakeholders of its necessity. This highlights the importance of change management in introducing automation to your organization. Cronofy believes that automation should support your existing workflows, not seek to replace them. ## There's an Ongoing Struggle to Keep Hiring Human Recruiters and HR professionals alike are people who still want to build and maintain relationships with candidates. It's no surprise that a recurring theme throughout this exercise was the desire to preserve meaningful human interactions while eliminating repetitive tasks with the use of AI/Automation. Recruitment leaders don't want to reject new technology but need some assurance new tools will enhance human capabilities. > Humans have no business scheduling interviews. Recruiters should see the people behind the CVs and focus on building relationships. Automation should just handle the scheduling piece. ## Recruiters Want to Keep Their Jobs Not all voters showed optimism about AI/Automation. Some - motivated by job security concerns - voted that recruiters should handle scheduling. This perhaps echoes the real anxiety around automation's impact in recruitment. ## What's Next for Hiring Teams in 2025? No doubt, teams will increasingly embrace AI/Automation into their hiring processes in 2025, but it's crucial to do it right. Here are five key insights to guide your approach: **** 1. **Audit your current processes:** There's no better time to review your existing workflows. Identify repetitive, manual tasks that drain your team's time and energy. 1. **Focus on augmentation, not replacement: **Whatever its promise, your new tool should meet your teams where they are and elevate their experience rather than forcing a steep learning curve. 1. **Start with high-friction, low-value tasks: **If - like interview scheduling - it's repetitive, somewhat predictable, and time-consuming, it probably needs automation. 1. **Involve your recruiters in the process: **Address concerns head-on by including your team in decisions about which processes to automate and how. 1. **Measure what matters: **Beyond time savings, track how new tools impact candidate experience and whether they accelerate hiring productivity. The most successful organizations won't be those who blindly adopt every new technology, but those who thoughtfully integrate new tools where it truly adds value. The leaders behind this change will cut through the hype to focus on practical improvements that empower their people to do what humans do best. ### Balancing Automation & Human Touch | HRTech Europe Discover AI's impact on recruitment and get practical advice on how HR leaders can leverage automation effectively while keeping the human element front and center. Blog Post 2025-03-10T10:54:00.000Z --- ### Is It Time to Change Your Recruitment Game Plan? Timing is key in recruitment. Knowing when and how to update your hiring strategy can make all the difference in attracting top talent and staying competitive. Read on to find out how to make the most of times of change in your company, including leadership shifts, team restructuring, and more. Blog Post 2024-08-29T13:20:00.000Z --- ### Switching interview scheduling tools? Here’s what you need to know Your recruitment process is only as strong as the tools behind it. Explore what makes a vendor stand out and how to navigate the switch without hurting your reputation at work. Blog Post 2024-09-16T08:00:00.000Z --- # Privacy & Security Cronofy takes security seriously, and employs best practices to ensure that privacy is never compromised ## Built in Europe with security-by-design Cronofy is ISO 27001, ISO 27018 and ISO 27701 certified and undergoes SOC 2 Type 2 audits annually. We're proud to be certified by third-party auditors – showing that we have an effective security and privacy programme to protect your data. [View Compliance Center](/compliance-center) [Access Cronofy's Compliance Reports](https://docs.cronofy.com/policies/compliance/compliance-reports/) How we think about data privacy and security At Cronofy, we are trusted with the calendar data of millions of people. That requires that we place privacy and security at the heart of all of our design decisions, technology choices and processes. Both of Cronofy’s founders had years of technical experience working in or servicing regulated industries. This ensured that as an organization, from the top down, mature and considered data management was a first class concern, pervading every decision from the very beginning of the company. A good example of this is how we securely support online booking workflows. We identified a key limitation in permissions schemes provided by the calendar services offered by Google and Microsoft. If you want to be able to create events in people’s calendars then the service providers require that you have full access to all of the data in their calendar. This is not a desirable position for any organization that is focused on data privacy. The job to be done is putting events in peoples' calendars at times that they are free. A software application shouldn’t need access to all of the detail of the calendar events in order to achieve that. To address this, we designed our temporal infrastructure to consider events that people put in their calendars separately to events that applications create via our APIs. This allows applications to request just free busy access to their users’ calendar data yet still create events when bookings are made. It wasn’t just a case of making this technically possible. We also had to build the security infrastructure around the data to protect it. This required a zero bug policy, fully automated deployment and testing and continuous internal education. Instead, they are an important reassurance to our customers that this is how we do business and that we continue to be good custodians of their data. Certifications **ISO 27001** Cronofy has achieved the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, the international standard for information security management systems (ISMS). The ISO 27001 certification requires the assessment of our information security management controls. **ISO 27018** ISO27018 is a set of controls and guidelines, which specify how to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the cloud. Cronofy complies with ISO27018, which provides a set of objectives for implementing measures to protect PII. This is in accordance with the privacy principles in ISO/IEC 29100 for the public cloud computing environment. **ISO 27701** Cronofy has achieved ISO 27701:2019, an extension of ISO 27701. Cronofy operates a PIMS (Privacy Information Management System) and data protection processes to an established, world-class standard. **SOC 2** SOC 2 defines the criteria for secure handling and management of customer data. Cronofy has been audited and complies with the standards set out by the AICPA as part of the SOC 2 standard. Cronofy has successfully completed audits for both SOC2 Type 1 and 2. Regulatory Compliance **HIPAA** Cronofy is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, ensuring that PHI (Patient Healthcare Information) is processed and stored, in line with the Titles defined within HIPAA, specifically, Title II. We can supply a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) on request. **GDPR** Cronofy adheres to the principles of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR is a comprehensive data protection law that governs the collection of and use of personal data of EU citizens and residents, and that allows data subjects to exercise control over their data. It is widely considered to be the most stringent global privacy standard and we're proud to uphold it. **CCPA** Cronofy has an explicit [Privacy Notice](https://docs.cronofy.com/policies/privacy-notice/) in place, that advises users of their rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We process personal data in line with the requirements set out by the CCPA, for the purpose of providing services. This includes compliance with policies such as Anti-Discrimination, the Right to Be Forgotten, the Right to Access Data Collected, and control over data shared with third parties. Want to know more? For any questions, please contact dedicated support team on [privacy@cronofy.com]() --- # Education and Mentorship Scheduling Connect students with educators and mentors using their real-time availability. Make it simple for students to connect with their teachers and facilitators. ## Simple Mentorship Scheduling Connect students with mentors using their real-time availability. > With Cronofy, we achieved the calendar integrations we thought would take months in just a few days. We’ve been able to expand into new product lines and delight our customers with seamless calendar flows. Cronofy has really helped accelerate our business" — Reilly Davis, Co-Founder and CTO, PeopleGrove ## Mentorship matters Mentorship programs are one of the best ways for universities to help students prepare for the outside world. ‍ Students can approach the workplace not just with the right knowledge and skills, but fully equipped for what the world of work expects from them. ‍ Mentorship schemes ensure that students learn from people who’ve been in a similar situation to them. They can then use their mentor’s experiences to better plan for their own future. ‍ It also speeds up how quickly their knowledge and skills progress because they can watch out for the mistakes their mentor made and avoid the same pitfalls. ## Almost there... Setting up a mentorship program is only half the problem solved. There still needs to be a way for students to find the right mentor and easily book an appointment with them. ‍ Having the right mentor is a crucial part of a student’s development, as the person could go on to play a huge role in their life. However, if it’s difficult for the student to meet with them they may give up and not meet with anyone at all. ‍ Students then end up back where they would’ve been had a mentorship program not been offered to to them in the first place. ‍ Emails are one option, but they often result in unnecessarily long chains. It takes an average of three emails to organize just one meeting. If a mentor has several mentees, this can easily add up to half an hour wasted just scheduling a handful of appointments. ## Make it easy to mentor Cronofy helps you to build [real-time scheduling solutions](https://www.cronofy.com/real-time-scheduling/) into your mentorship scheduling program. ‍ Once you’ve integrated the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) into your software, mentors can sync their calendars with it in just a couple of minutes. ‍ Unlike if the calendar sync was built straight into the calendar service, Cronofy can be set up to only access users’ free/busy data, ensuring that private appointments stay private. ‍ Mentor’s real-time availability can then be offered to students. As soon as a new appointment is added to their calendar, it’s removed from the list of options. ‍ Mentors can also specify times when they’re available. This means that if they want to keep every Tuesday afternoon free, or only be available for meetings on a Tuesday afternoon, they can. When they’re available is completely customizable based on their personal preferences. ## Create connections in real-time You could even allow students to search for mentors based on their availability. This ensures mentees can speak to someone as soon as possible without searching for hours only to find the person they want to meet is unavailable for the next six months. ‍ To ensure that students don’t forget their appointment, they can also connect their calendar to your software. Appointments will then be added to their schedule automatically. Notifications can even be sent via their calendar to inform them when it’s time to leave. ‍ If the meeting needs to be rescheduled, this can be done just as seamlessly. Everyone’s real-time availability is still factored in, avoiding double-bookings even if things change at the last minute. ‍ Recurring and one-off meetings can be organized (or reorganized) in exactly the same way, making it a simple, seamless process for your users. ‍ [Booking a meeting](https://www.cronofy.com/meeting-room-booking/) is minimal effort with maximum gains. ## Work with one API, build integrations with multiple calendar services Instead of building integrations with five different APIs – one for each of the main calendar services – you work with just one. It’s so quick to implement that by this time next week you could be offering real-time scheduling solutions to your users. We do all the hard work for you – all you have to do is build the software and make your customers happy. All the upkeep and ongoing maintenance is done by us. Our API even works with older versions of calendar services, like [Microsoft Exchange](https://www.cronofy.com/exchange-calendar-api/) dating all the way back to 2007. Integrating with so many different calendar services – and so many versions of each calendar service – means you can maximize the number of people who can use your mentorship software. Developers can use our sandbox for free with up to twenty users. And, because we know you’ll love Cronofy when you add it to your software, it’s free until you’re ready to go live. That means you don’t have to pay to build your new feature – you only pay when your customers start to feel the benefits of real-time calendar sync. Our pricing is based on how many users take advantage of calendar sync. That means if fewer students and mentors are taking advantage of mentorship programs over the summer, you only pay for the customers using your service. Features such as [real-time availability](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) and [automatic calendar connectivity](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/)are only available on certain plans. To find out more about which of our pricing plans suits your needs, visit our [pricing page](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing) or contact us using the form below for more information. --- # Our discussion on HR tech and candidate experience with Bill Boorman Bill Boorman advises on the integration of social recruiting for corporate companies. We spoke with him about our recent research into candidate expectations. Bill Boorman advises on the integration of social recruiting for corporate companies. We spoke with him about our recent research into candidate expectations. *[Bill Boorman](http://www.billboorman.com/)** advises on the integration of social recruiting for corporate companies, including ProvenBase and CandidateID.*In light of our [recent research into candidate expectations](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/), we wanted to talk to him about our findings and more.Read on for the full conversation below.*[Bill Boorman](http://www.billboorman.com/)** advises on the integration of social recruiting for corporate companies, including ProvenBase and CandidateID.* In light of our [recent research into candidate expectations](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/), we wanted to talk to him about our findings and more. Read on for the full conversation below. ### What leapt out at you from the research? There’s two things. One is being an employer of choice. So candidates will generally be in multiple pipelines rather than singular pipelines. If they’ve taken the step to be interviewing with you, they’ll be interviewing with three or four brands. The better the overall experience in that process, the less likely they are to opt out. And that’s really the improvement that we want to get. And that’s very similar to consumer behavior. If you’re trying to sign up for something or get to the next step and it doesn’t quite work the way that you want it to, you opt out. We’re in an opt-out society. So I think the more important challenge is around things being logical. Make everything as simple and logical as possible – and you want to be able to do it in that one one transaction. If you see a job, you want to be able to get assessed against that job, apply, get interviews scheduled or follow up actions in the same transaction. You don’t want it to be a series of emails or a series of back and forth. I think when we talk about “candidate experiences”, we focus on the wrong things because we pick pieces out. When we’re talking digital workflow, we need to think of total experience rather than pieces of it. Whoever the stakeholder is, they should have the same level of experience and the same intuitive workflow. You should be really looking at a basic blueprint of the experience we want everyone to have. ‍ ### So if what we’re saying is “forget candidate experience” — how do you unify how this is all treated within the business? Part of it is the recruitment process automation, which is really just saying any task that can be automated should be automated digitally. So we should do that and we should make it intuitive so that if there’s a yes or no decision, there’s a rule for what should be done without the need of input from another human. We want to join up as much of our workflows as we can in single actions. However – nothing is really a plug and play technology. It’s about creating the rules, challenging the rules, then supervising the learning period. And actually it’s a lot of heavy lifting and the challenge you have is normally there’s too many current day-to-day demands to think about, to have time to think about or create tomorrow. There’s always a requirement to say: yeah, that’s great, but we need to fill these 40 seats or these 30 seats today. We’ve always been in a period with digital transformation where we’re too busy to do the essential work to move things forward. ‍ ### What about the relationship between human touch and use of technology? The reality is that candidates would much rather deal with automation and hiring managers would much rather deal with automation. Chat bots are the best example. I was writing up an implementation by Airbus and what we found was that when we gave the options of chatbot or person, 95% of the people opted to talk to the machine to get an answer. Because they just want black and white information. And they want to get it in the quickest available time. If you just think about the process of how you make appointments and how many emails are in that chain, how many people need to look at diaries — there might be another 20 emails in that chain before we actually end up having an answer. Whereas if we can have a simple set of rules where I can commit to this next step and you can come back to me straight away and say: okay, that’s happening next Tuesday at four o’clock – that’s job done. So I think people overwhelmingly are showing us they prefer automation. This is also about our perception of the capability of humans. If you start looking at things like matching technologies and shortlisting and assessments, the belief is almost like recruiters are “CV whisperers”. Actually what happens here is just that people don’t understand the human algorithms that they apply to their work. People think what they do is intuitive and has no consistency but then when you talk through each decision: where do you look, what are you thinking about, how do you make a decision between this candidate and that candidate — you get consistency of rules based on human algorithms. So we have all of these data inputs in our brain, which are not visual. They’re not written down anywhere, they’re acquired over time. And we call it gut feel. When you track those transactions over a period of time with machine learning, you then can challenge and understand why you made that decision and you make it on a consistent basis. We can learn that. The other surprise of the Airbus project was that actually the more senior the candidate and the older they were, the more likely they were to opt for technology versus talking to people. They just wanted the answer. They didn’t want any discussion with it. So then when you start to question: what part DO people play in that process? ‍ ### What would be your major recommendations to anyone looking to improve this area? The first process you need to go through is actually documenting your workflow. How did people get attracted to your organization? How do they get hired? What are all the things and all the transactions that happen in between? I’ve yet to go to an organization where they know how people get hired. And so we follow the paper all the way through and go, right? Where does this go? Who makes a decision at this stage? And who does what? And you normally find an average enterprise organization has 79 tasks for someone to get hired. So we look at that and say, right, once we’ve got that workflow, how many of those things could we automate and make simple? Most hiring processes include programmed actions that lead on from the previous automation stage to deliver a smooth candidate experience. *We recently surveyed 6,500 candidates in the US, UK, France and Germany. **[Read our report](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/)** on how interview scheduling impacts candidate experience and a business’ ability to hire.* --- # Cronofy successfully renews SOC 2 Type II attestation Last year we achieved SOC 2 Type II attestation and ISO27001 compliance. We're pleased to announce that we've successfully renewed our SOC 2 Type II attestation. Last year we achieved SOC 2 Type II attestation and ISO27001 compliance. We're pleased to announce that we've successfully renewed our SOC 2 Type II attestation. Last year in 2020, Cronofy achieved both [SOC 2 Type II](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/soc2) attestation and [ISO27001](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/iso27001) compliance. We're pleased to announce that, after a year of continually improving our security posture and products, we've successfully renewed our SOC 2 Type II attestation for another twelve months - achieved with zero non-conformities or advisories. ### **What is SOC 2 Type II?** SOC 2 (System and Organization Controls) examinations were designed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants ([AICPA](https://www.aicpa.org/)). They were created to assist organizations of any size, regardless of industry and scope, with ensuring the personal assets of their potential and existing customers are protected.Cronofy was tested by an independent auditor, [A-LIGN](https://a-lign.com/compliance/soc-2/), against the defined principles and criteria published by the AICPA. Throughout the audit, we demonstrated a comprehensive and thorough approach to mitigating information security risks and the secure management of data. ### **What this means for Cronofy customers** In the past twelve months, we have launched a [new product](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/), expanded into [more regions](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/data-centers/?utm_campaign=Newsletters&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=2&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_AgO4fkGnz4Hwrd8vQQDvy-gpAW8Vh_1WODVkpO1Y9lE4V8kkITm-d-UKqu6FIincL06Qsyuok9UlaX86D9HTRFbZKTA&utm_content=2&utm_source=hs_email), added [even more features](https://changelog.cronofy.com/) and continued to grow the team. Alongside doing all of this, Cronofy has consistently met the rigorous standards set out by the AICPA, culminating in us renewing SOC 2 with flying colors.Cronofy continues to lead the market in security and compliance, constantly reviewing and improving our security positioning. This means that our customers can be safe in the knowledge that their data, and the security of their data, is paramount in everything we do. ### **What’s next?** As part of running an effective information security program, Cronofy is committed to continual improvement, and whilst SOC2 Type II is a great achievement, we won’t rest on our laurels. We now go into our ISO27001 surveillance audits and are including ISO27018 in that.If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at [privacy@cronofy.com](mailto:privacy@cronofy.com). --- # Calendar hygiene: a guide to cleaning up messy calendars See how to manage and maintain calendar hygiene for efficient scheduling and meeting bookings. Is your calendar messier than a teenager’s bedroom? Time for a spring clean – read on for our top calendar hygiene tips. The saying is true - tidy desk, tidy mind. The same goes for your calendar. In the modern age of constant connectivity and hectic schedules, keeping track of appointments, meetings, social events, and personal commitments has become a challenge. When it all gets too much, it can actually make you a whopping **[40% less productive](https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/basics/productivity)**. Messy calendars can lead to missed appointments, double bookings, and increased stress levels. Sound like you? You might just need a calendar spring clean. We’ll equip you with some simple strategies and digital tools to transform your chaotic calendar into a streamlined and organized masterpiece. ‍ ## 1. Assessment: the first step Calendar clean up can be a daunting task, especially if you have a particularly busy schedule, and you may not know where to even start. Before you dive into the cleaning process, take a look at the current state of your calendar. Separate recurring events and one-time appointments, and pinpoint any glaring conflicts. This step will give you a clear picture of what you're dealing with and help you plan your cleanup strategy effectively. ‍ ## 2. Prioritization: separate the musts from the maybes Not every event on your calendar holds the same level of importance. Start by categorizing your commitments into "must-attend" and "optional" sections. You can even colour-code events so you can see at a glance what’s top of your priority list. This will allow you to allocate time and resources more efficiently and ensure that you're dedicating energy to what truly matters. ‍ ## 3. Elimination: declutter with purpose Now that you've identified the optional commitments, it's time to declutter. Carefully evaluate each item and ask yourself whether it aligns with your priorities and goals. If an event or commitment no longer serves a meaningful purpose, it might be time to remove it from your calendar. Remember, a clutter-free calendar is a gateway to improved focus and reduced stress. ## 4. Time blocking: strike a balance Time-blocking can be a powerful technique for maintaining a tidy calendar. Allocating specific time blocks for tasks can enhance productivity by dedicating focused time to each task, helping you maintain a structured day. However, if you are a **[busy hiring manager](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/onboarding/best-practices-with-your-hiring-managers)** for example and need to provide times for interviews, it’s important to strike the right balance of blocked and free times in your calendar or this can create a scheduling nightmare for recruiters and candidates. If there are events in your calendar that you’re willing to be more flexible with and can be overwritten if necessary, such as a focus time, you can set the event as ‘free’ in your calendar, signalling to others that you can technically be free at that time if required. If you’re using a scheduling tool, this can be particularly effective to ensure you get the most out of it and don’t run into scheduling dead-ends. ‍ ## 5. Consolidation: merge and conquer Having multiple calendars can exacerbate the chaos. If you're juggling personal, work, and family calendars, consider merging them into a single system. Tools like Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, or Apple Calendar offer the ability to create multiple color-coded calendars within a single interface. This not only helps prevent double bookings but also provides a comprehensive view of your commitments. ‍ ## 6. Scheduling buffer: leave room for the unexpected One of the main causes of calendar chaos and stress is the lack of buffer time between commitments. Back-to-back meetings don’t account for unexpected delays, overruns, or simply the need to take a breather. This is important for hiring managers and recruiters for example, as they need time to look over CVs and questions prior to an interview. You can even use scheduling tools like Cronofy that ensure buffer times are automatically booked into your calendar when a new event is scheduled, so there’s no chance of the dreaded wall of meetings. ## 7. Syncing and reminders: stay connected Take advantage of calendar syncing features to ensure that your commitments are accessible across all your devices. Additionally, set up reminders for important events. Modern calendar apps allow you to receive notifications via email, pop-ups, or even SMS, so you never miss an important date. ‍ ## 8. Calendar boundaries: communication is key Aside from the tech and tools you can utilize to keep things under control, communicating with the other people in your business is crucial. If there’s a particular time you never want to be booked in for meetings, or likewise busy times that you’re open to being flexible on, make this clear to the people booking in with you, or booking meetings on your behalf. That way you improve your working relationships and your time is respected. ‍ ## 9. Prevention is better than the cure: Use a scheduling tool The best way to ensure you won’t see the double-bookings and missed meetings pile up again is to put preventative measures in place. There are plenty of tools that can help keep things organized. Automation can significantly decrease your scheduling stress. Not only does it save you hours every week, but also ensures your calendar is always up to date and synced with the right information. Tools like Cronofy **[automatically update your calendar](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler)** when a meeting is scheduled or rescheduled so you don’t need to worry about deleting and updating your calendar manually. It also provides you with the flexibility to override blocked times in busy calendars, and offer as specific availability as you like with our custom times feature, so there are no surprise meetings. Finally, you can take control of your calendar! ## 10. Maintenance: review regularly Cleaning up your calendar is not a one-time task. Make it a habit to review and update your calendar regularly. Add new commitments promptly, remove completed tasks, and adjust your priorities as needed. This will prevent your calendar from becoming cluttered again in the future. ‍ ## Ready to take charge of your calendar? In a world where time is a precious commodity, an organized calendar is essential for maintaining sanity and achieving productivity. Cleaning up a messy calendar might seem daunting, but with the right strategies and tools, you can transform chaos into order. Scheduling tools eliminate a lot of the hard work for you and make sure you’re always up to date, as well as prevent your calendar becoming cluttered again. By following our guide, you'll be well on your way to a harmonious and productive life, one well-organized event at a time. ‍ *Want to find out more about how scheduling automation can transform a messy calendar?* *Take some time to speak with one of our expert team and see the *[*Scheduler*](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler)* in action!* [Talk to us today](/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic) --- # Product Updates and Releases 2019 A lot can happen in a year. A lot of products can be updated and released in a year, too. In 2019, we released some of our most exciting products yet. A lot can happen in a year. A lot of products can be updated and released in a year, too. In 2019, we released some of our most exciting products yet. A lot can happen in a year. A lot of products can be updated and released in a year, too. In 2019, we released some of our most exciting products yet. You’ve embraced our [UI Elements](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/) to further streamline your development process and provide better scheduling to your users faster. You’ve suggested ways we can further improve our core products, helping us to create the best scheduling solutions out there. And we’ve got plenty of exciting things to come in 2020 to help you do this even better.But for now, let’s take a look back. In no particular order, here are our biggest product updates and releases from 2019: ## UI Elements By far, our most significant release of 2019 was our UI Elements.These can be embedded into your website or application to provide your users with a simple scheduling interface.They’re fully customizable, meaning you can design them to match your branding and provide a seamless experience for your users. ## Agenda View With the Agenda View, users can see what they’ve got coming up for the day ahead.This is useful when embedded into HR applications as it allows users to see their schedule in the same place that they can connect with colleagues, schedule meetings, track progress, etc. ## Slot Picker The Slot Picker can be embedded into any website or application to allow customers or colleagues to book appointments with your users. We’ve seen customers embed it into chatbot flows to schedule interviews or follow-up support calls. It could also be embedded on marketplaces to allow customers to schedule appointments with vendors. ## Availability Viewer The Availability Viewer is a calendar view of someone’s schedule. Customers or colleagues can use it to see when the user is free and use this information to pick a suitable time to meet with them. ## Availability Rules Users can specify when they want to be available for meetings using Availability Rules. They can block out time for lunch breaks, deep work, or personal time. This ensures that nobody will be able to schedule a meeting with them during that time when using Cronofy. [‍Find out more about our UI Elements](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/). ## Bookable Events Bookable Events allow you to track event registrations. You can use it to set event capacities, closing event registration once the maximum capacity has been reached. If someone cancels, a slot will re-open for someone else to book. ‍[Read more about Bookable Events](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api-alpha/bookable-events/). ## ‍Availability API response formats You can now choose from three different response formats from our Availability API. You can set it to generate slots that overlap with the start interval, non-overlapping slots of equal length, or contiguous available periods of a minimum length. ‍[Read more about API response formats](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/scheduling/availability/#response_format). ## ‍Availability Buffers This ensures space is left between bookings when using our Availability API or Real-Time Scheduling. Your users then don’t need to worry about back-to-back meetings: they have time in between them to do any follow-up actions or prepare for the next meeting.It’s also useful for anyone who travels between appointments, such as a vendor or healthcare practitioner. ‍[Add Availability Buffers to your software](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/scheduling/availability/#buffer.before.minutes).‍ ## Available Periods Your application can record fixed time periods where you want to make a user available for scheduling purposes. ‍[Find out more about Available Periods](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/scheduling/available-periods/). ## Availability Rules Allows the capturing of regular available hours for a person or resource. ‍[Add Availability Rules to your software](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/scheduling/availability-rules/). ## ‍Batch Endpoints Batch endpoints allow for multiple API transactions in one request. This is ideal when your application needs to add a set of events to a user’s calendar. Up to 50 transactions can be included in one call, allowing your application to perform the operation more quickly and avoid hitting rate limits. ‍[Discover more about Batch Endpoints](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/batch/). ‍ ## Conclusion Phew, that’s a lot! Of course, we couldn’t have done any of this if we hadn’t scaled so rapidly this year. In the last 12 months, we’ve expanded our sales, marketing, development, and support teams. We went on our first company retreat to Mallorca. We’ve experimented with new ways of doing things to make our schedules smarter too. Above all else, though, we’ve spoke to you, our customers, to find out what you want. Our development process is influenced by what you need from us. Got a suggestion for 2020? Drop us a line at hello@cronofy.com. If you’d like to find out more about any of the above updates, you can check out our [Docs site](https://docs.cronofy.com/). --- # How to Communicate Your Company Culture with Candidates Communicating your company culture is imperative to hiring the right person first time. The more clearly you get your company culture across to prospective candidates, the more likely you are to attract applicants with not only the right skills but the mindset you are looking for, too. According to the Harvard Business Review, people and cultural fit is the most important part of a job for candidates. It even comes above opportunities for career progression. Should you hire a candidate with a poor cultural fit, you're likely to find yourself re-hiring for the same position pretty quickly .But getting your company culture across to people outside of your organization isn’t always easy. Especially if you're a startup. To effectively share your company culture with candidates, you need to be open and honest with them from the start. That way, they know exactly what to expect as soon as they walk through the door. Communicating your company culture is imperative to hiring the right person first time. The more clearly you get your company culture across to prospective candidates, the more likely you are to attract applicants with not only the right skills but the mindset you are looking for, too. According to the Harvard Business Review, people and cultural fit is the most important part of a job for candidates. It even comes above opportunities for career progression. Should you hire a candidate with a poor cultural fit, you're likely to find yourself re-hiring for the same position pretty quickly .But getting your company culture across to people outside of your organization isn’t always easy. Especially if you're a startup. To effectively share your company culture with candidates, you need to be open and honest with them from the start. That way, they know exactly what to expect as soon as they walk through the door. Communicating your company culture is imperative to hiring the right person first time. The more clearly you get your company culture across to prospective candidates, the more likely you are to attract applicants with not only the right skills but the mindset you are looking for, too. According to the [Harvard Business Review](https://hbr.org/2014/03/how-companies-can-attract-the-best-college-talent), people and cultural fit is the most important part of a job for candidates. It even comes above opportunities for career progression. Should you hire a candidate with a poor cultural fit, you're likely to find yourself re-hiring for the same position pretty quickly. But getting your company culture across to people outside of your organization isn’t always easy. Especially if you're a startup. To effectively share your company culture with candidates, you need to be open and honest with them from the start. That way, they know exactly what to expect as soon as they walk through the door. ## Write a job description that reflects who you are Your job description is the first thing candidates will see. For some, it may even be the first time they've heard of your company. Getting the tone of voice right is therefore imperative. The way you write your job description will affect which candidates you attract, so keep that in mind when putting it together. A poorly written description damages your [employer brand](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-build-a-strong-employer-brand-image/) and will fail to attract the candidate profiles you are trying to appeal to. Ensure that everything is properly worded and formatted so that the content is easy for candidates to digest. Spend time considering the vocabulary you use as well as the values and principles you want to communicate. Make the responsibilities of the role clear, too. If it’s the kind of role that requires someone with a range of skillsets, say so. If it requires a specialist, make that clear instead. This can be done both in the job title and the role requirements. ## Consider your hiring process The application form is the next thing future employees will see when they apply for a role. It’s important that your hiring process reflects what life is like for your employees. Do you put a focus on lean processes? Make sure they can apply to the role in minutes, not hours. Do you value mindset over skills? Ask questions that get to the root of how they think. Applicant tracking systems make every step – from shortlisting to [interview scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/real-time-scheduling/) – faster. The faster these steps are completed, the faster you can find the perfect candidates to fill your vacancies. You're also more likely to get your top choice because you'll have interviewed candidates and made your offers while your competitors are still trying to schedule interviews. ## Tell them about the company during interviews It’s common to ask candidates what they know of the business during interviews. This is a good way to evaluate their research skills and see how well they prepared. However, an online search will only give them basic information. It won't tell them about the inner workings of the company. Be open to answering candidate’s questions about what the company and role is like. Ask them directly about the management style they are comfortable with or what their ideal work environment looks like. Give them insight into an average day in the role, what success looks like, and introduce them to the team. The more information candidates are given, the more information both you and they have to make a decision about if they're the right person for the job. ## Explain the benefits/perks What are the benefits that come with working for your company? Not free tea and coffee or fruits, but opportunities for job progression and learning. Employees value these things far more than free sustenance or ping pong tables. Offering better progression and learning opportunities than your competitor could be the difference between a candidate choosing you over them. ## Show what you value This should come across in everything from the job description to the interview. What do you value the most in employees? Are you looking for potential over existing skills? Do you want autonomous individuals or team players? Make what you value as clear as possible right from the start. There is nothing worse that moving the goalposts after a new hire has been made ## Conclusion Communicating your company culture with candidates clearly can be the difference between a successful hire and a failed one. It helps you find talented candidates who will fit in your company and their team. Making the right hires help companies grow faster and, because hiring is expensive, it saves a a lot money too. From clear job descriptions to [automated interview scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/automated-interview-scheduling-report/), there are plenty of ways you can share your company culture with candidates whichever stage of the hiring process they're at. --- # Adam Test ## MCP Server --- # Templates - Help Articles Learn how you can create, update and use Templates and placeholders on their own or within integrations for fast and efficient event creation with Cronofy ## Templates **Templates** can be created in Cronofy for fast and easy scheduling and are a great way to standardize your invites. They allow you to pre-set all the details that you would normally add when you create a request from scratch. When you select a template as the basis for your new request, it will pre-fill everything you set in the central template. You’ll still be able to make any edits you like. **Q: How do I create templates?** A: To create a template you need to click you OU one the left hand panel and select **Scheduling** and then the **Templates tab**. - (Name of your OU) **Settings** -> **Scheduling** -> **Templates**. From here you can see and edit your already created templates or click on the **Create template** to get started and name your new template. Now that you have create the template you will be taken to the page to fill out any information. You can start from the **name**. **Template types**: there are **3 types** of templates you can select from,depending on how you intend to use them. The main thing to remember here is that only **Scheduling Request** type can have **no host**. We will look further into why below. A **host** can be set pre-selected here as an individual user or a **selection** **rule** with multiple people. You need to set them up beforehand or you can click create selection rule right there, [more info here.](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/creating-groups) The rest of the template is set up pretty much the same way a scheduling request is, and includes the additional information prompts at the end for Public link conversion. **Q: What are the template types?** A: There are three template types: **Public links:** this will always require an individual host and/or selection rule(s) and can be used to send to a bulk of people. E.g. for sourcing. **Scheduler requests:** this is the standard template you can use to get details for specific meeting types pre-filled in the request form where you create a link. **Scheduling triggers:** this will require an individual host and/or selection rule(s) and can be used in stage transition automation with your ATS integration (SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse, lever, SAP). **Q: How do I edit or delete templates?** A: To edit an already created Template, go to the **Templates tab** and click **Edit Template.** You can also now simply click the **public** **link** **icon** next to the template to **instantly** copy the link to your clipboard. You always need to **save** so that the changes you've made will apply. Any issues or conflicts will be displayed after clicking save on the top of the page. If you have any issues please reach out to our [Support](mailto:support@cronofy.com). **Delete Templates** You can **delete** any template by clicking **edit** as explained above and scrolling to the bottom and click "**DELETE**". **Q: How can I use templates with integrations?** A: Some **integrations** can use templates, you can visit the Integrations page for more. **Q: Can I use placeholders for my templates?** A: You can use placeholders now in both **titles** and **descriptions** on all scheduling requests, but **templates** use this feature best. **Placeholders** will automatically populate information in a request like **host name, attendee name, organization name** and **more**. Always ensuring that the events have the necessary information at a glance (in titles) or a customized description, for a personalized candidate experience. To **insert** a placeholder simply click the **button** as shown on the **right** side screenshot or type the **{** symbol and then choosing the desired placeholder. To remove a placeholder simply use the backspace **<-** to delete the text. --- # How Technology is Disrupting the Education Sector There’s no denying that technology is changing every industry in a plethora of ways.It’s shrunk the world for us all, making things that were once impossible accessible to everyone. Education is no different. In the last few years, technology has been used to create better experiences for students, teachers, and administrative staff. There’s no denying that technology is changing every industry in a plethora of ways.It’s shrunk the world for us all, making things that were once impossible accessible to everyone. Education is no different. In the last few years, technology has been used to create better experiences for students, teachers, and administrative staff. There’s no denying that technology is changing every industry in a plethora of ways. It’s shrunk the world for us all, making things that were once impossible accessible to everyone. Education is no different. In the last few years, technology has been used to create better experiences for students, teachers, and administrative staff. The smaller world means that wherever you are, you can still take advantage of great learning opportunities even if you can’t afford the cost of living in expensive cities, or simply prefer the countryside. Students have more chances to learn new skills because geography no longer limits what teachers they have access to. Here are some of the other ways technology is disrupting the education sector. ## Virtual lessons Virtual lessons are one of the best parts of modern technology. They mean that should students want to learn a new language, even if there aren’t teachers that speak that language in their area, they can still learn from a native speaker in real-time. Virtual lessons also mean that if a teacher can’t get to the classroom, students don’t have to miss out on their education. Students who can’t get into the classroom due to bad weather or health problems, meanwhile, don’t have to miss out either – they can be just as much of a part of the class as someone there in person. AR and VR can take this even further, putting students in situations that would previously have only been experienced from a book or a film. For students learning about dangerous or remote situations, they can also learn without the dangers or expenses. Alternatively, students can take part in lessons in their own time, meaning that they can pause video lessons to give them more time to take notes, or replay sections that they don’t understand. ## Bridging the gap between education and employment Taking the leap from higher education into employment is terrifying. Technology helps to bridge the gap between education and employment by connecting students with businesses that may want to hire them. Students can also use this information to get career advice from people who work in the industry they want to find out more about. ## Interactive classrooms Thanks to technology, lessons can be more interactive than ever. Professors can send quizzes to their students in real-time to make sure that they’re taking notes on their devices and not perusing Facebook. Gamification is also an effective way to engage students in classes, particularly ones that aren’t typically hands-on. Turning tedious subjects into games makes them more engaging for students and therefore more memorable, too. ## Research is easier and more accessible While nobody can deny the allure of a good book, trawling through books for the right quote or theme that you want to discuss is the worst part of research. The internet – and apps such as Kindle and iBooks – have eradicated the need for this. Students can highlight passages they want to refer back to in ereader apps, and even make annotations in the apps themselves. That way, they don’t need to flick back through the book to find what they want – it’s already there for when they need it. The internet, meanwhile, means that they can search for whatever they need and instantly come up with thousands – or possibly even millions – of results related to their query. While this is daunting, it’s a whole lot faster to get started than it used to be. ## Real-time, automatic timetable updates Timetables can change, and sometimes it can happen at the last minute. This means that it’s difficult to let everyone affected know within the appropriate time frame. Syncing a student or teacher’s schedule to their mobile calendar means that they get notifications as and when anything changes. This can be anything from a lesson cancellation to a change of teacher or venue. ## Professors are more accessible Technology means that students don’t have to queue up outside a professor’s office to wait for some advice. Instead, they can email that professor their queries. Alternatively, they can book a session with their professor online without the fear of turning up and not knowing if their professor will even be there. ## Online courses The University of London now allows you to get a full degree while studying from a distance. It has all the content as an in-person course, but students can take part wherever they are in the world. This means that more mature students who want a great education but can’t afford to live in London or don’t want to uproot their life can still get the best education possible. Online courses are nothing new, but prominent universities segueing into this sector shows that they’re recognising how technology is changing the landscape of education. This is likely to appeal to mature students who want to study but may not have a university nearby that teaches the right course for them. It also offers a cheaper alternative to students who may not be able more expensive university prices but still want to take advantage of the best education they can get. ## Cloud storage Cloud storage makes it easier for students to continue their studies when they get home. There’s no need to carry masses of notebooks or textbooks; everything can be accessed on any device they like. Teachers can also use cloud storage to access students’ essays and mark their work, leaving annotations that are legible and not scrawled across the page. ## Conclusion These are just some of the ways in which technology is disrupting the education sector. In the next few years, we’re going to see an increase in schools and universities adopting mobile learning, AR and VR, and other interactive learning tools. These all help to make learning more engaging, but crucially, more accessible, too. --- # Embed complete meeting workflows into your product Let users schedule meetings, record calls, generate AI summaries, and trigger follow-up actions ## Add meeting capabilities to your product Let users schedule meetings, record calls, generate AI summaries, and trigger follow-up actions without needing to build or maintain complex calendar and conferencing integrations yourself. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) ## Ship meeting functionality in weeks, not months As real-time meeting workflows become more automated and agentic driven, the complexity behind building them yourself only grows. Our meeting and scheduling infrastructure eliminates this friction, powering your product’s next evolution while saving you months of engineering time. ## Connect every calendar in 1 integration Your users expect their calendars to sync with your platform, but integrating them means juggling multiple APIs, outdated availability, and support tickets about "missing meetings" or permission errors. Cronofy’s single integration gives you real-time availability across all major calendar providers, so your team stops debugging calendar conflicts, and your users stop seeing double-bookings. [Learn more](/developer/calendar-api) ## Automate complex meeting workflows Your users don’t care about timezone logic, calendar syncs, or rescheduling nightmares, they just want meetings to work. But when you build it yourself, you’re the one stuck explaining why a meeting disappeared or why the conferencing link is missing. With Cronofy, your users can book any meeting in seconds. Let attendees self-book in their local time, and automatically sync invites, rescheduling, meeting room and conferencing details back to your product. [Learn more](/developer/availability-api) ## Unlock a new layer of meeting data Cronofy captures transcripts and recordings from meetings across Teams, Zoom or Google Meet, giving your application a data foundation to power new product capabilities. Use it to automatically populate records or dashboards, and trigger automated workflows like feedback drafts, CRM updates or follow up tasks. [Learn more](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## Integrate Cronofy your way Product leaders in HR Tech, Telehealth, EdTech, and CRMs use Cronofy to ship scheduling features through our API for full control, Embedded Scheduler for faster launches, or via our MCP server for AI-native experiences. Pick what fits your needs, or combine approaches as you scale. ### White-label API For teams who need complete flexibility. Build custom workflows and UX with our API, designed for deep integrations where every detail matters. --- ### Embedded Scheduler For teams who want to launch even faster, drop booking links into your product with a pre-built UI and minimal setup. --- ### AI-native Scheduling For AI-powered apps. Let agents handle scheduling through our MCP server. Perfect for conversational interfaces and agentic workflows. ## Why product teams choose Cronofy Time to value ## Ship meeting workflows without blocking your roadmap Building in-house drains engineering resources. Teams spend months battling timezone bugs, recurring event logic, and complicated orchestration of conferencing and recording capabilities before shipping anything. Cronofy provides pre-built infrastructure so you can deliver features users need without the time and cost of building them from scratch yourself, with hands-on support from a team that’s already solved these scheduling challenges at scale. Differentiate your product ## Keep up with rising user expectations Your users demand more efficient ways to remove the most time consuming tasks, like scheduling and rescheduling meetings, capturing notes and getting insights into meeting outcomes. They expect to work within your product or delegate via agents, and your competition is shipping fast to meet these rising expectations. Our sole focus on meeting infrastructure, alongside our support and expertise help you to quickly deliver the roadmap you need to stand out from competition. Boost stickiness ## Power native experiences built for real-world complexity Cronofy is the infrastructure teams choose when features can’t fail. With 99.99% uptime and enterprise level SLAs, we power the complex use cases that break most tools. Your features stay reliable, no-show rates drop, and users complete meeting workflows inside your product instead of reverting to email or manual workarounds. Build trust ## Unlock regulated markets while building trust Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. Six regional data centers give you complete control over where your data lives. That’s why industries like HR tech and Healthcare trust Cronofy to power their infrastructure, passing security reviews easier and winning customers quicker. > Implementing Cronofy was painless – they provide a simple and clear API that allowed me to have the integration live to customers in less than one month. — Drew Zader, Senior Software Engineer, Handshake Start building Explore our API in a free sandbox and build a proof of concept on your own terms, with clear [documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/), full [API reference](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/) and [quick-start tutorials](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/getting-started/). Alternatively, submit the form below and one of our solution specialists will walk you through your use case and help you plan your implementation so you can move fast and get it right from day one. Get my sandbox ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- # How to deliver the experience candidates want Companies have been beating the drum of improving the candidate experience for decades. Every new shift in society, business, and technology elicits more reasons for talent acquisition teams to refocus their efforts on improving the candidate experience. Today, disparate factors converge to make the candidate experience matter more than ever. In this webinar we want to help you understand how you can transform your standard hiring process into a hiring experience candidates actually stay in! Our recent survey of 6,500 candidates from around the globe found that **62% of senior candidates have left a hiring process because of scheduling delays**. This has a direct impact on organizations being able to hire the best talent. This impacts businesses ability to grow at a time when organizations are very focused on economic recovery and recruitment teams are stretched. The competition for talent is fierce and organizations cannot afford to waste time because of interview scheduling delays. Join us as we discuss the data and the importance of creating the right interview process. Insights from our Candidate Expectations report and discussion on the importance of creating the right interview process. ### Candidate Expectations Report 2023 --- ### SmartRecruiters Hub --- ### Recruiting Brainfood - Candidate Expectations Webinar 2023-09-28 Join Hung Lee and a panel of expert guests as they dig into the Report insights for 2023, and how it compares to the last two years. --- # How to Improve Your Coworking Space Management Recent years have seen the rise of coworking spaces for individuals and businesses. For freelancers, coworking spaces offer them a reprieve from the loneliness that can come from working at home all the time. For startups and small businesses, it gives them somewhere to work from without paying expensive city rents or needing to find an office the right size for their team – the space can scale as their team does. Recent years have seen the rise of coworking spaces for individuals and businesses. For freelancers, coworking spaces offer them a reprieve from the loneliness that can come from working at home all the time. For startups and small businesses, it gives them somewhere to work from without paying expensive city rents or needing to find an office the right size for their team – the space can scale as their team does. Recent years have seen the rise of coworking spaces for individuals and businesses. For freelancers, coworking spaces offer them a reprieve from the loneliness that can come from working at home all the time. For startups and small businesses, it gives them somewhere to work from without paying expensive city rents or needing to find an office the right size for their team – the space can scale as their team does. Paying per desk is a much more affordable way for startup teams to benefit from office space and can dramatically reduce their overheads in the crucial formative years. Renting out an office in a coworking space is another option for startups, which means that teams can get their own space while still benefitting from the [meeting rooms](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/meeting-room-booking/), resources, and networking that can come from coworking spaces. However, in coworking offices problems inevitably arise. How do you manage meeting rooms for hundreds of people? What about bookable resources? Or desks that are rented on an ad-hoc basis? Creating calendars for these resources is one way around this, but it only solves half the problem. How do you add these calendars to a booking software and ensure that community members use these calendars in the right way? ## Meeting room bookings Meeting rooms are one of the main benefits of coworking spaces. Community members can reserve them for one-on-ones, retros, conference calls (if the right equipment is available), etc. The easier it is for members to book these spaces, the more likely they are to do so and the less likely it is to cause any double-bookings or other scheduling issues. Adding a [calendar booking interface](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/) to your workspace management software is the easiest way to manage meeting rooms. Users can see what rooms are booked and when, allowing them to book a meeting room that suits their needs. One of the big issues with this interface is that members often forget to cancel a booking if they don’t need it any more. One way around this is to require members to confirm their attendance at a meeting room, but it’s easy to forget to do this and end up with someone else booking the room and all sorts of scheduling conflicts arising. Another option is to send members a meeting reminder shortly before, asking them to cancel the meeting if they don’t need it any more. Alternatively, meeting room bookings can be added to their calendar. This is a place that they’re likely to use every day to manage their time. Their booking will therefore be right in front of them and they’ll think to cancel it if they don’t need it any more. This way of approaching meeting organization also means that there aren’t any duplicate calendar events in someone’s calendar. These duplicate events can cause confusion and lead to cluttered calendars. Meeting room booking software that allows organizers to add attendees to the meeting makes it easier for teams to organize the meeting. They don’t have to book the room then create a separate calendar event to invite everyone; everything can be organized at the same time, creating a more streamlined process. This function also means that meetings aren’t booked for rooms that are too small to hold the maximum number of attendees. Organizers can see exactly how many people the room can hold and add all of those people to the meeting without worry. ## Resource reservations Resources are another important part of a coworking space. Conference equipment, projectors, and TV screens can make a huge difference to a meeting or talk. It’s therefore important that community members can access them easily. Creating calendars for these is an often-overlooked way to manage communal equipment. It ensures that no two people will try to use the same piece of equipment at the same time and find themselves in a difficult situation if they can’t use the screen or conference equipment that they need. These bookable resources are vital to helping community members run their businesses, so it’s important that it’s easy for them to access them. ## Desk management Desks are the most important part of a coworking space. Without them, team members have nowhere to work from and no reason to give coworking spaces money. If it’s the kind of coworking space where members rent desks, not rooms, it’s important that there’s a good desk management process in place. Not every desk will be occupied every day. Some members may only be there a handful of days a week. Operating on a hot desking basis and allowing team members to pay as and when they need a desk opens up the space to be used by more people. This means that team members save money. Coworking spaces get the benefit of more people using their services, which helps to naturally spread the word and increase a coworking space’s reach. People that use the space may also find that they need an extra desk or two sometimes for visiting colleagues or guests. An efficient desk management process means that space managers can see what desks are available and when for them to use. This makes it easier for them to allocate space and provide an easier booking process for everyone. This can be achieved by creating calendars for each desk. Office managers can then see which desks are available and when. Connecting this to a coworking management software makes it even easier to organize these resources. ## Conclusion Running a coworking space is a challenging but rewarding undertaking. Managers get to see community members grow – and eventually outgrow – the space. In the meantime, they can provide companies with a friendly, welcoming environment that puts them in a great mood for the working day. Small changes to workplace management solutions can dramatically improve the experience that customers receive. Adding calendar sync to meeting room booking systems or coworking management software means that users can take advantage of the spaces to their fullest extent. Nobody will have to worry about two people booking the same meeting room for the same time. Everything will run automatically behind the scenes, leaving managers with more time to develop other areas of the coworking space. Calendars for desks and other bookable resources further make everyone’s lives easier. Everyone can always see what resources are booked out and when, making it easier for them to schedule appointments where they’ll need equipment. To find out more about adding calendar sync to your booking solution, [get in touch](https://www.cronofy.com/contact/). --- # How Investing in the Pre-Onboarding Process Helps Increase Employee Engagement and Retention Keeping employees engaged is key for any business to grow. Employees who are engaged are the ones who have bought into their employer values and mission. Keeping employees engaged is key for any business to grow. Employees who are engaged are the ones who have bought into their employer values and mission. Keeping employees engaged is key for any business to grow and be successful in the long term. Employees who are engaged are the ones who have bought into the values and mission of their employer. They feel valued and listened to. They stay longer with the business. It’s an employer’s role to make sure the processes and support systems are in place to accompany employees on their first day and every day after that. But the employee experience shouldn’t only begin when a new starter walks in for their first day. The importance of pre-onboarding is becoming clearer as businesses and HR professionals continue to better understand employee engagement levers. More and more “pre-onboarding” has become a buzz word in the HR Tech industry. But what does it really mean? And how can employers leverage it to increase employee retention and happiness? Let’s take a look at the current situation and best practices for pre-onboarding employees. ## What is pre-onboarding? When we talk about pre-onboarding, we’re referring to the period of time after a candidate accepts a job offer but before their first day. In some cases – such as with new starters who have extensive notice periods – this can last for several months. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about pre-onboarding is the admin side. Sorting out employment contracts, references, background checks, HR records, etc. While these activities need to happen, there is a lot more to pre-onboarding. It’s a period of time that presents a unique opportunity for the employer to welcome new hires and introduce them to their future colleagues. It will help make their induction period easier and keep them motivated while they’re working through their probation period. ## Why is pre-onboarding so important? > 28% of employees are willing to quit a new job in the first 90 days if they don’t find it satisfactory. **Robert Half & Associates** The time after accepting a job offer can be a weird phase for the new hire. They have to work their notice period. They might be apprehensive about starting a new role and meeting new people. That’s why it’s important that their future employer keeps in touch with them regularly and gives them reasons to be excited about starting their new job. This will pay dividends down the line. The more [onboarding](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-build-an-effective-employee-onboarding-process/) tasks – both admin and social – are completed before a new starter’s first day and the more they can focus on understanding their role right away. It will save them a whole lot of stress and help the employer deliver a superior onboarding experience. ## Communication is key Throughout the pre-onboarding phase the major risk is for the new hire to lose their sense of excitement and eagerness at starting a new job. This is especially true for prolonged notice periods – something common in engineering roles. The future employer and the new hire’s future line manager have to make the effort to stay in touch regularly with the new starter. The employer should send a welcome package to the hire with some branded items – stickers are always popular – as well as information about the company’s culture and values. But the most important thing is that the manager communicates with their future report as often as possible. They can send them regular updates about company news, schedule monthly catch-ups to know how they’re getting on, and start teasing the projects that the team is working on. It’s also recommended to share the onboarding process steps with the new starter so that they know exactly what to expect from their first few weeks with their new organization. Any question or requests by the new hire should also be prioritized to show them that the company and team they’re joining value them and want them to succeed. ## Encourage socializing Starting a new role almost always means joining a new team. Meeting new people and creating new social relationships can greatly influence how happy and engaged an employee will be. Meeting a lot of new people on the first day just adds stress to an already stressful time. New starters will be worried about remembering faces and names. That’s why inviting new hires to staff events or team lunches before their first day is a great way to break the ice in a more relaxed environment. The conversations will flow a lot better in a casual setting. Talking with peers is also going to provide new hires with more valuable insights into the company and the role. The stress of the first day with be greatly reduced when they walk in to be greeted by familiar faces. ## Better scheduling helps remove frictions As we’ve seen so far, a first-class pre-onboarding experience should include many interactions between the new hire and their future colleagues. These interactions can be in person or over the phone and will be part of a process formalized at organization level. It’s important for the organization to ensure that these interactions happen to assess the efficiency of their pre-onboarding program. That’s why selecting a pre-onboarding tool with [built-in scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/availability-api) and tracking capabilities can make the difference between a smooth and rocky experience for the new hire. This tool should be able to help the managers share their [real-time availability](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/availability-api) with the new hire to schedule regular catch-up calls. It can also be used to schedule one-to-one catch-ups with team members or to ensure that a member of the HR team will be present when the new hire comes in for an admin task. Overall, great scheduling removes stress as the new hires always know when the next interaction will be. When they can book in their time slots it also puts them in control and reinforces the notion that their employer really cares about their work-life balance. ‍ ### Paving the way for a lasting relationship with pre-onboarding Providing a great pre-onboarding experience will pay dividends throughout the employee tenure at their new company. It will also ensure that the new hire turns up excited on day one – or in some cases just turns up at all – passes their probation period and becomes a successful, productive and engaged member of the team. ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Cronofy meets Workology on podcast episode: ‘How to choose the right tech to speed up time-to-hire' HR tech and automation is growing in popularity among time-strapped recruitment firms. Our CEO, discusses how the right tech can speed up time-to-hire. HR tech and automation is growing in popularity among time-strapped recruitment firms. Our CEO, discusses how the right tech can speed up time-to-hire. HR tech is growing in popularity among time-strapped staffing and recruitment firms, particularly solutions that can automate tedious administrative tasks. Automated interview scheduling, onboarding, and payroll services are among recruiters’ top sought-after solutions, hoping they will save hiring time while improving the candidate experience. **The question is: how do you choose the right tech for your business?** Our CEO, Adam Bird, recently sat down for an episode of the [Workology podcast;](https://workology.com/podcasting/) ‘*How to choose the right tech to speed up time-to-hire*’. Adam was joined by Ken Krieger; Executive Vice President of staffing firm, The Judge Group. Cronofy recently partnered with The Judge Group to provide a resolution to their scheduling problems, leaving their recruiters with more time to focus on what’s important: matching the right candidate with the right position. #### Here’s a list of the main highlights from the podcast: ## The phone-tag phenomenon The back-and-forth between recruiter and candidate is an infuriating game, and it only gets worse as a business grows. The Judge Group knows this all too well; they have eleven hundred full-time employees, seven million candidates, and two hundred thousand client contacts, all trying to schedule meetings. Adam explains that scheduling technology can streamline the process. An automated email with potential interview time slots can be sent to candidates when they move from one stage of the hiring process to the next, based on the real-time availability of recruiters. Ken agrees that Cronofy scheduling has helped rid the company of the phone-tag phenomenon, which was draining both the recruiter's and candidates' time. He explains how the speed of an email response complete with interview scheduling link on completing their job application gives them a 'buzz'; they feel seen as a person and more engaged in the process. ## The vendor appeal Recruiters and Talent Acquisition teams invest in HR technology solutions to improve their performance – from reducing time-to-hire, to enhancing employer brand. But deciding on the vendors can be tricky. Ken talks about how Cronofy's commitment to data privacy and security was a critical deciding factor in their decision process. He also highlighted the intangible factors he considered, for example, how reactive Cronofy was to their needs and having the flexibility to build bespoke solutions. ## Buy-in from the board Getting HR tech buy-in from the board is usually the biggest hurdle a HR leader faces before implementation. Ken and Adam discuss how to tackle this and effectively communicate to the board how the tool would benefit the business as a whole. They also cover the importance of aligning your new tech with business strategy to ensure people use it to their advantage. ## Don’t side-step the security gaps Security is a top priority for any business, especially within HR and recruitment, as they deal with so many personal details and sensitive data on a daily basis. Adam stresses how important security is to Cronofy and how this shapes our products and services. While they save the recruiters time, we always make sure to never scrimp on security. ## Our candidate expectations report Adam discusses the results from our “[Candidate Hiring Expectations” report,](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download/) which is full of invaluable insight to give recruiters the edge in the war for talent. The report is based on a survey of 6,500 candidates across the world. We conducted this research in partnership with OnePoll to better understand the impact of interview scheduling on candidate experience and employer brand. Hearing directly from candidates that interview scheduling delays lead to drop-off and negative employer brand perception stresses the importance of investing in the right technology to win the War for Talent. Want to listen to the full podcast? [Find it here](https://workology.com/episode-317-how-to-choose-the-right-tech-to-speed-up-your-time-to-hire/) on the Workology website! --- # How AI in Education Saves Time and Encourages Smarter Decisions 77% of teachers feel they can’t do their best work because of a lack of time and resources. That means millions of students aren’t getting all they should be able to from their lessons. Tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer new resources to teachers and can help them save time. Teachers with more time and resources can focus more on the individual needs of their students. AI doesn’t just have the potential to benefit teachers, though. Students and admin staff can also use it to be more efficient. 77% of teachers feel they can’t do their best work because of a lack of time and resources. That means millions of students aren’t getting all they should be able to from their lessons. Tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer new resources to teachers and can help them save time. Teachers with more time and resources can focus more on the individual needs of their students. AI doesn’t just have the potential to benefit teachers, though. Students and admin staff can also use it to be more efficient. 77% of teachers feel they can’t do their best work because of a [lack of time and resources](https://flickread.com/edition/html/5c614896b72fb#22). That means millions of students aren’t getting all they should be able to from their lessons. Tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer new resources to teachers and can help them save time. Teachers with more time and resources can focus more on the individual needs of their students. AI doesn’t just have the potential to benefit teachers, though. Students and admin staff can also use it to be more efficient. In fact, it can be used in most parts of the education process, from helping to teach students right through to grading papers and even sorting through admission applications. Let’s take a deeper dive into how AI already helps schools and universities, and what might be to come. ## Artificially intelligent teaching assistants In large classrooms, it's impossible for teachers to tailor lesson plans to suit every students’ needs. Instead, they focus on what will benefit the majority of the students in the class. This means that those who learn faster or slower than their peers don’t always get the attention they need. Artificially intelligent teaching assistants (AITA) tailor class content to students’ skill levels. Students can progress at their own pace without needing to wait for their peers to catch up or feeling like they’re slowing other students down. It provides students with feedback on their skills in real-time, removing the delay that comes with teachers grading work after classes. This can spark immediate conversations on what students can do to improve their skills and of course, their grades.AI and machine learning can also help on a smaller scale, for example, with writing tools such as Grammarly or Hemingway. These can be used in everyday classrooms without the need to invest in expensive equipment. A more tailored approach to teaching means that every student gets the attention and feedback they need to progress in their studies. When AI is embraced, they’re not let down by a lack of human classroom assistants. This means they're less likely to become disengaged because the teaching style doesn’t fit their learning requirements. ## Faster grading Grading papers is one of the most time-consuming parts of teaching. If a teacher can [grade one page in three minutes](https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-teachers-to-grade-papers-on-average-in-high-school), it will take them around 12 minutes to grade a 1,000-word essay. For a classroom of 30, that’s six hours of marking. For a single essay, from a single class. Right now, AI is best suited to grading multiple-choice questions, as the answers are either right or wrong. However, this is changing. AI and machine learning are adapting to understand the context of language, making it better at grading essays. AI can grade 16,000 essays in [as little as 20 seconds](http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/artificial-intelligence-used-to-mark-exam-papers/article/523361). No human teacher will ever be able to replicate that. They can, however, use the time that AI saves them. Even if there will always be a need for a human eye to balance the evaluation from AI, teachers can save hours on grading every week. This time can be used to plan lessons, work with students, and recover after a long day. Rested teachers will have more energy and focus to provide a better quality of teaching to their students. Saving teachers time provides them with a better working environment, making teaching a more attractive career choice. Faster marking also means that students can [receive their grades sooner](https://medium.com/hubert-ai/ai-in-education-automatic-essay-scoring-6eb38bb2e70). They then have longer to act on the feedback they’re given. This means they have longer to work toward improving their grades. Over the course of their academic career, this additional time that they have to act on feedback can make a huge difference to a student’s academic progress, changing everything from their GPA right through to the colleges and universities that they can apply to. ## Smarter timetable management Schedules and timetables keep schools, colleges, and universities running. They’re vital in helping students and teachers know where they need to be and when. Software that coordinates these without factoring in real-time schedules risks falling prey to scheduling conflicts. Unlike traditional scheduling software, which doesn’t factor in users’ current schedules and often results in double-bookings, AI can schedule classes in seconds. Because it can automatically connect to everyone’s calendars there’s no risk of scheduling conflicts for anyone or anything involved. AI can also ensure that two classes haven’t booked the same room at the same time. No class has to miss out due to miscommunication or poor scheduling solutions. When schedules are created using calendar sync and AI, personalized schedules can be created for everyone. Students are placed in classes that suit their skills, not their schedules. Even though schedules are more tailored to everyone, they require less work from admin staff to create. Once information on staff, students, and subjects has been inputted, AI can work out the rest.AI and calendar sync can also be used to make it easier for teachers to book out resources such as tablets or VR equipment. This avoids any double-bookings, providing a better experience for students and teachers. Teachers can then form lesson plans around the availability of these resources without needing to mitigate the risk of something being unavailable or double-booked. Smarter schedules also make it easier to manage the timetables of substitute teachers. They can be provided with information directly to their calendars on where they need to be and when. For teachers that are in different schools each day, information on the school's location can also be added to their calendars. Organizing substitute teachers faster means that students are less likely to fall behind in their studies because they’ve missed out on valuable lesson time. ## Streamlined admissions processes The average college admissions team receives [75,870 applications every year](https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list-college/articles/colleges-that-received-the-most-applications).AI can filter through admissions essays to see if students use terms or phrases that show if they’re a good fit for the institution. Cultural fit is one of the top three reasons that students leave before having graduated. Some argue that AI will help to find more of a cultural fit, while others argue that it can’t take into account diversity or other factors that are equally important for colleges and universities. [Chatbots](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/calendar-sync-chatbots/) with AI can answer common questions that students have, saving staff hours every week answering students’ questions via email or on the phone. Scheduling admissions interviews, meetings with scouts, and campus tours can also be done with AI and calendar sync. Schedules for these meetings can be synced with the organizers, avoiding any double-bookings in their calendars. Students are provided with a faster, simpler booking experience and can organize everything they need at the same time. They’re left with a more positive view of the institution, meaning that they may be more likely to choose it if they receive multiple offers. ## Conclusion AI can give teachers more time to spend with students in a variety of ways. It’s not about taking away from their job, it’s about giving them more time to do what they’re paid to do: help students to achieve their full potential. It’s also about ensuring that students get the best possible education they can, regardless of what their baseline abilities are. Students shouldn’t suffer during their academic years because how they’re taught doesn’t suit how they learn. Students ready to go to college or university are also provided with a better experience. Everything they need can be done online using AI, from booking meetings and interviews to getting their questions answered. The admissions process is more streamlined, saving admissions teams countless hours every year. This gives them more time to deal with the tens of thousands of applications that they receive every year. Admin staff can use the time that they save from coordinating schedules to focus on providing a better experience for staff, students, and parents. This creates a better working environment for staff, and a better learning environment for students. Long-term, the institution’s brand will benefit from this improved working and learning environment, bringing in more students and therefore more revenue. What education-related tasks would you like to see AI take care of? [Let us know on Twitter](https://www.twitter.com/Cronofy)! --- # Improving the Employee Journey with Real-Time Calendar Sync Hiring great employees is tough. You can spend months looking for the right fit for your business. You can’t afford to mess up and set your hiring plans back. Once you’ve hired your staff and built your teams, it’s important to show employees that you care about them. Creating a positive working environment ensures your team come to the office with a smile and staff turnover stays low. Hiring great employees is tough. You can spend months looking for the right fit for your business. You can’t afford to mess up and set your hiring plans back. Once you’ve hired your staff and built your teams, it’s important to show employees that you care about them. Creating a positive working environment ensures your team come to the office with a smile and staff turnover stays low. Hiring great employees is tough. You can spend months looking for the right fit for your business. You can’t afford to mess up and set your hiring plans back. Once you’ve hired your staff and built your teams, it’s important to show employees that you care about them. Creating a positive working environment ensures your team come to the office with a smile and staff turnover stays low. It therefore makes sense to invest in the tools and technology that will help you create a great work environment. From the interview process all the way to when your employees move on to pastures new, there’s plenty that you can do. This is where real-time calendar sync comes into play. At Cronofy we have a vision. We believe that by connecting people’s schedules we can change the way that time is managed and improve everyone’s lives. This vision starts with helping businesses connect their software and applications to the calendars of their employees. Doing so helps to streamline repetitive tasks and avoid time-wasting, which can lead to frustration. There are plenty of occurrences where calendar sync can help you to deliver a smooth experience while also building up your employer brand. Let’s look at some of the key milestones in the employee’s journey. ## Better candidate experience with calendar sync The first contact a future employee has with a company comes when they apply for a position and interact with your recruiting team. Whether you use an agency or do your recruitment in-house, job applications are usually managed through Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Many Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions also include an ATS module. Arranging interviews can be hard, especially when there are many qualified candidates. Hiring managers need to find a time that works for the members of the interview panel and for the candidates. Doing this without calendar sync means having to first gather the availability of the interviewers, then call or email each candidate individually to see which day and time they can do. Often the solution is to filter candidates based on their CVs or based on initial phone conversations, potentially missing out on talent. When you enable real-time calendar sync, that experience is completely transformed. The hiring managers can access the schedules of the interview panel simply by accessing their calendars then generate a scheduling link that they can email to the candidates. There’s no need to call the candidates while they’re at work either – everything can be done when it’s convenient for them. The availability of the interviewers updates in real-time, preventing double-bookings and allowing the same scheduling link to be shared with as many candidates as needed. Calendar sync helps transform the interview scheduling process into a straightforward experience for candidates and interviewers. Your team saves time and, by creating a better candidate experience, you can [improve the quality of your hires](https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/10-hr-recruiting-wish-knew-last-year/) by as much as 70%! ## Calendar Connected from the first day on the job Applying for a new job can be stressful, but the first day in a new company is even more stressful for new starters. It’s no wonder that [20% of employee churn](https://www.clickboarding.com/18-jaw-dropping-onboarding-stats-you-need-to-know/) happens within the first 45 days. They meet new people, try to remember their names, and do their hardest to get their bearings in a new work environment. You don’t want to add any unnecessary stress on top of that. That’s another thing calendar sync can help with. There are inductions and introductory meetings to schedule. It’s unlikely that authorizing calendar sync for their calendars will be at the top of a new starter’s list of priorities. Thankfully that’s not something you have to worry about with Cronofy. With our Enterprise Connect feature, you don’t need to request individual authorization to connect to the calendars of each team member – you can onboard an entire company or team in one go. No fuss. And no extra tasks for the new member of your team. Employees who receive a great onboarding process are [69% more likely to stick around](https://www.clickboarding.com/18-jaw-dropping-onboarding-stats-you-need-to-know/) after 3 years. It’s a no-brainer, really. ## Save time and reduce stress with calendar sync Now that your employee is settled into their new job, there will be many regular occurrences when colleagues will need to access their calendars to schedule events painlessly. Here is how calendar sync can help with some of these recurring events. ### Training and Learning When an employee joins a new company it’s important for them to learn how to use the tools and techniques they will need to be successful in their new role. After that initial training, a business should always be looking to offer more opportunities for their staff to work on building up their skills through internal or external training programs. Providing your teams with training can make a huge difference to employee happiness and can help to increase loyalty. It makes employees feel valued as they understand that the company is helping them acquire new skills. These skills will be useful at different stages of their careers and not exclusively in their current position. Companies will often ask their HR teams to find a time and a place to organize training. This can be a painful process when more than a handful of people are involved. The bigger the company, the truer this is. Trying to align everyone’s schedules takes time. Once a time is agreed there’s always the chance that one of the attendees will have to cancel because an important client meeting has come up. This process is frustrating for the trainer and for the employees who may have to adapt to last-minute changes. It is also frustrating for the organizers who could be spending their time on higher-value tasks. Once calendar sync is enabled for your booking tool – be that a classic scheduling tool or your HR software – the process becomes a lot more straightforward. With access to everyone’s calendars it’s easy to find the sweet spot when everyone and everything (meeting rooms, parking spaces, etc) are available. If you need to bring an external trainer in you can let them choose when works best for them and even share geolocation details via calendar invites. ### Performance reviews and appraisals For many companies the end of the financial year is an extremely busy – dare we say sometimes chaotic? – time. It’s a time when new budgets need to be agreed, deals are signed, and plans for the following year are finalized. It is also the time of the year when managers sit with their staff to look at their past performance and to discuss future objectives. It’s not something to treat lightly or ignore as it can set the mood of a team for the next 12 months. Unrealistic targets or low expectations aren’t good for anyone’s morale. Managers scramble to fit appraisals into their calendars while juggling all their other commitments. Appraisal season is also when the competition for meeting rooms become the fiercest. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With calendar sync, dozens – even hundreds – of appraisals can be organized in minutes. The events can be added to everyone’s calendars based on their availability. If you have created calendars for your meeting rooms they can be booked automatically too. What was once a painful process becomes nothing more than simple admin tasks. Managers are more relaxed, employees can focus on preparing for their appraisals, and everyone is happier. ### Paid time off Most people love vacations and your employees are no different. No one can be effective without taking a breather from time to time. So why make booking paid time off a hassle? In the current situation, employees have to login to an external tool to book their absences. Managers will then receive an email asking them to login to that same tool. If they are lucky that tool will tell them if the holiday request conflicts with time off booked by other team members. If they want to check that the time off won’t conflict with upcoming deadlines they’ll need to check their calendars. Don’t go in circles when a straight path is available! With calendar sync you can allow employees to book paid time off directly from their calendars. This is where they manage their time, after all. Calendar notifications keep managers updated and any conflicts are highlighted and visible where it makes sense. ## Don’t forget about exit interviews Even the best things come to an end. When an employee leaves, most companies set up an exit interview to understand the reasons behind their decision. That’s important as it can help the business to improve as an employer. When leaving a job, though, someone’s top concern will be handing over their responsibilities and finishing projects, not checking if they have been invited to a meeting to discuss their departure. Connecting your HR software to your employee’s calendars means this is something that can be built into HR workflows. When an employee hands in their notice their exit interview can be automatically booked, meaning there’s no risk of it being missed. ## Build up your employer brand In the grand scheme of things, building calendar sync into your HR software applications might not sound like a fast track to employer branding greatness. But it really can be. Well-utilized calendar sync is a discreet feature that simplifies all your scheduling processes. It saves time for everyone and saves additional stress throughout an employee’s time with your company. This is the kind of benefit that helps to create a positive experience that present and past employees will share with their social circles. If they use Glassdoor to leave reviews on your interview process and working environment it will reach an even wider audience. Positive feedback helps to boost people’s perceptions of your company. It also ensures you attract and keep the best talent so that your business can soar. ## No time like the present to get started There is a clear use case for calendar sync throughout the employee journey. These are just the ones we considered when building our products. It’s likely that over the next few months we will see more being developed by our clients and users. Cronofy’s Calendar API is the perfect tool to build real-time calendar sync into any HR software. Take a look at [our documentation](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/), [create your free account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer), and start building calendar integration into your software today. ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Effortless calendar management for photographers with Iris Works Iris Works is an all-inclusive cloud based studio management system built for photographers by photographers. It focuses on being easy to use, set up, and manage, giving photographers more time to let their creativity run free. Iris Works is an all-inclusive cloud based studio management system built for photographers by photographers. It focuses on being easy to use, set up, and manage, giving photographers more time to let their creativity run free. [Iris Works](https://www.iris-works.com/) is an all-inclusive cloud based studio management system built for photographers by photographers. It focuses on being easy to use, set up, and manage, giving photographers more time to let their creativity run free. Photographers are often small-business owners who have to juggle between their photography work and growing their business with their personal life. Therefore, being able to manage all commitments from one place and having an online scheduling tool that allows them to share their availability is important. Iris Works’ system provides calendar management for photographers’ sessions. Usually photographers offer different types of sessions, for example family sessions, newborn sessions, or wedding sessions. Within Iris Works, users can have a different calendar associated to each type of session they provide. They can also choose a customizable workflow for each calendar that will kick start once a booking is made. The workflow includes sending quotes, confirmation emails, contracts, and invoices to customers. > The Cronofy integration has been a huge selling point for Iris Works. Photographers typically manage at least 2 calendars, and with our Cronofy integration our users can easily connect their calendars and manage their businesses more effectively. — Meredith Gradle, Founder and CEO, Iris Works ## The Challenge Iris Works is committed to helping their users maximize their time, grow their customer base, and increase revenue. So, when users requested an online scheduling component to be added to the system, the company looked into how it could be achieved. Sharing calendar availability and giving **customers the power to book appointments** online drastically decreases the time business owners have to spend on repetitive admin tasks. It gives them more time to focus on their work and on growing their businesses. It also **increases customer satisfaction** by enabling them to book suitable time slots in just a few clicks. While many systems on the market use a third-party scheduling system, Iris Works wanted to build it in-house. They were looking to offer their users and their users’ customers a seamless process so that when a booking is made, the associated workflow is automatically triggered without the photographer having to switch applications. Iris Works’ development team looked for a scheduling API that wouldn’t force them to spend time and resources building a different calendar integration for each calendar service. That’s how they found Cronofy. They then started testing our standardized calendar API, which allows developers to sync their software to all major calendar services. ## The Solution Cronofy exists to solve all scheduling challenges, and that includes helping organizations provide a better online booking experience to everyone. Our [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) was a perfect fit for Iris Works’ needs and the integration happened seamlessly. This integration means that photographers who use Iris Works can now connect their personal calendars and **share their availability **with the platform through Cronofy. They can share their calendar’s availability on their websites, social media accounts, in emails, and text messages. When a slot is booked via Iris Works – whether that’s on a website, via text message, or by email – that event is **automatically added **to the connected person’s calendars. The opposite is also true. If an event is added to the person’s calendar, that event will be reflected in **real-time** in all the calendars in Iris Works. This also means that when a slot has been booked, it will no longer be shown for booking to anyone else. Everything happens in real-time, so the risk of double bookings or missing appointments is gone. If photographers don’t know their schedules ahead of time, they can also choose to select a few available dates to send customers in a booking link on a case-by-case basis. Iris Works users can now manage all their commitments from one place, and they can allow customers to book online. This helps them to reduce their admin burdens, giving them more time to focus on providing high-quality work to their customers and growing their business. Since using our [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) and adding **real-time scheduling** to their offering, the team at Iris Works have registered an increase in conversion rates from free trials to paid customers by** 5% per month**. > As a wife and mom, it's important that I'm not glued to my computer any more than I have to be due to editing and what not. So having a booking system in place helps eliminate the back and forth between me and my clients so they can easily find a time that works for them and my schedule and book their session all while I'm spending time with my family. The whole process is seamless and saves me so much time, especially with use of workflows that will kick off once my client books and send out any of my follow up email communications. — Megan Al-Hassani, Professional Photographer, Iris Works ### Give your users the right calendar management tools [The Cronofy Scheduling APIs](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduling-apis/) allow you to add scheduling tools that work with all major calendar providers to your software. This saves your users time they’d otherwise have spent on admin tasks and allows them to maximize their working hours. If you’re a developer, you can create a [free account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/new) to try our API for free and see what features you could build. If you’re a product owner, or just generally interested in learning more about Cronofy and how clients use our service, please get in touch today. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? The recruitment process can be a make-or-break moment for both candidates and employers. While companies strive to attract top talent, many inadvertently push candidates away due to common pitfalls in their hiring processes. Understanding the factors that lead candidates to abandon the interview process is crucial for improving recruitment strategies and maintaining a strong employer brand. Let’s explore what the insights from our recent annual candidate survey data tell us about the reasons why candidates drop out, and the significant effects this has on both the candidates and the employers. ## 1.** Lack of Communication Leads to Frustration and Dropouts** Amongst all current issues in hiring, candidates cite a [lack of communication](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#959b1c9f9206) as the most frustrating aspect of the recruitment process. One of the primary reasons candidates leave the interview process is insufficient communication from recruiters and hiring managers. Delays in responses, unclear instructions, and infrequent updates leave candidates uncertain about their application status and next steps. ### **Impact on Employer Branding:** - **Risk to Reputation**: Candidates who experience poor communication are likely to share their negative experiences on platforms like Glassdoor, which can impact your company’s reputation. - **Decreased Trust**: Lack of communication erodes trust in the employer, making it harder to attract high-quality candidates in the future. - **Lower Candidate Engagement**: Candidates may disengage from the application process early or avoid the company entirely, leading to a reduction in the overall quality of applicants. ### **Our Tip**: **Maintain regular communication to keep candidates engaged** Keep candidates informed at every stage of the process. Use automated updates to ensure timely communication and set expectations about timelines. ## **2. Ghosting and Lack of Transparency Damage Trust and Employer Reputation** [Ghosting](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#23fc7acb112f), or the sudden cessation of communication from recruiters, leaves candidates feeling undervalued and disrespected. This lack of closure, combined with insufficient information about the interview process, timelines, and role details, can lead to significant drops in candidate trust and engagement. According to the Candidate Expectations Report, a lack of transparency was cited as the second most frustrating part of the interview process by [17% of the candidates](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#be088ba06865). > In 2024, there are no excuses for ghosting candidates anymore, because there are multiple tools and systems to support you in giving feedback to candidates. You can use an ATS to schedule communications, there are assessment solutions that offer automated feedback on test results. In the recruiter's defense, I think one reason for ghosting is actually the good intention of wanting to give manual feedback, yet only a few of us have enough time to actually do it. — Malin Freiman Moezzi, Licensed Psychologist ### How to Overcome Ghosting in Recruiting Duration: 1:32 ### **Impact on Employer Branding:** - **Negative Reviews**: As with lack of communication, candidates who are ghosted or left in the dark often leave scathing reviews online, warning others about their experience. This can deter potential applicants from considering your company. - **Perceived Disrespect**: Ghosting and lack of clear communication are seen as disrespectful and unprofessional, damaging the employer’s image and leading to a perception of a toxic workplace culture. - **Increased Candidate Drop-out Rates: **Candidates are more likely to withdraw their applications if they feel uncertain about the hiring process, leading to a smaller and less diverse talent pool. In fact, [43%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#bd0e6da011b3) of candidates report dropping out of interview processes due to long times to schedule interviews in 2024. - **Reduced Candidate Referrals**: Candidates who feel ghosted are unlikely to refer others to apply for positions at your company, reducing your talent pool. ### **Our tip***:* **Ensure transparency and implement no-ghosting policies to maintain trust** To foster trust and maintain candidate engagement, make it a policy to provide feedback to all candidates, regardless of their progress in the hiring process. Clearly outline the interview process, including the number of stages, expected timelines, and preparation guidelines. Some companies include this information on their career page to set clear expectations from the start. By maintaining transparency throughout job descriptions, interviews, and all stages of communication, you can build a strong foundation of trust with potential hires. ## **3. Prolonged Interview Processes Increase Candidate Stress** Globally, [38%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#f356bb9d5569) of candidates cited long and drawn-out processes as a major source of stress, and this number rose to [56%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) for those who identified as neurodivergent. Prolonged interview processes can wear candidates down. Long waits between stages, excessive rounds of interviews, and delays in decision-making can cause candidates to lose interest or accept offers from other companies. ### **Impact on Employer Branding:** - **Perception of Inefficiency**: Lengthy interview processes can make your company appear disorganized and inefficient, which can be off-putting to potential applicants. - **Higher Dropout Rates**: Candidates are more likely to drop out and accept other offers, leading to a need to restart the hiring process and higher recruitment costs. - **Competitive Disadvantage**: When faced with multiple offers, 70% of candidates consider the smoothness of the recruitment process to be a key factor when deciding which role to pick. This could leave your company at a disadvantage. ### **Our tip**: **Streamline processes to reduce candidate frustration** Eliminate unnecessary steps and aim to reduce the overall time-to-hire. Use tools like automated scheduling to speed up the process – in fact, candidates picked it as the [top area](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#8560eaaa9e8a) they want to see automated in hiring this year. ## **4. Disorganized Processes Deter Top Talent** Disorganized and inefficient interview processes, such as long wait times, unclear communication, and poorly structured interviews, can lead candidates to withdraw from the process. However, the broader issue is the perception candidates form about the company when faced with disorganized interview processes. ### **Impact on Employer Branding:** - **Negative Public Perception:** Candidates are quick to form negative opinions about a company with disorganized interview processes. According to the Candidate Expectations Report, [34%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#245b2f4be11d) of candidates felt that disorganized processes indicated that the company did not respect their time. - **Perceived Lack of Care:** [33%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#245b2f4be11d) of candidates believe that disorganized interview processes suggest that the company does not care about its candidates or the recruitment process. This perception can severely damage the company’s reputation and make it less attractive to top talent. - **Perceived Lack of Organizational Resources**: Candidates might view inefficient processes as a sign that the company has insufficient assets, which encompass human, technology, and financial resources. This can deter candidates who value structured and efficient recruitment practices. - **Concerns about Company Culture: **Disorganized processes can make candidates question the overall company culture, including its commitment to inclusivity. Candidates expect a company to be well-organized and efficient, reflecting a culture that values all employees. As seen in the graph above, [12%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#245b2f4be11d) of candidates felt that a lack of organization indicated poor inclusivity. ### **Our Tip:** **Improve organization and demonstrate inclusivity** Ensure your hiring process is well-organized and efficient to reflect a positive company culture. Implement structured interview processes and use technology to manage scheduling and communications. Show commitment to inclusivity by making accommodations for diverse candidates and communicating these efforts clearly during the hiring process. By demonstrating respect for candidates’ time and a commitment to inclusivity, you can enhance your employer brand and attract top talent. ## **Top takeaways:** When candidates drop out due to the factors above, it affects their perception of the company and can lead to negative word-of-mouth, both online and offline. This can deter other potential candidates from applying. For employers, the impact is significant. They lose out on great hires and their employer brand suffers. Negative experiences are often shared on review sites, like Glassdoor, affecting future talent acquisition. By addressing these factors, companies can improve their hiring practices and maintain a strong employer brand. A well-organized, transparent, and respectful recruitment process attracts top talent and enhances the company’s reputation. ## **Ready to Enhance Your Recruitment Process?** Discover how you can streamline your hiring and improve candidate experience by reading the full [Candidate Expectations 2024](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024) report. ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience Recruitment What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- # Scheduling API | Cronofy Cronofy's Scheduler API enables seamless integration of advanced scheduling features into your application, supporting complex multi-person scheduling with automated rescheduling and customizable workflows. ## We built scheduling so you don't have to Cronofy's embedded scheduler is a pre-built solution for custom scheduling use cases. Embed fully managed scheduling into your website or application that supports multi-person, multi-event, rescheduling, and complex selection rules. Get started [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/) > Cronofy helped us in the early stages of Dubsado, we were able to save vast amounts of time on writing code and focus on other ways to grow our business. Cronofy played an instrumental part in making our team more efficient. — Jake Berg, Co-Founder & President, Dubsado Embed Scheduling ## As simple as a button embed The fastest way to add scheduling to your application. Add the [Cronofy Embed NPM package](https://www.npmjs.com/package/cronofy-scheduler-embed) to your app and you'll embed all of the capabilities of the Cronofy Scheduler. A full set of client and server-side callbacks allow you to track when times are selected, rescheduling occurs and much more. Fully managed by us, so you don't have to. [Customize the Scheduler](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/customization/) Rescheduling ## Automated Rescheduling Built-in Rescheduling is often the most time-consuming and painful aspect of scheduling, so we handle it for you and notify your application when it is done. Whether you're using the embedded Scheduler or the Scheduler API, you can control both whether people can reschedule and what happens when they do. [Read Scheduler API docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api-alpha/scheduling-requests/) Scheduling Complexity ## Built for your scheduling needs Most scheduling services only handle one to one meetings. Cronofy is different in that it supports multiple people as standard. With automated selection rules, multi-person scheduling eliminates the burden of hand rolled matching and coordination logic. [Read the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/) Customization ## Custom workflows to match your business needs Cronofy’s workflow engine will notify your application of meeting bookings, rescheduling, upcoming events and much more. Configure one web hook for your application and you'll always be up to date. Allowing you to focus on building the features that differentiate your app against your competitors. [Read about workflows](https://docs.cronofy.com/scheduler/workflows/) Get a free developer account and start exploring No credit card required. Get your free account [Talk to a specialist](/book-a-demo-api) --- # Own the meeting workflows your customers rely on Platforms are under pressure to consolidate tools and streamline workflows, and automated meeting scheduling and note-taking are now table-stakes. We help you deliver them. ## Own the meeting workflows your customers rely on Platforms are under pressure to consolidate tools and streamline workflows, and users expect automated meeting scheduling and note-taking to be built in, not bolted on. Cronofy's infrastructure lets you embed scheduling, recording, transcription, and AI summaries in weeks, without re-building them yourself. [Future-proof your platform](https://www.cronofy.com/future-proof-your-platform#84e97e25655b) ## Keep critical user workflows in your product If users jump to external tools to schedule meetings or capture notes, your platform loses stickiness. Cronofy embeds directly into your product to automate scheduling, recording, transcription, and AI-generated summaries. Meetings are booked faster, notes and summaries are captured instantly, and your users stay in your product. ## Stop letting unstructured notes limit your AI roadmap Private docs and scattered notes can't power the agentic workflows your users expect. Cronofy gives you a structured, contextual data layer from every meeting so you can unlock AI-driven capabilities like auto populating post call notes and eliminate the manual work that slows users down. ## Ship faster than the platforms you complete with Rebuilding scheduling, calendar sync, recording, and transcription costs your team months, and delays the features that truly differentiate your product. Cronofy gives you a fully integrated infrastructure layer already powering leading platforms across HR, CRM, EdTech and Healthcare that’s ready to ship in weeks, so your team focuses on what sets your product apart instead of re-building plumbing. > Implementing Cronofy was painless – they provide a simple and clear API that allowed me to have the integration live to customers in less than one month. — Drew Zader, Senior Software Engineer, Handshake ## Trusted by leading platforms See how leading platforms use Cronofy to power native meeting workflows. ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study ## Future-proof your platform Cronofy helps platforms build AI-ready, integrated meeting workflows without starting from scratch. Book a call to learn how. --- # Interview scheduling: streamline hiring processes and make your team more efficient Interview scheduling automation to streamline recruitment processes to make teams more efficient. In this on-demand webinar, Deniz, our interview scheduling expert will explain how you can use Cronofy to schedule interviews directly from BambooHR. Deniz will also cover how Cronofy: - eliminates back-and-forth - improve speed-to-hire - reduce scheduling and rescheduling time from 3-5 days to 2-3 hours - integrates with video conferencing services - is cost effective with Active User pricing See how you can schedule interviews from BambooHR with Cronofy --- # Charlie’s founder tells us how culture is core to the interviewing process Ben Branson-Gateley is CEO and Co-Founder of HR software focused 'Charlie'. We spoke with him about our recent research into candidate expectations. Ben Branson-Gateley is CEO and Co-Founder of HR software focused 'Charlie'. We spoke with him about our recent research into candidate expectations. *Ben Branson-Gateley is CEO and Co-Founder of **[Charlie](https://www.charliehr.com/)** – an HR software focused on delivering a first-class employee experience. In light of **[our recent research into candidate expectations](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/)**, we wanted to talk about our findings and more. Read on for the full conversation below.* ### What leapt out at you about the research? I think one of the shifts that we're seeing, and I'm a big proponent for, is leveling the playing field between candidate and employer. I've always believed your most valuable asset as a person is your time, right?So if I'm deciding to work somewhere, really what I'm thinking about is how do I want to spend my time in the future? How do I want to spend a resource that it's impossible for me to ever get back?You're not doing anyone a favor by giving them a job. And I know that's kind of how employers feel sometimes.We want to try and create a level of balance of appropriate give and take and push and pull from both sides. > 77% of senior staff said that it would affect their perception of an employer. 64% of them said they'd be less likely to engage or recommend a business in future. ### So actually it's not just about a kind of balance for ethical reasons – there are real consequences if you alienate people through your process? There really are. And I think that your employer brand should be thought of as the external-facing part of your culture. People are experiencing that - through the interview process - and you want them to have as positive an experience as possible, because you have no idea who they're going to come into contact with.And you have no idea where they're going to go on and be in five, ten years time.We have people on our team who I interviewed once, and we said, this is probably isn't the right time. And then two, three years later, we've hired them back. ### What we're saying is that it's easy to think of the interview process as the end of the story but that's not it at all. There is a long-term mentality missing from this a lot of the time. Yeah. And I think that's not just true in hiring but in business more broadly. There's the new Simon Sinek book, which is called [The Infinite Game](https://simonsinek.com/product/the-infinite-game/). And we need to remember that building a business isn't like playing sports where you’re done in 90 minutes and on to the next one – it is infinite.I think investors, and the media, and all of us can do a better job of trying to push that narrative. If you think about things through an infinite lens, then you're much more likely to treat candidates well, be good with feedback, be good with rejections, do all of that stuff correctly. ### How do you look at designing a great and seamless experience at CharlieHR? The first thing I would say is we are definitely not perfect. We always start everything from a position of trying to be open and honest, to try to learn.We approach everything in our business from a place of purpose first and then everything else sits on top of that.So we talk about “making work better” as our internal purpose, but what is interesting about that phrase is that it applies for our team and organization, as well as our customers and our products. Having something that's really simple can help make it obvious what the do's and don'ts are.We put a very particular instruction on that phrase, which is that we must always start with ourselves before we can start with others. How do we make it right for our team and if we do that well, we can do it for our customers. ### When it comes to making work better, how do you find balance between use of people to do what they do best and the use of tech to make things efficient and streamlined? I think it's about the ordering. So we talk about “human-led” and “software-enhanced”.Some organisations might think: we need to upgrade our team engagement. They’ll do a survey or run some polls. But that's not engagement, it’s just a way to get yourself data on what is going on within your organization.Technology is not a get out of jail free card. You’ve got to start with a human led approach and the software is there to enhance it and scale. ### Do you have specific recommendations for how people can get started with this? With hiring specifically, the three biggest levers are your job ad, your hiring process and candidate feedback. You want a job ad that has as much information in as possible. It should not be some cryptic, descriptive bit of prose. It should be factual. It should be well written. It should be super transparent and clear about what you're looking for, but also what the experience of working at the organization is going to look like. Who is the successful candidate going to interact with? What's their day-to-day going to look like? Benefits, policies, all that kind of stuff. It should include some kind of banding when it comes to salary. That's been shown to 100% improve the types of candidates, the diversity of candidates, the quality of candidates that apply. Next, be really transparent with your process: this is who's going to be involved. This is the type of thing we're trying to work out at each level. Explain your decision-making process and how you give feedback. If someone has gotten down to the last round, if someone has even made it past the phone screen, I think everyone deserves feedback. What that means is having some criteria for how you're making a decision. Too often, this is what’s stopping great feedback – the organization hasn't really deeply thought about what criteria they're using to determine whether they come up short on a particular area. Share with candidates what's going to be required at every stage and what to expect, along with three defined criteria for how you're going to make the decision, and give feedback against afterwards. Even if they're not the right fit, they're going to leave with a really good taste in their mouth. And who knows what value that's going to provide you in the future. It goes without saying you should be using technology to support the high value touch points that only humans can do. Naturally, scheduling interviews efficiently is an absolute no brainer. *We recently surveyed 6,500 candidates in the US, UK, France and Germany. **[Read our report](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/)** on how interview scheduling impacts candidate experience and a business’ ability to hire.* --- # Cronofy is the European secure, flexible and cost-effective alternative to Calendly | appointment scheduling Cronofy’s scheduling technology is the perfect alternative to Calendly for teams who are looking for value, flexibility and security. ## The best Calendly alternative for teams with complex scheduling needs Calendly is an appointment management solution for individuals. Cronofy is a fully customizable scheduling assistant for any type of meeting. [See pricing](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic) ## Why do teams choose Cronofy over Calendly? ## Combine calendars in real-time without creating groups Calendly requires you to create a group of attendees to compare their calendars, this gives you no flexibility when coordinating group meetings. With Cronofy, you don't need to set up polls requesting people's availability or create groups to compare calendars, you just add the emails of your attendees to find their combined availability in real time. ## Cronofy is the end-to-end interview scheduling solution Recruitment teams often have complex meeting needs and Calendly falls short on customizable features to adapt to these needs. For instance, recruiters find that with Calendly they can't personalize booking pages for candidates or curb unsolicited scheduling. Cronofy powers scheduling for over 75 Applicant Tracking Systems worldwide and fully automates interview scheduling for teams. ## Calendly is expensive when you need to scale With Calendly, you might pay more for extra features, and you still pay during less busy seasons. Finance teams love Cronofy's pricing model because we only charge for active usage. > Cronofy has significantly reduced the time we spend coordinating interviews. Their sequence template feature has been an efficient way to schedule multiple interviews with a candidate, without our team coordinating calendars manually. — Stephanie Romero , TA Strategy and Experience Specialist, UKG ## What makes Cronofy better? Cronofy vs Calendly - 1-to-1 - Personalized scheduling links - Advanced rescheduling - Schedule any meeting on behalf of others - Override busy calendars - Real-time availability for group meetings - Multi-domain branding - Add breaks between working hours - Track all meeting status - Browser extensions - Enterprise integrations - Send separate invites - Panel - Combined panels and dynamic pools - Allow private events - Sequences (back-to-back interviews) - Auto-schedule when candidate changes process stage - Buffer times around interviews - Rotate interviewers from a pool - Add candidate profile and interview kit to interviewers' invite Speak with an expert to learn more about how Cronofy compares to Calendly Cronofy understands scheduling is not one-size-fits-all and** **offers more flexibility for teams without implementation headaches. Let's show you how Cronofy adapts to your needs. [Book your demo today!](/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic) --- # HRTech Breakout Session for Talent Acquisition Leaders Network with Talent Acquisition leaders and gather intel on how leading organizations are implementing AI & Automation in their recruitment process. ## #HRTech Breakout Session Join us in debriefing the top talking points about implementing automation and AI in your recruitment workflows - we'll sweeten the deal with pastries, too. [Save your seat](#form-614d7fdf-32a0-4df8-9c19-2162bf0afc9d) --- # Discussing the future role of telehealth with Dr. Til Jolly Dr. Jolly is a Chief Medical Officer, and was previously at the Department of Homeland Security. We spoke to discuss the findings of our new Healthcare Report. Dr. Jolly is a Chief Medical Officer, and was previously at the Department of Homeland Security. We spoke to discuss the findings of our new Healthcare Report. ***[Til Jolly](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiljolly/)****** is Chief Medical Officer of ******[Aveshka](https://aveshka.com/)******, and previously held senior roles at the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA.*** ***We spoke to him about the findings of our new ******[Remote Healthcare Report](https://cronofy.com/remote-healthcare-scheduling-report)******, particularly about what prevents practices from improving in these areas.*** ### What are your thoughts on the research? Healthcare is woefully behind every other industry that allows you to book and attend appointments online interactively. People are used to online appointments for all kinds of things, and we make it harder than it needs to be. It’s interesting that one of the top three things patients like about remote healthcare is easier booking. That’s interesting because there’s no reason why booking should be any easier for telemedicine versus in-person care. Whether it’s live or telemedicine, an appointment has got to be scheduled. So, there’s a big market for that. And you have to wonder why doesn’t it happen? ### So why is it? What is it in the nature of this industry? Healthcare professionals are more modern than we used to be but we still do things in a very traditional way. You’re ordering tests and you go back and write it in, then you try to call somebody and maybe their pager goes off – we’re very old-fashioned in the way we do things and think of things in healthcare. So the systems persist of having a person answering the phone with really long hold times. If I’ve got a patient in position and it’s between nine and five (except for lunch, of course) and I want to talk to somebody, it’s remarkable how long the hold times are – even if you want to reach a doctor’s office or hospital. The fact is that current healthcare systems are not integrated at all. We talk about integrated health systems but we don’t have one. We have a bunch of different systems that don’t talk to each other. It’s just very tradition-bound and partly it’s cost, partly it’s a complex issue that’s tough to tackle. We also have to consider that security is an issue now too. And then, there’s just not huge competitive pressure to improve it. If you’re a doctor’s office or clinic and you’re running at full capacity, then you are most likely happy to let it run at full capacity. ### Do you think experiences with remote healthcare during the pandemic have changed people’s expectations? There is going to be an expectation if you look at utilization. Usage climbed rapidly through last spring, and then it has leveled off at a new baseline. I think there is an expectation that remote healthcare should be available. But it’s interesting, there’s still a wide variation between patient populations about what they want and need. In the US, the regulations are about to change. We had all kinds of regulations that relate to privacy and payment and other things where the waivers are probably going to go away. So in the end, what are we going to be allowed to do and supported to do after the public health emergency goes away? ### What would you do to fix and improve the system? I think one of the big frustrations for patients is the requirement to repeat information. Particularly very basic information like demographics and basic health history and things like that. We need to do something to improve our information systems. Where the system falls apart is primary care sends you to a cardiologist or a primary care center. That information needs to be repeated because the systems don’t talk to each other very well, or even if the systems do talk to each other, people won’t trust them. It’s really down to the information flow. If you look at billions of dollars spent 15 or 20 years ago trying to drive interoperability, that’s the big word. But the electronic health record systems, both in hospitals and in individual provider groups are kept proprietary. From a regulatory standpoint, they’re not forced to share information. And if you are a practice, you’re not really incentivized financially to upgrade because you’re not getting paid for it. You’re operating on very, very slim margins. And you have to churn out more patients per hour because of the way you’re compensated. This is a fundamental system issue that we need to sort. ### What else do you think stops progress in accessibility and convenience? I think, as the provider community, we don’t really know how to market this. And we don’t even really know what marketing is. If you look at the websites of provider groups, they’re all basically designed the same way. They all have: who we are and what services we provide and maybe what sets us apart and where our offices are located. And there might be a link to the telemedicine and to the scheduling. But it’s a fundamental rethinking of how we communicate. We don’t like thinking of patients as customers. We’re taught that healthcare is a mission and a sacred trust and all that sort of stuff. And because we weren’t taught to manage things that way, you still can have a physician/ patient relationship but you’ve got to put in place things that are more similar to the way Disney does things or Amazon or United Airlines. People know how they interact with organizations that are fighting for market share. Knowing this, they assume that healthcare ought to interact that way. And it doesn’t. But it creates uncertainty and it creates annoyance because the system doesn’t work. You see the signs up on highways with live updates on what the wait time is in the ER around the corner. It drives us crazy because we know those numbers aren’t really true, but it shows tension between providing a healthcare service and that higher calling. I once heard a presentation from an operations leader at a huge family practice group in Northern Virginia. They said they left 40% of their schedule open every day because they knew that a certain proportion of their patients would want same-day appointments. It’s really a data management issue. You’ve got to have a data and analytics team that tells you, for example at an orthopaedics: we’re going to leave 15% of our schedule open on Monday because we know people are going to break things on Saturday and Sunday and want to come see us. ***We surveyed 2,000 US patients who had used remote healthcare at least once in the 12 months leading up to June 2021. We aimed to assess the appetite for future use of remote healthcare, booking and accessibility, and compare preferences and frustrations with in-person healthcare. ******[Get the infographic and data here](https://www.cronofy.com/telehealth-survey-data)******.*** --- # How a scheduling integration with Cronofy freed thousands of hours for BambooHR users BambooHR's scheduling integration with Cronofy is now saving recruiters thousands of hours! Read the integration story and see the integration in action! BambooHR’s dual focus on candidate experience and removing administrative fatigue led them to integrate Cronofy’s embedded scheduler to help save recruiters thousands of hours from manual scheduling. **Streamlined scheduling for recruiters** without having to leave their ATS **Thousands of hours saved** across organizations in just a couple clicks **Fastest ever growing integration** on BambooHR's marketplace > We see thousands of interviews being scheduled through the integration. That equates to hours and hours being saved for organizations. — Jonny Rejholec, Principal Product Manager, BambooHR The philosophy behind** **[**BambooHR’s**](https://www.bamboohr.com/h1/)** **product strategy focused on “trying to make the complex simple” when thinking about the end user. We asked BambooHR’s Product Manager, Jonny Rejholec what this means in practice. # Complex calendars: BambooHR’s dream to free users of manual scheduling burden "Most people get into HR because they care about people. They’re interested in helping their companies become better places to work,” shares Jonny. However, scheduling places a significant burden on users, who spend not just hours, but days per week on it. On the other end were candidates, often left waiting weeks for their interviews, or worse, ghosted because companies were crushed under the administrative fatigue of scheduling. This did not fit with the picture BambooHR had in mind for their users. “Part of our philosophy is really leaning into helping companies be more strategic, even with their operational tasks and HR to try to improve that employee experience.” Upon realizing candidate experience is inseparable from smooth scheduling, BambooHR set course to address this. "People’s days are managed by their calendars,” explained Jonny. “One of the greatest gaps right at the top of our product was scheduling." That’s why giving users the ability to take better control of them was the basis of BambooHR’s mission to transform their scheduling offering. With this in mind, a partnership to add a more streamlined scheduling functionality within the BambooHR environment was a natural next step in a bid to improve recruiter experience. Enter Cronofy’s integration. [Learn more about Cronofy's integration in BambooHR](https://www.bamboohr.com/integrations/listings/cronofy) ### What's been the biggest impact of integrating Cronofy into BambooHR? Duration: 0:31 # Streamlined scheduling for recruiters without having to leave their ATS BambooHR’s product focus has been putting emphasis on improving their hiring module as a priority to alleviate the effects of scheduling burden for both companies and candidates. > Scheduling is a core part of the hiring process from your first phone screen, all the way through to doing your reference calls. "Throughout the hiring process, there was this need to be able to schedule with various individuals involved. It was a top need if we were going to make our customers' lives better and easier," added Jonny. Embedding a good candidate experience throughout the product was at the forefront of what BambooHR wanted to deliver to its customers and enable them to hire better. “We know that a candidate who has a good experience is more likely to accept an offer,” Jonny explained simply. "And a candidate who has a poor experience is less likely to accept an offer, but also more likely to talk about it. In the short term, that hurts because you lost that candidate. In the long term, it *really* hurts because they talk about it online, they share it and it hurts your employer brand." Cronofy’s Candidate Expectations research shows that candidates value respect for their time above all else, and perceive [**disorganized interview processes**](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#98114601989a) to be a precursor of things to come. As an embedded scheduler partner, BambooHR joined forces with Cronofy to drive the feel and outcome for the implementation to deliver exactly what their users needed. The partnership with Cronofy was a natural fit and allowed BambooHR to add key features to their offering at a quicker pace without having to bear the engineering burden. “We didn't want to do all that heavy lifting on our own. Cronofy has a great support staff, it has the tech, and the tech is easy to work with,” shared Jonny. “The user experience is great. All those things really aligned with what we were looking for. Cronofy has not only the simple features, but also the advanced features for scheduling; it works for all various types of customer needs." As a future-forward organization, BambooHR were on the market for a solution that would serve their diverse customer base for the long term. # Thousands of hours saved across organizations with just a couple clicks The results of the partnership blew expectations out of the water with record-breaking numbers. > We saw value right away. Within the first month, we had hundreds of customers sign up for this integration. It was the number one fastest growing integration on our marketplace. "We see thousands of interviews being scheduled through the integration,” spoke Jonny on the positive customer response seen since the offering went live. “That equates to hours and hours being saved for organizations." This efficiency had positive knock-on effects for candidate experience — thanks to the time reclaimed, BambooHR users now had hours of free time per week to give candidates the personal touch they crave, and to close roles faster after being [**freed of administrative burden**](https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/streamline-interview-scheduling). With Cronofy, scheduling within BambooHR now [**happens in a few clicks**](https://www.bamboohr.com/product-updates/interview-scheduling-with-cronofy), rather than hours of back-and-forth emailing. “It has made us happier here at BambooHR, made our customers happier, and our candidates too.” For BambooHR, the mission to give companies a platform enabling them to hire better continues. “We’re on a mission to do great work here. We’re also not only trying to set people free to do great work, but we want to help them get there,” shared Jonny when asked about what’s next on the horizon. “The future of our products will be aligned to that purpose, and our partnership with Cronofy is testament to that.” [Explore Cronofy's integration in BambooHR](https://www.bamboohr.com/integrations/listings/cronofy) ### Pinpoint streamlines interview experiences with real-time scheduling Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. Case Study --- ### Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Blog Post 2024-06-19T12:00:32.123Z --- ### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? Blog Post 2024-07-15T14:00:40.161Z --- # How Emerging Technology Drives Productivity Technology in the workplace is the new normal. Thanks to greater integrations in our personal lives, employees and employers alike are acquainted with the many benefits technology offers and are looking to see these benefits translate into their work lives as well. Using the best tools and software on the market is not only beneficial for business leadership, but it can also contribute to a happier, more engaged workforce. Technology in the workplace is the new normal. Thanks to greater integrations in our personal lives, employees and employers alike are acquainted with the many benefits technology offers and are looking to see these benefits translate into their work lives as well. Using the best tools and software on the market is not only beneficial for business leadership, but it can also contribute to a happier, more engaged workforce. Technology in the workplace is the new normal. Thanks to greater integrations in our personal lives, employees and employers alike are acquainted with the many benefits technology offers and are looking to see these benefits translate into their work lives as well. Using the best tools and software on the market is not only beneficial for business leadership, but it can also contribute to a happier, more engaged workforce. This is because many new types of technology help streamline workflows, allowing employees to divert their attention at work to larger projects as opposed to getting lost in the tedium. Although most businesses recognize the value that technology can drive toward an organization, a staggering [60% of organizations](https://www.dimensiondata.com/microsites/-/media/95C5923C59FD4437B870929D3396F891.ashx) have not yet developed a strategy for deploying tech usage in their workplace. To help your company design a strategy for implementing new technology, we’ve listed a few key areas of business operations, and how corresponding technology can have a substantial impact on productivity across your organization. ## Strength in team dynamics Whether you have three employees or 300, your company’s ability to establish strong connections amongst one another is paramount to success. This is because strong teamwork environments are known to [boost engagement and reduce turnover](https://museumhack.com/reasons-why-team-building/) — and according to Forbes, fostering team dynamics is [the most valuable investment you can make](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianscudamore/2016/03/09/why-team-building-is-the-most-important-investment-youll-make/#1263ea12617f).Thinking of team dynamics as an investment requires you to reconsider how you implement team strategies in the office. Instead of spending your resources on team lunches or happy hours, you can foster higher levels of engagement and ROI through investments in new technology that will create a fortified work front for your teams. [Learning management software](https://skyprep.com/lms/features/) (LMS), for example, bridges the gap between your current employees and recent hires to boost interpersonal relationships within your department. These platforms offer a cohesive digital space to track the progress of your employees currently onboarding, which can help your new hires become proficient in their positions much more quickly. Because so much of learning a new job is centered around asking questions and associating with other people in your department, most LMS platforms offer designated spaces for mentorship programs and feedback from your teams, allowing new hires to understand the demands of their job through a more human connection. ## Customer inquiry management Great customer service demands both speed and precision, which is exactly what makes it so difficult to master. One study found that [90% of polled consumers](https://blog.hubspot.com/news-trends/live-chat-go-to-market-flaw) rated an immediate response as important when they have a question for customer service teams. At the same time, [62% of consumers](https://financesonline.com/customer-service-statistics/) say that insights and knowledge are critical to their customer experience. How do you ensure timely responses that don’t lose that personal touch when so often prioritizing one means sacrificing the other? Technology designed to better manage customer inquiries can help your business preserve both quality and quantity.Take [contact center software](https://www.8x8.com/contact-center) as one example. Designed to enhance customer experience by lowering wait times and directing calls to the correct department, contact center technology aids your support teams to help keep customers satisfied and engaged. Many call center solutions offer call volume management features, such as intelligent interaction routing, which can help managers visualize current queues and relay customers to agents they’ve spoken with previously. When paired with a knowledge center or CRM database, you can ensure that your teams have the background information they need to tailor conversations to each individual’s needs. This helps teams move through pending inquiries with both speed and accuracy.Many businesses have also optioned for an [AI chatbot solution](https://flowxo.com/product/flow-for-chat/) to maximize the time and productivity of their customer service teams. With the advent of eCommerce marketplaces and other online transaction systems, companies have discovered that their customers want to be in control of their own purchase journey – researching, buying, and problem-solving without ever contacting a company representative. [Chatbots](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/calendar-sync-chatbots/) take the self-service journey one step further by enabling customers to ask questions whenever they want to make a purchase. And since these inquiries would otherwise need to be answered during office hours by one of your team members, chatbots guarantee that your customers receive instant answers to their questions around the clock. ## The mobilized workforce [Over 3.7 million employees](https://www.fundera.com/resources/working-from-home-statistics) work remotely for at least half of their workweek. These numbers partly indicate an increasing demand to balance work and personal time for employees, but they are also indicative of the trend toward global operations. Even small businesses today work outside of their local communities – whether they’re selling their digital products to overseas clients or connecting with vendors on the other side of the state.With a greater number of employees working in their home offices, traveling for meetings or switching to [coworking environments](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/coworking-space-management/), mobile technology is one of the only ways to guarantee that your staff stay connected and at their maximum productivity levels. Making its way onto the mobile market, businesses are converting to [5G cellular technology](https://www.verizon.com/about/our-company/5g/what-5g) for unparalleled speeds on mobile networks. Previous generations of cellular unlocked new capabilities for smartphones, tablets, and other wireless devices (1G offered voice calls, 2G enabled SMS messaging, etc).When compared to 4G LTE, 5G hasn’t expanded into many new features for its users – still offering video streaming, web access, texting, voice and video calling – but this technology has instead prioritized speed, latency and quality of cellular signals.With speeds tracked at 10 gigabits per second, 5G technology will completely redefine the way that we do work. Employees will enjoy even greater connectivity between all of their devices, thanks to deeper integrations with [Internet of Things (IoT) systems](https://flex.com/cross-industry-technologies/iot-platforms), which are capable of pairing everything from your company coffee machine to the laptop you work on every day. Although IoT and 5G won’t completely reinvent the devices you already use in your office, these emerging pieces of technology will make it possible for the tools you use daily to work in sync with one another much more smoothly, giving your teams the time and resources they need to handle bigger-picture concerns as opposed to getting stuck in their day-to-day operations. Aubrey Galbraith is a business communications specialist. Her main areas of focus include business technology, company culture and the intersections between both. When she isn’t writing, you can find Aubrey reading the news or researching the latest trends affecting businesses everywhere. --- # 5 ways to secure the best talent for your clients As an external recruiter, competition for the best talent is fierce. Writer and recruitment expert, Nicola Wright, shares her five top ways to attract and secure the top candidates for your clients. As an external recruiter, competition for the best talent is fierce. Writer and recruitment expert, Nicola Wright, shares her five top ways to attract and secure the top candidates for your clients. We’ve lived through some truly unprecedented events in the past few years, and those experiences have upended the way a lot of people think about work. The effects of seismic shifts in the hiring market are still being felt by employers; though The Great Resignation may have begun during the pandemic, it’s showing no signs of slowing down just yet. According to PwC, almost nine out of ten organizations [experienced higher turnover than usual](https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/pulse-survey/future-of-work.html) in 2021—and by March 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics noted a [record high of 11.5 million job openings.](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-job-openings-hit-record-high-115-million-march-2022-05-03/) People are reevaluating what they want from their working lives, and that includes the hiring process. Understanding exactly what candidates want, and successfully adapting to these new expectations, is proving a challenge for hiring managers and recruitment agencies alike. But in a tight labor market, those who get their recruitment strategies right will be rewarded with the best candidates. If you’re a recruiter looking to help your clients attract and retain top talent, here are five ways you can tighten up your hiring process. ‍ ### **#1 – Sell the client** Hiring is a two-way street. Too many job ads merely outline the role and what the client wants from a candidate. But what does the candidate get out of it? The best talent isn’t just interested in a paycheck, and a job ad that outlines why someone would want to work for your client is the best way to attract candidates to the role. And when we’re talking benefits, we don’t just mean things like dress-down Fridays and cycle-to-work schemes. Candidates should be able to see a future when they read your ad. Outline what the company does to support the development of its people, and make sure any reader knows that they’ll be valued and invested in going forward. Positioning a role in this way can have a significant impact on your client’s (and your) retention rate. Find a client an outstanding candidate who wants to grow with the business and commit long-term and the client not only keeps talent around longer, but it also shows the client that you know their business inside-out. Nothing solidifies client relationships like placing a well-fitting candidate that becomes an integral part of their team. Don’t forget: the most successful recruiters see past placing a candidate and think about the value they can bring to a client. Helping them build out their recruitment strategy by offering this kind of advice will enable you to become a valued staffing partner and not just a seat-filler. ‍ ### **#2 – Keep it simple** It’s a candidate’s worst nightmare. They’ve reviewed the criteria, uploaded their beautifully formatted resume, attached their cover letter, and then: “Please fill out your work history”. That’s going to be a hard no for a lot of candidates. Overcomplicating the application process with unnecessary legwork will lose you great candidates at the first hurdle. Their time is valuable, so make things as straightforward as possible. An efficient process reflects well on you and the client too—any organization that’s operating a sloppy, ineffective application system is not making a good first impression. A one-page online application will help boost completion rates. Essentially, the fewer clicks it takes to get to that apply button, the better. That’s where hiring platforms can help. Recruitment software like applicant tracking systems (ATS) have been around for a while, and although they’ve previously gotten flack for not being sophisticated enough to interpret certain formats or data (overlooking strong candidates in the process), modern recruitment platforms have evolved significantly. The best recruitment platforms on the market today use AI to size up a candidate’s skills and experience and filter out any applicants that aren’t a good fit for the role. Using a smart ATS will help you pinpoint the best candidates fast, and streamline a lot of admin for both the applicant and you. Integrating your ATS with platforms like LinkedIn that let candidates apply using their profile is even better. ‍ ### **#3 – Think mobile-first** Thanks to the constant connectivity of the internet, we live in an always-on world. That means more people are looking for new opportunities on the go. Candidates might spot an interesting role on LinkedIn during their commute, or while scrolling through Twitter from the sofa on a Sunday night. Cloud storage and online job boards mean candidates are ready to apply for jobs at the drop of a hat, so you have to be ready to facilitate them. Last year, 67% of job applications [were submitted on mobile devices](https://info.appcast.io/whitepaper/2022-recruitment-marketing-benchmark-report-website), so ensure your application process, plus any portals used to manage the process, are mobile friendly. ‍ ### **#4 – Move fast (no, even faster than that)** Time is money, and things move fast in the hiring market. This is especially true at the moment when unemployment is low and candidates have the upper hand. No candidate likes waiting around, and the onus is on you to get them moving through the process immediately. Plus, the most sought-after professionals will likely be in touch with several recruiters when they’re in the market for a new role. If you’re not responsive, they won’t waste their time when there are plenty of other options on the table. It’s nice to feel wanted, right? Nothing makes a candidate question your interest in them like waiting days to be offered an interview slot. Of course, you’re not just sitting on your hands during that time; often you’re waiting for the client to get back to you with availability. But that waiting game can kill your chances of hiring a suitable candidate. How do we know this? Because we asked them. We spoke to 6,500 job-seekers for our most recent Candidate Expectations report and found that 71% of candidates are [only willing to wait up to a day](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-report-2022-download) for recruiters to schedule an interview before dropping out. ‍ ### **#5 – Automate your interview scheduling** Convenience is something we’ve all come to expect in recent years. The ability to place orders, book appointments, and get instant answers is prevalent in all aspects of our lives, and candidates want to see it in the hiring process too. Finding a job can be a stressful time with spinning plates a-plenty. Automating the lower-value manual tasks like sending updates on the process, scheduling interviews, and gathering information makes things easier for you and the candidate. Consistent communication is essential for keeping candidates engaged in the process and making sure the process is moving swiftly. Automation gives you peace of mind that the wheels are turning, while you do something more valuable with your time. Of course, recruitment can’t be left to the machines. Knowing that someone will be a perfect fit for a role and your client’s company culture is an art that can’t be replicated by algorithms, but the admin that comes with it? That definitely can. Taking advantage of [automated interview scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) is a no-brainer. You spend less time on the back-and-forth, it’s easier for the candidate (making it less likely that they give up and drop out), it avoids scheduling delays to get the best people in front of the client faster, and helps vacancies get filled in record time. If you’re battling to land the best talent for your client, scheduling automation lets you nail down interviews 95% faster, ensuring your client gets time with the candidate before their calendar fills up with other opportunities. Plus, many interview schedulers sync with widely used calendar systems like Outlook, iCal, and Google Calendar, so there’s no need to keep yet another digital diary up to date. This nifty trick avoids double bookings or the need to shift interviews due to schedule changes by reflecting interviewer availability in real-time. New meeting in their calendar means they can no longer be available 2-3 pm? The automated interview scheduler will know that immediately, eliminating the need for awkward rescheduling conversations with candidates. According to research, automated interview scheduling frees up 284 hours a year per recruiter—just think how much more you can achieve for your clients with that time. ‍ *Nicola is a writer and recruitment industry expert. She has been creating specialised helpful content for this audience for the past six years.* ‍ *Want to learn more about how automated interview scheduling can help secure the best talent for your clients? **[Book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo)** with one of our experts and see the Scheduler in action!* --- # Speak with us at Unleash World Meet the Cronofy team at UNLEASH, we love learning about hiring process challenges and helping you find the right solutions. Find us at booth #C119 ## Streamline Interview Scheduling with Automation Our automated interview scheduling solution eliminates manual coordination, allowing candidates to self-schedule interviews and recruiters to focus on hiring the right talent. Speed up time-to-hire, reduce candidate drop-off, and improve the interviewing experience. Book a time to speak with Cronofy at UNLEASH > Within months of going live with Cronofy, what took us 6 days to schedule an interview, now has a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Calendar hygiene: a guide to cleaning up messy calendars Is your calendar messier than a teenager’s bedroom? Time for a spring clean – read on for our top calendar hygiene tips. Blog Post 2023-10-29T15:27:00.000Z --- ### Agreena recruiters automate panel interview scheduling and save 5 hours a week each Agreena helps farmers profitably transition to regenerative agriculture and companies achieve sustainability goals. Case Study --- # Cronofy becomes a certified Lever integration partner! We've partnered up with another leading ATS, Lever, and have launched our integration for their users! We have more integration partnership news to share! We’re excited to announce that we've just launched our integration for leading ATS provider, [Lever!](https://www.lever.co/) Now all Lever users can take advantage of Cronofy’s flexible automated interview scheduling. Cronofy will be included on the [Lever online directory](https://leverpartner.com/listings/cronofy) as an approved integration for their customers to easily find. ‍ The Scheduler was created to tackle scheduling headaches and save recruiters precious time to spend on higher-value tasks, like candidate sourcing and relationship building. Now with the Lever integration, users can schedule any kind of interview without any back-and-forth, all within their Lever platform. Cronofy fits into existing workflows seamlessly, so there's no implementation issues and no need to change the rest of your recruitment process. ‍ ### Stress-free interview scheduling All recruiters know that interview scheduling can be a frustrating, time-consuming process, involving a lot of back-and-forth conversations trying to find the best time slots for everyone. This is made even more painful when there are multiple people involved, such as for a panel interview. The Scheulder works by allowing recruiters to create public or personalized booking links that can be used to schedule interviews in a few clicks. Recruiters and Hiring Managers can share their real-time availability with candidates and accelerate the hiring process. From our conversations with thousands of recruiters, we know a common problem is not being able to find free time in a hiring manager's calendar for interviews. Often they block out time, for example a focus block one afternoon. With Cronofy that isn't an issue – you can choose to override blocked out times and offer interview slots within that agreed period. Users can build dynamic interview panels, pick from interview pools and even schedule on behalf of busy hiring managers to keep the recruitment momentum going. This all comes with full video conferencing support and real-time calendar sync. Scheduling links created with our browser extension automatically populate with the relevant information stored in Lever, such as name and email address, and any changes or updates in the interview process will always be kept in sync with the Lever interview records. This looks set to revolutionise how Lever users schedule interviews, saving them hours per week and speeding up time-to-hire, all while improving the candidate experience. Our CEO Adam had the following to say about the partnership: > “This partnership is another step toward our goal of taking the stress out of interview scheduling for everyone. Lever is trusted by recruitment teams across the globe – our integration provides them with a solution to frustrating back-and-forth interview scheduling and saves them precious time. We can’t wait to see where this partnership takes us!” Scott Hauswirth VP of Partnerships at Lever said: ‍ > “We’re thrilled to have added Cronofy to our list of integration partners. The growing demand for scheduling automation is undeniable, particularly for our customers who schedule interviews at scale. This integration looks set to revolutionize their working days, saving them a lot of time and hassle while improving the candidate experience. Welcome to the Lever ecosystem, Cronofy!” The Lever partnership is the latest to add to a growing list of ATS providers who trust Cronofy. We’re immensely proud of the fact we’ve been trusted by multiple highly esteemed companies and that are helping us reach our goal of helping recruiters hit their talent acquisition targets and make their days more productive. *‍* *Want to integrate Cronofy with your Lever platform?* *[Book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo)* *and see how it can work for you.* --- # Contact us | Get in touch with Cronofy Get in touch with the Cronofy team via email, social media, or even snail mail. We're responsive to all enquires! # Contact us Interested in finding out more about Cronofy? Fill out the form below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. For support enquiries please contact **[support@cronofy.com](mailto:support@cronofy.com)** ## How can we help? ## Contact information For feedback and all other enquires drop us a line to **hello@cronofy.com** **Amsterdam** Mr Treublaan 7 Amsterdam 1097 DP The Netherlands **London** Runway East 20 St. Thomas Street London SE1 9RS UK **Nottingham** 1 Broadway Nottingham NG1 1PR UK **New York** 228 Park Ave S New York NY 10003 USA --- # New: Send Separate Calendar Invites to Different Participants in a Meeting Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. Hint: automated scheduling might help you along. Booking a meeting may seem simple until you are faced with complexities like managing the expectations of different participants. Separate Invites enables you to send customized calendar invites to different attendees in the same meeting, enhancing privacy and boosting team productivity. In today's fast-paced business world, efficient scheduling is more important than ever. Whether you work in recruitment, healthcare, or any industry that depends on smooth appointment management, customizing communication for different participants can make a huge difference when dealing with external parties. This not only shapes how your organization is perceived but also impacts how well or poorly your internal teams work together. It’s why we are excited about our latest release - Separate Invites. This powerful new feature empowers Cronofy customers to send customized calendar invites to different attendees for the same event, enhancing privacy and team productivity. ## How Separate Invites Works for Teams As a recruiter coordinating interviews, with Separate Invites, you can: - Send the candidate interview preparation tips - Provide interviewers with the candidate's CV and evaluation criteria - Maintain privacy by keeping candidate and interviewer(s) contact details separate For medical professionals managing patient appointments, Separate Invites allow you to: - Send patients detailed instructions for their visit, including any necessary preparations - Provide staff with relevant patient history and treatment plans - Ensure patient confidentiality by keeping personal information secure Sales teams can also leverage this feature to: - Send prospects a clear agenda and value proposition - Equip internal team members with account history and talking points - Protect sensitive information about pricing or strategy from external view Separate Invites brings a new level of context and personalization to Cronofy scheduled meetings. By customizing event titles and descriptions for different participants in one meeting, you can send your invites with confidence, knowing each participant receives precisely what they need for a productive meeting. ## Take Action Ready to see how this works? Here's how to get started: 1. **Current Cronofy Users:** This feature is now available in your account. [Log in](https://app.cronofy.com/) and explore Separate Invites in our web app or inside your Applicant Tracking System using the browser extension. 1. **New to Cronofy?** [Book a demo today](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter?utm_source=product%20update&utm_medium=Blog&utm_campaign=SI) to see how Separate Invites and our full suite of scheduling capabilities can improve your time-to-hire. 1. **Have questions?** Our [support team](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/separate-invites) is on standby to help you make the most of this Separate Invites. At Cronofy, we're committed to continually improving your scheduling experience. Separate Invites are just one more way we're helping businesses spend time doing more productive work, communicate more effectively, and protect privacy. Learn more about Cronofy [here](https://www.cronofy.com/). ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience Recruitment What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. --- ### Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What Metrics Truly Matter Recruitment In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. But are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Talent Acquisition experts Stephanie Baysinger, Mary-Kay Baldino, and José Manuel Delgado Garcia share their thoughts. --- # Cronofy MCP Server Build with Cronofy’s MCP server and let AI agents create booking links, suggest meeting times, and schedule conversations using users’ availability. ## Give your AI agents the ability to schedule meetings reliably Build with Cronofy’s MCP server and let AI agents create booking links, suggest meeting times, and schedule conversations using users’ availability. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) ## Add agent-powered scheduling without building the orchestration layer The Cronofy MCP Server connects your AI agents to real scheduling infrastructure through the Model Context Protocol. Agents can access scheduling tools in a standard way, while Cronofy handles calendars, availability context, coordination, and booking logic behind the scenes so you can launch agentic scheduling quickly, without building complex integrations or infrastructure yourself. ## Keep users in the flow of work Let agents handle scheduling where users are already in the flow of work. Let users move from task to meeting without breaking context - ideal for workflows like lead qualification, interview coordination, or customer follow-up. ## Turn conversations into scheduling actions Let users ask an agent to create booking links or schedule meetings using natural language. Agents can generate links from templates or raw details, turning text into action without manual coordination. ## Give agents real context into user availability Cronofy keeps context around availability and constraints in a single system, giving agents structured, reliable context to schedule on behalf of users. Instead of relying on incomplete or inferred signals, agents can access real-time availability, preferences, and constraints across participants to enable reliable coordination at scale. ## When to build with Cronofy’s MCP server ### You want agents to handle scheduling tasks Let AI agents create booking links, suggest times, and coordinate meetings conversationally. --- ### You want to keep users in the flow of work Keep users in your application while agents manage scheduling, instead of sending them to external tools. --- ### You want agents to stay context-aware Give them real-time availability and timezone-aware options so they suggest the right times, not just any times. [Read the MCP server docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/mcp-server/) ## Built on a single, compliant infrastructure backed by 99.99% uptime The MCP Server runs on Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure, which also powers the API and Embedded Scheduler. Because everything is built on the same foundation, you can combine approaches across your product for different use cases, without managing separate systems. Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified, with six regional data centers giving you complete control over where your data lives. [See all capabilities](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) [See pricing](/api-pricing) ## Powering SaaS applications of all sizes ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) --- # 6 Systems for Better Work Schedule Management Managers are busy people. Not only do they have to organize their own time, but they’re responsible for much of their employees’ time, too. The bigger the team, the more difficult it is for them to juggle everything. Coordinating their team’s schedules is a time-consuming administration task that doesn’t need to take as long as it often does. When the HR software that managers use has integrated scheduling, they have more time to spend improving their employees’ work lives and developing their own careers. Managers are busy people. Not only do they have to organize their own time, but they’re responsible for much of their employees’ time, too. The bigger the team, the more difficult it is for them to juggle everything. Coordinating their team’s schedules is a time-consuming administration task that doesn’t need to take as long as it often does. When the HR software that managers use has integrated scheduling, they have more time to spend improving their employees’ work lives and developing their own careers. Managers are busy people. Not only do they have to organize their own time, but they’re responsible for much of their employees’ time, too. The bigger the team, the more difficult it is for them to juggle everything. Coordinating their team’s schedules is a time-consuming administration task that doesn’t need to take as long as it often does. When the HR software that managers use has [integrated scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduling-apis/), they have more time to spend improving their employees’ work lives and developing their own careers. Managers and their employees can both benefit from using a HR software’s scheduling features. The biggest benefit for managers comes when both they and their team are calendar synced. It allows for everything from paid time off (PTO) to be managed more efficiently, to a more streamlined interview scheduling process. ## More efficient PTO management Make it easier for managers to approve paid time off – let them do it from their calendars. They already spend much of their time organizing their day in their calendar. Why not give them the chance to organize even more of their day from the same place? Employees can submit their time off requests from within their calendar, then their line manager can approve it from within their own calendar. This means that they can see what deadlines are coming up, and compare it against other employees’ time off, too. Everything can be done from the same place, making everyone’s lives easier. Alternatively, it can all be done from within the HR software that they use. This still means that employees and managers aren’t flitting between multiple applications to find the information that they need, as all of their up-to-date appointment information can be stored in the software that they use on a daily basis. Keeping everything in one place makes everyone’s lives easier. It stops any confusion, avoids any double-bookings, and means employees don’t need to learn how to use multiple pieces of software. This is a much better way for new employees to be onboarded and means that there isn’t such a steep learning curve for them to follow. ## Faster meeting organization Meetings are an important part of a manager’s day, but coordinating them can be complicated. Take away one of the more tedious admin tasks from managers by allowing them to organize everything at the same time. When managers, their employees, rooms, and the equipment around them are calendar connected, this is exactly what they can do. It means that there’s no chance of the room or equipment they need being double-booked and causing delays. Meetings are also guaranteed to be booked for a time when everyone and everything required is free. Meetings of all shapes and sizes can be organized in this way, from one-on-ones to larger, team-wide meetings. Only rooms large enough to fit the required number of attendees will be offered, ensuring that a large team meeting isn’t scheduled for a room that’s barely big enough for three people. Organizing a meeting in this way can save managers – who typically spend [23 hours or more in meetings every week](https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness) – hours of time. They then have more time to focus on their team and on their own careers. ## Calendar invites for external meeting participants Sometimes meetings need to be organized with service providers or other external participants. It can be tedious to send them all the information they need and be certain that the event has been added to their calendar. [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/) allow managers to send calendar invites to external meeting participants. These trackable calendar invites ensure that invitees have RSVPed. It also gives them all the required information that they need in one place. Unlike with an email, this information is available offline, meaning that even if they find themselves somewhere with a poor phone or WiFi signal, they can still find what they need. ## Control over working hours Managers can set their availability with [Availability Rules](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/). This means that they can choose when they want to be available for meetings and when they would like to set time for things like lunch breaks or deep work. It gives them more control over their schedules while ensuring that they’re still around to help their employees. Their team can also benefit from this feature. The team could agree on set hours when people are available for meetings, and hours when they have quiet time to focus on their tasks. This helps everyone to concentrate and helps to build routines that get people into the right mindset to concentrate. Perhaps they could block out one day every week where no meetings are allowed to be scheduled, and they only focus on personal tasks. Or they only have meetings in the mornings or afternoons. Depending on the size of the team will depend on how easy or difficult this is, but setting working hours using Availability Rules means that it’s much easier to stick to these agreed availability hours. To book meetings with their colleagues, employees can use the Availability Viewer. This shows them the most recent schedule of the manager or colleague that they want to meet with. The easier it is for employees to book meetings with their managers the more likely they are to do so should any issues arise. This means that the problem can get dealt with sooner and isn’t just saved for one-on-ones or team meetings, or not dealt with at all. ## Faster interview scheduling In fast-growing companies, interviews are crucial to building teams. Scheduling them is a time-consuming process that can be difficult to coordinate, particularly if several people or steps are involved in the interview process. Interview scheduling facilities mean that managers and recruitment coordinators don’t waste time finding days and times that work for everyone. Candidates can choose a time that suits them based on the interviewer’s – or interviewers’ – real-time availability. Not only does this create a better candidate experience, but it also requires minimal work on the interviewers’ part – once their calendar is connected to the software, their scheduling work is done. It’s quick and easy for them to set up, and it can save them hours for every role that they hire for. Even complicated, multi-part interview sequences don't have to be a headache to organize. They can all be coordinated using [intelligent sequencing](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduling-apis/) that even lets recruiters choose between a fixed or flexible order for each step of the interview process. When all of this has been organized, candidates can be sent a booking link to allow them to choose an interview time that suits them. This provides a [better candidate experience](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-experience/) and frees up hiring managers' time to focus on other aspects of the hiring process. ## Conclusion Removing the scheduling burden that managers face means that they have more time to help their employees and more time to build their team. They also have more time to develop their own careers. Everything from meeting organization to time management can benefit from managers and their teams embracing better scheduling software. To find out more about adding scheduling to your HR software, [get in touch today](https://www.cronofy.com/contact/). --- # Own the meeting workflows your HR customers rely on HR platforms are under pressure to consolidate tools and streamline workflows, and automated meeting scheduling and note-taking are now table-stakes. We help you deliver them. ## Own the meeting workflows your HR customers rely on HR platforms are under pressure to consolidate tools and streamline workflows, and users expect automated meeting scheduling and note-taking to be built in, not bolted on. Cronofy's infrastructure lets you embed scheduling, recording, transcription, and AI summaries in weeks, without re-building them yourself. [Future-proof your platform](https://www.cronofy.com/hr-platform-readiness#db7571393cd2) ## Keep critical user workflows in your product If recruiters or team members need to jump to external tools to schedule meetings or capture notes, your platform loses stickiness. Cronofy embeds directly into your product to automate scheduling, recording, transcription, and AI-generated summaries. Interviews and meetings are booked faster, feedback is captured instantly, and your users stay in your product. ## Stop letting unstructured notes limit your AI roadmap Private docs and scattered notes can't power modern AI features HR teams expect. Cronofy gives you a structured, contextual data layer from every meeting so you can unlock AI-driven capabilities like auto populating interview feedback and performance guidance. ## Ship faster than the platforms you complete with Rebuilding scheduling, calendar sync, recording, and transcription costs your team months, and delays the features that truly differentiate your product. Cronofy gives you a fully integrated infrastructure layer already powering leading HR platforms that’s ready to ship in weeks, so your team focuses on what sets your product apart instead of re-building plumbing. > HR Systems today need to have the employee front and centre and must require minimal training. Leveraging chat systems and native interfaces like calendars provide people with natural user experiences that just work wherever they are. — Anton Roe, CTO, MHR ## Trusted by leading HR Tech platforms See how top teams use Cronofy to streamline scheduling, accelerate hiring, and improve product retention. ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### Pinpoint streamlines interview experiences with real-time scheduling Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. Case Study --- ### How Business Draft’s conversational ATS schedules candidate interviews with Cronofy’s White-Label API Business Draft is a modern applicant tracking system (ATS) that’s helping teams hire better talent, faster. We speak to CEO Ty Peck to hear how they’re delivering superior candidate and talent team experience with simplicity and text message communication at the core. Case Study ## Future-proof your platform Cronofy helps HR platforms build AI-ready, integrated meeting workflows without starting from scratch. Book a call to learn how. --- # Cronofy Embedded Scheduler Add meeting scheduling capabilities inside your product with the fastest path to launch - using a pre-built scheduler that handles user availability, coordination, and booking for you. ## Embed fully managed scheduling into your product Add meeting scheduling capabilities inside your product with the fastest path to launch - using a pre-built scheduler that handles user availability, coordination, and booking for you. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) ## Let users schedule without leaving your application Combine availability across people, time zones, and calendar providers to surface bookable time inside your product. Let users coordinate and book meetings instantly, without manual back-and-forth. ## Keep meetings in sync as plans change Handle rescheduling, cancellations, and updates automatically across calendars and participants. Define how changes are managed, without building the logic to keep everything aligned. ## Let users book instantly, or share their availability via booking links Generate booking links via your application for users to drop into their existing workflows, or let them book a slot instantly inside your application. Give them flexible ways to schedule without sending them to external tools. ## Customize the styling to suit your branding and application’s interface Style the Embedded Scheduler in a way that fits your branding or UI - including colors, border styles, padding, and other CSS properties. Deliver an embedded experience that feels native, not bolted-on. ## When to build with the Embedded Scheduler ### You want to launch quickly Embed scheduling with a few lines of code instead of deeply customizing workflows with our API. --- ### You don’t need full UX control Use a pre-built scheduling interface instead of building fully white-labelled workflows from scratch. --- ### You want to keep users in app Whether that’s a recruiter booking interviews inside an ATS, or a sales rep sending scheduling links from a CRM. [Read the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/) > We first tried integrating with different calendar providers ourselves, but we had difficulties and maintenance issues. It was time consuming for our engineering team to maintain reliable service and squash bugs. — Baptiste Lilles, Growth, Doctor Anytime ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ## Built on a single, compliant infrastructure backed by 99.99% uptime The Embedded Scheduler is built on top of Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure, giving you all of the benefits of our capabilities in the form of a fully managed service. Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified, with six regional data centers giving you complete control over where your data lives. [See all capabilities](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## Explore other ways to build with Cronofy Built on the same infrastructure, so you can combine approaches for different use cases as your product evolves. ### Need more control? For teams who value control over speed, build fully white-labelled and custom workflows with our API, without being constrained by a pre-built UI. --- ### Building with Agents? For AI-powered apps. Let agents handle scheduling through our MCP server. Perfect for conversational interfaces and agentic workflows. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) [See pricing](/api-pricing) ## Powering SaaS applications of all sizes ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) --- # Embed meeting capabilities into your CRM Use our API and let users schedule meetings, record calls, generate AI summaries, and trigger follow-up actions ## Record, transcribe, and summarize meetings for your users Cronofy removes the plumbing behind meeting intelligence, so you can automatically capture, transcribe, and summarize sales conversations - eliminating manual note-taking for users while unlocking structured data to power automation and agentic workflows. [Learn how](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/unlock-meeting-data-inside-your-crm#b6035fd277b5) ## The data layer your CRM is missing When meeting recordings, summaries, and notes live in separate tools, the most important context never makes it back into your CRM. Deals get updated manually, follow-ups are missed, and your product can’t act on what was actually said, leaving your platform blind to the conversation that just happened. ## Capture context from every conversation With a single API call, dispatch an agent to join, record, transcribe and summarize calls across Meet, Teams and Zoom. Use Meeting Agents as a standalone product, or embed our meeting and scheduling infrastructure to automate the entire meeting workflow, from booking to follow-up. [Learn more](/solutions/customer-relationship-management) ## Unlock a new layer of contextual data Private docs and scattered notes leave your product blind to what happened in the meeting, creating a data gap that can’t support the automation and AI features your users expect. Meeting Agents give your application a data foundation to power entirely new capabilities, like automatically populating deal notes so reps get clearer guidance on what action deals need. [Learn more](/developer/meeting-agents) ## Why product teams choose Cronofy Time to value ## Ship AI-ready meeting workflows in weeks Building recording and transcription in-house means creating and maintaining fragile meeting bots across every conferencing platform. Cronofy provides pre-built meeting and scheduling infrastructure, so your CRM can start capturing structured conversation data and delivering AI-powered insights without the usual engineering lift. Differentiate your product ## Deliver the experience your users now expect Users expect their CRM to understand what happened in the meeting, without taking notes themselves. Meeting Agents eliminate manual admin for reps while giving your product structured meeting data to power next-step guidance and follow-up workflows. Boost stickiness ## Make your CRM the system of record When meeting notes don’t sync, reps use third-party tools, and every gap in your CRM becomes a chance for churn. Cronofy feeds transcripts and AI summaries back into your CRM, reducing drop-off, boosting adoption, and keeping users in flow. Build trust ## Unlock regulated markets while building trust Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. Six regional data centers give you complete control over where your data lives. That’s why industries like HR tech and Healthcare trust Cronofy to power their infrastructure, passing security reviews easier and winning customers quicker. ## Ready to capture the conversation for your users? After submitting the form, you'll be able to book time with a member of our team. In a 30 minute call, we'll walk through your specific use case, show relevant API flows and integration examples, and answer any technical or product questions you have. ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- # Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Cronofy, the embedded scheduler for high-performance teams, has released the latest edition of its annual Candidate Expectations report. Surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries in Europe and North America, the report presents exclusive insights into what candidates want out of hiring experiences. Here's a glimpse of what this year's results taught us: ## 1. **Long waiting times psychologically damaging to anxious candidates** Candidates from the UK, France, Germany, USA, Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands share that long times taken to schedule interviews, ghosting, and a lack of communication are placing higher psychological burdens on candidates than ever before. They name the top most frustrating issue in recruiting as lack of responsiveness and poor communication (at 28%). Neurodiverse candidates feel the effect of inefficient interview processes even more keenly, reporting higher levels of stress at 56%, compared to the global population (38%). ## 2. Candidates complain of longest interview scheduling delays on record due to increased recruiter workload Amidst layoffs, candidates report feeling that the market is starkly less stable compared to previous years. In 2024, a higher proportion (36%) candidates are waiting a month or more before disengaging from an interview scheduling process, up 12% from last year. Just 12% of candidates would disengage after 1 week, less than half compared to 2023. Recruiters come under more pressure as the percentage of candidates expecting to wait a month or more for their first interview is up almost 3x from last year (from 5% to 14%). The largest proportion of candidates (31%) report their first interview took as long as 2-3 weeks to schedule, presenting a missed opportunity for recruiters looking to recruit top candidates. ## 3. Candidates demand automated interview scheduling to ease delay pains Candidates named the top area they want to see automated as interview scheduling at 37%. With 81% also saying having human touchpoints during the hiring process is vitally important, recruiters need to balance automation and timely communication to succeed. ### Want to learn more about what candidates want from recruiters? Get the latest on candidate experience, as well as insights about how to get hiring right in 2024 by reading the full [2024 Candidate Expectations Report](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024). ### Calendar hygiene: a guide to cleaning up messy calendars HR Tech Is your calendar messier than a teenager’s bedroom? Time for a spring clean – read on for our top calendar hygiene tips. --- ### How to Create a Recruitment Outreach Strategy Recruitment Founder of QuickMail.io, Jeremy Chatelaine, shares his actionable recruitment outreach strategy to help recruiters have more conversations with qualified candidates. --- ### Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What Metrics Truly Matter Recruitment In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. But are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Talent Acquisition experts Stephanie Baysinger, Mary-Kay Baldino, and José Manuel Delgado Garcia share their thoughts. --- # Cronofy at RAC - Optimize the candidate journey with automated scheduling We were delighted to be a part of the first ever Recruitment Automation Conference, a free fully-virtual conference that brought together the global recruitment, to learn, grow, and connect. We were delighted to be a part of the first ever Recruitment Automation Conference, a free fully-virtual conference that brought together the global recruitment, to learn, grow, and connect. We were delighted to be a part of the first ever [Recruitment Automation Conference](https://hopin.to/events/recruitment-automation-conference), a free fully-virtual conference that brought together the global recruitment, to learn, grow, and connect. The event was geared primarily at recruiting practitioners, executives, builders, and industry experts: the people that are the driving force behind the evolution in digital recruitment - and the people that want to learn more about it. We presented alongside some of the biggest names in the HR world. Our CEO, Adam Bird, talked to attendees about how to optimize the candidate journey through automated scheduling. We had a great turn out on the day but if you missed it, you can view the presentation recording below. --- # 10 Types of Recruitment Tech to Look Out for in 2021 Recruitment tech is becoming an increasingly important part of every business. The right tech stack can be the difference between a great candidate experience or a poor one. A poor experience means candidates are less likely to accept an offer. They may even drop out. This prolongs the hiring process and makes it more expensive. It costs an average of $4,000 to replace an employee, but the more senior the role and the longer it takes, the more expensive this becomes. Recruitment tech is becoming an increasingly important part of every business. The right tech stack can be the difference between a great candidate experience or a poor one. A poor experience means candidates are less likely to accept an offer. They may even drop out. This prolongs the hiring process and makes it more expensive. It costs an average of $4,000 to replace an employee, but the more senior the role and the longer it takes, the more expensive this becomes. Recruitment tech is becoming an increasingly important part of every business. The right tech stack can be the difference between a great candidate experience or a poor one. A poor experience means candidates are less likely to accept an offer. They may even drop out. This prolongs the hiring process and makes it more expensive. It costs an average of [$4,000 to replace an employee](https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/calculate-cost-per-hire/), but the more senior the role and the longer it takes, the more expensive this becomes. You then have less money to spend on growing the business and investing in the right software. A great hiring experience means that you always attract the top talent and can hire faster. This makes a huge difference to productivity in the short and long term. Attracting the top talent also helps your business to grow faster. Here’s a list of some of the recruitment tech that you can leverage to provide a better candidate experience and save your hiring managers hours every week. ## Writing assistant software Using the wrong language in a job advert can prevent the right candidate from applying for a role because they – consciously or subconsciously – will be led to believe that the role isn’t the right fit for them. Without realizing it, we use gendered language all the time. ‘Manage’ is seen as masculine, for example, while ‘nurture’ is feminine. However, these are both words that can be used to describe a managerial role. Writing assistant software helps to remove unconscious bias in job adverts. It ensures that language is gender-neutral and adverts are therefore more likely to appeal to a wider range of candidates. Tools like [Textio](https://textio.com/) analyze job descriptions to find gender-neutral language that can be used in place of gender-specific terms. This means that candidates will focus on the tasks that they have to complete in the role and not the gender fit. ## Chatbots Chatbots can be used at every step of the hiring process, but they’re most useful at the start. They can be used to answer prospective candidates’ questions. They can also be used for the application itself, asking candidates filtering questions about their previous experience in a similar role. [PhenomPeople's Phenom Bot](https://www.phenompeople.com/candidate-experience#chatbot-n678), for example, asks candidates qualifying questions to save recruiters time. It then offer successful candidates the opportunity to schedule an interview from within the chatbot itself. Scheduling solutions can also be embedded on job boards or company websites to make it easier for candidates to connect with you. Scheduling links can be generated and used by candidates once they’ve passed the filtering questions. Unlike a human recruiter, a chatbot can talk to candidates 24/7, meaning that they can answer their questions and filter candidates much faster. This helps to [reduce time to hire](https://wadeandwendy.ai/product/) and cost to fill by up to 50%. ## Recruitment marketing software Recruitment marketing is a huge part of developing your employer brand. It builds the know, like, and trust factor that’s vital to build a talent pipeline. It also ensures that you’re at the front of candidates’ minds when they come to apply for a role. They then apply with a higher level of awareness about your company and what you do, reducing your time to hire. Recruitment CRMs help you to keep track of candidates that have applied for roles in the past or that have shown interest in working for you. You can then use this information to keep candidates engaged until you’re ready to hire. You could send them emails about what you’ve been up to, or details on the latest job openings. Your CRM has information on all past and present job applicants. It has details of active and passive talent, making it easier to engage the right person at the right time. Social media integrations also exist so that teams can manage social media accounts as part of candidate marketing campaigns. As the face of your company, it’s an important way to keep in touch with candidates. The kind of content that you post reflects your company and the culture within it. It’s the perfect way to engage with passive candidates.[70% of recruiters](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/number-of-employers-using-social-media-to-screen-candidates-at-all-time-high-finds-latest-careerbuilder-study-300474228.html) also check social media to screen prospective hires. This shows the important role social media plays in hiring processes for all types of roles and businesses. ## Resume screening It takes a human an average of [two minutes to screen a resume](https://medium.com/the-mission/2-minutes-thats-how-long-recruiters-take-to-review-your-resum%C3%A9-make-it-stand-out-1634bc72bf7). A resume screening software can do this in seconds. This can dramatically reduce your time to interview and time to hire, especially for high volume hiring. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) can be set up to ask candidates mandatory questions alongside the rest of their application. These eligibility questions help to filter candidates further, getting specific information that’s required for the role. These could be basic questions about how long someone has worked in an industry, or more complex questions like how they’ve handled a particular situation in the past. Once the application has been received, the software can filter the resume based on criteria specified by hiring managers. They can input keywords or phrases that indicate a person’s eligibility for a role, such as ‘SEO’ for a marketing role. Anyone that fits the criteria can progress to the next stage of the hiring process. Any that are unsuccessful can receive a rejection faster – sometimes in a matter of hours or even minutes. This allows candidates to move on sooner. Timely communication improves the hiring experience. [75% of candidates never hear back](https://www.hci.org/blog/statistics-rethink-your-candidate-experience-or-ruin-your-brand) from a recruiter after applying for a job. 60% never hear back after an interview. While this is understandable for busy recruiters, it creates a poorer candidate experience and makes them more likely to leave a negative review and not apply for future roles. ## Assessment tools Assessments and tests are common ways for companies to assess a candidate’s skills or cultural fit. They test a candidate’s skills, knowledge, performance, and behavior. These are a useful way to filter candidates before a face-to-face interview, or during it to test a particular skill. Questionnaires and interactive tasks measure candidate’s soft skills. These are particularly important in industries such as call centers and retail. What soft skills really tell an employer is how much potential a candidate has to excel in the role they’ve applied for. However, every role requires different skills. This is why assessing them can make a difference to a person’s success. For example, an accountant needs to be risk averse, while a salesperson is risk taking. Cognitive reasoning tests measure how candidates think. The most popular versions are verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, and general cognition. They predict a person’s success in most roles, but can work against people who come from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds as education is often a factor in passing these tests. Hiring managers can then analyze the results to see if the candidate could be the right fit for the role and move them on to the next stage of the hiring process. ## Interview scheduling 41% of recruiters take [more than three days to schedule an interview](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/). This is valuable time that could be the difference between a candidate taking one job or going with another company that has a more streamlined interview scheduling process. More and more companies are embracing [interview scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/interview-scheduling/). It provides a better experience for everyone involved in the hiring process. Hiring managers don’t need to constantly consult their schedules to find a time that works for them. Interviewers can connect their schedules to the software to offer candidates a real-time view of their availability. They then don’t have to spend time coordinating schedules. Once their schedule is synced, the rest is done automatically. Candidates can book an interview at their own convenience instead of needing to take phone calls or respond to emails during working hours. It provides a better candidate experience that can help to boost your employer brand in the short and long term. Everything from simple one-on-one interviews to complex multi-part or group interviews can be scheduled quickly and easily with the right tool, making it a seamless process for candidates, recruiters, and interviewers alike. ## Video interviews Video interviews are a faster way to filter candidates than in-person interviews and a useful alternative to phone interviews. They’re also embraced by teams that work remotely. They’re less costly when it comes to resources for both parties. Many initial video interviews are short videos where candidates answer a few questions. The interviewer pre-records the questions then sends them for candidates to answer. Candidates record their answers in video format then recruiters can watch the video in their own time. Live interviews are sometimes organized using Zoom, GoToMeeting, or Skype. However, some ATS have built-in video calling – pre-recorded, live, or both – to ensure that everything is kept in one place and information doesn’t need to be updated manually. Candidates don’t need to travel to the venue, which means that they have more time to prepare. It’s also useful for hiring managers as they can read a candidate’s body language as well as hearing their voice, which can help them to make a better judgment on the type of person they’re hiring. ## Interviews with artificial intelligence Video interviews – and sometimes in-person interviews – can be taken a step further with artificial intelligence (AI) interviews. As AI becomes more advanced, it’s getting better and better at mimicking how we speak. Robots of various kinds can therefore be used to conduct interviews with candidates. It’s been developed to measure the language, tone, and facial expressions candidates use when they respond to questions. These help to filter candidates out before they speak with a hiring manager. [According to The Telegraph](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/27/ai-facial-recognition-used-first-time-job-interviews-uk-find/), some of what it measures includes: > Facial expressions assessed by the algorithms include brow furrowing, brow raising, eye widening or closing, lip tightening, chin raising and smiling, which are important in sales or other public-facing jobs. AI interviews focus on measuring a candidate’s extraversion, emotional intelligence (EQ), and communication skills. These are all vital parts of a many roles, meaning that hiring someone who fits the criteria is imperative. However, judging these skills can often be subjective.This is something that [Tengai](https://www.tengai-unbiased.com/) – the world’s first interview robot – wants to change. It’s a physical robot with expressions that mimic ours. It’s designed to ask neutral, non-leading questions that accurately assess a candidate’s skills without any form of bias. The main aim of these is to measure a candidate’s soft skills in an unbiased way. As time goes on and this software is used more and more, it will continue to learn from interviews and get even closer to speaking how we do and offering better judgments about candidate suitability.Conducting interviews using AI is another way to save hiring managers time. It ensures that only the highest quality candidates go through to in-person interview stages. ## Virtual reality This is a rapidly growing area of recruitment tech. Companies like [Actiview](https://www.actiview.io/) use virtual reality (VR) to measure candidates’ problem-solving skills, motivation, creativity, leadership skills, and more.Tasks can be set up to mirror what someone would face in the day-to-day role, offering a better way of telling how a candidate will think and behave in the workplace. It’s a more advanced version of psychometric testing that’s more immersive and therefore more accurate.The idea behind this is to make recruitment more engaging – and fun – for candidates while still being scientific.VR can be used in other ways, too, such as to provide a company tour to show candidates what it could be like to work there.VR could also be used to interview remote candidates. This is a more immersive experience for candidates and interviewers alike, potentially providing a more interactive experience and therefore more accurate results.It’s still in its infancy right now, but there are lots of companies emerging that offer VR for recruitment, so it’s worth keeping an eye on as this technology continues to evolve. ## Applicant tracking systems Applicant tracking systems (ATS) can combine some or all of the features mentioned above. They help companies to track candidates from the start of the hiring process right through to the end. They’re the primary tool used by recruiters to manage the application process. Some are generic HR tools, or included in HRMS software, while others are industry-specific to cope with the needs of a particular industry. They can also post on job boards, saving the need to share the same role individually to dozens of different sites. Interviewers can also add notes to the software alongside candidates’ resumes, highlighting any questions they have about it, or any potential discussion points. ## Conclusion New technology is emerging faster than ever. It’s disrupting every stage of the hiring process, and it’s imperative that businesses keep up to date with the innovative solutions that are emerging. Choosing the right tech stack is a key decision and can be the difference between building a strong employer brand and jeopardizing future hiring processes.There’s a lot of competition out there for top talent, so you need to find the right hiring solutions for your business. In competitive industries like software development and graduate hiring, this is more important than ever.Technology helps teams to do more with less. Even small teams can achieve great things with the right recruitment tech.The more features a tool has, the easier it is for you to manage. It becomes overwhelming to learn to how to use multiple different programs and constantly have to switch between the two. That’s why [Cronofy integrates](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduling-apis/) with many popular ATS. The more steps you have to take to do what you need to do, the more frustrating it becomes and the more time it takes up.The right tech stack helps you to hire more diverse teams. This has been shown to improve employee happiness and company profits, meaning it’s something that should always be top of mind for any business. [Diverse companies outperform non-diverse companies](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters) in every way. Embracing the most innovative recruitment tech helps you to stand out from your competitors and attract top talent. It also builds a strong employer brand, which helps you to attract the best talent and fill roles faster. To find out more about interview scheduling for your recruitment tech, check out our [interview scheduling use case](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/interview-scheduling/). --- # How to deliver the experience candidates want Companies have been beating the drum of improving the candidate experience for decades. Every new shift in society, business, and technology elicits more reasons for talent acquisition teams to refocus their efforts on improving the candidate experience. Today, disparate factors converge to make the candidate experience matter more than ever. In this webinar we want to help you understand how you can transform your standard hiring process into a hiring experience candidates actually stay in! Our recent survey of 6,500 candidates from around the globe found that Interview scheduling is a time-consuming, often frustrating task. SmartRecruiters Sr Manager of Ecosystem, Liz Laurent, joins our Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, to discuss common pain points and how to make the process more efficient, saving you 300 hours a year! Plus, see our new SmartRecruiters integration in action, demonstrated by our Head of Sales! Advice on how recruitment teams can improve interview scheduling efficiency to save you 300 hours a year ### Candidate Expectations Report 2023 --- ### Recruiting Brainfood - Candidate Expectations Webinar 2023-09-28 Join Hung Lee and a panel of expert guests as they dig into the Report insights for 2023, and how it compares to the last two years. --- # Developers, meet the Embedded Scheduler Seamless scheduling, directly in your application or website. See how we're making it easier than ever for developers to go live with a solution to their scheduling needs with updates to our support pages about Cronofy's Embedded Scheduler. Seamless scheduling, directly in your application or website. See how we're making it easier than ever for developers to go live with a solution to their scheduling needs with updates to our support pages about Cronofy's Embedded Scheduler. Cronofy's Embedded Scheduler offers a seamless solution to your scheduling needs, allowing you to integrate our Scheduler and its advanced scheduling capabilities directly into your application or website. Now, embedding our Scheduler has become even more easy and straightforward, thanks to the recent updates to our support pages. # **The Embedded Scheduler** You can now embed Cronofy’s Scheduler directly in your application or website in order to enable multi-person, flexible scheduling into your web applications with minimal effort. By leveraging Cronofy's robust scheduling infrastructure, businesses are providing users with real-time booking experiences without leaving their platform. ## Key Features: - **Multi-Person Scheduling:** Unlike many scheduling services that handle only one-to-one meetings, Cronofy supports multiple participants as standard. Users can organize them into groups with complex selection rules, ensuring optimal meeting arrangements. - **Real-Time Availability:** The Embedded Scheduler provides real-time insights into participants' availability, streamlining the scheduling process and reducing back-and-forth communications. - **Customizable User Experience:** Developers can tailor the Scheduler's appearance and branding to align with their application's design, ensuring a cohesive user experience. ![Scheduler Button GIF]() ## **Recent Enhancements to Support Pages:** To assist developers in integrating the Embedded Scheduler, we've updated our support documentation with comprehensive guides and resources: - **[Installation and Embedding:](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/installing-and-embedding/)** Step-by-step instructions on enabling the Scheduler Embed for your application, generating embed tokens, and incorporating the scheduler into your web pages. - **[Customization Options:](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/customization/)** Detailed guidance on customizing the Scheduler's button using various element attributes, allowing for an on-brand scheduling experience. - **[Webhook Notifications](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/receiving-updates/)**: Set up webhooks to receive push notifications for the scheduling requests’ statuses, ensuring your application stays updated about user interactions. - **[User Onboarding:](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/embedded-scheduler/onboarding-users/)** Select between our simple onboarding process or an enhanced workflow, by leveraging specific JWT claims during the embedding process. ## Getting Started: Integrating the Embedded Scheduler into your application is designed to be straightforward: 1. **Enable Scheduler Embed:** Access your Cronofy Developer Dashboard, navigate to the "Credentials" section, and generate a new embed secret. 1. **Generate Embed Tokens:** Utilize the embed secret to create JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) for authenticating the Scheduler within your application. 1. **Embed the Scheduler:** Incorporate the `` element into your HTML, configuring attributes such as `embed-token`, `recipient-email`, and `event-summary` to customize the Scheduler's functionality. ## Get started today: Cronofy's Embedded Scheduler empowers businesses to offer seamless scheduling experiences directly within their applications. With the latest updates to our support pages, integrating this feature has never been easier. We encourage developers to explore the enhanced documentation and elevate their application's scheduling capabilities today. ### Balancing Automation & Human Touch | HRTech Europe Discover AI's impact on recruitment and get practical advice on how HR leaders can leverage automation effectively while keeping the human element front and center. Blog Post 2025-03-10T10:54:00.000Z --- ### Your Applicant Tracking System Needs Calendar Sync. Here's Why. Cronofy’s clients Personio and MHR build innovative HR software and help organizations initiate and manage strong relationships with candidates and employees alike. They are also always looking for ways to improve their products and that’s why they chose the Cronofy Calendar API to add real-time interview scheduling into their Applicant Tracking Systems. Blog Post 2018-03-29T11:16:00.000Z --- ### It's not always 200 OK When creating the Cronofy API, we didn’t just want to create a one API for all the calendar services, we wanted to deal with many of the problems when integrating with those APIs individually.Through judicious use of the less commonly encountered 202 Accepted we’ve endeavored to do just that. Blog Post 2015-12-02T13:37:00.000Z --- # Cronofy has renewed ISO27001:2013 and added ISO27018:2019 We are pleased to announce that we have completed our yearly ISO27001 surveillance audit, whilst successfully adding ISO27018 to the scope of our ISMS. We are pleased to announce that we have completed our yearly ISO27001 surveillance audit, whilst successfully adding ISO27018 to the scope of our ISMS. The Cronofy team is pleased to announce that we have completed our yearly [ISO27001](https://www.iso.org/isoiec-27001-information-security.html) surveillance audit whilst successfully adding ISO27018 to the scope of our Information Security Management System (ISMS). The International Organization for Standardization who provide these security and data handling benchmarks is known as ISO. ‍ ### **What is ISO27018:2019?** ISO27018:2019 is a code of practice specifically related to the protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in public clouds acting as PII processors. Alongside ISO27001, ISO27018 provides a set of objectives, controls and guidelines for implementing measures to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This is in accordance with the privacy principles in ISO/IEC 29100 for the public cloud computing environment. ISO27018 is not a standard that organizations can be certified against. It is a set of controls and guidelines, which specify how to protect PII in the cloud. ISO27018 is used to enhance an organization’s overall information security management system. ‍ ### **What is Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and why do we need to protect it?** PII is information that could be used to identify an individual. Some examples of PII are: - A person's name - Their date of birth - Their address - Bank details - IP addresses - Medical records - And more... Businesses like Cronofy must protect PII because when that data is not protected, a threat actor or malicious party could use the data to commit fraud or steal an individual’s identity. The increased usage of PII online has led to an increase in threat actors looking to exploit businesses’ vulnerabilities, steal sensitive information, and the sale of PII on the dark web. Data breaches can of course have adverse effects for organizations. These effects can result in a range of consequences monetary damage (fines) to reputational damage and customer loss. It is the responsibility of businesses to protect PII and ensure that data is safe and secure at all times. ### **What does ISO27018 mean for Cronofy customers?** Annex A of ISO27018 sets out controls and guidelines, created to ensure that PII is protected at all times. Here's a list of these controls: - Information security policies - Organisation of information security - Human resource security - Asset management - Access control - Cryptography - Physical and environmental security - Operations security - Communications security - System acquisition, development and maintenance - Supplier relationships - Information security incident management - Information security aspects of business continuity management - Compliance The news of the implementation of ISO27018, alongside Cronofy's existing [ISO27001](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/iso27001), [SOC2](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/soc2), [GDPR](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/gdpr), [HIPAA](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/hipaa) and [CCPA](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy/ccpa) compliance is another important milestone for Cronofy's customers and their users. It provides them with assurance that PII, data, and information are processed and stored appropriately, prioritising the importance of keeping this data secure at all times. ### **What's coming up next?** As part of running an effective information security program, Cronofy is committed to continual improvement. We are working towards ISO27701:2019, which is an extension to ISO27001 and involves Cronofy establishing a Privacy Information Management System (PIMS). We aim to start the audit process for ISO27701 in March 2022. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at [privacy@cronofy.com](mailto:privacy@cronofy.com). --- # AI-powered recruitment automation Mercu now booking interviews via WhatsApp Learn how Mercu, the AI-powered recruitment automation platform, used Cronofy to book interviews via WhatsApp. Learn how Mercu, the AI-powered recruitment automation for volume hiring, revolutionized their product offering by integrating Cronofy’s scheduling API. > Although on the surface it seems simple, we knew scheduling was very complex, and we knew we wanted to launch quickly. That’s why opting for Cronofy’s API was the obvious choice. — Jascha Zittel, Co-founder, Mercu Success for Mercu **Interview no-show rates reduced by 33%** Self-scheduling with automated pre-event reminders sent to candidates for maximum impact **Recruiters freed from repetitive manual tasks** Combination of interview scheduling automation and chatbots for FAQs enables hiring at scale **Combining automation and gen AI on WhatsApp** Solving unique volume recruitment challenges to increase candidate engagement on native messaging platform Learn how Mercu, the AI-powered recruitment automation for volume hiring, revolutionized their product offering by integrating Cronofy’s scheduling API. We speak with co-founder Jascha Zittel to hear Mercu’s story, and why getting interviews booked via WhatsApp has been a game-changer for their customers. ## The problem: # Lack of formal calendars making scheduling even tougher for recruiters hiring on scale Having worked in Southeast Asia at a leading delivery app firm alongside his co-founder Elliott Gibb, Jascha Zittel was aware of the challenges that faced high-volume hiring in the region. High turnover rates met no-shows and **[ghosting](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#23fc7acb112f)**, creating the perfect storm, making it difficult for recruiters to secure reliable interviews. Often, both candidates and hiring managers alike did not keep formal digital calendars, or use email in their daily work lives, making the traditional way of scheduling interviews through back-and-forth emails to find free times unsuitable and slow. Jascha realized that when it comes to satisfying hiring needs and streamlining the entire experience, “meeting candidates on platforms they already use is far more convenient, and decreases time-to-hire and time-to-onboard.” They began their mission, bringing together their market-specific knowledge of the prevalence of WhatsApp in the region with the fast-paced volume recruitment market, which was ripe for disruption. The pressures caused by the ever-increasing volume of applicants per role could not be ignored, either. “Everyone is using AI, not just recruiters. Especially in entry-level roles, recruiters are just getting bombarded with AI-driven applications,” explains Jascha. > How do we make it seamless for recruiters to filter through the noise and get to the best candidates? We need to close the loop on these candidates by connecting with them on messaging platforms where they already spend so much time. Then came the idea to move more of the candidate experience onto WhatsApp to take away some of the administrative burden on recruiters. “We thought, can we reach people on WhatsApp faster, therefore **reducing time-to-hire**, and make the whole experience more conversational? Once generative AI entered the market, being able to layer AI to automate a lot of conversations that recruiters previously had to have one-on-one sped things up even more.” After conversations with hiring managers crunched for time, the answer was clear. They needed to build an experience that moves candidates through with velocity, without losing the interactive touch. A smooth scheduling experience was non-negotiable. Here’s how they made it happen. ### Why did Mercu choose Cronofy's Scheduling API? Duration: 00:34 ## The solution: # A simple scheduling experience within a familiar interface For Mercu, simplicity is the key mantra when it comes to building their product. The choice to pare down the user interface for candidates to choose times from available blocks is a deliberate one. Mercu have been careful to distinguish when using conversational AI increases productivity, versus adding unnecessary friction. “There’s two sides to candidate experience: **structured **and** unstructured**,” explains Jascha. > When it comes to unstructured experiences, Mercu gives customers the ability to train an assistant on their interview guidelines and values. Candidates no longer have to wait for a response to get them ready for the interview, and recruiters no longer need to answer the same questions hundreds of times. Removing these barriers has increased candidate engagement and access to information. “Candidates are now better informed and are asking more questions than before because previously, it would’ve required sending an email, or getting on the phone.” Rather than replacing recruiters as the champions of information about their company’s hiring process, AI is empowering them to do more with their time. “Recruiters are able to move higher on the value chain by being able to dedicate time to tasks that don’t require them to do the same thing over and over again.” “Scheduling is not a free-flowing conversation, but a structured experience—it’s much easier to pick from a list than going back-and-forth with AI reading from the hiring manager’s calendar.” By making the booking experience more streamlined and sending reminders before the interviews, Mercu have managed to reduce no-show rates from figures that were previously as high as **50%**. “We knew that for recruiters, interview scheduling is a massive pain point, and we also knew that we were not in the business of building scheduling infrastructure. Although on the surface it seems simple, we knew it was very complex, and we knew we wanted to launch quickly. That’s why opting for Cronofy’s API was the obvious choice.” Mercu’s agile team worked to ship the first version of their automation featuring Cronofy’s scheduling API merely two weeks later. “**[Documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/)** is super important when you’re onboarding to an API. Cronofy’s documentation is stellar, and made it really easy for our engineering department to implement the API,” speaks Jascha on their experience with integrating the API. Although there is a human element to no-shows meaning that the number will never be zero, automated reminders sent 24 hours and two hours before the interview pre-empt any communication issues from candidates who can no longer make it. “Having interview reminders as **[trigger points](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/workflow-triggers/event-triggers/)** really drove down interview no-shows,” speaks Jascha on the success of the feature. “You no longer need to pick up the phone or email. It’s now so much easier to tell the recruiter you can’t make it, or to reschedule.” ### How did Mercu create a scheduling experience on WhatsApp with Cronofy's API? Duration: 01:08 ## The result: # Blend of trained AI and controlled automation is reinventing how fast-moving workplaces hire In many dynamic retail and service environments, hiring managers do not have dedicated calendars to schedule meetings. To overcome this challenge, Mercu is making use of **[application calendars](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/calendars-events/application-calendars/)**. This is particularly relevant in cases of volume hiring where the manager conducting the interview is whoever is the shift leader at the time. “Giving users the flexibility to create an interview link and connect it with an application calendar linked to their restaurant or store is very powerful. It frees businesses to conduct interviews according to their needs and employee schedules, without needing to tie the interview to a particular hiring manager,” speaks Jascha on how they solved this problem. In fact, calendars are no longer even a necessity to get interviews booked for candidates. “Many assume both recruiters and candidates have a calendar, but this isn’t always the case. What Cronofy allows us to do is to have a candidate experience completely within WhatsApp, with reminders that keep them engaged and informed before the interview.” This keeps the candidate experience within an environment that they are natively familiar in, streamlining communications between the candidate and the company. “By being able to make use of developer accelerators like **[webhooks](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/push-notifications/)**, we were able to deliver pre-event reminders. They’re bringing huge value to our customers by driving down no-show rates. What has traditionally been a problem—with some roles in service industries in localized areas in Singapore seeing no-show rates as high as 50-60%—is now massively reduced.” > In our experience of working with Cronofy, we never felt like a small startup. Cronofy gave us the time and the attention to deeply understand our use case, and being able to leverage the [startup discount](https://www.cronofy.com/api-pricing) ultimately made the decision very easy. For Mercu’s customers, being able to schedule with ease is continuing to change their working lives for the better. “Many recruiters just accept that wasting time playing calendar ping-pong is a part of their job. When we show them how automated scheduling works with Cronofy, they’re blown away.” What's next for Mercu? “Recruitment is ultimately pairing people with opportunities, so it's a very human experience. But volume recruitment has certain aspects that can be automated, or can be given to an AI agent. We’re figuring out where those entry points are to streamline the frustrating and time-consuming manual work to connect candidates and recruiters in better ways.” Solve your scheduling needs ## Speak to our specialists ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### Pinpoint streamlines interview experiences with real-time scheduling Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. Case Study --- ### Seamless, automatic time management with JobAdder Industry-leading recruitment software provider JobAdder is dedicated to optimizing hiring processes everywhere by providing a unique user-friendly service with innovative features and clever integrations. Case Study --- # Wade & Wendy: making HRtech a pillar for diversity and the hiring crisis Wade & Wendy is a recruitment platform that helps recruiters and their candidates. We spent a little time speaking with their Chief of Staff. Wade & Wendy is a recruitment platform that helps recruiters and their candidates. We spent a little time speaking with their Chief of Staff. *[Wade & Wendy](https://wadeandwendy.ai/)** is a recruitment platform that uses conversational intelligence to help recruiters and their candidates find the best next role with less effort.* Given their particular perspective on the industry, we spent a little time speaking with Chief of Staff Dave Mekelburg about his thoughts on HR tech, his experiences with Cronofy and his mission to truly help solve the hiring crisis. ### Why is scheduling in HR such a big deal? There are two main areas for this. One: it’s time consuming, and it’s time consuming in a disruptive way. People aren’t on their email 24/7 — so when somebody offers availability, you might have a very small window to respond. Otherwise, you could be waiting until the next day for more times. It’s a really messy use of time and it blocks any further progress in HR workflows. The other side is the experiential side. What I just described is painful for people. It’s not a nice experience for either side of the equation. If you’ve just sent a message to somebody who’s the perfect fit for an opportunity and then your first human interaction with that person is: “Oh, actually, tomorrow doesn’t work, how’s Thursday?” “Okay, Thursday doesn’t work — how’s next week?” “Actually I’m on vacation next week can we do the week after?” What could have been a moment for powerful human connection instead devolves into this immediate negative interaction. ‍ ### What else do you think is important in the industry today? Our first core company value is trust and it has been the first since before the product even existed. Because this is among the most important decisions that people make in their lives and that companies make in terms of who they bring in. If people don’t trust their recruiter and the experience, the flow of information actually gets disrupted. When people trust the process and know that, hey, if I give you this information, it’s going to get heard, it’s going to get synthesised, it’s going to get understood — people want the opportunity to tell their story. And if they trust that story is going to be heard, it’s going to make for not just a better experience, but actually they actually give more information and they give better, more relevant information because they’re able to tell their story in a way that’s specific and unique to the job that they’re talking about. Resumes don’t do that conversation. When people are coming together armed with more data and information about each other, the conversation is almost facilitated, it’s more of a warm introduction. The other side of it is that humans are deeply flawed and almost always biassed in the decisions that they make. Technology grapples with how to mitigate bias and it can bring a level of data and insight that enables a more equitable hiring process. For example, textual analysis tools like Talvista can help mitigate bias through things like understanding job descriptions. I think how you build that equitable candidate experience and the language that’s used throughout it is something everyone should think about. How hard was it to get this experience right on the technical side? One of the things that we were really excited about when it came to Cronofy was the out of the box functionality. So we just had to implement it and then turn it on and people connect their calendar with a click of a button. And then all of a sudden scheduling exists natively in our platform. But the other side was the ability to customise and further develop to our specific client needs and workflows. That covers everything from technical and security implementation, calendars and major compliance challenge code. We started this process in January when video wasn’t as important to a lot of our enterprise clients. When things started moving to a remote hiring process, we were able to really quickly spin up an automatic video plugin because we have Cronofy in place. For people that didn’t even have a video solution set up for their hiring teams yet, we were able to deliver it to them. Which is crazy. ‍ ### How do you see tech helping HR through the months ahead? The unemployment crisis here has impacted HR and hiring in a variety of horrible ways. One of which is a third of all recruiters in the US have been laid off. Which is insane. And what that means is that you have recruiting teams all of a sudden being asked to do three times the work on a dime, with less resources than they ever had to do that work. It means that the nature of hiring has been massively complicated because instead of a predictable requirement to process X many people during Y amount of time, you have spikes. Very quickly it becomes “we need to process twice as many people as we have ever processed.” And then that process might go on hold next week. Automation tools can help smooth that out, because if a lot of that work is being automated, then you can focus on the spikes and excess. And hopefully get things back to a predictable place. When we talk internally about our mission, solving the unemployment crisis is really core to what we’ve been focusing on over these past months. The faster we can get people back to work, the less time that a seat is open, the more time they can focus on getting that next person back to work. And on the candidate side, it’s figuring out what’s next and helping to navigate that process, which is so unwieldy today. And then when you look at diversity and inclusion, building an equitable solution has always been core to what we wanted to do. And this moment is ripe for change. It has the attention of business leaders across the country and actually more broadly the world, right now. *If you want to share how automated scheduling is helping your business adapt and transform don’t hesitate to contact us at **[marketing@cronofy.com](#)**.* --- # Inside Cronofy with Chris Nevett, Senior Engineer Our second instalment in our Inside Cronofy. Today we speak with Chris, a Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering team! Our second instalment in our Inside Cronofy. Today we speak with Chris, a Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering team! Welcome to the second instalment in our Inside Cronofy: interview series where we sit down with members of the Cronofy team, to learn about the various projects they work on. Today we speak with Chris Nevett, a Senior Software Engineer in our Engineering team! ### Hi Chris, please tell me about yourself and your role at Cronofy. I’m a Senior Engineer looking after a small team of Mid and Senior Engineers, mostly focused on the backend. We’re working on the API and all the things powering the guts of our user facing features like the Scheduler and the Calendar Sync. I’m very much hands-on in the work we’re doing, and everything we do quantifies as a collaborative piece of work. I get to work from end-to-end of any project, which is great. I’m involved in product decision-making all the way through to designing the architecture and actually being hands-on involved in implementation. ### How long have you been at Cronofy? And what were you doing before you joined? 18 months now. Before I joined, I was working at a company called UNiDAYS, a student discount website and app. I was heavily focused on the backend, and as a Lead Engineer I was looking after a bigger team. I’d reached the point where I was a bit more arms length from the customers we were serving and a lot further away from the actual day-to-day engineering. Actually being able to code was slipping away from me and the reason for wanting to make a move was to solve those two issues. ‍ At Cronofy I can still remain in the backend, but I’m fewer steps removed from the things that our customers are interacting with because it’s a technical product that we’re putting out (our API). Also, I am able to be more of an individual contributor again and get a lot closer to actually building the solutions themselves. ‍ ### OK, great. Tell me about a project that you’re working on right now. So we’ve just put out the first version of our [Event Triggers](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/workflow-triggers/event-triggers/) feature which is a way for our customers to have their applications receive push notifications, relative to when particular events start or end in one of our synchronized calendars. It’s a really cool feature because it takes a whole load of infrastructure and huge chunk of the problem away from our customers. If they just want to implement something as simple as sending a reminder email 10 minutes before an event; it’s a simple product feature on the face of it, but you need to schedule that action to occur ahead of time, and keep track of the event being rescheduled or cancelled, and robustly do that for a large numbers of calendars and events. ‍ It’s been a very interesting problem to solve from the point of view of scaling up and down, since most calendar events start at the top of the hour, quarter past, half past, so the work we’re doing has to immediately spike up and then down again, which is a fascinating technical problem to solve while maintaining a consistent level of performance. ‍ ### So why is this project so important? For us to be able to build that and put it out as a feature means that our customers can focus on the problems that they actually want to solve and the [features that they want to build](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/build-vs-buy-scheduling-automation-software). That’s really what the history of Cronofy has been; finding these patterns and common issues in our customer’s workflows, using our experience to solve them as best we can, which allows them to focus on their own product. ‍ ### What is your role in this project? I lead the technical implementation. The design of the feature was a collaborative effort between the whole team, and then the actual design and implementation of the infrastructure – powering that thing – was a project that I was able to own a great deal of which was fun! I’m very satisfied that I got a great deal of ownership in the project. ‍ ### And you mentioned that that you’ve recently launched the first version, so what’s next for Workflow Triggers? When we put a first version of an API feature out, the main thing we’re interested in is how our customers are using it and getting as much feedback as possible from them. We’re very lucky that we’ve got highly engaged customers that are like-minded, customers that are often developers themselves, so we have a great relationship with them. At this point we’re just looking to inform our next decisions on how we enhance the feature further. ‍ ### Great! So what are you enjoying most about this project? The most enjoyable part personally was being able to use the project to learn some new skills. We used the Go programming language to build some of the infrastructure power – which differs greatly from the language that most of our platform is written in (Ruby) – but it lends itself really well to the particular challenges of this project. A nice side effect of building this as a team was that we gained a great deal of knowledge in a new set of tools to make use of for future projects as well. Personally though, it’s always exciting to be able to learn new things on the job. ‍ ### What do you enjoy about working at Cronofy? I particularly enjoy the fact that I can be really hands-on throughout all stages of the product and development life cycle, all the way from the initial sparks of an idea and designing a solution for a problem through to implementation, and even through to discussing features directly with customers and having that feedback loop built into our processes. The second thing that I really enjoy about Cronofy is the culture that we work in. We have a set of Principles that we publish, but I think unlike some other companies, they really match how we work, rather than trying to write down a set of values that describe how we would *like* to work. They’re not some sort of idealistic values. ‍ We’ve got the cultural qualities that have been built by the people that work here and particularly by the co-founders. Our Principles do a really good job of describing the things that are important to us in everything we do. For instance, a focus on privacy and data management, which is crucial in the types of work we’re doing, through to how we approach work-life balance issues and interpersonal communication or even social issues. It’s refreshing to be in a company where I’m confident that the picture of ourselves we put out to the world is a perfectly accurate representation of how we actually all think and behave. ‍ ### Finally, what would you say to anyone who is considering applying for a role with us? I would say if the problems that we’re solving sound like interesting problems to you, then you should just go for it. It’s not a case of needing to match a really specific set of technical skills because we’re completely happy to bring people up to speed. Whether it’s a particular programming language that we’re using or aspects of our infrastructure, we’re just keen to have like-minded developers that are excited to solve challenging problems. ‍ *We hope you enjoyed the interview and the insight into Cronofy’s culture. Don’t hesitate to head to our **[Careers page](https://www.cronofy.com/careers)** to see our current open positions or to submit your CV to our HR team.* --- # Top Strategies for Hiring Success in 2025 What's on the agenda for recruitment in 2025? We reflect on the state of hiring in 2024 and look at research unpacking what strategies you need to secure the best candidates in 2025. What's on the agenda for recruitment in 2025? We reflect on the state of hiring in 2024 and look at research unpacking what you need to secure the best candidates in 2025. As we enter 2025, we’re taking a moment to reflect on the dynamic landscape of recruitment and hiring. Last year was marked by significant shifts in candidate expectations, recruiter strategies, and overall market trends. What comes next? Let's dive into the key insights from the recruitment industry that shed light on the state of hiring in 2024 and what to focus on in 2025. ## Job seeker behavior is changing Despite high job satisfaction rates, with [79%](https://www.jobvite.com/lp/employ-job-seeker-nation-report-2024/) of U.S. workers reporting contentment in their current roles, an astonishing 86% remain open to new opportunities. The fact that employees can be content in their role but still open to new ones highlights the need for employers to stay vigilant in their retention efforts while also maintaining strong recruitment strategies. [MRK Associates](https://www.mrkassociates.co.uk/hiring-and-recruitment-trends-for-2024#:~:text=the%20Recruitment%20Process-,The%20Rise%20of%20Remote%20and%20Hybrid%20Work%20Models,-In%202024%2C%20remote) explains further: "Companies are recognising that flexible work arrangements not only expand the talent pool beyond geographical limitations, but also encourage a work-life balance that attracts high-calibre candidates." ## How do you deliver flexible work? We partnered with Flexa to exchange data on what candidates want out of flexible hiring experiences. See what leading companies are doing to attract top talent. [Read the Post](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024) ## Candidate expectations: A shifting paradigm ### The Rise of Flexibility The debate on remote work continues to influence job seekers' decisions. Employ highlights that 66% of workers consider remote work options important when accepting or rejecting a job offer. Furthermore, 23% would decline a job that requires full-time office presence. Interestingly, preferences vary across generations, with Gen Z placing the highest importance on remote work options (75%). Employers should consider offering flexible arrangements to cater to diverse workforce needs. ### The Need for Speed and Efficiency In 2024, candidates placed a premium on efficient hiring processes. Cronofy’s [Candidate Expectations Report](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ae57a23ff9d5) revealed a strong preference for automated interview scheduling systems over lengthy back-and-forth communications, with "70% of job seekers expecting to be able to schedule interviews online”. This preference for automation was echoed in the [Employ Job Seeker Nation Report](https://www.jobvite.com/lp/employ-job-seeker-nation-report-2024/), which found that 78% of workers expected the application process to take less than 30 minutes. To succeed, hiring teams in 2025 will continue to invest in technology to streamline and speed up their hiring processes. ### Communication is Key Poor communication remained a significant pain point for candidates. The Candidate Expectations Report highlighted that 28% of job seekers found lack of responsiveness and poor communication to be the [most frustrating aspect of the hiring process](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#959b1c9f9206). ## What are Candidates' expectations? We surveyed 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities last year, and what were they hoping for in 2025? Read the results to get ahead today. [Read the Report](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024) ## Recruiter challenges and how to overcome them ### Leveraging Technology The adoption of AI and other advanced tools helped reduce the average time-to-fill positions. [LinkedIn's Future of Recruiting report](https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/resources/future-of-recruiting) found that "43% of companies either have implemented or plan to integrate AI interviews by 2024," highlighting the growing role of technology in recruitment. Forward thinking technology companies like Wise are already [cutting their time-to-schedule from 6 days to 90 minutes](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling) thanks to interview scheduling automation. ## How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. [Read the Story](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling) ### Stress and Workload Management While recruiter stress levels decreased slightly from 2022, [54% of recruiters still found their jobs more stressful in 2024](https://pages.jobvite.com/rs/659-JST-226/images/2024-Employ-Recruiter-Nation-Report-Empowering-People-First-Recruiting.pdf?version=0). The primary sources of stress were an increase in open requisitions (44%) and a lack of qualified candidates (48%). Identifying repetitive, manual tasks in the recruiters day to day and finding ways to [automate the hiring process](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/team-of-one-how-solo-hr-professionals-can-run-efficient-hr-functions#49367f5dd49b) is an simple way to reduce stress and workload. ### Focus on Employer Branding With competition for talent remaining fierce, the importance of employer branding was emphasized across multiple sources. Getting your employer branding right is the top recruitment strategy for 2024 according to [Qualtrics](https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/recruitment-strategies/#:~:text=1.%20Get%20your%20employer%20branding%20right). Defining "who you are as an organization, what makes you different and the value you can give candidates in return for their commitment and hard work” will be key to making this a reality. For candidates, first impressions matter. [44%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#33c8d4ad7370) say they perceive efficient hiring processes as a sign of respect, and for a further [62%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#33c8d4ad7370), the time taken and overall experience in interview scheduling forms perceptions of employers early on. ## Looking ahead: 5 hiring trends for 2025 Here’s what the research shows will be on the horizon for recruitment this year: ### 1. Prioritizing building relationships with talent - Companies who focus on continuous talent relationship management will build robust networks that go beyond immediate hiring needs - People strategies that include proactive candidate engagement, strategic networking, and dynamic talent pool development help attract quality future hires ### 2. Work models will evolve - Hybrid work remains dominant with 57% of companies preferring this approach, while 34% plan to return to full in-office work - Promoting workplace flexibility continues to be a key differentiator for companies when attracting top talent ### 3. AI’s integration in recruitment will continue - AI is set to revolutionize recruitment by automating tasks, conducting initial interviews, reducing bias, and providing data-driven insights - Like any new technology, AI needs careful consideration so we [keep the human in HR](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-keep-recruitment-human-centric-in-the-age-of-ai#571fe10f745e6df49262407e90d9acc1), but when done well will enhance efficiency and effectiveness in candidate evaluation, selection and performance management ### 4. Emphasis on Diversity and Inclusion - DEI is still a critical factor in recruitment strategies, with 53% of U.S. workers considering it key to employment decisions - Companies who implement more robust diversity tracking and inclusion initiatives to meet evolving workforce expectations will be employers of choice for candidates ### 5. Prioritizing learning and development to nurture talent - Recruitment strategies will shift towards skills-based hiring and emphasize continuous learning opportunities - Focusing on internal talent development will nurture and shape the skills of existing employees, encouraging them to stay within the company long-term ## Scheduling interviews now takes 30 seconds, leaving plenty of time for upskilling Here's how one recruitment coordinator used Cronofy in BambooHR to save hours of manual scheduling time, enabling her to upskill within her organization and deliver more valuable experiences to members of ONWA's community. [Read the Story](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/hiring-coordinator-schedules-interviews-in-30-seconds-bamboohr-cronofy) ## Getting ready for success in 2025 The hiring landscape in 2024 was characterized by a delicate balance between candidate expectations and recruiter capabilities. As we move into 2025, those wanting to succeed in hiring the top candidates will need to prioritize efficient processes, clear communication, and flexibility, all while leveraging automation in the right places to streamline operations and enhance the candidate experience. By staying attuned to these trends and adapting accordingly, organizations can position themselves to attract and retain top talent in an increasingly competitive market. Ready to streamline your interview scheduling workflow? See how Cronofy solves interview scheduling for in-house recruitment teams and recruiting operations leaders. [Learn more about scheduling for recruiters](/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) ### Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Blog Post 2024-06-19T12:00:32.123Z --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. Hint: automated scheduling might help you along. Blog Post 2024-06-27T09:30:00.000Z --- ### How to Keep Recruitment Human-Centric in The Age of AI AI is transforming recruitment, making it faster and smarter to hire talent. But no technology can replace the importance of human connection. Let’s explore how to balance AI, automation, and personal interaction to enhance your hiring process. Blog Post 2024-10-14T13:46:00.000Z --- # Why Are Exit Interviews and Staff Handover Periods Important? The time between leaving an old job and starting a new one is awkward. Employees can’t take on any more work, but they can’t just abandon ship, either. Once they’ve tied up their workload as best they can ready for the new person to take on the role, what are they supposed to do next? How can you ensure that they make the most of the time that they have left? The time between leaving an old job and starting a new one is awkward. Employees can’t take on any more work, but they can’t just abandon ship, either. Once they’ve tied up their workload as best they can ready for the new person to take on the role, what are they supposed to do next? How can you ensure that they make the most of the time that they have left? The time between leaving an old job and starting a new one is awkward. Employees can’t take on any more work, but they can’t just abandon ship, either. Once they’ve tied up their workload as best they can ready for the new person to take on the role, what are they supposed to do next? How can you ensure that they make the most of the time that they have left? The onboarding process is one of the toughest parts of an employee’s journey. Employees are much more likely to leave if they suffer from a poor onboarding process. It’s therefore important that the transition process is as seamless as possible. Exit interviews and handovers help to ease the transition process for everyone. Here’s how. ## Exit interviews An exit interview helps companies to work out why an employee has chosen to leave. This then helps companies to work through any issues that may have led to the employee deciding it was time for a change of direction, and if necessary, to take further action to prevent the same thing from happening in the future. If the employe has big issues with the role, teams can seek ways to fix them before their replacement starts so that the pattern doesn’t repeat itself. This is particularly useful for roles or companies with a high staff turnover. If departing employees’ concerns aren’t addressed, this high turnover can [cost the business thousands of dollars](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/high-turnover-costs-way-more-than-you-think_b_9197238) for every employee that they need to replace. This quickly adds up to money lost that could’ve been spent on new product development or growing teams instead of replacing them. Exit interviews also ensure that departing employees still have a voice despite their decision to leave. This shows them that they’re still valued by the company, and may lead to them one day returning in a different role. ## Handover periods Handover periods are one way for departing employees to make the most of the time that they have left. They can train up their replacement during the overlap so that the loss of productivity the company experiences is reduced. This only works if a company has an efficient hiring process, though. During the handover process, the departing employee can talk their replacement through all the necessary processes required for the job. This makes the transition process smoother for everyone involved. Getting departing employees to train up their replacement also ensures that the person who’s best qualified for the job passes the baton. Managers then don’t lose time from their own schedules to train the new hire in a role they may not be familiar with. Handovers also ensure managers don’t neglect other employees because they nee to spend longer getting the new hire up to speed. Should the company not be able to fill the role before the employee leaves, the employee can use this time to create or update any guides on how to make the most of their role. This could include how to use a particular service or software, company processes, or background information on the role. ## Conclusion When an employee hands in their notice, it can be a nerve-wracking time for their line manager. An efficient handover and exit interview process helps to ensure that everything goes smoothly. It also ensures that departing employees are useful right up until their last day, helping to ease the transition between their leaving and their replacement starting. A streamlined, effective hiring and onboarding process takes this even further because replacements can be found faster and are more likely to stick around. Find out more about how you can speed up your hiring process with [Real-Time Scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams). ### How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? **[Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/)** ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # A Recruiter's Guide to AI and Automation in The Hiring Process Discover insights from talent teams on AI's impact in the hiring process, learn how to integrate AI and automation effectively, and explore the right balance between technology and the human touch in recruitment. ## A Recruiter's Guide to AI and Automation Lead the AI transformation in your recruiting organization. Discover how TA leaders are using AI and Automation to streamline hiring, reduce recruiter workload, and enhance candidate experience without losing the human touch. [Download Guide](#form-2c8a03ae-6f40-4698-b186-96c442219348) ## Are your recruiters drowning in applications? You are not alone. - **Talent Acquisition teams are doing more with less:** AI and Automation can help, but only if implemented effectively. - **Candidates expect a seamless experience:** 81% still value human touch, so striking the right balance is key. Get the intel on how top TA teams navigate AI and Automation to accelerate hiring productivity. **How 12,000+ candidates use AI** And what hiring teams can do about it **Where to use AI in hiring** From interview scheduling to offers **Discover what actually works** and what's just noise **How leading teams automate interview scheduling ** Streamlined interview scheduling inside SuccessFactors --- # Combined Calendar Availability Streamline scheduling with Cronofy's combined availability feature. Effortlessly coordinate multiple calendars with interviewer pools to simplify panel interviews scheduling. ## Share your hiring team's availability Cronofy's Combined Availability feature allows you to presents the real-time availability of your hiring team and connected contacts to candidates when using a self-scheduling link. [Schedule a Demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) [Scheduling Links](/scheduler/scheduling-links) Why connect and combine availability? **Speed** Quickly coordinate multiple interviewers' schedules, streamlining the hiring process **Context** Schedule panel interviews with your team without changing tools and context **Reliability** Confidence through automated scheduling across multiple calendars in your team **Experience** Ease of use for hiring teams and candidates booking their interviews > Cronofy has enabled us to speed up our scheduling process significantly. The often time-consuming search for available times for appointments is no longer necessary. As soon as a scheduling link has been sent, it only takes a few minutes for candidates to book in. Like this, we can offer them a positive experience and save valuable time within our team. — Natascha Postrak, Talent Acquisition Specialist , Haufe Group ## Precision scheduling Cronofy removes the co-ordination tax of finding availability of hiring managers and team members for panel interviews. By automatically combining and presenting the availability of people you need in meetings, scheduling goes from days to minutes. [Scheduling Links](/scheduler/scheduling-links) [Read Case Study](/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling) ## Controlled availability sharing Control your availability preferences and how long you share it with candidates for, with all connected hiring team members only sharing free/busy information for the period of time set. Choose from fixed periods from a week up to a year. Privacy and security first > When you’re scheduling manually, you’re not winning. — Tanya Towner, Human Resources Coordinator, Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA) Streamline your interview scheduling [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic) --- # How Technology Can Make Your Meetings More Effective Booking a meeting room sounds like such a simple thing to do, doesn’t it? In smaller companies, it can be as straightforward as stepping into one and closing the door. But offices only have a limited number of meeting rooms. The bigger the company, the more employees. The more employees, the more meetings, and the more difficult it gets. Especially at busy times of the year, such as during yearly appraisals. Booking a meeting room sounds like such a simple thing to do, doesn’t it? In smaller companies, it can be as straightforward as stepping into one and closing the door. But offices only have a limited number of meeting rooms. The bigger the company, the more employees. The more employees, the more meetings, and the more difficult it gets. Especially at busy times of the year, such as during yearly appraisals. Booking a meeting room sounds like such a simple thing to do, doesn’t it? In smaller companies, it can be as straightforward as stepping into one and closing the door. But offices only have a limited number of meeting rooms. The bigger the company, the more employees. The more employees, the more meetings, and the more difficult it gets. Especially at busy times of the year, such as during yearly appraisals. A booking system helps alleviate some of the pain by allowing employees to book their meeting rooms in advance. But that still means employees need to log on to another application every time they book a meeting. This doesn’t need to be the case. Here are some of the ways that technology can help make booking meeting rooms – and the meetings themselves – easier. ## Simpler process, less stress, more time Getting a group of busy people together for a meeting isn’t always straightforward. Schedules need to be aligned to find a time that works for everyone. But you also need to find a meeting room that’s free at the right time and big enough for everyone to fit! If someone needs to reschedule, a new time needs to be found. This could mean the meeting room previously booked becomes unavailable. This can go on and on until everyone finally gets a chance to meet. By connecting the attendees’ calendars to a booking software, the organizer can access everyone’s [real-time availability](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/availability-api). That way, they don’t need to make dozens of phone calls or send countless emails to find the best day and time to meet. To make things even easier, businesses can create calendars for meeting rooms and use them to help the organizer get everyone together at a time when a suitable meeting room is free, and clearly show when a room is booked. The whole process takes a few minutes instead of a few hours, giving the organizer more time to spend on preparing for the meeting itself. It’s also possible to build meeting room preferences into the booking system so that the right room is booked based on the number of attendees and required resources. It can also be automated so that when the meeting needs to be rescheduled a new meeting room can be found straight away. For recurring meetings, calendar connected booking software can organize everything just as quickly. During appraisal season, these meetings could even be automatically scheduled and added to everyone’s calendars, meaning that line managers don’t need to coordinate their schedules with every employee to find a time to meet. ## Smart meeting rooms are more eco-friendly Having lights on in a room 24/7 can get expensive. And it’s not a great use of energy. Smart meeting rooms, on the other hand, not only benefit the users of the meeting room but can dramatically decrease overheads. And help a company do their bit for the environment. If a room is only used for a couple of hours a day, motion sensors can switch off the lights, thermostat, screens, and other equipment when nobody is around. This also saves someone needing to go around and switch off all the lights at the end of the day, something which can be time-consuming and prone to error in a large building. Giving each room a thermostat that adjusts based on if people are in the room is another way to save electricity. A minimum temperature can be set to prevent the room from getting too cold. When people want to use the room, they can set the thermostat to a temperature they’d like, or leave it as the default. When there’s no longer anyone in the room, the thermostat switches itself off. Adding [calendar sync](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api) means that an empty meeting room can be shown as available on the booking system too. And when everything updates in real-time, it’s easy to jump in last minute as you can be sure that the meeting room’s schedule is an accurate representation of its availability. Smart meeting rooms can go beyond just motion detectors, though. If you sync a calendar to the meeting room management software, lights can be turned on automatically when a meeting is scheduled. ## Make meetings more immersive Smart meeting rooms can also take advantage of AI or even VR to create a better experience for its users. It especially benefits communications and helps increase attendee engagement. For team members who work remotely or can’t make it into the office, virtual reality offers them the chance to feel like they’re in the room. Staff can also attend meetings with clients off-site and get the same sense of immersion that they would if they were in the same room. This helps employees to keep focused and not get distracted like they could in a traditional meeting. Smart meeting rooms can also be equipped with recording technology to create high-quality videos, which can be useful for anyone who can’t attend at the time. AI, meanwhile, can be used to take the minutes of a meeting or search for online resources, tasks which often take time out of a meeting or mean that not everyone is paying attention. Directions are another key feature that can sometimes be overlooked. If you have external attendees it can be useful to create directions to the room or make them easy to identify. Some systems can integrate with digital signs or tablets by the door, and details can be attached to calendar invites. ## Smart meeting rooms create a better user experience Technology can help with everything from making the booking process easier to making meetings more engaging. Whether a room is used for a large corporate meeting or a one-to-one, with calendar sync users can access the real-time availability of meeting rooms and book the room they need. Meeting rooms themselves can be set up to detect movement and automatically switch resources on or off based on if anyone is in the room. This not only benefits the users, but also saves the company money on its overheads and is an eco-friendlier way of working. Virtual reality, meanwhile, will become an increasingly popular part of everyday life and there’s no reason it can’t benefit meetings, too. There are many, many more ways in which technology could be used to benefit the workplace. The question is, how will you use it? ### How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? **[Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/)** ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Scheduling Agent for Slack | Cronofy Slack as a window on your calendar. Check what's on, schedule meetings by @mentioning participants, move things around, and send scheduling links to anyone outside Slack. ## Schedule meetings without leaving Slack Slack as a window on your calendar. Check what's on, schedule new meetings by @mentioning the people you want to meet, move things around, and send scheduling links to anyone outside Slack. The agent handles real-time availability, time zones, and calendar invitations. [Add to Slack](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/slack) [Talk to a human](#form-829ed116-324e-48cd-9731-a588ba8553c8) ## A window on your calendar Ask the agent what's on your calendar and it tells you. "What's on tomorrow?", "When am I next meeting Sarah?", "Am I free Thursday afternoon?" Answers come back in the thread, in your time zone, without opening another tab. Booking is one of the things you can do here. Reading is the other. Once you stop thinking of Slack as just a chat tool and start thinking of it as a window on your calendar, the friction of switching apps for quick checks disappears. ## Ask, Pick, Done! Step 1 — Ask Cronofy. In any channel or DM, @mention the Scheduling Agent along with the people you want to meet. Tell it what the meeting is about and any constraints. Write it the way you would ask a colleague. Step 2 — Review suggested times. Cronofy checks connected calendars for every participant in real time, accounting for time zones and working hours. It replies in the thread with times that work for everyone. Step 3 — Confirm and go. Pick a time. Calendar invitations are sent automatically with the right details, conferencing link, and time zone. ## Multi-person, multi-timezone, one message Panel interviews, cross-functional reviews, client calls. @mention everyone who needs to be there and Cronofy finds times that work across all of their calendars. Time zones are handled automatically. No mental arithmetic, no "is that your time or mine?" When plans change, ask the agent to move any meeting on your calendar to a time that works. It proposes new options based on real-time availability, sends updated invitations, and can add or remove attendees as needed. It works on meetings the agent booked and on existing meetings in your calendar. ## Send a scheduling link in seconds Some meetings are easier when the other person picks the time. Ask the agent to create a scheduling link for a recipient and it generates a personalized URL based on your real-time availability. Send it however suits, by email, in another Slack channel, or pasted into a CRM. They pick a slot, the meeting lands on your calendar. Useful for candidates, prospects, clients, anyone outside your workspace where back-and-forth in a thread would not work. ## Up and running in minutes Install from the Slack App Directory. An administrator connects calendars through Cronofy (Google, Microsoft 365, Exchange, Apple). Once connected, any team member can start scheduling immediately. No training needed. For enterprise deployments, scheduling templates let admins pre-configure meeting types and rules (durations, buffers, working hours, host selection) so the agent applies them automatically when teams ask to schedule. [Add to Slack](#form-829ed116-324e-48cd-9731-a588ba8553c8) ## Calendar data handled responsibly ISO 27001, ISO 27018, ISO 27701, and SOC 2 certified. Full support for GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Calendar data is processed in Cronofy's own data centers, not passed through third-party AI services. The Scheduling Agent uses AI to interpret natural-language requests. All AI-generated suggestions should be reviewed before confirming. To report concerns about AI-generated content, contact support@cronofy.com. ## Your next meeting is a message away --- # Scheduling Request - Help Articles Learn how to schedule events with the Cronofy Scheduler, for yourself or others, within your browser or an integration ## Scheduling Request A scheduling request is a shareable link that lets invitees book from your available times. With Cronofy, you can host meetings or coordinate scheduling for others, maximising team productivity. **Q: What is a scheduling request?** A: At its core, a scheduling request is a link you generate and send to your invitee, they then can choose a time to book based on what you offered. You can choose **when**, **what** times and **who** you would like to participate. With Cronofy you can schedule your own appointments as a host, or act as a coordinator to manage scheduling for others, maximising your teams time and productivity. **Q: How do I create a scheduling request?** A: You can start by opening your cronofy **extension,** the **overview** in your dashboard or your **integration icon**, then you click on the **create a new request** . Choose if you want to create a single event or a *multi-event link*. Multi-events are not enabled by default, you can request them though our **[support](mailto:support@cronofy.com)**. Single events: One link for one event to be booked. Multi event: One link for up to 5 events to be booked. We recommend you create your first link using **guided** **mode** that will teach you the basics of creating a scheduling request. You can toggle this anytime on or off by using the slider. Next, you are going to pick the events participants. **Q: Who can you schedule for?** A: After selecting the event type, it’s time choose the participants. **WHO** are you creating the request for and who should participate? Generally you need a **HOST** that offers time and an **INVITEE** that will pick the time. Attendees are optional. Simply paste or type their emails in the field to add them. You can also add a **[selection](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/creating-groups)** **[rule](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/creating-groups)** as a **host** or **attendee**. *Schedule as* option appears if you have multiple OU in Cronofy, you can then switch between OU's from there, matching therefore any branding you have setup. You can schedule for yourself or click on the turning arrow icon and schedule for someone else in your organisation. Other attendees can have their calendars synced as well, if they are in the same OU as you. You always can hover over the **?** icon to get more information about what each field in a request means. **Synced Calendars:** The green calendar icon next to someones name indicates that the calendar is synced and their availability is being taken into account. **Ignore** **availability:** this is if you want us to ignore all events on someone’s calendar, giving the ability to schedule over other events. Hover over a participant’s calendar icon and select the option; the calendar icon will then be greyed out. This only works for users in your Cronofy OU. **Q: What type of availability can I share?** A: Finally you choose the time you would like to offer, this will be based on your needs and the type of event you want to have. They are broken down to: - **Availability preferences**: these are based on the preferences you have set in your account and are available as: - *Working* hours or *Interview* times - **Custom** **hours**: are time-blocks you can choose in the availability preview to green to make them available. - **Specific** **slots**: as the name suggest these are specific time slots you can offer to invitees. The [availability options article](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/availability-options) will explain in detail how these modes work and when you should select them. By default you will have Availability preferences set to active. **Offer slots during selected times,** is an option offered with custom hours and specific slots and you will be able to choose from: **Only when I'm free:** Cronofy will only book free slots in you calendar. **Whether I'm busy or not:** we will book over busy slots in your calendar, except other Cronofy created events. You can allow the invitee to **reschedule** the event by revisiting the scheduling link. **Q: How do I schedule from my browser extension?** A: Our web extension enables you to easily create a request from **any** browser tab. It woks with our ATS integrations and **automatically** detects the invitees email. **Available for :** - **[Google Chrome](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cronofy/anglfpgnejdnlomjepkpjlfnhigepkip?hl=en)** - **[Mozilla Firefox](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/cronofy/)** - [**Microsoft Edge**](https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/cronofy/lbdiedeaaaohjkebpinhcifflnedfiil)**.** Click the links above to install the extension on your browser. If your IT department manages extensions, admin **approval** may be required. Once installed, sign in to the extension as you would for your account - this only needs to be done once. **Q: Can I edit a scheduling request once its created?** A: You can now edit a request by following these steps: 1. Go into the Cronofy dashboard. 1. Select the **Requests** tab from the left hand menu. 1. Click on any scheduled request to open it. 1. You can edit the request by clicking the pencil icon next to the request. 1. Remember to click Save once done. After this the calendar invite(s) will be updated. ❗ **Please note that the title of a separate invite for an invitee cannot be updated yet. So if the old host name is in the title, it is better to cancel and create a new request with the new host.** ### **Editing the title, event description, date/time** You can edit any of these field on the page and save them directly on the page. The changes will be pushed to the calendar events. **Who can edit?** - The **creator** of the request and the **person** the request was scheduled on behalf of. - **Scheduler admin and owner:** edit any event. Any preferences such as limits, buffers, or working hours are not taken into account when editing the date and/or time. **Q: How do I schedule with an integration?** A: Depending on the integration, we recommend you visit the integrations page for detailed steps. **Q: How do I create a scheduling request the easiest?** A: - **Templates** are a great way to standardize your invites. They act as **scheduling rules** that you can reuse to schedule a high volume of similar events in one go. After you create a template you can use it **multiple times** or make a unique public like. More information you can find in the **[Templates Article](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/templates)**[.](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/templates) - After you have created more scheduling requests, they will be saved for you, for up **10 recent requests.**These saved requests can be **reused** for scheduling recurring or similar interviews, allowing you to have the following fields pre-filled: - **Host** of the meeting - **Event** **details**: title, location, duration, and calendar invite text - **Tags**: if interviewer limits are set up - **Custom** **hours** or **specific** **time** slots you previously selected. - **Rescheduling** **option**: whether the "Allow Rescheduling" checkbox is enabled or disabled You can access the 10 most recent scheduling requests **you created**. Simply select one, and we’ll copy all its details into your new request, saving you **time and effort**. **Q: How can I instantly schedule a meeting with an invitee?** A: **Book now** is a feature that lets you **instantly** book a meeting for someone when you need to without needing an invitee to choose a slot. **You** create a scheduling request as usual and then **select** your preferred slot to instantly book the meeting. To enable this feature in your OU you need to head to your OU's **Settings** and the **Scheduling Tab.** Scroll down until you find **Show** **Book** **Now** **button** tickbox, then click save. You will now have the button show up when creating a new request on the bottom of the page. --- # Introducing Intelligent Sequencing Your users can now schedule a sequence of events in minutes. It doesn't matter how many calendars or how many steps are involved. It's a simple, more user-friendly way to organize multi-part interviews, delivery schedules, and more. Your users can now schedule a sequence of events in minutes. It doesn't matter how many calendars or how many steps are involved. It's a simple, more user-friendly way to organize multi-part interviews, delivery schedules, and more. Your users can now schedule a sequence of events in minutes. It doesn't matter how many calendars or how many steps are involved. It's a simple, more user-friendly way to organize multi-part interviews, delivery schedules, and more. At the core of this feature is Intelligent Sequencing. It's designed to find the best possible times for a sequence of events. ## Use cases Intelligent Sequencing solves a whole range of common scheduling challenges. Here are a few examples to get you started: ### Interview sequencing Schedule a multi-part interview in minutes. Connect the calendars of the interviewers, provide the timeframe for the interview, specify how long each step should take, and we'll do the rest. ### Deliveries Nobody likes wasting all day stuck indoors while they wait for a delivery. Allow your customers to specify a delivery window so that they know when to expect their parcel. ### Appraisal scheduling For large teams, appraisals can take up a huge amount of time. Intelligent Sequencing means that a set of appraisals can be arranged for a single day around everyone's already existing schedules. ### Hospital appointment schedules Hospital visits often involve many parts and lots of waiting around. Work out the best way for hospitals to schedule all the required tests and procedures on a patient before they visit. ## Fixed vs flexible ordering Sometimes a series of events needs to be in a certain order. You can specify this when making an API request. Our API will then return times for those events in that order. When you don't need the events to happen in a specific order, Intelligent Sequencing finds the best possible sequence of events by re-ordering the sequence. A mixture of fixed order and flexible ordering patterns are supported, giving you total control over the sequence of events. ## Standing on the shoulders of giants As this feature builds upon our existing Availability API and Real-Time Scheduling, you also have all the advanced scheduling features available to you. We support the ability to define [buffers](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/buffers-availability-api/) for each step in your sequence as well as the starting intervals for each event. You can read more about how these features work by reading our [API documentation](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/). There, you'll find extended examples outlining the usage of these features. Easily connect all your organization's calendars using [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/). You can even check the availability of meeting rooms and resources to make sure a room is always free. ## Get started today The Sequenced Availability API is available now. You can check out our [API documentation](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/alpha/#sequenced-availability) then go to your [developer dashboard](https://app.cronofy.com/developer_dashboard) to try it out. If you’re not ready to start building, let’s talk about it! [Book a one-on-one demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo/). --- # Enterprise Connect is key to Iron Mountain's real-time booking system Global information security giant Iron Mountain provides record management, information destruction, and data backup services to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. Global information security giant Iron Mountain provides record management, information destruction, and data backup services to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. **Global information security giant ****[Iron Mountain](http://www.ironmountain.co.uk/)**** provides record management, information destruction, and data backup services to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. You’ve probably seen their trucks drive past you on the streets.** As part of their growth strategy, the Iron Mountain sales teams are always keen to present their services to potential customers as well as continue to develop their relationships with existing clients. It’s important that Iron Mountain’s sales teams – like any other sales team – can set up regular meetings and conversations with their clients and prospects. ## The Challenge Iron Mountain’s teams approached Cronofy because they wanted to build an internal booking system. That system would allow business development executives and telemarketing teams to book client meetings based on the real-time availability of sales representatives. Meetings needed to be created and pushed to the calendar of the relevant salesperson with all the necessary information. Following an initial conversation with Iron Mountain’s development team to understand their requirements, we recommended including [Appointedd](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/online-booking-appointedd/) in this project. ‍ ## The Solution Appointedd is a leading online booking and scheduling software that enables any business to schedule across teams and timezones. Cronofy partners with Appointedd to provide online booking with integrated calendar capability for enterprise organisations. The Appointedd user interface is sleek and easy-to-use, aligning it with Iron Mountain’s requirements. They also already use the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) to ensure that their users’ schedules are always up-to-date and to prevent any double-bookings. For Iron Mountain, protecting their employees’ privacy and the data entrusted to them by their clients is paramount. One of the challenge of this project was ensuring that there will be no possible breach between the calendars of Iron Mountain’s sales teams and other part of the business. Choosing Cronofy made sense at every level thanks to our straightforward onboarding feature, Enterprise Connect. ## How it works The booking process is done via the Appointedd booking system interface. Iron Mountain employees can now connect to it and use it to book meetings on behalf of sales representatives. In addition, Iron Mountain’s clients can book directly with sales representatives 24/7 offering the ultimate customer convenience and reducing the time spent scheduling by employees. Appointedd’s unique timezone technology enables customers to book with Iron Mountain from anywhere in the world. Appointedd manages the impact of each booking through the business with MI reports, automated SMS and email communication and the ability to store client information. Appointedd use the Cronofy API to surface the real-time availability of connected calendars and returns that data securely – through encryption – to their booking system. Cronofy’s data security processes comply with data protection needs and policies of a stock exchange listed business like Iron Mountain. This is crucial for a business whose activities are based on information security. The Cronofy team worked hard to ensure that Iron Mountain was protected according to the standard any client would expect of such a business. This involved working closely with their data information security team, Exchange team, and active directory team. Cronofy’s [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) ensures that the integration is fully secured. Multinational organizations like Iron Mountain can onboard calendars in bulk with Enterprise Connect. There’s no need to ask users to connect their calendar individually, which isn’t practical for a large organization. Enterprise Connect also provides greater control and [security](https://www.cronofy.com/security-performance/) than when each calendar is connected individually. There’s only one entry point into an organization’s calendar service, meaning that there’s only one entry point to secure and monitor instead of hundreds or thousands. The result has ensured that only Iron Mountain sales teams can connect a subset of calendars to the Appointedd booking system. There’s no risk of other employees of Iron Mountain sharing their availability information or event details. The sales team’s calendars are isolated from the rest of the organization, so no other calendars are exposed. This architecture was designed by Iron Mountain and Cronofy’s development teams after completion of a STRIDE threat model. The STRIDE threat model was created by Microsoft. It is designed to assess potential threats such as data breaches and information security challenges by describing threats and planning responses in order to mitigate them. ## Going further Part of the challenge with this project was Iron Mountain’s use of [Exchange servers](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/exchange-calendar-integration/) to host their employees’ calendars. Exchange is difficult to integrate with due to there being over 127 different versions, all of which have different functionalities. To build foolproof calendar sync Iron Mountain was looking for a Calendar API that catered to all existing versions of Exchange. That’s why we built the Cronofy Calendar API – so that developers can create calendar integrations that work no matter the calendar service and no matter the version. We handle all the connections and maintenance issues. ### Get secure and real-time calendar sync for your business If you want to build a custom booking system for your business, Cronofy can help, no matter what calendar service your users chose. To see Cronofy in action, don’t hesitate to [book your demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo/). ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # BambooHR Candidate Expectations Report Webinar October 2023 Since 2021, Cronofy has surveyed 6,500 candidates each year ato understand their preferences and frustrations with the hiring journey. Our aim is to help recruiters improve their processes so they’re more efficient and provide a great candidate experience. An in-depth look at the frustrations, expectations and preferences. Adam and guests will focus on the data in the UK and US. Since 2021, Cronofy has surveyed 6,500 candidates each year to understand their preferences and frustrations with the hiring journey. Our aim is to help recruiters improve their processes so they’re more efficient and provide a great candidate experience. An in-depth look at the frustrations, expectations and preferences. Adam and Erica will talk about what the candidates want and how talent leaders can deliver a better experience in the future. In-depth webinar focusing on the insights from the Cronofy Candidate Expectations Report ### Candidate Expectations Report --- ### Customer stories: Agreena --- ### Use Case: Interview Scheduling --- # Talking telehealth and healthcare convenience with Dr. Lisa Koonin Dr. Koonin worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before founding her consultancy. We spoke with her about our Healthcare Convenience Report. Dr. Koonin worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before founding her consultancy. We spoke with her about our Healthcare Convenience Report. **[Dr. Lisa Koonin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-koonin-a4a3a410/)**** spent 30 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before founding Health Preparedness Partners, her consultancy. ** **We spoke to her about the findings of our ****[Healthcare Convenience Report](https://www.cronofy.com/telehealth-survey-data)****, particularly in relation to where Telehealth can make the biggest difference.** ## **What were your initial thoughts on the research?** I think that sometimes in life we are forced to do things that we would normally be resistant to – because we just don’t like change generally, especially in the medical field. And I think that particularly in the States, offering telemedicine before COVID was difficult for many providers. There were a number of financial and access barriers before the emergence of COVID-19. It didn’t pay on par with the face-to-face visits, the patient often couldn’t even be in their home (they had to be in a medical setting) and physicians had to be in the same state and with licensure to practice in the same state as the patient. The hurdles and bureaucratic rules made it a tool that was underutilized and inaccessible. And then in March 2020, when policy changes and regulatory waivers from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in response to COVID-19 and provisions of the U.S. Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, were enacted, a number of these barriers were lifted and utilization of telehealth dramatically increased. If these provisions can endure and the constraints are not reinstated, then I think we might be able to accomplish things that are desperately needed in clinical care. But telehealth is still not accessible to everyone. There remain issues such as limited awareness of telemedicine services, user reluctance or lack of familiarity with computers, scheduling constraints and bandwidth limitations for users and providers. ‍ ## **Tell us more about this - what kinds of care can this affect too?** First of all, we’ve seen a huge explosion in mental health visits by telemedicine, because it’s easier to access and it’s less embarrassing than being in front of a person or going into an office that’s marked “psychiatrist”. So this is an opportunity to actually improve the services for mental health, which we desperately need. But we have to get the word out in a culturally competent way. The second is chronic disease patients. I’ve managed patients a lot and usually in the initial exam, you do need hands-on physical – you want to listen to the heart, you want to touch and check things, do a neuro check and so on and so forth. But after you have established that baseline with the patient, it’s basically monitoring, recurrent lab studies, and managing meds – and this can be easily done by tele-medicine. With chronic disease, the person has to do something every single day – take their meds or watch their diet or inject insulin – and that is hard to do. Unfortunately people just go months and months and months, if not even years without touching base with the healthcare provider. And what they really need is monitoring and coaching, they need support and they need the questions answered. The insight here is that telemedicine doesn’t always have to be a physician delivering services. We could easily improve chronic disease management by having an array of professionals who were available in little 15 minute visits. The third gap telemedicine can help is postpartum care. What we know is that there’s huge gaps between women of color and white women in terms of morbidity during and after pregnancy. When a mother has a newborn, there’s all kinds of things that they need support for – in terms of caring for the newborn, in terms of resolution of the pregnancy status, watching for danger signals and seeking care immediately when needed in terms of parenting skills, in terms of bonding. And in the U S most women have to wait six weeks after they are discharged from the hospital before they return to see a provider. So much can go on in that time period that can create problems. Not only physical problems but mental health problems, postpartum depression. Bonding and nurturing, baby care issues. And telemedicine could be a perfect way to help. ‍ ## **What did you think about peoples’ main frustrations with the face-to-face experience?** Let’s talk about waiting. There’s a not so subtle message in the waiting room if I have to wait 30 minutes or longer for my appointment, which means my time as the doctor is more important than the patient’s and that message is not lost on many people. When you have an appointment and you have to sit in the waiting room for 40 minutes, or sit in the exam room with a little paper gown for a prolonged period of time your experience is diminished. Your trust in your experience with the provider is colored by your feelings of disrespect or wasting your time. And what I’ve noticed with telemedicine visits is that, even if sometimes they’re delayed, many times they are prompt and on time. ‍ ## **What else can providers do today to make services more accessible and convenient?** I think that providers have been reluctant to really go out and do heavy marketing for the options, not knowing what is going to happen after COVID-19 with respect to the funding and regulatory side. Providers should be really thinking about how to maximize preventive and chronic disease management by use of telemedicine. But I’m afraid that what’s going to happen is when the pandemic is no longer declared a national emergency, some of these things are going to go away. And so I think everybody’s worried about that. I would also suggest that providers ought to consider offering new services. They should focus on segments of the population by contacting their patients and inquiring how well they are managing their hypertension or diabetes? They can ask if patients are having a struggle? Or if they need some assistance with their diet, insulin injections or glucose monitoring system? The bottom line for continued and increased use of telemedicine is about reimbursement for the providers and the cost and convenience to the patient. You know, if this is not covered by insurance or the providers are given a fifth of what they would get for an in-person visit, it’s not going to happen. ‍ ## **What else do you think is important here?** There’s a good chunk of the American public that are insured by capitated managed care, health plans, like Kaiser Permanente, Group Health, and all that. So the insurance company gets a fixed fee for caring for the patient, and then essentially the patient is not out of pocket for individual charges beyond the premium And so these Practices are where the incentives are aligned, meaning that the patient’s desire to be as healthy as possible aligns with the insurance company and provider. And the Providers want them to use as few expensive services as possible to keep them healthy. Those things come together and are aligned because it’s a capitated payment system. This arrangement makes it a very important place to start advancing some of these telemedicine techniques, because it will be cost-effective for the company and beneficial for the patient. And there won’t be any out-of-pocket costs. ‍ ## **How does all this relate to the patient experience?** Medical practices are essentially small businesses. Some have really good customer service and patient flow – they’re efficient and they have got things down to where it runs well, and the experience is great. But others do not. They don’t have a fine-tuned scheduling system. They don’t have someone running the Practice in a way that keeps everything on time and people flowing. And there’s a lot that can be done to improve efficiencies in medical practices that will go a long way towards improving patient satisfaction and revenue too. ### Revolutionizing digital healthcare support with Tidepool Tidepool are committed to helping all people with insulin-requiring diabetes safely achieve great outcomes through more accessible, actionable, and meaningful diabetes data. Case Study --- ### Cronofy Partners with Whereby for Integrated Video Calls and Streamlined Scheduling Cronofy has partnered with Whereby to further accelerate scheduling and video conferencing capabilities for product builders. Our shared vision of creating secure, scalable and flexible solutions for developers and product teams, is now set in motion. Blog Post 2024-09-24T10:31:00.000Z --- ### Docplanner Group uses full calendar sync to power its SaaS healthcare solution Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. Case Study --- # UI/UX Talk: Optimizing Patient Experience and Engagement for Telemedicine How do you achieve great user experiences inside your telehealth platform or application? By focusing on intuitive, patient-first UI/UX. In this session, you will learn how to achieve just that. From factoring in aging populations and tech familiarity, this session will dive into what makes and breaks good patient experiences. How do you achieve great user experiences inside your telehealth platform or application? By focusing on intuitive, patient-first UI/UX. In this session, you will learn how to achieve just that. From factoring in aging populations and tech familiarity, this session will dive into what makes and breaks good patient experiences. Drawing on knowledge of how [Whereby](https://whereby.com/?utm_source=cronofy&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=cronofy-webinar) is helping leading telehealth platforms like **DrDoctor **and** Accurx** offer video consultations, as well as Cronofy's scheduling interface for providers like **Docplanner** and **Alma,** the panel will break down how to create interfaces that are accessible and intuitive for all users. You'll also learn which considerations should be top of mind when choosing vendors to expand the capabilities of your application, and how to determine when you need to build versus buy. You'll leave with deeper knowledge of what customization truly means, and what to bear in mind when building your ideal patient-practitioner experience. ### Additional Resources - Download the presentation [here](https://cdn.sanity.io/files/ygfbhkqr/production/9ef3a4ff4bf1a011d444449be615ff9b8d4763c8.pdf) - Turn on conferencing and scheduling capabilities inside your Telehealth application. Learn more [here](https://www.cronofy.com/integrations/whereby) The Role of User-Friendly Interfaces in Telehealth Platforms --- # Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What Metrics Truly Matter Discover game-changing recruitment KPIs that truly drive talent acquisition success. Learn which metrics matter most for strategic hiring and organizational growth. In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. But are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Talent Acquisition experts Stephanie Baysinger, Mary-Kay Baldino, and José Manuel Delgado Garcia share their thoughts. In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. Metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire are the well-worn paths that have guided recruiters for years. But this begs the question: are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Have they been challenged recently? Our recent [webinar in partnership with Recruiting Brainfood](https://www.cronofy.com/webinars/recruiting-brainfood-how-should-recruitment-teams-measure-their-efficiency) delved into the world of recruitment KPIs and which ones we should prioritize. We were joined by talent acquisition experts [Stephanie Baysinger](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniebaysinger/), [Mary-Kay Baldino](https://www.linkedin.com/in/marykaybaldino/), and [José Manuel Delgado Garcia](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-manuel-delgado-garcía-760804155/). ‍ ## Measure processes not people KPIs are put in place to measure a process, not people. It’s about looking at how these people flow through the process. Keeping an eye on candidate drop-off is a great place to start in terms of measurements as Stephanie explains. “You have to focus on the process stages and being able to measure the efficiency from one stage to the next. So what is your recruiting funnel? And what follow up do you have at those different stages? Are you collecting too many applications or too few? And the only way to know that is if you understand how people are flowing through the funnel.” You can speed up your recruitment process by utilizing your ATS and combining with a [scheduling tool](https://www.cronofy.com/integrations), to ensure you're working as efficiently as possible. ‍ ## Adapting to change In such a fast-paced and ever-changing industry, it’s inevitable that the KPIs should adapt alongside it. KPIs should be assessed regularly to make sure they’re reflective of the market and your business goals. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach,” Jose explains. “Different companies need to tackle different things. And the market is always changing; we need to keep a close eye on the advancements. I've been in companies that have really changed the process throughout the time, because the market changes so quickly. So definitely, really understanding the moment and the context is really key.” ### Recruiting Brainfood webinar: How should recruitment teams measure their efficiency? Duration: 60:23 Hung Lee 0:00 But I think, yeah, I think that's okay. I think we're on time. So it's fantastic. Welcome, everybody to this the second of our webinar series with Cronofy where we are talking about how to measure recruitment, operational efficiency. Our entire purpose here is to figure out, you know, how do you get more efficient is the end goal, but also, what are the measures that you need to put in place to know you're making progress on this, I think it's a topic that a lot of people in the industry are interested in. But the default situation seems to be the person who's got to be there by themselves to figure it out by themselves. And we just thought, let's get some heads together that have done this before, and see whether we can share some best practice on this and see how we go. So folks are welcome to the show, I just waited for a few more people to arrive. For the people that have arrived. Obviously, you should be familiar with Zoom already. Completely overly familiar with it. But as a webinar service, you should be able to operate and have some additional functions that you might want to just get used to. So be aware, of course, the q&a feature, we're going to go to questions towards the end of this conversation. So if you have any particular questions for our panellists that you definitely want to have answered, make sure you use the q&a feature there. Obviously, we love to have a chat with anybody who is involved in this. So I believe you can have the chat function available. In fact, why don't you test that? Anybody who is on chat now just switch it to everyone in terms of defaults? And if you're happy with it, go and send a message in chat. Let me know whether firstly, you can interact with chat and whether you can hear it and see me okay. And, and and yeah, I think we should be ready to go. So why don't we kick off with a few introductions before we go. Mary-Kay online? Why don't you introduce yourself real quick? Who are you? What is you do? Hi, Mary-Kay Baldino 2:02 I'm Mar- Kay Baldino. I live in the Chicago area and I lead talent acquisition for a company called R1 RCM. We're a revenue cycle management company for hospital and clinical systems, basically making the patient experience better by streamlining the entire process of how people interact with their hospital, their doctors, and all of that Hung Lee 2:26 Fantastic stuff. Stephanie, why don't we go with you who you are what you do. Stephanie Baysinger 2:31 Hi. Hi, everyone. I'm Stephanie Baysinger. Also US based I am in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is quite hot here. Already in this desert landscape. I have been working in recruiting operations and recruitment efficiency for over 10 to 12 years, a couple of companies I've worked for I've actually built efficiency measures from scratch, specifically in the technology space. So I've been at HubSpot Clayview And then most recently, a FinTech company called Marketo. That's based out of Oakland and the UK. Fantastic. Hung Lee 3:05 And Jose, would you like to introduce yourself? Who are you what you should do? Jose Delgado Garcia 3:08 Yeah, sure. Thank you so much. So yeah, I'm actually based in Barcelona and having me actually leading the team, the hiring team in a company called Global Savings Group as well. We're actually coming from tech companies scale up really from earliest stages from from startups as well. I'm more into like a more advanced stages. And basically, yeah, we've been really working a lot of like, improving efficiencies and processes and building and scaling up as well. So that's really where my main focus has been throughout my career, and always international companies considering euro, but also us and also now across the whole globe. So yeah, thank you so much. Hung Lee 3:44 Fantastic. Let's kick off with sort of one of the primary questions, I guess, people are gonna say, okay, what are the KPIs I need to care about? You know, do we still roll back to the stuff that we all know? Is it still time to hire? Is it still, you know, a cost per hire, you know, those types of classic things? So tell us like, those sort of all the more kind of conventional measures, are they still useful? If so, why have they been challenged of late? And if so, why is that? Any thoughts on this? Why don't we want to go with you? First of all, it's definitely What's your when you go business to business trying to set these things up? Are businesses still expecting this the old measures to be to be provided for in the reports that recruitment? I give back to them? Stephanie Baysinger 4:41 I I'd say yes. These are kind of your fruits and vegetables when it comes to your recruitment metrics, and they're also universally kind of understood, I think more and more by various audiences. So as talent acquisition becomes a bigger part of how a business is running. I think we're getting a bigger seat at the table. It's also a lot of metrics, like how long is it going to take to hire? When I work with finance teams, what is the cost per hire? What is the productivity of a recruitment team, these are things that I have built out and had to report to C suite, to other business leaders to the board at every company I've been at. And trust me I have tried to pivot around them are trying to come up with really amazing metrics and a dashboard. And always at the end of the day, and I'll talk more about this, but the simplicity of it, these are simple metrics that if you're working at an organisation right now, and you don't know these, this is worth a week of digging in getting your formulas correct. There's so much great automation. Now just know these and then expand on to the things that help you hit business objectives, what your team is really passionate about. But I think knowing your general funnel metrics, your productivity of the team, and even your time to fill are really good super power basic tools to have going into any meeting. Hung Lee 6:04 Yep. So a really important point to make. I think in recruiting like any field, sometimes we become like very much, neophilic, is that the right word, where we're kind of always interested in the new and we want Hey, you know, what's the best way to do it is now this all that's well and good. But we have to understand that we are providing the data, not only for ourselves, but for the business, and they themselves have been pre trained to understand and expect certain types of information. So from a non recruiter perspective, things like how long is the job empty? How long? Is it going to? What is the cost to get this person in in terms of the dollar signs or the euro signs? And what is the effort level required to actually do this? So those types of your baseline metrics we have got to be on top of you can't deny them, we can certainly try and evolve the conversation as we go. But we need to be able to negotiate our way forward. Firstly, by having that solid foundation Mary-Kay going to you on this, would you would you kind of agree with Stephanie's view on it or because because you obviously have went into your business? I think about two years or so ago. So you've had the chance to come in? Experiment with a few things you probably got to the point now where okay, we know what the business expects and wants. So can you take us a little bit through that journey? And how does that kind of map towards some of the things Stephanie's just said? Mary-Kay Baldino 7:27 Yeah, I mean, I think I would agree with somebody that those things are considered baseline, that's table stakes type of stuff. And if you can't measure that, you definitely can't measure anything more sophisticated, right? Because if you're if your data is not clean, and you don't have your you don't have the right formulas, you know, you can't produce basic metrics, then forget evolving. What I would say, though, is the time to fill is the least interesting metric that I can think of in terms of actually measuring recruiting efficiency. I think a couple of things that you do to involve that are start having conversations with the business about well, how can we measure things that actually change outcomes that improve efficiency? So for our one, we have evolved towards measuring time to fill variance. It's not the actual time to fill that's interesting. It's the how much variance around a mean, you know, so we look at setting up a target start date, when we're doing an initial kickoff to search. So based on like, how long is the interview, many interview cycles? And how small and specific is the is the talent pool for this job? We set a target start date, and then how close are we on an ongoing basis across volume? How close are we to actually hitting those targets start dates. When you look at the outliers, then you know, you're looking at the outliers, you're able to really start focusing in on what's going wrong in your process. So it's yeah, you have to be able to measure the basics in order to get to the more sophisticated measures, but boring, just doesn't actually help you drive improvement. Hung Lee 9:18 No. So let me understand this a little bit more clearly, Mary-Kay, what you're saying is, we can be sometimes seduced by having the one number at all time to fill across the company is, I don't know 80 days or something. But it might not particularly be useful because obviously you've got a huge variance within the rules in your company. Some some rules might be filled in 10 days, another might take 500 days. And obviously those things skew what the overall measure might be. So you need to do variance and in terms of role, and then it's a case of can you improve on that so it's not necessarily one number is a bad number or a good number. It's like oh, this is just historically be In the number, and then have a look at okay, well what things are we doing to get to that number that we can improve? And that's the those are the almost the secondary measures that are going to be more important because you can actually then influence the this is exactly what it's all about the influence the efficiency of it. So excellent. I'm play, please, I understood you well, because I doubt sometimes my ability to grasp information, but you explained it very well. Jose, let's go to you on this. From from what Stephanie and Mary-Kay talked about so far, how much does that resonate with your kind of approach and process? But is there a general consistency? How to do this? Or is it different companies kind of evolve their own way of doing it? And how does it all fit together? Speaker 3 10:47 Yeah. And I gotta say, I really agree with Mary-Kay, as well. Because in the beginning, also, when you're like, you start your career small, you don't really understand, what's the reason what you really understand over the time, and really, when you're building processes is exactly not the number, but actually the, you know, the alternative by those bottlenecks and bottlenecks and those blockers as well, what exactly do you really need to tackle because every company is completely different. At the end, we're all fighting for the same talent in a way. So it is important to understand how to remain competitive and how to find that. So I think that it's important, as basically as your question, yes, you need to connect that as well, to them, your company to the talent segment, that you're also targeting what you're after, but also really how that evolves. Because I've been in companies that have really changed the process throughout the time, even in the same process, because market changes so quickly. So definitely, really understanding the moment and the context is really key. And that's exactly the number that we are looking at, but just know from the numbers is just because it gives you the key of the blockers and how to connect that actually indirectly with all the areas such as Employer Branding, as well, why are we going quickly? Or why not? Are we the preferred option or not? So those are a lot of different indirect variables that we are actually introducing that number as well. Hung Lee 12:05 Yeah very, very interesting, folks, just a quick word out to you let us know if we are like going too fast and too deep on this. Because we want to make sure that everyone kind of follows along with what we're talking about. I'm like hanging on with my fingernails here. So if you're like me, you're not quite there, let us know in chat. And you know, I'll try and dumb dumb things down for you. But I think everyone knows generally well. Well, one thing you mentioned really interesting. Jose, was this concept of can numbers be like elastic or dynamic according to need? And I think that's an interesting idea, isn't it? Because sometimes when you throw together a very, let's see, you come to a point, hey, we've got our numbers, we've got our ratios, we've got your this is it. But then how does it then it's how do you keep that flexible, according to conditions that might change very quickly. And of course of the last 12 months or so we've probably seen evidence of that. Because 2021 And off early started 2022 Everything was going northeast, everywhere charge charge charge, suddenly the world changed dramatically and the market changes. So how do we make sure that our metrics kind of are able to adapt to that? Or do we leave it structured and just be able to kind of put a mark in the in the in the chart to say, Oh, this, this terrible event happened? Or, you know, this, this, this scenario occurred, and therefore, we need to reset our expectations, keep those measures fixed. I think Martin said something really interesting. It was it Martin. Martina Okay. Martina said, Okay, could you go over the main areas that you should absolutely measure before go? So we're going to absolutely do that is an evidence of our ability to be flexible. So So let's, let's talk about this. We're coming from a complete blank slate, I am a new person that's in charge of a TA department never done this before. What kinds of things the basics? How do I make sure I've got the right sort of numbers that I need before I even have a single conversation with a C level? Let's start from there. So you're coaching me to do this? What do I need to know? Let's go with you first Mary-Kay? Mary-Kay Baldino 14:12 Sure. I think the key thing to remember is that you're measuring a process, not people. Obviously, people influence the performance of the process, but you got to focus on what are the process stages and being able to measure the efficiency from one stage to the next. So kind of the what is your recruiting funnel? And what kind of follow up do you have at those at those different stages? You know, do you are you collecting, for example, too many applications or too few. And the only way to know that is if you understand, you know how people are flowing through the funnel. So those kind of basic process measures around fall off are a really great way to start in terms of measuring We're cycle time is important as well, you know, talked a little bit about that already, we've touched on that. So I do think that's really an example of efficiency and then looking at recruiting costs. So I like looking at recruiting costs relative to the salaries of the people who are being brought in. So a recruiting cost ratio, what are all of your recruiting costs, your your talent acquisition team, your employer branding, and recruitment, marketing expenses, any, you know, agency fees, you're paying all out all of those together, and then divide it by the salaries of the people being hired. And you can then turn that over time to understand whether your costs are going up or down relative to how many people you're hiring and how, how those people are paid. Because the tents general, a general rule of thumb is that, you know, the more expensive your labour force, the more specialised it is. So you may need to spend more time and more effort and more marketing numbers, attracting that kind of that kind of a workforce. So you know, and a lot of these things, only mean something if you train them over time. So establishing solid measures that you know, how you have really good data definitions around and then being able to train them over time is super critical. Hung Lee 16:24 Yep. Let me just read restate some of this. So basically, a very basic level, you need to know what the recruitment events are where to get someone hired, like in your business, what are the things that happen in order for this person to be recruited, you need to understand whether there's variance in those stages according to the different roles, which there probably are. And I guess that you may then have slightly different numbers according to different jobs, but you might then have an overall piece. And then you're looking at the the, I guess, the conversion ratio. So anybody who's done sales understands this, like how many calls you need to make before this thing happens, how many of those things need to happen before the next thing happens, and that's the classic understanding of how the funnelling process works. So understanding of what those numbers might be. Really, I'm gonna go back to the last point you made before I go to the main one, I think, Mary-Kay. But essentially, you also need to understand the historicity, the historicity of it, if that's too many syllables, possibly it is. So you're if you're arrived to a company, you may already be able to go back in time, so to speak, to have a look at some historical highs, and then track back in time, if they've got a decent ATS and they've maintained it or it's been automated in some way you can, you may be able to track that so little bit of data analytical work may be required there. Worst case scenario that hasn't happened, then I guess, you've got to start today and start putting those numbers in. So if you're starting right from the get go, and Martina, I'm just addressing you here, but I'm sure I'm addressing a lot of people also, if you're starting right from the beginning, you need those numbers. Basically, if they're not there, you just got to stop and figure out, start from that point and start putting those numbers in. final final point I thought was super interesting. And I think the finance guys in the C-level will be interested in is the amount of money basically it takes to hire the candidate. The cost-per-hire classic one is calculated by having all of the inputs required to get this to link the labour cost at any advert plus maybe even the time I think sometimes we don't put the time in. But let's say you're hiring managers, they're expensive. You know, if you're they're plugged in to do 20 hours of interviews a week, that's a cost. You could you could put that in as well, your choice or moderate that there's some classic ones in there. And then you divide by the salary of the person. Is that right? Mary-Kay so that you can just basically get a trend lines and figure out where you need to focus your resources. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. So some data analysis work, basically, I hope all of that makes sense. Stephanie, why don't we go with you? How would you add to that? Would you contest any of those of that commentary? Again, treat me as a person that doesn't know what they're doing? What else do I need to know before? You know I charge ahead? Stephanie Baysinger 19:24 I will agree with everyone in the chat Mary Kay is just such a good thing to remember around measuring a process and not people. Especially spending a lot of my time running recruiting operations. I spent a lot of time in dashboards and looking at the data and I would agree with what Mary-Kay highlighted in terms of what measure I loved what you said hung and when you summarise around knowing the steps of your recruitment process. So as you come in, really being like an anthropologist or a detective and looking through the data that currently exists is the process to hire somebody to come into the company and just taking some time a scratch piece of paper I've done and just mapping it out. I think this can feel like a very overwhelming task to say, what are all the KPIs? What are all the metrics? What I think, you know, we're kind of summarising here, we're focusing on time, we're focusing on cost, and then we're focusing on the events. What we're saying is that these are these are basic things to kind of take a minimal viable product amount of effort. This is not if you're coming into a new role to answer the question more directly. This is not something to kind of put on like a quarterly plan and say, by the end of the quarter, I'm going to understand these metrics, this is coming in even taking a piece of scratch paper within a week and getting a general appetite palette, you know, understanding of where the company is. And then the other side of this that I will just add, when it starts to get more of the art of this art and science job that we do is what are the objectives of the company. And as you start to kind of match what you're hearing from leaders, what you're hearing as friction points from hiring managers, what you're hearing from your own recruitment team, you kind of have this like backboard baseline data to kind of start to match that together is what I'm hearing accurate with the data that I'm seeing, is there a complete disconnect? Where should I focus and that's the other piece of the data collection is kind of the anecdotal experiences that people are having the perceptions they're having within your recruitment events, which I think is a really important just add on to that that I've had to work through. And I think Jose made a fantastic point around meeting the company where it is. I've been in situations, we've had a blank sheet of paper. I've been at places where historical data has existed. And I'm kind of just piecing it apart and asking and poking some questions. And yeah, that's what I would say in terms of like that that next piece is having that baseline data so that when you're going out on roadshows and presenting information and hearing friction points, you have something to kind of bounce that up against instead of kind of taking everything at face value. Hung Lee 22:06 Yep, very interesting. Okay, well, I have to ask you the same question, Jose, you're, you're training me? What kind of things do I need to so already I've got loads of stuff from Steph and Mary-Kay? What are the things do I need to put in there? To make sure that I've got a good foundation for me to build a business going forward? Jose Delgado Garcia 22:28 Yeah, I actually need to agree with both of them. But I think at the end of the day, what is important is like when in doubt, go back to basics. And I think what I really measure, always, especially now that I just joined this company, and we're really building and really reassessing everything that we have actually, like, they normally the first number of questions like, How long like they're from, especially from senior leadership, what is the forecast of how long are you going to take or what is expected, you know, and at the end, it's always like, we need to have a Start Date Time. And what's important is to, for me, there are two main different things. One is the quality of the hire as well, considering that what is the source, what are the kind of like the recruiting marketing campaigns that we're doing whatever we whatever kind of even the roles that we're checking, because we cannot assess all the roles or have a process similarly, for all of them, we can unify with we need to definitely localise to each one of the roles that we are looking into it. And the other one is the conversion rates. So normally, what is important is that maybe on top of the funnel, the conversion rate, maybe it's a bit lower, but if we see the de dot conversion rate throughout the stages is going higher, that's what I've noticed, then normally, the cost is actually the lowest because actually, we've done a good job in the beginning, aligning, resetting expectations with everyone. And normally, you really see how they actually turn into higher and actually, given the offer to time to offer the offer acceptance rates, and everything increases so positively. So I think that is really important as well to check the quality, the roles, and also the conversion rate conversion rate. So I think to me, that's really all what has been very, very key. Hung Lee 24:01 Yeah and conversion rate, by the way, is the classic way, you know, the optimal conversion rate is 11111. Right? Like, okay, one candidate goes through all that the classic process, because you get your hire with, I guess, minimal effort, because let's face it, if you're plugging in loads of candidates, you can, you can kind of over acquire candidates, because you actually expand the access time. And in fact, you know, that's not a particularly efficient way to do it. Of course, the one moment when one is pretty apocryphal by the time recruiters actually get into a business, because that's basically your best friend, go through that process. You know, when you're hiring strangers, typically you have a wider funnel, but at each stage of your of those recruitment events, you can do a conversion, okay? It's a very simple a number to track. And as Jose mentioned, the closer you get to one basically means the more efficient you're going to be getting and the They're less cost involved in doing that work. And a quick question for you guys, in terms of what are the metrics that are important to the business? The first is two things. What are the what are the numbers that are important to the business? And what are the numbers that are important to TA? They can often overlay or overlap, but oftentimes they might not. Because the company, for instance, might believe, okay, we're overwhelmingly keen on like vast numbers of people applying to us. I'm sure there's companies out there or, or leaders in business that just want everyone to apply, because it shows how wonderful we are as a business. But for recruiters, that's not necessarily great. Because what you we want to do is measure how efficiently or how, how, what improvements are in recruitment efficiency is a slightly different set of numbers, we need to think about, how do we play around with the challenge of reporting to the business compared to the challenge of actually getting operating intelligence for our own needs within TA? Do we do those things separately? Or do we kind of mash them together? Or is this even a problem? I'll open up to anybody to answer this, or at least put a thought into this discussion. Mary-Kay Baldino 26:13 Simply the metrics that get reported on to the business tend to be process metrics. And, you know, if you're measuring the process, there are certain key moments where your recruiting recruiters influence that process. And they have an ability to change outcomes. And so in measuring recruiter performance, you got to focus on those key moments. So for my team, it's things like the quality of the kickoff meeting. And their, you know, because if you if you go upstream in the recruiting process, the first moment the recruiter touches the recruiting process, and really has an opportunity to change the outcomes of the recruiting process or at that kickoff meeting, so quality, their quality of the recruitment strategy and and how effective that is. How are you sourcing? Are you using the right sources? Are you is your outreach effective? You know, are you communicating well, the value proposition of that job, to your candidates, your time to get to a slate of candidates. And I just want to emphasise here that some of the things that business cares about actually are in live in tension with other things that cares about. So everybody wants things fast in recruiting, but Speed Kills diversity of candidates leads. So if your company wants both of those things, how do those live kind of intention with each other, which is why I think Stephanie might have already mentioned this, but getting to kind of a balanced scorecard with the business is important. But in terms of measuring, you know, recruiter, productivity, you have to focus on things that they can actually control and influence and the totality of cycle time is not one of those things. So I don't measure recruiters on how long it takes to build jobs, for example Hung Lee 28:11 Yeah, really, really important point. But I think actually a lot of the reasons why recruitment teams kind of shy away from putting the measures in, because they're fearful of actually creating a rod for their own back to say, Oh, if I put these measures in and, you know, we had a lucky six months or something, I don't want everyone else to look at us and saying, Oh, we're going to redo that or do better. Because actually, there's tonnes of stuff we don't control. For instance, hiring manager typically is not the recruiter that is someone who is making a hiring yes, no decision. can we influence that person? Yes. But can we can we can we compel that person to make decisions? No. And so you know, it's time to hire cannot be fully our responsibility? When you have a hiring manager that might oftentimes say yes or no, depending on you know, that their own their own purview. So for us in recruiting is like, what are the things that are fully in our control? And that's our activity, and our behaviours, and we can kind of map that to how effectively we might might be relating to the rest of the to the, the business. But it's not like a direct contingency, for instance, classic one will be Have you met the hiring manager? Or have we had a proper kickoff meeting? You know, or is it just, you know, the spec has just been sent by email hasn't been a synchronous conversation. Probably we can say that sort of sub optimal meeting, I would say, and the chances of us having a great experience or being effective in recruiting are going to be constrained because we haven't actually got that information. So stuff like that does is that what you mean by quality of of kickoff meeting by the way Mary-Kay I've assumed it might be. But Mary-Kay Baldino 30:02 Yeah, we have some pretty specific standards for our team around what a quality kickoff meeting looks like. We we train to those standards for the recruiters, our recruiting managers sit in on kickoff meetings to ensure that, you know, recruiters are continuing to develop in that area, because really the goal is that recruiters can are capable of advising in those in those meetings, and that they are steering the search in a direction that will lead to the best combination of outcomes, a diverse slate, high quality candidates and efficient process. Hung Lee 30:44 Yep, so basically, would there be a me again, just digging into this? I think it's a really illustrative example. But might there be circumstances where a recruiting process kicks off without a fully sort of fully compliant if you like, approach, and that would be ranked down in some way, in your view, it would be a number that would go into a system to say, you know, what, this is chances of this, you know, being absolutely superb, a kind of minus two, as a result of, you know, Mary-Kay Baldino 31:16 there there are, there's repetitive hiring in almost every company. I mean, I suppose really small companies, there might not be but you know, we have some high volume hiring areas where you've got the same team that just somebody in another role for the same kind of person that they always hire. Right? Do you actually do a full on kickoff meeting for that? Absolutely not, you integrate that into your broader existing pipeline, and you keep moving, right? So you'd have to have an approach that's adapted to the circumstances. But in general, for most kinds of hiring, that kickoff meeting is where you your process starts to succeed or starts to fail? Hung Lee 32:07 Yep, absolutely. So and there's other kind of moments of recruiter influence out there. Looking at your situation here or your experience, Stephanie, in particular, what are the moments would you say a recruiter can kind of say, right, we're a little bit in control of this part of it, and therefore should be some of the measures for the TA teams, kind of operational performance drove efficiency. Stephanie Baysinger 32:34 I think one of the places that recruiters really have a lot of creativity and control is around building a top of a funnel. It's soup, I am a huge advocate around structured interviewing and creating consistency for across the business for how the processes will run, I think where recruiters get to really kind of pull levers within the process is where is our talent coming from? How does it align with what the business needs? And are we creating a diversity, a diverse, focused pipeline, which is which is extends to where we even find the talent. And so that's where really impressive data can really come in and knowing kind of the state of the state of your overall talent, pipeline and funnel is, where are we right now? And then I know, there's a question that I saw in the chat around quality of hire, very loaded question and can't wait to get to it. But when you know, the business is looking for something at the end of the process? What are what kind of mechanisms are you putting in place at the beginning to increase your likelihood of success? And I think recruiters have a very, very big hand in saying, here's the talent market. You know, the past America is point like we have, you know, roles where we might have hired the same role multiple times, let's actually do a quick analysis of what those pipelines look like. Let's be really honest around where we could have done better, what are the measurements of success? And at the top of the funnel, do we need to, you know, work more on our branding, our job descriptions actually bringing in and deflecting the right type of talent? Should we be focusing more on sourcing and I think that is just such a really powerful thing for recruiters to own specifically right now with the market. And I've been in positions where we're, we're sourcing and that's like, the biggest thing that we need to do because the market is so competitive. Now, I know a lot of recruiters gonna be folks out there right now on the call are dealing with hundreds upon 1000s of applications based on the market like we need to be aware of the market and then the recruiters are really really talented and pivoting and adjusting to the new market to get the right type of funnel in to hit that quality of hire. At the end of the day, the ultimate North Star. I'd love the answer to to one day so Hung Lee 34:55 yeah, we're gonna get to the door and we're gonna get to the call to hire question in a second. By the way folks, even for people that are very base level that might think recruitment metrics are a little bit outside of comfort zone where you you've probably already been doing it in a way that because when you post an advert for instance, you're also intuitively understanding are you getting people applying to this, and you might have posted an advert 18 months or so ago and got very little response, post an advert today, suddenly you get an overwhelming response, that itself is a couple of some signals as the market change. And it could give you an idea as to what you should or should not be doing. Because is it a good idea to post an advert when you haven't got a system in place to handle volume, for instance, and then suddenly, you're exposing your you're jeopardising, potentially your candidate experience your employer branding, because you can't handle 500 applicants that you didn't, you didn't consider that you had capacity for. So all of those things needs to be part of your kind of thought process as you go through this. Okay, Jose, I wanted to sort of shift a little bit here. Because when we're talking about numbers and metrics, like do we also calculate, like the difficulty of the job? Like, I think one of the things that is difficult when you're, you know, you're trying to produce some generalisations, you know, to say, you know, what, yes, on average in this department, it's going to take this amount of time to hire for this type of role, etc. That's all good. But, you know, maybe the rules are so different that it takes just yeah, have to calculate difficulty of hire into the process before you know and communicate it to the business because you know, something that is very much overly generalised is that one, one sort of manager might, you know, have a look at his own department, they go, why am I taking so much more time to hire for the this, why the TA takes so much time to populate the pipeline for this particular function? When you know, my buddy over there seems to be getting better service, quote, unquote. So how do you put in, I guess, the question, how do you kind of inject or calculate difficulty of higher? What's the way to do that? Jose Delgado Garcia 37:08 Yeah, that's a good question. Actually, that's internal conversation, we're having our company as well, because we're talking about, for example, prioritisation of the role, especially when you're, you know, you kick off a year, and you are really forecasting them on a road, you're gonna hire for that year. And throughout the quarter, something that we're doing actually is considering the amount of roles but also the complexity considering, you know, the talent mapping as well out there in the market, how many companies are hiring for those ones, where it's kind of like, you know, the background and so many different topics. So that is something that we're doing. And the best way that we're doing right now is actually selling mapping right now with our sourcing team as well, making sure that we understand what is the level that we're looking for? How many like the comparison where we can hire where the team base as well. So he's very, very difficult, to be honest, to really answer that question, because that's something that we are checking that we're trying to do that and really try normally to save that on a more creative way, in a way. So really understanding. Okay, is there anybody internally that we maybe think we can we can hire us? Well, what is exciting that we are looking for? So it's very complex? But yes, we are really measuring, we're having that conversation as well, considering the complexity on the front. Let's say we've created vandalism, how are we going to base or measure that as well? And then we'll see how we will affect that as well, specifically with those recruiters that they're going to take care of that. So it is a bit complex to measure Yes, yet for that, how to inject that. But I think it's more like really putting an x ray for extra love with that as well, on other kind of like, campaigns or referrals. So it's really still difficult to measure, if I may, if I may say very, very, completely honest. Hung Lee 38:48 No, no, I think more I think about it, the more difficult it is. So there's one element, that difficulty is the overall size of the talent pool. So for instance, if you have a very large talent pool, presumably it's easier to hire those people. But if you have very few, then of course, it's harder. But there may be more custom things. Like for instance, your company might have a particularly weak brand in a particular function of thing or for whatever reason, and you do factor that and suddenly, you have to think about okay, market perception of the role. As a classic example, maybe a prominent person in the industry wants to have your business left in disgrace, and you're really hammered your your business in black glass door or something. Yeah, that's probably going to be quite your increased challenge of hiring for people into that company. And again, you need to factor a factor down how well this is a different one, maybe inexperienced hiring managers that you put that is as a factor in the difficulty of hiring because we know that if a hiring manager is less experienced, they're going to be more hesitant to say yes to things compared to, you know, an experienced manager who's often too quick to say yes. Because you know that their magnificent management skills will obviously make you know, any any good Creek diamonds out of anything. So, so yeah, there's lots of complexity. But I guess it's kind of you've got to come into your own kind of DNA of the business to figure out what inputs go into assessing complexity, right? It's definitely Mary-Kay, do you want to chime in on this idea of complexity of role. What kinds of things go into review thinking about creating a number against this? Stephanie Baysinger 40:35 I love what you said about the hire. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, no. Go ahead, Stephanie. I love what you said about hiring manager experience. That's a new one. And I just wrote that down that that is a great idea for themselves or to the baseline. I think Jose kind of touched on this, and I would agree of what is the business trying to accomplish? Like, what are the ultimate business goals? And which roles are going to impact those? And how do you prioritise those? And then what is the complexity of those roles? Like I, I think that's another input of, you know, what is the impact this role is going to have? What's the prioritisation of the business? And then how do you resource that effectively, so that you can get those results? I'll aim there. I'll stop there. So I think that's a bit more high level to your question. But it's just something that's top of mind for me of, we could we could give everyone a lot of scores for other roles and hire those. And then I've been in positions where we're like, Wait, we've done all this complexity measurement. And actually, the one position that we needed is still is still on the on the in the process right now. And if we wouldn't, we just have to just prioritise that from the beginning, and it might have a ripple effect on that hiring manager being in the business and being able to hire more people for their team, etc. Hung Lee 41:54 Yeah, absolutely. How about your first Mary Kay, how do we how do we calculate complexity of the job? Like, how difficult is the hire that role? Mary-Kay Baldino 42:01 Yeah, I think that one of the things we haven't touched on yet, but is the, to me, the great enabler of a lot of these things that we have been discussing is strategic workforce planning. And just very, very few companies actually even attempt it. And even fewer get it right. Most recruiting functions are put in a position where really, they just have to react. Because the business doesn't know what it wants until it's right in front of them, they can't give you a forecast of their hiring needs more than 90 days out, they can't give you a succession plan that has any high degree of accuracy below the C suite kind of level. Right? And so, you know, I think we have to accept that in most companies, we have to build a recruiting engine that is capable of pivoting and capable of a great deal of flexibility. The ideal state is we do strategic workforce planning. And we understand those roles in the context of what they contribute to the company's strategy. What they the difficulty of the market factors, right, because street strategic workforce planning is looking at external inputs from the labour market, not just what is our company strategy. If you're, you know, only like navel gazing and looking internally, you're really never going to get to a very strategic view. So not to take us down a rabbit hole on strategic workforce planning, because that could be a whole nother webinar unto itself. But but it is a huge missing factor. And that is, could be an incredibly powerful engine for building a way more efficient and productive recruiting team. Hung Lee 43:53 Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, a couple of the panellists have mentioned things like talent mapping, and what have you noticed people have mentioned in the chat certain tools that you should be or can be using? Unfortunately, all of them are paid for, I think LinkedIn insights, I believe, is available, but on certain types of paid licence. I think the talent mapping scene is quite healthy in terms of provisioning of tools, but they do cost. So you might need to go to public data at times. Follow lake, the labour market economists understand sort of what the the environment is, for the key roles that you're hiring for. And by the way, if you don't have to do this for every role, but have a think about what the key positions are, that your company, either strategic positions for your company, or their evergreen companies, you know, this is essentially what your company does. If you're a software development house, you probably want to know sort of what it is what the software development market looks like. That's where you need to put some investment in investment of time. And indeed, resources. Folks, we are accelerating through to the we still got some time to go Go to this webinar. But I just want to do a quick reminder to everybody. If you do have any questions that need to be answered and we have managed, pick them up in the chat, ask them in the q&a section because we will definitely go to that towards the end of the conversation. Okay, let's talk practicalities here. I think if we if recruiters had infinite amount of time, of course, we would do all of this talent mapping, of course, we would pour all of these very sophisticated measures in place, all of those things would happen. But there's a reason why talent operations has emerged as as a sub genre within recruiting is because an operation recruiter cannot possibly be doing all of this. This is why we've we've had almost this career path merge, of which Stephanie may not be an exemplar. So bear in mind, though not every organisation is of scale, size, scale maturity to have a tonne ops as distinct function. How do we kind of make the sort of practicalities work where we need to have some numbers in place with this person is still needing to recruit, you know, I'm imagining a figure maybe only we're one recruiter in or perhaps small team around them. How do they assemble something really scrappy, that kind of works for the time being, whilst they still have to knock in a knock down these rules? Any thoughts on the I guess doing a quick and dirty is probably the way I would think about it. Jose, your thoughts on this? Jose Delgado Garcia 46:28 Yeah, I love this person. Because that's something actually they're coming from scale level as well, like scale up companies as well. It's always a struggle that we had something that we normally would have been doing in this country to actually doing in my current company goals in this group. But also in the past, actually, to really make sure that specifically not consider recruiters are as a service. But actually, as a tea party. I think that is, and that is really key. And it might sound like it's not connected, but it is because something that we did, it's also really divided the role in a way of like having like an 80%, where they dedicate, obviously, to really the main goal for recruiters, which is like also really being like, at the end of the day, hire people we pretty like really plan and plan as well. But what is important also for me is really that scalable system as well, and how to relay that notion and knowledge management as well how those parameters are also able to grow in their careers, how to really make sure that the processes are automated, to be able to be more efficient as well. And also give them time as well for matters of diversity of really bringing the top of the funnel be more creative as well. So when it comes to practicality, to be more practical, let's say it's really important to obviously focus on what we need to do. But also really making sure that we give a space for them to really work as a team and really building their foundation. I've noticed that when companies as well try to go a bit more like really out of the box, but nothing is really built on the on the on the ground, everything just will fall apart. So I think it's really really important. As I said before, going back to basics basics, go to there have the knowledge management, set expectations really be aligned have and I think what's also what Mary-Kay really measure is that workforce planning was something that has been really a key key point as well and really connected that with a team of recruiters, it really, really helped a lot and then connected obviously, with how the market is now with employer branding, our diversity and inclusion, I think that really brings so much efficiency as well. And at the end of the day, it also sees practical in the short, very long term as well. To me that is something that is the best way of building like really a practical and a strong team as well for in different timelines. Hung Lee 48:35 Yeah that they don't think there exists a tool that does this. This is I imagine there might be I mean, I guess they talk about AI at some point like is there a scenario whereby there may be a way in which some sort of artificial intelligence can connect with a bunch of systems the start giving us some insight and outputs there currently seems to be pretty scattered. I think most people who are building some type of recruitment ops efficiency metrics probably will be building this in Excel even or would be building it on you know, maybe some sort of consumer great app, you know, I think Visual Studio or something, I don't know the ways to do it, but it's not necessarily you know, a tool or kind of magically does it for you so perhaps there's an opportunity there for somebody. Okay, let's do the practicalities again as Stephanie How would you know you do it and in fact, you were the one that mentioned the scrap piece of paper so what was on the paper? Stephanie Baysinger 49:37 Google Sheets can be your friend I have definitely built very, very easy equations of you know, a funnel in Excel that's you know, you can type in the past through rate percentages. You can build this yourself. Get to know your ATS if you have an ATS. Like just take an hour block off an hour this week and Just poke around with some of the basic funnel metrics like, take some time, I think, you know, Jose to your talk on like knowledge management, like, put the responsibility on yourself or your team to upskill. You want to do it all at once. But one task a week for the next couple of weeks. I'm going to analyse my ATS this week, and I'm going to see if they can give me the general you know, what are the events in my process? And do I have an understanding of what is going on in those events? Because I might be asked, or when I do my next role, I want something to go back to it's just setting the small habits and pieces every week to do that, I think that's the most practical thing to do. And then for those that are on the call that might be recruiting managers or leading teams, what is your role when you have one on ones or when you're holding the team accountable to things? What questions are you asking? And how are you reinforcing that knowing these metrics is actually part of the role, whether it's, I love what you said, Jose, I believe that's why my operations role kind of exists is taking that 20% of, you know, spending time on your metrics as I get to kind of build that at scale. But if you don't have that, still dedicating that 20% of your role to knowing what your pipeline looks like. And as if you're a manager, I know we can tend to say like, Alright, are you feeling good about the role? You feel like you got a good candidate? Okay, good. Okay, next one, like actually pausing and asking questions like, What are you noticing about your pipeline? Right now? Pause, let's talk about it. Let's get in the data together. You know, what, what have we not tried yet? You know, what, how can we brainstorm a little bit right, now, let's actually pull up a piece of paper or your ATS and map out some things and just dedicating five or 10 minutes of all of your meetings, to talk about those pieces, I think is just setting very practical habits and making this part of kind of the DNA of your team. Hung Lee 51:49 And that's actually kind of one of those incremental. Incremental may not be the right word, but it's one of the ways in which you can move the your TA function into more data driven contexts, is from a manager's perspective, that may be the first five minutes of your meeting to on the one to ones to talk about this in this way. And as you say, it's moving away from the gut feel stuff. But talking about, hey, you know, what is the pipeline telling you? And then that forces the recruiter, however, experienced or not, there may be to start thinking, Yeah, I need to have those numbers for the manager when we have this chat. Okay, Mary, Kay, what are your thoughts on this? I mean, you kind of have kind of, you've got to this two year mark of putting together some of these things. Can you give us a few examples of of things that worked and things that didn't? I mean, now that you if there's time to kind of do a quick review? Like, what kind of measures do you think, okay, we read, that worked, worked in the sense it was implemented, and actually you use it to improve and give us an example of something that you've learned that actually turned out not to be particularly useful? Mary-Kay Baldino 52:57 Yeah, I think we switched applicant tracking systems a little over a year ago. And so the the focus initially was just on making the data as transparent as possible, giving hiring managers direct access to reports and metrics and making sure that they they knew what was going on at all times, right? The worst thing is recruited to the position of, you know, just having to constantly provide updates, because managers can't see for themselves what is going on. So that is a huge efficiency gain. Right there. Getting to roll clarity is so much easier when you have that, that transparency. I think one of the things that we continue to work on is data visualisation, you can give people a tonne of data. But if that data doesn't tell a story, or you can't put it in a context or without visuals, that data visualisation, it's very difficult to get people to use that data to change behaviour. So that's kind of, for me, the big focus area right now is moving beyond just data transparency, and making sure everybody has access to real time information. That's, that's meaningful. And moving beyond that to really using data visualisation to change specific important behaviours. Hung Lee 54:30 Really interesting, some really important points here, by the way, because obviously, we've been talking so far about what we're doing with regards to recruiting metrics, but of course, it may well be you got hiring managers that are part of this process. They are not directing it, but they're full stakeholders because they're doing the interviewing. They should be giving you feedback. They should be doing scorecards do all of that stuff. But are they doing it is the tooling provided for them to do that? That's probably still an ongoing conversation a lot of us may be having, because I'm just imagining, okay, you know, the default, maybe just a decent ATS that everyone has access to. But there's some folks out there that are on Excel still or, you know, the pre ATS in that way, how do you mobilise managers to do those types of stuff. So getting the managers involved and contributing to it can help release the report reporting burden from the TA team, which is actually a massive efficiency gain. Because you can just point the hiring managers to a dashboard and say, hey, you've got the same information as we do you. There's no point in asking us for a report. Okay, moving on to data visualisation. Super interesting, because we do have to end this conversation a little bit with AI because there's been some really interesting innovations hasn't there about, hey, suddenly, we can ask chatGPT to produce like, hey, a chart that tells us this. What's your view on generative AI's role in recruitment metrics? Do you think it's a powerful addition to the toolkit? Or do you think at the end of the day, it's not really going to do too much? We still have to, you know, do the hard work ourselves a little bit on this? Any thoughts? I'll throw it open? I had you experimented with chatGPT. What are you what's your take on it or any of the generative AI when it when it comes down to the recruitment operation, metrics on this Stephanie Baysinger 56:23 Really quick, hot take on it. I'm excited about some of the things to come, I think the biggest thing is just clean data. So if you don't know the data that's in your system, or it's not organised correctly, asking an AI tool to spit out metrics, and then taking it at face value, I think goes almost against this entire conversation of building and knowing the basics. So my big thing is like, let's just get this data clean. And I'm and having people around to kind of piece what it spits out apart and just quality check it right now. Hung Lee 56:55 Yep, your thoughts on this? Jose? Speaker 3 56:58 I pretty much agree on these ideas. So when you go, but I think what is important is like we don't have any, we're better than the house and the foundation is not properly built, I think the races is gonna tumble down as well. So I completely agree with her as well, in the sense of like, we really need to have like clean data. And that's actually what has been really my role lately as well, because it is important for the when we build something, it's connected, and everything makes sense. And we really understand how to manage that tool as well. So So yeah, pretty much on the same on the same path, basically. Hung Lee 57:27 Great stuff. Mary, Kay, your thoughts on this? Have you ever used it? Or do you think actually no, smoking mirrors? What? Mary-Kay Baldino 57:33 I don't? Well, I don't think it's going to end up being smoking mirrors. I think at this point, you know, I would agree. Like, if the foundation isn't there, you don't have a solid process, then your data isn't clean? And then, you know, why are you bothering to play around with tools that are still fairly experimental? In some cases, I do love the opportunity for efficiency, that AI promises, like, I don't know, it's delivering on that promise. But, you know, there are so many things like creating, you know, cut more complex formulas and creating more interesting graphs and charts that you can have ai do that work without having to spend hours and hours of human effort. I think that is a really interesting application of AI. But so far, I would say, you know, from my experience, a lot of companies still are working on, you know, having essentially basics around clean data in their recruiting processes, having unbiased data, so things like, you know, interview feedback, for example, and whether or not that is unbiased. But, you know, I think there's tremendous potential for a streamline Hung Lee 58:55 I'm and the fact the final bit of potential, by the way, folks, is that you can use it as a resource to learn about recruitment operations, you can learn it as a resource to learn about conversion rates and stuff like that, just ask it and see what it comes up with. There'll be stuff out there because it's been trained on the internet, so to speak, so somebody would have produced some content on there. It's useful at the very basics as a research and research and learning tool for this topic. Folks, we are out of time, so we have to put an end to an end here. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you to our wonderful guests Mary-Kay Baldino, Stephanie Baysinger and Jose Manuel Delgado, wonderful to have you on the panel guys. Thanks, everyone for watching. I hope you've enjoyed our second of our series with Cronofy. We're going to roll straight into webinar three, because Cronofy have done an excellent survey on candidate expectations, particularly when it comes down to the recruitment logistics. So if you're interested in exploring what those expectations might be. Make sure you tune into the next webinars that we're going to set up shortly. Kathryn, I'm sure we'll be sending you an email for that. Okay, that's about it, everybody. Thanks for watching. Wonderful to have you. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Bye bye ## Go beyond time-to-fill Time-to-fill is a more controversial metric, and is starting to lose its relevance when looking at recruitment efficiency. Mary-Kay suggests focusing on time-to-fill variance instead. “Start having conversations with the business about how we can measure things that actually change outcomes that improve efficiency. So for us, we have evolved towards measuring time to fill variance. It's not the actual time to fill that's interesting. It's about how much variance there is between roles. For example, we look at setting up a target start date, when we're doing an initial kickoff to search. So based on how long the interview is, how many interview cycles, and how small and specific the talent pool is for this job, we look at how close we are to actually hitting those target start dates. When you look at the outliers, you're able to really start focusing on what's going wrong in your process.” It is undeniable that context is crucial when looking at KPI targets and what success looks like, as Jose explains. “KPIs can be hard to generalize across the board as there’s often a huge variance within company roles a recruiter is hiring for. Some roles might be filled in 10 days, another might take 500 days. And obviously those things skew what the overall measure might be. So you need to do variance in terms of role, and then it's a case of can you improve on that so it's not necessarily one number is a bad number or a good number.” For time-to-fill, simply subtract the opening date from the offer acceptance date, and look across all of your roles to see what the trends are. ‍ ## Time to schedule A recurring pain point for recruiters is coordinating a time for all the people necessary for an interview, particularly complex panel or sequenced interview scenarios. This can lead to a lag between each interview being scheduled, keeping the candidate stuck in the recruitment pipeline for longer. This waiting time is essentially dead time, leaving you susceptible to candidate drop-outs and essentially leaving the job unfilled. People expect speed and efficiency in every area of their lives thanks to technology and our "everything now" culture, and the time to schedule an interview is no different. If the process takes too long, it's a lot harder to keep the best talent iterested. Jose mentions the importance of speed in recruitment: "In the end, we're all fighting for the same talent. So it is important to understand how to remain competitive, and speed is a critical part of this. Automation is great for this as it can take out a lot of the time-consuming admin that recruiters hate." Having scheduling automation in place is the best way to ensure the candidate is moving through the stages efficiently and there is no wasted time. The average amount of time it takes for recruiters to schedule interviews is 3-6 days – [our Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) whittles this down to just 2 hours, which is a huge saving and a powerful tool for a recruiter to have under their belt. ‍ ## Recruiting cost ratio Recruiters should also be looking at recruiting costs relative to the salaries of the people who are being brought in. Stephanie explained how you would calculate this. “Look at all of your recruiting costs, so your talent acquisition team, your employer branding, and recruitment, marketing expenses, and any agency fees. Then divide it by the salaries of the people being hired. And over time you’ll understand whether your costs are going up or down relative to how many people you're hiring and how those people are paid.” Factoring in training is also critical, especially if they’re a specialized and highly paid professional. They need to be given the best chance of success and training is an important part of this. “A general rule of thumb is the more expensive your labor force, the more specialized it is,” said Stephanie. “So you may need to spend more time and more effort attracting that kind of a workforce. And these things only mean something if you train them over time.” So a good formula for this is: (External Costs) + (Internal Costs) / Total Compensation of New Hires x 100 A metric that feeds into this is calculating the complexity of a job to establish how much effort and money you should be spending on the recruitment process. This all comes down to what your overall business goals are, as Mary-Kay explains. “Ask yourself: what are the ultimate business goals, what should you be prioritizing? Which roles are going to impact those, and how do you prioritize them? What is the impact this role is going to have, and how complex is it? And then how do you resource that effectively, so that you can get those results?” ## Quality as a priority Recruiters should focus on quality-of-hire rather than putting such an emphasis on time-to-hire. According to a [Linkedin report](https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/business/talent-solutions/global/en_us/c/pdfs/GRT16_GlobalRecruiting_100815.pdf), only 36% of recruiters measure quality-of-hire while 50% measure time-to-hire. Of course both should be assessed but the quality of the employee is what is most important in terms of making the money, time and effort a worthwhile endeavor. “If you’re getting in a lot of job applicants but they’re all low quality, you are wasting time and money,” Jose says. "What's important for me is the quality of the hire, how good of a fit are they for your role. So if you're getting a low quality, you need to look at where these candidates are coming from, what recruiting marketing campaigns are you running, and are you assessing each role properly." You can measure quality of hire while they're in the recruitment process by looking at referral rates and pre-hire assessments, then look at job performance and retention once they are part of the company. And example of how this could be calculated: [**Quality of Hire**](https://resources.workable.com/blog/quality-of-hire) [(%)](https://resources.workable.com/blog/quality-of-hire) = (Job Performance + Engagement + Cultural Fit) / 3 ## Conversion rates The rate of conversion reflects the effectiveness of the recruitment process in keeping the candidates engaged and interested in the role, which is vital to uphold throughout each stage. Jose explains, “If we see the conversion rate throughout the stages is increasing, the cost is actually the lowest because we've done a good job in the beginning, aligning, setting expectations with everyone. And normally, you see them turn into a hire.” This metric is also about quality of the candidate over quantity. "If you're plugging in loads of candidates, you can actually over acquire them. Just because they're applying doesn't mean they'll stay within the recruitment process for long. And that's not a particularly efficient way to do things. Instead of looking at how many candidates are applying, look at how many are converting. This means you're more efficient yand you'll be spending less." The best way to calculate this metric is: Successful hires made / total vacant jobs x 100 = Coversion Rate (%). ‍ ## The Enduring Value of Traditional Hiring KPIs The overall consensus is metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire remain fundamental in the recruitment world. When presenting to the C-suite, business leaders, or the board, these metrics offer a clear picture of your recruitment process's health. “These traditional KPIs are the nuts and bolts when it comes to your recruitment metrics,” says Stephanie. “They're universally understood by various audiences. Once you know these, then you can expand into the things that help you hit business objectives, what your team is really passionate about. But knowing your general funnel metrics are super power tools to have going into any meeting.” Mary Kay agrees: “Those metrics are considered baseline and if you can't measure that, you definitely can't measure anything more sophisticated. If you can't produce basic metrics, then forget evolving.” Here are the simple calculations for those basic metrics: The time-to-hire calculation: **working days from first job post to official hire / number of roles hired = time-to-hire** Cost-per-hire calculation: Internal costs + external costs / number of hires = cost-per-hire ‍ ## KPIs For The Win Many of the traditional KPIs are still relevant today, but they should be adapted and expanded on to get a holistic view of modern recruitment efficiency. By embracing a combination of metrics, understanding the nuances of each role, adapting to changing conditions, and fostering creativity in talent acquisition, recruiters can truly measure and enhance their operational efficiency. The recruitment landscape is ever-evolving, and so should your metrics. Adapt, innovate, and measure what truly matters to ensure you're not just filling roles quickly but doing so efficiently and effectively. ### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? Blog Post 2024-07-15T14:00:40.161Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Internal Training vs External Training: Which is More Effective and Why? I’m probably in the minority when I say that I love a good training session. Not the boring kind where the person sat next to you is falling asleep because they missed out on their morning coffee, but the interesting, engaging kind where you learn something new and leave feeling empowered. Blog Post 2018-06-07T11:16:00.000Z --- # Events - Help Articles Learn how to create, edit, cancel and reschedule single and multiple events when scheduling with Cronofy, and how to manage tags and statuses. ## Events Cronofy **events** are created, managed, and edited from the **Requests** tab. From here, you can schedule events with individual attendee invites or set up multi-day events such as panel interviews. All scheduling changes, including cancellations, are handled in this tab. **Q: How do I edit/change an event?** A: You can edit a request by following these steps: 1. Go into the Cronofy dashboard. 1. Select the **Requests** tab from the left hand menu. 1. Click on any scheduled request to open it. 1. You can edit the request by clicking the pencil icon next to the request. 1. Remember to click Save once done. After this the calendar invite(s) will be updated. ❗ **Please note that the title of a separate invite for an invitee cannot be updated yet. So if the old host name is in the title, it is better to cancel and create a new request with the new host.** ### **Editing the title, event description, date/time** You can edit any of these field on the page and save them directly on the page. The changes will be pushed to the calendar events. **Who can edit?** - The **creator** of the request and the **person** the request was scheduled on behalf of. - **Scheduler admin and owner:** edit any event. Any preferences such as limits, buffers, or working hours are not taken into account when editing the date and/or time. **Q: How do I edit the host of an event?** A: **Updating the Host for Scheduled and Pending Requests** You can update the host for both *scheduled* and *pending* requests. For *scheduled* requests, when you change the host, the system will **disregard** the new host's preferences (such as minimum notice, working hours, and limits). The change will be reflected in the calendar invite. You can switch from a host selected by a rule to a specific host, or from one specific host to another. Once the host is updated, the new host will receive an **email notification** about the event, while the previous host will have the event removed from their calendar. If the person making the change is different from the original event creator, the **creator** will be notified about the update. For *pending* requests, when you change the host, the system will apply the **original request's** availability settings (such as working hours, custom hours, or specific time slots) to the new host. You can update the host to another specific host or change it based on a selection rule, but this can only be done before the event is officially scheduled. Please note that you **cannot** edit the host while a request is in *pending rescheduling* status. **Q: How can I keep track of events?** A: Your dashboard is located under the "**Requests**" tab on your Cronofy home page and displays all requests scheduled using Cronofy. From here, you can perform various **actions** and searches, providing you with a powerful overview of your tasks. 1. Search and filter bar. 1. Export the requests in your dashboard as a .csv file. 1. Request and their status. **Clicking** on an individual event opens it, allowing you to view more detailed information and edit it. When you click on an individual request it will show you all the details of that request so you can keep track of their status. What you can find: 1. Title of the request. 1. Who created the request and at what time. 1. The timezone in which you are viewing the event(s) of the request. 1. Invitee of the request. 1. Date and time of the event(s). 1. Host of the event. 1. Attendees of the event. 1. Duration and conferencing. 1. Event description (also for separate invites). This is also where you can cancel and reschedule a request. Use the **search bar** to locate events by **host** or **invitee** email. Combine this with **filters** to refine your results further. Filter by **organization** if you belong to multiple organizational units, and by the status of the request. Create and apply custom **tags** for additional filtering options. You can download a **.csv** file containing all requests or just the filtered ones displayed on your dashboard. **Q: What are the statuses of events in Cronofy?** A: All requests have status phases that indicate their current status: **Pending**: The request has been sent to the invitee and is awaiting a time selection. **Scheduled**: The invitee has selected a slot, and the appointment is scheduled. **Done**: The appointment has taken place and is completed. **Expired**: The request was sent out, but the invitee did not select a slot within the given timeframe. **Canceled**: The appointment was canceled. If rescheduled, the new appointment will appear further up. **Pending Rescheduling**: The appointment is awaiting a new time slot after a reschedule request. **Declined**: The invitee has declined the request. **Host Declined**: The host has declined the request. **Invitee Unavailable**: The invitee is not available at any of the proposed times. **More Times Requested**: The invitee has requested additional time options. **Q: Can I do multiple events?** **Q: How do I use tags in my requests?** A: Adding a **tag** to your scheduling request will help you identify which projects or customers it relates to. This will make it easier to **filter** through all scheduled requests and follow up with any outstanding ones, allowing you to **organise** them on a per-project basis. You can create tags from the ‘**Create a new request**’ page when creating a request. Please enter the name of the tag in the ‘**Add tags**’ field in the middle of the request and hit enter. You then need to create the link to **save** the tag. If later, you would like to add existing tags, update or remove them, you can do this via the ‘**Requests**’ page by selecting an existing request. Once you have accessed the request, scroll down to the bottom to add the tags. Then press enter to add the tag to the request and hit the ’**Update tags**’ button. To filter requests by tag(s), click on the ‘Filter by tag’ dropdown button on the ‘Requests’ page. To update tags, you would simply need to remove the tag from the request and add a new one. *The maximum number of tags per request is 32. The character limit for tag names is 64 characters. Please note that you can only remove a tag (not delete it).* **Q: Can I cancel an event?** A: You can cancel a request by opening the request from the dashboard, scrolling all the way to the bottom and clicking "**cancel**". An invitee can cancel the invite from the link they receive per email after and event was scheduled. Or **decline** the meeting in the initial scheduling request. In **both** cases all participant are informed per email. **Q: Can I reschedule an event?** A: Conduct easy rescheduling as a host by opening the event from the dashboard and clicking "**Cancel and Reschedule**". The event will be canceled in order to remove it from everyone's calendars. Invitees can **reschedule** if the option is set before sending the invite link. --- # A Recruiter's Cheat Sheet on Working With Recruitment Agencies Download this free cheat sheet to discover practical steps you should take to get the most out of your recruitment agency and fill critical roles fast. ## Get More from Your Recruitment Agency Partnerships Got hires to make? We've got the tactical cheat sheet for busy Talent teams under pressure to fill demanding roles fast. Gather insights from a seasoned TA leader who's worked on both sides of the table and avoid another agency misfire. [Download Cheat Sheet](#form-d22fc800-68bd-4a00-ac83-abe36302dcdc) ## Are you struggling to deliver that new hire? When roles stay open too long, or you're stretched too thin to give them the focus they need, agency support becomes essential. But not all partnerships lead to results, and working with agencies can quickly become just one more thing to manage. This cheat sheet shows you how to brief, manage, and collaborate with recruitment agencies in a way that moves the needle without adding more burden to your plate. **When to call in agency support** Spot the right moment to bring help in **How to write a brief that works** Cut the guesswork and align early **Where internal hiring teams lose momentum** Avoid process delays that frustrate everyone **What great partnerships actually look like ** Signs your agency is working with you, not just for you --- # Discussing automation and the future of recruitment with Hung Lee We recently spoke to Hung Lee, the Curator of one of the world's most influential HR and recruitment communities, Recruiting Brainfood. He discusses COVID-19, candidate expectations, and automation's impact on the ever-changing recruitment industry. We recently spoke to Hung Lee, the Curator of one of the world's most influential HR and recruitment communities, Recruiting Brainfood. He discusses COVID-19, candidate expectations, and automation's impact on the ever-changing recruitment industry. *Hung Lee is the Curator of one of the world's most influential HR and recruitment communities, **[Recruiting Brainfood](https://www.recruitingbrainfood.com)**. He discusses COVID-19, candidate expectations, and automation's impact on the ever-changing recruitment industry.* #### **Hi Hung, thank you for speaking with us today!** #### **In your experience, what are the main challenges facing the recruiters in your communities?** **‍**The main challenge I hear about regularly from the recruiters in my community is increasingly demanding candidates. A significant cause of the candidate shortage is that people expect much more from employers than before Covid-19. The pandemic and the necessary mitigation policies such as working from home have changed the game in terms of what people think is a fair deal. Candidates are looking for better pay, increased flexibility, and more control over their working arrangements – recruiters have to match these high expectations, making it more challenging to match people to a role. It also makes the hiring landscape much more competitive – with the rising number of vacancies and the dwindling number of candidates, recruiters are all vying for the attention of these demanding job seekers. ‍ #### ‍**Have you seen more recruiters adopting automation over the last year?** **‍**As automation is becoming commonplace across many industries, recruiters are acknowledging the value of automating their admin-heavy tasks to save time. Any ideological opposition against tools like chatbots dealing with job seeker FAQs and [automated interview scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/interview-scheduling) has almost disappeared. We're no longer contesting whether these are good ideas or not and have moved on to thinking about when we should implement them. The candidate shortage for recruiters is accelerating this. There are too few recruiters, hiring for too many roles, and automation is considered the only way to increase recruiter productivity without burning them out. #### ‍**What are the benefits of adopting automation into the recruitment function?** **‍**There's really no negative. There were perhaps initial concerns that 'over-automation' could lead to poorer candidate experience, but these have since been mitigated by improved understanding of the psychology of job seeking. People want timely updates on the status of their application – it doesn't matter whether it's a human or machine that delivers the news. In fact, there is some data to suggest candidates may prefer to deal with a non-human for parts of the process. The benefits are also obvious – recruiters can deliver more efficient processes, giving them more time to focus on the higher value parts of the recruiting process, such as candidate sourcing and relationship-building. ‍ #### ‍**What common blockers do you see for the recruitment leaders in your communities considering automation?** **‍**Automation is still relatively new, so it requires an element of change. Many organizations will have invested heavily in their existing systems and processes and may think the switching costs are too high. However, vendors are increasingly providing impressive solutions that are ready to use. The easier it gets to trial or pilot, the quicker those blockers will dissolve. ‍ #### ‍**Which recruitment processes do you feel should be automated?** **‍**Any recruitment process that requires repetition, coordination, accuracy, and speed should be automated. As I mentioned earlier, chatbots for answering candidate FAQs are invaluable, as well as automated interview scheduling. Interview scheduling is one of the most time-consuming tasks for a recruiter when done manually and can result in [frustrated candidates](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download). Automating this task improves the life of the recruiter and the scheduling experience for the candidate. Additionally, interview transcription, process updates, stakeholder coordination, report production – so many areas of the recruitment process would benefit from being automated. It will be exciting to see more recruitment departments put all of this together. #### ‍**What do you predict the future of recruitment will look like?** **‍**It will go one of two ways. Recruiters will either shrink in value if they continue with a business as usual approach or grow in value if they can increase the scope of their roles. A big part of achieving the latter will be through taking advantage of the increased capacity automation provides. *Want to learn about automating time-consuming tasks like interview scheduling?* [*Come along to our webinar*](https://www.cronofy.com/product-demo-webinar-interview-scheduling-with-the-scheduler)* and discover how automation boosts the efficiency of your team and streamlines your hiring processes, saving each recruiter up to 284 hours per year!* --- # Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. The recruitment process is shaped by evolving candidate expectations and psychological factors, which often make it difficult to navigate. Our upcoming annual Candidate Expectations Report, which collected data from 12,000 candidates across 7 countries, provides us with invaluable insights into these factors. Cronofy Co-founder & CEO Adam Bird and Lic. Psychologist Malin Freiman Moezzi unpack these findings and provide actionable suggestions on effectively addressing them in a recent conversation at the world’s largest virtual HR conference, [BambooHR Virtual Summit](https://www.bamboohr.com/virtual/). This is what we’ve learned at the session: ## 1. Expectations are changing One notable trend highlighted in the report is the shift in candidate expectations. Compared to previous years, candidates now expect less from recruitment teams in terms of response times and communication, reflecting a growing sense of realism and pragmatism in the job market as competition for roles increases. ### Why is candidate ghosting getting more prevalent in 2024? Duration: 02:49 ***Actionable step:**** Candidate self booking links and automated scheduling from inside your ATS are a great way to exceed expectations. Connect and speak with candidates faster, before your competitors do.* ## 2. Long interview processes stress candidates the most A significant finding from the report is the negative impact of long interview processes on candidates. Globally, nearly 40% of candidates cited long and drawn-out processes as a major source of stress, emphasizing the need for efficiency and transparency in recruitment. ***Actionable step:**** Review and streamline your recruitment process to ensure it is as efficient as possible. Set clear timelines for each stage and communicate these to candidates from the outset. Aim to reduce time-to-interview and time-to-hire by eliminating unnecessary steps and automating where possible.* ## 3. Human touch is vital Despite the increasing use of technology in recruitment, candidates still value human interaction. Over 80% of candidates identified human touch, including personalized communication and engagement, as crucial elements of the recruitment process. ***Actionable Step:**** Invest in technology to automate repetitive tasks and improve efficiency. Use tools like Cronofy to automate interview scheduling and ensure timely communication. Regularly review your tech stack to identify opportunities for further automation and process improvement, as automating manual steps opens up opportunities to introduce more human touch in the right places.* ## 4. Communication is Key Lack of communication emerged as a common frustration among candidates. Half of the candidates cited a lack of communication as the most frustrating aspect of the recruitment process, highlighting the importance of timely and transparent communication from recruiters. ***Actionable Step:**** Implement a communication strategy that includes regular updates to candidates. Use your ATS to send automated status updates at key stages of the recruitment process. Provide candidates with clear information about what to expect next and the estimated timelines.* *Implement no-ghosting policies to maintain a positive employer brand. Every interaction with a candidate influences how they view your company, including the farewell process. Maintaining a positive employer brand will help you attract top talent over time.* ## 5. Candidates want inclusive and fair processes The report also shed light on the unique challenges faced by neurodiverse candidates. Drawn-out processes were found to disproportionately affect neurodiverse candidates, leading to higher levels of stress than other parts of the population. Neurodiverse also preferred to self-schedule – a larger majority than average (58% compared to global average of 53%) say they would prefer to schedule their own interviews through provided time slots. Neurodiverse candidates also felt scheduling difficulties more acutely, as 56% said they have left recruitment processes because they were frustrated with the time it took to schedule an interview, compared to a global average of 42%. ***Actionable Step:**** Adopt evidence-based recruitment methods to ensure a fair and objective process. Clearly explain your interview techniques, and provide candidates with sample questions. Ensure your process is designed to be inclusive, accommodating the needs of neurodivergent candidates and others who may face challenges in traditional interview settings. Give candidates the option to self-schedule interviews with times that work for them without the back-and-forth through a scheduling tool like Cronofy.* ## Conclusion Understanding candidate psychology is essential for creating a positive and inclusive recruitment experience. The 2024 Candidate Expectations Report reveals a shift towards more pragmatic expectations, the detrimental effects of prolonged interview processes, the ongoing importance of human interaction, the necessity of clear communication, and the unique challenges faced by neurodiverse candidates. By addressing these findings, recruiters can refine their strategies to create a more efficient, inclusive, and positive experience for candidates, ultimately strengthening their employer brand and attracting top talent. ## Ready to Elevate Your Recruitment Process? Get ahead of the rest of the market read insights from 12,000 candidates across 7 geographies in the latest edition of our [Candidate Expectations report](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024). You can watch the full session below, and take the chance to speak to us about improving your candidate experience. [Speak to us today](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) ### Full session: How to show candidates you care Duration: 23:47 ### Calendar hygiene: a guide to cleaning up messy calendars HR Tech Is your calendar messier than a teenager’s bedroom? Time for a spring clean – read on for our top calendar hygiene tips. --- ### How to Create a Recruitment Outreach Strategy Recruitment Founder of QuickMail.io, Jeremy Chatelaine, shares his actionable recruitment outreach strategy to help recruiters have more conversations with qualified candidates. --- ### Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What Metrics Truly Matter Recruitment In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. But are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Talent Acquisition experts Stephanie Baysinger, Mary-Kay Baldino, and José Manuel Delgado Garcia share their thoughts. --- # Maximize Interviewer Availability for Competitive Hiring Discover how Cronofy’s new features—Interview Times, Availability Reports, and Host Editing—are helping recruitment teams eliminate scheduling bottlenecks, reduce cancellations, and improve interview planning, helping you land top talent faster. Scheduling delays cost you top talent. Discover how Cronofy’s new features help reduce availability bottlenecks and enable you to plan interviews smarter. Time-to-schedule makes the difference between landing or losing exceptional candidates, this is why we keep building on our promise to eliminate the scheduling friction that delays candidate progress. We’ve introduced exciting scheduling capabilities to help you navigate interviewer availability and unlock capacity to accelerate hiring success. Read on for more details about these updates! ## Schedule interviews for busy colleagues with Interview Times Even the best recruiters can’t win against poor calendar hygiene. Time commitments secured during kickoff meetings quickly become outdated, and interviewers, on the other hand, are overwhelmed in fulfilling their primary role responsibilities. This results in a frustrating cycle of unavailable slots, cancellations, and no-shows that delay your hiring process. Interview Times enables recruiters to secure interviewer commitments to specific time slots through dedicated availability windows, e.g., *“I’m available for interviews between 2 pm and 4 pm on Wednesday this week and Tuesday next week”.* These time slots are transformed into dynamic placeholders in the interviewer’s calendar but remain fully adjustable by the interviewer. **Interview Times delivers some key benefits:** - **For recruiters:** - Significantly reduces cancellations due to outdated availability and eliminates time-consuming back-and-forth renegotiations that slow down hiring - Improves confidence that candidates are booking into actual available times with assigned interviewers - Unlocks more capacity for interviews as hiring teams feel more comfortable sharing time commitments, knowing they can make changes independently as their day changes - **For interviewers:** minimizes surprise interview invites and repetitive scheduling discussions while keeping them in control of their calendars - Highly valuable for executive interviews where recruiters can’t directly access calendars or in scenarios requiring coordination with busy calendars Read more about how to use Interview Times [here](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/availability-options#92fc84985ed499b64dbc48e2fb1493cf). ## Forecast interviewer capacity with Availability Reports Understanding who’s available to meet candidates has traditionally been a complex blend of manual calendar tetris, automated pool management, and a third critical factor— gut feel. This reliance on instinct creates a perpetual guessing game where talent acquisition leaders and recruiters are pressured to reduce time-to-hire but lack concrete evidence when interviewers are the scheduling bottlenecks. Recruiters also often find themselves playing the waiting game, where they delay candidate progress while they negotiate additional times with interviewers. This typically occurs in advanced-stage interviews, which often require multiple stakeholders and can dramatically extend the hiring timeline. Availability Reports visualize who’s available in an interview pool over a four-week period at a glance. With this, interview capacity becomes a measurable metric rather than an abstract concept, transforming your kickoff meetings from guesswork into data-driven planning conversations. Recruiters and TA leaders can proactively address capacity issues head-on instead of merely reacting to them. **Availability Reports also help you to:** - Instantly identify the most and least available interviewers based on their actual calendar availability - Make smarter interviewer pairing decisions for upcoming interviews - Anticipate scheduling bottlenecks weeks before they impact candidate experience - Hold interviewers accountable to meet hiring targets This feature also complements Interview Times by encouraging interviewers to make scheduling commitments they can easily adjust in their calendars through the hiring process. ## Swap an interviewer for a scheduled meeting Before now, if a hiring manager who was scheduled into an interview became unavailable, you’d have to cancel and offer the availability of a new interviewer, requiring the candidate to rebook. Now, you can edit and change the host without canceling and rescheduling the original interview. **Editing hosts unlocks some new possibilities, such as:** - Ensuring candidates progress through interview stages without schedule disruptions - Supports the addition of a backup interviewer or a pool to find an ideal replacement These enhancements will free recruitment teams to focus on high-value candidate interactions and improve hiring productivity. ## Your next steps to reducing time-to-hire Cronofy customers can instantly access these new features in the Scheduler, for assistance, please [contact our support team](https://www.cronofy.com/guides). New to Cronofy and want to learn more about these solutions? Speak to a specialist and get a personalized tour of the Cronofy Scheduler today. [Discover Interview Scheduling with Cronofy](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### Are interview scheduling delays costing you top talent? --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes --- ### Why more coordinators don't always improve Time-to-Hire --- # Talking data and gender in recruitment with Workology Jessica is founder of Workology and a thought leader in human resources. We spoke with her about our recent research on candidate's expectations. Jessica is founder of Workology and a thought leader in human resources. We spoke with her about our recent research on candidate's expectations. *[Jessica Miller-Merrell is founder of Workology](https://workology.com/author/jessica-m/)** and a workplace change agent focused on human resources and talent acquisition.* In light of our [recent research into candidate expectations](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/), we wanted to talk with her about our findings and more. Read on for the full conversation below. ### What was your immediate reaction to the results? The fact that they’re losing out this high percentage of people because of scheduling is a huge concern. I’m seeing a lot of recruiters complaining about not getting the quality applications they need. So when you get these applications in your funnel, you want to keep them, especially if they’re qualified. Scheduling is part two of that. As teams have gotten smaller, there’s an increased amount of pressure that says, “I have so much more to do. People are ghosting me more or they’re not following up or they’re falling out”. And you don’t have the time to go back and send the follow-up email. So mental health is a big, big concern. A lot of people are hitting their breaking point. Losing candidates to scheduling frustrations is another thing added onto their plates. I thought the data on women was really interesting. But it makes sense because we all know the amount of bias and unconscious judgment occurring when a child comes into the room during a meeting. Also, you have no idea if the person that you just treated unfairly and didn’t give a response might have 2 million followers on TikTok, and one video could totally disrupt not only your recruiting process, but your whole business. Employers say they want to hire people with influence, but then they’re scared of it. ‍ ### What recommendations would you have to people looking to improve this area? You need to look at your data first. And it could be something simple like a survey where we just send out a short Google form to recent hires and say: what did you like, what did you not like, give me some feedback. And make it anonymous so they can tell you. And then – and I know it’s hard to hear criticism and most employers do not want to do this – but we still need to talk to people that didn’t get hired. Quit being in denial about it. You need to sit down and say, Hey, candidate, I know you didn’t get the job. And I probably ghosted you and didn’t give you a follow-up. But rate your experience with me so that you can understand what you really want. From there, you can pick which technologies, tools, processes you want to put in place that will be the most impactful because you have the information right in front of you. ‍ ### What was your reaction to the findings about gender? I really feel like the gender thing is big because I’ve been doing a lot of work on the pink collar recession. There’s a lot of women exiting the workforce right now. And there’s fear that we’re going to be falling back 30 years. Talk to your diverse candidates or recent hires and ask for feedback, ask questions. If you truly want to be an inclusive organization, you need to make your hiring experience inclusive. And part of that is the scheduling tool. If your application isn’t accessible or takes too long, these impact having an inclusive representation of candidates to pick from and hire. For example, the group most likely to use smartphones as their sole form of technology in the US is Hispanics. And so if you make your application process so difficult on that format, you’re discriminating against this minority group. And at some point there’s going to be lawsuits around career sites and employer hiring processes that exclude certain protected classes or minority groups. We’re just not there yet. I’m sure there’s a lawyer working on something somewhere for this very thing. *We recently surveyed 6,500 candidates in the US, UK, France and Germany. **[Read our report](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-expectations-report-2021/)** on how interview scheduling impacts candidate experience and a business’ ability to hire.* --- # Intelligent customer relationship management with Rezi Estate agent favorite Rezi is a super-smart CRM platform that enables realtors to optimize their time, information and data for unparalleled success. Estate agent favorite Dezrez is a super-smart CRM platform that enables realtors to optimize their time, information and data for unparalleled success. **Estate agent favorite ****[Rezi](https://www.dezrez.co.uk/)**** is a super-smart CRM platform that enables realtors to optimize their time, information and data for unparalleled success.** **‍**The brainchild of renowned property software experts Dezrez, Rezi is the one-stop solution for intelligent client and property matching, efficient lets and sales management, and developing effective customer relationships. Rezi utilizes cutting-edge technology to stay ahead of the game, which is why partnering with Cronofy made sense for optimizing its calendar functionality. A key feature of Rezi’s system is the ability for agents to display and edit their appointments, both for their own use and the rest of the team’s. ## The Challenge Every user needs real-time availability of calendar information, but not every user remembers to keep their schedule updated when it means manually inputting information in multiple places. Just a small lapse in memory can mean an annoyed client or manager, or even a lost sale. As Rezi prides itself on making estate agent practices run as efficiently and intelligently as possible, this was a big potential pitfall. All users need to have access to scheduling details anywhere, anytime, with complete confidence that the information is accurate and secure. ‍ ## The Solution By introducing the Cronofy API into their service, Rezi was able to meet these vital requirements for their users and reduce the amount of user admin time needed while maximising reliability. Now, estate agents simply select their choice of calendar via a dropdown menu to add their professional schedule to Rezi, and appointments are automatically added and kept up to date. In addition to reducing friction and maintaining Rezi’s reputation as a user-friendly platform, this method ensures that users stay in control of their personal information and what they choose to share at all times. As data can be imported from any calendar service, it also means no workflow changes: estate agents can continue to use iCloud, Google Calendar, Exchange, Outlook.com or Office365 in line with their preferences. Agents know they can trust appointments and availability in Rezi to have real-time accuracy – no questions asked. Through integrating with the Cronofy API, Rezi benefits from: ‍ - **Reliable real-time availability information** – Every calendar is kept up to date automatically, making it easy to see available slots and scheduled bookings. - **Seamlessly controlled team- and company-wide calendar sharing** – Users control the information they share to maintain privacy and professionalism. - **Easy multi-client scheduling** – Agents and managers can see and schedule appointments easily with an unlimited number of customers. - **Scalable scheduling** – No matter how many calendar users are added, performance remains optimized. - **At-a-glance planning** – Users can see which days and times are the most popular, and managers can see where their agents are spending their time. - **Optimal reliability** – The system handles the information rather than the user, cutting down on admin and ensuring real-time accuracy. - **No workflow or software changes** – Estate agents can still use their preferred choice of calendar service, and everything sits within Rezi for easy access. - **On the go accessibility** – As Rezi can be accessed anywhere, anytime, from any device, fluid calendar integration makes remote working (and remote team management) much easier, giving estate agents the flexibility they need to extend their reach. With Cronofy, users at all levels have greatly reduced time spent on tedious admin tasks, leaving them free to focus on what they do best – selling. ## How it works Calendar filtering is used to ensure that only data from selected calendars is added to Rezi: crucial for agents who have a number of calendars for personal and professional areas of their life. Push notifications are sent to users when changes are made to a calendar so everyone is automatically kept up to date on their mobile devices – particularly important with the amount of time estate agents spend out and about. Markup can be used within events so that agents have direct links to all the information they need about properties and prospects, creating an efficient workflow and reducing the risk of error. The Cronofy API helps Rezi maintain its high standards and renowned user experience by ensuring its scheduling functionality – and users – stay ahead of the game. > It’s a given that integrating with Cronofy delivers benefits to our clients but there is value for us too. No other estate agency software provider offers two-way email and calendar sync beyond Outlook, which is fairly limiting for our market. This means we are the first to offer a way for estate agents to be truly plugged into the office from any device when they are out with clients. — Ian Pearce, CTO, Dezrez Rezi ### Manage customer relationships like Rezi If you’re a developer, [sign up for free](https://app.cronofy.com/session/new) and begin coding straight away. If you’re a product owner or just generally interested in learning more about Cronofy and how it’s used, please get in touch via the form below. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # Users - Help Articles Learn how to add and manage users to Cronofy either manually or automatically and how to use your public link, change your password, and add conferencing and more calendars. ## Users Before you can **share** your availability with your colleagues or schedule an event on their **behalf**, you need to add them to your Cronofy Organisational Unit (OU) Learn how to add and manage users to Cronofy either manually or automatically. . **Q: How do I login to Cronofy?** A: To login you can choose again between **Google** or **Microsoft Office 365** (via Graph API) based on your preferred calendar provider. You must sign in with SSO (Single Sign-On) by clicking the "Continue with " option. Ensure you choose the correct data center associated from the **dropdown**, with your account when you registered. **Work email**, remember is for only the developer account and will not work for most users. **Q: How do I update my scheduling preferences?** A: **Availability:** This is the time you will be available for interviews and other events planned with Cronofy. Options include : - Time Buffers between appointments. - Times you are available during the day. (Default is 9am-5pm / Mon-Fri) - Minimum notice, how long beforehand you want people to be able to book with you. **Event details:** Here you set options for where the events are taking place, virtually and physically: - Set in which calendar the appointments should reside. - Setup your prefered Conferencing service. - Location of the meeting and more. **Public Link:** This a static link allows anyone to book an event with you according to your Preferences. This is perfect if you need to reuse it for multiple bookings. Anyone visiting the link will be required to enter their details before their meeting is scheduled, as shown below. **Q: How do I add members to my organization in Cronofy?** A: There are three ways to add users into an organization: 1. **Manually**, through an email invite in the members section. 1. **Domain** **sign** **up**, which can enable anyone in your company with the same email domain to sign up automatically. 1. **Active** **Sync**, which can partially or fully sync your directory, creating scheduler account automatically for users. **Q: How do I manually add members in my OU?** A: This is the standard way to invite users to your OU (Organisational Unit). To invite users manually head to: **OU settings -> Members** -> **Users** Scroll all the way down and select **Invite** **Users.** This will open the the invite tab (see screenshot) Now you can enter the emails (up to 20 at a time) of the users you want to invite to your OU. Bellow that you will find the roles selector which determines the role if the users you invite. The users will then receive an email prompting them to accept your invite, which is valid for 48hrs. ## The invitees email: ![email invite]() **Q: How do I automatically add members in my OU?** A: ## Domain sign up: You can **skip** sending invites to your team and allow any coworkers who share your email **domain** to join your OU by enabling **Domain Sign Up**. To enable Domain sign up, you need to click on your OU on the left hand panel. Then you select **scheduling>settings.** Simply click on the tickbox and the option is enabled. Only **Owners** can do this. ## Active Directory Sync: Our **Enterprise Connect** function allows you to connect a service account via MS365 or Google Workspace, quick and easy **without** extra cost. From there you have the option of **full** or **partial** directory syncs. The service account will **auto-generate** Cronofy accounts for your users without them having to accept email invitations or sign-up **themselves**. **Q: How do I update preferences of another member? ** A: Manage team members in the **Members -> Users** section on your organisational settings. Owners can change the availability of a member by setting their **working** **hours** or **interview** **time** placeholders. In addition you can view your members buffer times and minimum notice. **{Your Org Name} Settings -> Members -> Users** Click on a user from the list to view and adjust their availability or update their role as needed. **Q: Where do I manage users?** A: In the **members section**, in your OU. **OU settings -> Members** As a **scheduler** **admin** or **owner** in Cronofy you have the ability to change roles and set availability for your users. To do this, you need to navigate to the **Members** section in Cronofy. - **Role changes**: Click the role dropdown and update the current role for the user you selected, then click **save** to confirm your choice. - **Availability preferences:** You can set the users availability as you would in your **own preferences**, and/or set the **[Interview Times](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/availability-options#92fc84985ed499b64dbc48e2fb1493cf)** to block certain times for specific types of events. - Changes to the user's **time** **zone** and the addition of **extra** **calendars** (for shared availability) can be managed here, provided that the calendars are already linked to the user's account. Don't forget to click **SAVE** after undergoing a change. Some setting cannot be edited yet from the members section, so you might want to do this in bulk or on behalf of interviewers so they don't need to go into Cronofy themselves. For this you need to reach out to our [Support](mailto:support@cronofy.com). ***We can bulk update for everyone at once like: Buffers, minimum notice and limits*** **Q: How do I remove a user?** A: To remove users from your organization in Cronofy, you need to have the **owner role.** If you are an owner you can click on any user from your member section and scroll all the way down. Click on the **Remove account from Organizational Unit** button. You’ll then be redirected to the user’s page, where you’ll see their involvement in **selection** **rules** and **templates**. If you choose to remove the user, we’ll also remove them from any selection rules and set the templates as “**no** **host**” if they’re the only host. **Q: What do the user roles in Cronofy do?** A: **Regular Roles** There are 3 main **roles** available to assign to users in Cronofy. The standard role is '***member***' which will allow someone access to only their own preferences and to schedule for themselves. (*This is advised for interviewers or hiring managers)* ***Scheduler Admin*** *(advised for Recruiters and Coordinators)* Admins have the ability to scheduler for others, add users and edit some aspects of the OU settings. Additionally they can create templates and and selection rules. ***Owner*** *(advised for managers)* is the highest role Cronofy provides and has full control over settings and members in the OU with exemption to billing which is discussed further down. Service accounts connections are also only achievable with this role. ## Understanding roles: ![role chart]() ## Additional technical roles: Some roles are meant to achieve certain things in Cronofy. These are not meant for regular Cronofy users, but more IT Developer, Developer Admin and Integration Subscriber. These catered for more technical users and integrations but here are some brief scopes. ***Developer***, can add applications to your Organizational Unit, allowing custom integrations to be built. ***Developer*** ***Admin***, has access to all Applications associated with the Organizational Unit and the ability to create new ones. ***Integration Subscriber,*** this role is only used when setting up Enterprise Conferencing integrations. **Contact Us** If you have any further questions or suggestions, please contact us at [support@cronofy.com](mailto:support@cronofy.com). **Q: What is a Public Link?** A: A **Public link** is a generated link that allows anyone to book an event with you according to your preferences in Cronofy. Anyone visiting the link will be able to book a slot with you and can be required to enter their details before their meeting is scheduled. You can add this link anywhere, as a **hyperlink** within a email signature for example, this is perfect if you need to reuse it for multiple bookings. **Q: Where do I find and how do I set up my public link?** A: When you sign up with Cronofy, your account will **auto generate** a public link that is only shared with you. This link can be found on your main page and can be edited in **preferences**. Navigate you the public link tab and edit the required field. **Preferences > Public Link** You can edit: - **Primary Organization Unit**: This will determine the branding of your Public Link. If you have multiple Organizational Units (OUs), please ensure you select the correct one. - **Data Capture**: You can have users provide their phone number and email before completing a booking and you can specify whether these fields are required, optional, or hidden. Additionally, you can set up a **Additional Information prompt** if you need to collect more specific details. Please note, the “Additional Information” prompt will be **limited** to 128 characters and your attendee’s response to 360 characters. That includes spaces. You can also include your **branding** in you public link. **Q: Can I have a custom public link?** A: You can create a **custom** public link by generating it from a **template**. Simply head to **Scheduling -> Templates** and when creating the template, make sure the public link option is ticked. It's important to know that a public link **always** requires a host to work. After creating the template you can copy its public link from the templates overview, by clicking the **templates** **icon.** **Q: Can I have meeting limits?** A: Yes, the **Limits** feature allows you to set a **maximum** number of events of a given type, that a user can be booked for on a **weekly** and/or **daily** basis. To apply a limit you need to set a tag and a user with that limit, when creating the scheduling request. To request a limit you must reach out to our [Support](mailto:support@cronofy.com) with the **email** or an email list of the **users,** the **tag** associated and the daily/weekly **limit** number. Below you find some of the scenarios you can use. **Some request examples:** - **example-user@company.info** with 1 daily/ 3 weekly for tag "Interview" - find attached a **list** of users, for 1 daily/ 3 weekly for tag "Hiring managers" - **Group name** in Cronofy for 1 daily/ 3 weekly for tag "Technicians" - List of people, out of these "**user1 and user2**" need to have 2 more meetings, the rest for 1 daily/ 3 weekly for tag "Interview" - Apply to **OU** **name** for all, 1 daily/ 3 weekly for tag "Interview" If you use the Limits for Groups, as a list, remember that these aren’t managed. This means that if a user is removed or added to the list, their limit **won’t** change. Any changes you want to limits individually or in a group need to be requested as well. Your request usually is processed within the day so you can use this feature. Let's take a look at how limits are applied and used. When you create a **single** **request** or setup a **public** **link**, you can add the users and tag to apply the limit. Simple as that! You can add as many tags as you want so that the users all have their limits respected. SoIf one user has the 2-per-day limit in the “**Interview**” tag, and the other user has the 3-day limit applied in the “**Hiring** **manager**” tag, you need to add both limits to the same request for them to kick in. If the user has no **limit** or the **tag** is not applied, then the limit will **not** work. **Q: How do I change my clock from 24hr to AM/PM format?** A: You nee to go to your account by clicking your name on the bottom right hand corner and then to **Your Account. **From here you need to change the language setting from English, to English US. This will display to time in am/pm format. Don’t forget to SAVE. **Q: How do I change my password? (Only for devs and Exchange users)** **Q: How do I add more conferencing services?** A: To add more conferencing you can head to [add conferencing page.](https://app.cronofy.com/user/conferencing_services) **Your Account → Conferencing Services** or **Your Preferences → Event Details → **[Configure calendar services](https://app.cronofy.com/user/calendar_services) Add calendars by following the authentication flow. **Q: How do I add more calendars?** A: To add more conferencing you can head to [Calendar Services page.](https://app.cronofy.com/user/calendar_services) **Your Account → Calendar Services** or **Your Preferences → Event Details → Add Conferencing** From here you can add Zoom, Teams and GotoMeeting. **Google** **meet** is automatically added by default for Google users. --- # Organizational Unit - Help Articles Learn how to manage users, template, workflows, branding and billing within your organization with Cronofy. ## Organizational Unit An **Organizational** **Unit** or **OU** is your workspace in Cronofy where all your scheduling and user information will reside. It connects people with shared settings, tools and permissions to simplify collaboration and scheduling. From here you can add users to share calendar data, create helpful templates, customize your link branding and more. ## Sign up - Setup **Q: How do I create an OU?** A: When creating an account with Cronofy, you will be prompted to create an OU before finishing your setup, by giving it a name. You can** later change** this in the settings if you wish to. If you already have an OU and want to **create a new one**, you can: Navigate to the bottom right-hand corner and click on your **username**, then click on the **Create a new Organisational Unit.** **Q: How do I join an OU?** A: You can join an OU by being **invited**. An OU owner will send you an invitation **via** **email** through the members tab. You’ll need to contact them to arrange this. Alternatively, if they’ve enabled **Domain** **sign**-**up**, you can automatically join the OU once you create an account. **Q: How do I leave an OU?** A: You can leave an OU by going to (Your OU name) **Setting**, clicking the **admin** tab and then the red box “***Leave OU“***. Note: If you are the only owner in the OU it will not be possible to leave, you either need to designate another user with the owner role, or reach out to support to have your OU off-boarded. **Q: How do I off-board an OU?** A: Cronofy is a pay as use product, so as long as it’s not used, you will not be charged. In the event however that you would like to remove your OU completely you can reach out to our [**Support**](mailto:support@cronofy.com) and we will get this sorted for you. Note: we cannot close individual accounts on behalf of someone else, only the OU and the requestors account. **Q: What are the settings in my OU?** A: You can find your settings on the left hand side on your Cronofy page. From here you’ll find three main tabs: **Members**: were you can add/manage users and rooms along with organizational accounts for syncing your directory. **Scheduling**: scheduler settings, setup your groups, templates and workflows. **Admin**: branding, integration setup, billing and reports. *Can’t see some of these? Speak to your company admin about changing your role.* **Q: What is a selection rule?** A: Groups are called **selection rules** in Cronofy and can be used in along with templates or scheduling request. These created user pools that can be used for scheduling events with multiple users, like panel interviews. These can have 1 or multiple **mandatory** attendees from the group and will be selected in a round robin fashion. **Q: How do I setup groups?** A: On the left hand tab you can see your Organizational Unit Settings based on the name of your OU. To create a group (selection rule) you can click on: - (Name of your OU) **Settings** > **Scheduling** > **Selection Rules**. - Click **Create Selection Rule,** you will then first choose a name for your group**.** - You can now choose any members from your **Organizational Unit** by searching them and clicking on them. *If you wish to add these users in bulk please reach out to our* [*support*](mailto:support@cronofy.com)*.* **The required field:** Specifies the number of users needed for **mandatory attendance** based on the selection rule. Users are chosen randomly but the system attempts to cycle fairly through all users included in the rule. The pool now appears in **Selection Rules** and can be added to any **Templates or Scheduling request.** ## Members Tab **Q: How do I create templates?** A: To create a template you need to click you OU one the left hand panel and select **Scheduling** and then the **Templates tab**. - (Name of your OU) **Settings** -> **Scheduling** -> **Templates**. From here you can see and edit your already created templates or click on the **Create template** to get started and name your new template. Now that you have create the template you will be taken to the page to fill out any information. You can start from the **name**. **Template types**: there are **3 types** of templates you can select from,depending on how you intend to use them. The main thing to remember here is that only **Scheduling Request** type can have **no host**. We will look further into why below. A **host** can be set pre-selected here as an individual user or a **selection** **rule** with multiple people. You need to set them up beforehand or you can click create selection rule right there, [more info here.](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/creating-groups) The rest of the template is set up pretty much the same way a scheduling request is, and includes the additional information prompts at the end for Public link conversion. **Q: How do I create workflows in my OU?** A: Please reach out to our support for more information. **Q: How do I setup my billing?** A: After your 14 day free trail you will need to setup billing in order to continue to use Cronofy. You start by adding your billing details in the Organizational Unit. **OU Settings → Admin → Billing **click on Setup billing. Billing details can only be edited only by a **billing owner**, this is a special role that is assigned to the person **that** **created** the organizational unit. This role **cannot** be assigned by any user and need to be specially assigned by our support. [Please reach out](mailto:support@cronofy.com) if you need this changed. **Q: How do I change my card details?** A: Card details can be edited in the billing plan in the billing tab. From here a billing admin can change the details. Billing details can only be edited only by a **billing owner**, this is a special role that is assigned to the person **that** **created** the organizational unit. This role **cannot** be assigned by any user and need to be specially assigned by our support. [Please reach out](mailto:support@cronofy.com) if you need this changed. **Q: Can I setup custom branding for my scheduling links?** A: You can edit the scheduling **slot selector page** your invitees will see when accessing a **public** **link** or a **scheduling** **request**. These are unique to each OU you have and can be edited by accessing: **Admin -> Branding** From here you have some color, font and logo options which you can edit if you have the owner or scheduler admin role. Next to these options you will see a **live** **preview** of how the page will look. - You can use the primary and secondary colors to match your branding color scheme with the **CSS** Hex codes. - You can choose from the provided fonts, or **request one** to be added via our **[support](mailto:support@cronofy.com)**. However, please note that some fonts are not available for addition. - Should be a **PNG**, **SVG** or **JPEG** file, less than 1MB. For best results, use a square image at least **350 x 350px.** If you belong to multiple Organizational Units, choose a “Primary Organizational Unit” to determine the branding of your Public Link. --- # The Benefits of Calendar Sync for Employee Scheduling Software According to the Financial Times: Three-quarters of the world’s workers are temporary, casual or self-employed and this sort of employment is likely to become more prevalent. This means businesses that require temporary, casual, or contract employees need to do more to keep attracting the best talent. The more temporary and contract employees there are, the more businesses will offer these kinds of roles. It's therefore important for businesses that need temporary and contract workers to stay ahead of the competition by offering better employee experiences – no matter how long someone works for them. According to the Financial Times: Three-quarters of the world’s workers are temporary, casual or self-employed and this sort of employment is likely to become more prevalent. This means businesses that require temporary, casual, or contract employees need to do more to keep attracting the best talent. The more temporary and contract employees there are, the more businesses will offer these kinds of roles. It's therefore important for businesses that need temporary and contract workers to stay ahead of the competition by offering better employee experiences – no matter how long someone works for them. According to the [Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/4f2e3516-fd67-11e4-b072-00144feabdc0): > Three-quarters of the world’s workers are temporary, casual or self-employed and this sort of employment is likely to become more prevalent. ‍ This means businesses that require temporary, casual, or contract employees need to do more to keep attracting the best talent. The more temporary and contract employees there are, the more businesses will offer these kinds of roles. It's therefore important for businesses that need temporary and contract workers to stay ahead of the competition by offering better employee experiences – no matter how long someone works for them. The better the employee experience is, the happier employees will be, and the more productive they’ll be. This means they’ll provide a better level of customer service to customers, which helps to increase customer referrals and improve reviews. One thing companies can do to ensure that their temporary employees have a great experience is to use an employee scheduling software with calendar sync. These makes it easier for companies and employees to manage shifts around pre-existing commitments. ## Hire people when they’re needed In industries such as retail, there’s an inevitable surge in the need for staff in the run up to the holidays. Employee scheduling tools that can see employees’ real-time availability make it easier for businesses to fill shifts. Instead of needing to manage an Excel spreadsheet (which [59% of call centers](https://www.callcentrehelper.com/beginners-guide-to-work-force-management-57124.htm) still use for managing shifts!), they can tap into workers’ availability. They can then offer employees shifts that work around their schedules, making them more likely to accept. It's also easier for businesses to find last-minute cover for employees that have called in sick or are no longer available, because they don't waste time contacting people who already have plans. ## Work around people’s schedules Having a work/life balance is becoming increasingly important in the modern world. Offering employees the opportunity to choose their shifts based on their availability makes it an easier, faster process to schedule their work. If their calendar is connected to shift management software, the software can suggest shifts that work around their already existing schedule. They don’t need to rearrange family commitments or healthcare appointments to be able to work – their work fits seamlessly around their lives. Alternatively, employees without calendar connectivity can search the database for shifts and choose the ones that best suit their schedules. Shifts can be set up to automatically close once a set number of employees have chosen it. This means there won’t be too many people signed up for the Tuesday afternoon shift but nobody around on Tuesday morning. If someone cancels, the slot will re-open for someone else to select. This flexibility helps to build a better employee experience, showing employees that their lives outside of work are valued, too. ## Automatically add shifts to employees’ calendars When dealing with temporary employees, there’s always a risk of no-shows. This then leaves the team short-staffed and makes it harder to deal with everything that comes their way. Automatically adding shifts to employees’ calendars helps to prevent no-shows. It ensures that the shift sits in their calendar alongside their other commitments. They can also receive [time-to-leave notifications](https://www.cronofy.com/event-geolocation/) based on their location, or reminders to make sure they don’t forget. For casual workers that don’t need full calendar connectivity, they can be sent [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/). These help businesses to track if an employee has confirmed their shift, ensuring every shift is filled in plenty of time. ## Create a better experience for everyone Syncing your shift management software with employees’ schedules makes it quicker and easier for your users to fill shifts. It's simple and stress-free to add calendar sync to your software using the Cronofy Calendar API. To find out more about what features you could add to your software, check out our [features page](https://www.cronofy.com/features/). How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? **[Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/)** --- # Employer Brand: Why it matters and why it’s essential to your hiring process, with James Ellis We sat down with James Ellis an ‘employer brand’ expert, to discuss why it is an essential part of the hiring process. We sat down with James Ellis an ‘employer brand’ expert, to discuss why it is an essential part of the hiring process. We sat down with [James Ellis](https://www.linkedin.com/in/thewarfortalent/) who self-describes as the ‘employer brand’ expert. James has been working on employer brand for over six years after starting off as an agnostic marketer and doing marketing for software companies, government and a range of other sectors. James’ interest in employer brand was kindled by the many parallels between marketing and recruitment. **Through our work with recruiters and recruitment software companies it’s become really obvious that employer brand is the very linked to the delivery of a great candidate experience throughout the hiring process. It’s not only important for present hires but also for future ones and preparing for this future growth is part of marketing for any brand. What’s your view on this?** **James Ellis:** Every other kind of marketing success is a function of more. You figure out who you want to talk to, figure out what they’re going to care about. Talk to them about the stuff they care about. Put it in a channel. They’re going to find it, convert them. Do it again. You almost always need more. More eyeballs, more leads, more conversions, more impressions, more shelf space, more share of wallet, share of voice. You should do more and more and more – more is always good. For almost every marketer more is the right word. Recruitment marketing and really employer brand is the only place where, when you really get serious about it, more is bad. And I always make this joke that if you’re selling donuts or toothbrushes and you sell a million donuts, you’re employee of the month. Congratulations. But if you get a million people to apply for your jobs. You’re getting fired, simple as that. Ultimately, what we sell is not a commodity in any way, shape or form. It’s a singular thing. You only have one job, so you can’t sell it twice (let alone a million times). So getting “more” just makes your job harder. People often push back. But what about enterprise, bespoke solutions? To an extent a lot of businesses don’t care who the buyer is so long as the check clears. Sure, if you’re selling hospital power backup systems, you only advertise and market to hospitals, but if someone walked up and said they’d take it for the asking price, you’d make the sale on the spot (and collect the bonus). You don’t care about the person, only the transaction (and the goal is always to have mere transactions). Marketing is different when it comes to recruiting. ALL we care about is the person. Have you ever bought anything where they said, “when’s the last time you bought one of these? Can I see a reference?” Never. They would never say that. “Give me your history of eating this donut. Show me, so I can check if you can eat it. It’s been three months since you’ve eaten a donut. Can you explain this to me?” They don’t do that. ‍ **So what do you find most interesting about this rapidly evolving space that is employer brand?** **James:** If you change the underlying foundation of marketing from quantity to quality – everything changes. It’s like gravity reverses itself and we don’t know anything – suddenly what’s up is down. That’s where people are at with employer brand – it’s new. And we’re just nibbling around the edges of what employer brand is, what it can do, how it’s important and what it means. Now we’re all in this space, wondering what other people know. What have they found? What are they doing? Is what they’re doing going to work for me and my hiring? In so many roles, we’re very much sticking to our knitting, right? You do: left foot, right foot left foot, right foot. You do the set process. You plug in the numbers. It’s a paint by numbers approach. With employer brand. It’s the wild, wild west. We’re all trying to move mountains in our own particular way. None of us are staffed. None of us are resourced. Hardly anyone has leadership who truly gets what the power of this thing can be. And that fascinates me. That to me is the most amazing part of what we do is because employer brand is a space where everything has not been decided. No one’s going to college for four years and learning to read the four books, how to do the thing and cite these people who say, “this is how we do it.” ‍ **Okay, so how has employer brand evolved into a key area of hiring and as a consideration for businesses wanting to hire?** **James:** In a way there’s only two kinds of employer branders, one kind or one school of thought is what do other employer branders do? What do the employer branding articles say, what does the employer podcast say to do? I’m going to go find 10 employer brand owners to ask them how they did it and do it that way. And the other school of thought is, since we don’t actually know anything, let’s go out, let’s go look at marketing, but let’s also go look at [semiotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics). Let’s go look at psychology and sociology, and there’s so much other stuff. And that’s where some other people are trailblazers. For example, Hung Lee, and his Recruiting Brainfood newsletter. He’s looking for new ideas, how to do it differently. And that’s interesting. Then, it’s all about asking how does that apply? And it forces us out of an off-the-shelf plug and play model, and instead to say, how do I use this to change my own thinking? And again, that’s really why I love it. Because this is a job where everybody either thinks or sinks. You’re responsible for helping a business to grow and thrive. ‍ **So can you summarize some key points for readers? Why do you think employer branding is important, especially when hiring and on the flip side of that, what’s at stake if businesses don’t invest in it?** **James:** I think employer brand is a little bit like salt, where you’re never going to go to a restaurant and say, “I’m really hungry. I want a plate of salt. Can you get me a plate of salt?” And the chef goes down and makes something, gets the pink salt, the black salt and the rock salt and just serves it. No one orders salt. But, if the chef decides not to put salt in the food it tastes rubbish. Salt is the thing that you don’t notice until it’s not there – it has magical, almost intangible properties. Besides making food taste better, it changes the boiling point and freezing point of water. It has chemical applications, and it has physical applications. It has texture – it has all this stuff, but it’s the invisible thing. And employer brand is a lot like that. If you’re hiring and you’re competing against a company that hasn’t invested in building their employer brand, it’s like saying I have some salt in my food and they don’t. And it doesn’t take long for candidates to realise theirs is not as good. Back in the day people used to apply for jobs advertised in newspapers. The ads back then didn’t even tell people what the brand was, it was just the job title and a line of copy. And candidates were supposed to know what that meant and send their resumes to this PO box. End of conversation. It was a miracle if you got anything back. And to an extent the world is still working this way with jobs posted on huge job boards. The world does not want to work that way anymore. Candidates want to know more about who they’re applying for. They want to know more about what this job might be. If someone is a project manager and there’s a project manager job at Google, and there’s a project manager job at American Standard, where they make toilets – the job is functionally the same – but is it really? Of course not! The job is completely different. It’s contextualized based on the company. ‍ And let’s embrace the century-old [Tayloristic](#) idea that jobs can even be “defined.” Jobs are perpetually evolving, and perhaps six months from now that job you’ve documented and advertised is going to change radically to the point where what you’re marketing and what it is don’t even look like each other. So why focus on the specific job? Employer brand is about focusing on the big picture of what the company is doing. This is the culture. These are the values. These are the people who do well here. This is *why* someone will do well here. This is where we’re going. This is what we’re trying to achieve. Do you want to be part of this? Is there a role, a value you can bring to this thing? Yes. Right – let’s go. No? Okay let’s not. Otherwise, you are back to being like corporations in the sixties. That archaic business world that is all about hierarchies and structure, playing politics to get ahead. Now what that says to candidates, is that an organization is doomed, and that’s not who people want to work for. Even if you’re the kind of person who does well with structure, that’s now not an organization that’s going places. So candidates have to be willing to ask, what am I really getting into with this brand? And employers need to answer that. ‍ **So how would you describe and explain employer branding?** **James:** Employer brand is a promise of what someone should expect when they work somewhere rather than any other brand. Let’s talk about Nike, for example. When I buy a pair of Nike shoes, I have a certain set of expectations of what I get with those shoes. I have an expectation. And that expectation is the brand, and that brand is pervasive: When Nike launches new shoes, even without trying them on, I have a sense of what that promise is. So when someone joins your company, should they expect freedom or a lot of structure, should they expect a lot of openness and people who collaborate or more of an autonomous, “you’re off on your own kid”. What should they expect? Let’s be fair, most job postings do not do that. And they should. Understanding your own employer brand is crucial. It’s a big step for lots of companies but it’s necessary. How does it impact the company? For example, if I have a hundred people who don’t know what the company is all about and what to do, there’s a hundred people going a hundred different directions. Even with management, even with structure, you still have got three or four teams going in different directions. Employer brand says “*this is who we are. This is why we do it. This is how we do it. *There’s the north star. Let’s work towards it in this way.” And it’s amazing what companies with strong employer brands can do relative to those without. ‍ **So how do businesses go about communicating an authentic employer brand?** **James:** Often what happens is a candidate experiences a certain culture that is presented to them throughout the hiring process, and they are promised particular things or have an impression based on their experience but that isn’t delivered when they arrive in the job. Basically it’s “I changed my life for you. And you lied to me.” That’s very common. And that’s unfortunate. That’s a case where an employer brand was expressed about the promise of what it’s like to work for your company to someone who has no idea who you are, but that promise was flawed The world is really split up into these two camps of objective value and subjective value. And objective value is great. If you’re Facebook and you say, “look, I’m going to pay you twice what everybody else is going to pay you.” And candidates know it to be true because when the offer letter shows up, the number is right there in black and white. There’s no argument with that. Also if they lie about that number, that’s called a felony. But if I say, “come join our company, we’re very collaborative. We’re transparent.” I can say all sorts of stuff, that may or not be true, or even defensible. And so it’s a claim. With subjective claims, they must be proven over and over again before someone goes, you know what? I bet that’s true. And that’s the game we end up playing during hiring. Many companies do try this approach. But all they do is say things like “we’re a great place to work”. By not explaining what that means and who it should resonate with it is meaningless. And that’s where the term “Blanding” comes from. ‍ **I feel like there are many companies that are aware of the importance of employer brand and how it needs to be formalized in order to make sure that you make a great impression as an employer. I think it’s fair to say that sometimes the way that’s done through hiring doesn’t actually positively impact the employer brand. What do you think?** **James:** The hiring process is clearly the very first impression that a candidate gets of your business and their experience during that process is the first window into your business and what it’s really like behind the scenes. Is it chaos? Do you respect people’s time? And that rolls out to candidates and some self-select out, and some say, yes, that’s exactly what I want. A business just reinforced who they are. And that doesn’t happen by making the logo bigger. That doesn’t happen by slapping a poster everywhere and that doesn’t happen by building a better website or bigger commercial adverts. It’s about saying if this is who we are, hire against that, to reinforce that, to make a business who they are. ‍ **We recently surveyed thousands of candidates to understand their ****[expectations around hiring](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download)****. What was interesting for us was the extent of how annoyed people were about interview scheduling and how much that impacted their perception of an employer – with 63% leaving the hiring process because of poor interview scheduling. What’s your take on this?** **James:** Interview scheduling is just that thing that slows recruitment down, it keeps a business from being the best it can possibly be at hiring, and if you can change that by buying a piece of software, I can see the value of that. Hiring is competitive, getting the best talent and getting the right talent is competitive. Scheduling can be seen as the weak link in the chain. And the weakest link dictates the entire experience. The same way, if I went to a four-star meal. And it was a course, after course, after course of delicious food. And then the dessert came and there was a tiny little bug on my ice cream. I would then say that it wasn’t a four-star meal. One little thing changes my impression of it. And so in a lot of ways, what you’re talking about with interview scheduling is saying, we’re not going to radically reinvent everything, but businesses should be mindful of something which can taint the experience so much. Businesses are not going to change who they are. But what they can do is be the best they can be, by taking away the most friction driven process in the recruiting funnel. Everybody hates the scheduling part. And everybody hates that process of saying, how do I align calendars and find time, put these people together – that is painful. And it’s not so much that solving it makes you a better company. But what it does is opens the door – if a company can make that painful process relatively painless it sets them at an advantage and different position for the rest of the experience. Everybody expects recruiting and scheduling to be painful. But, what if it isn’t? What does that allow after that? You’re enabling change in a way, by removing that limiter. ‍ ‍ *Brilliant insights in to the role of employer brand in hiring and the impact that not investing in it, and the factors that impact it – such as interview scheduling – can have on your recruitment success. Read the full Candidate expectations report **[here](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-survey-report-download)**.* --- # Personio HR tech solves scheduling and calendar sync Real-time interview scheduling allows HR teams to streamline their workflows and hire more efficiently, learn how Personio achieves this with Cronofy. Personio is hollistic HR software that gives people and talent teams powerful tools for the job. Personio leverages Cronofy APIs to power their interview scheduling module. Personio, based in Munich, Madrid and London, has set itself the goal of making HR processes faster, clearer and more efficient. In turn, this allows HR managers to take the time to focus on the most valuable assets in any successful company: the employees. With this goal in mind, Personio is developing an all-in-one software solution for recruitment processes, employee management and payroll. Almost 2,000 customers in over 40 countries are already successfully using Personio. > Personio is building an innovative HR management and recruiting solution for HR departments, managers and employees. Real-time calendar sync is crucial to ensuring it fits seamlessly into both their working and personal lives. — Hanno Renner, Co-Founder and CEO, Personio ## The Challenge One of the main use cases of Personio for hiring is interview scheduling. Personio clients can easily and efficiently manage their end-to-end recruitment process directly. From setting up interviews to communicating with candidates and the interview panels, the process is simplified and streamlined. After conducting user research to find out the most pressing pain points of their users of the recruitment features, Personio found that one of the really big problems was that the .ics files generated by their software for interviews did not allow you to book rooms. They saw that a lot of double work was happening – booking the interview in Personio, but then having to go to the standard calendar and set up a parallel meeting for the room additionally. ‍ The other thing that they found with .ics files is that they can’t have changing participants and still connect in one event. For example, if an original invitee declines or a new person needs to be invited. ‍ Personio is always looking for innovative solutions to improve the users’ experience with their product. They needed a solution that worked with all major calendar providers – and having undertaken research realised this was going to be a complex task that could take their developers half a year or even more to complete internally. They wanted to address the calendar integration challenge but didn’t want to have to become experts in calendars, keeping focus on what they excel at already. ‍ Early on they identified that interview scheduling was an area where they needed to offer improvements. Personio knew from speaking to their customers that interview scheduling can be a full time job for some HR professionals and were looking to reduce this admin burden and save their users time. Knowing who is required for the interview panel, what their availability is, and which meeting rooms can host the interview involves a great deal of back and forth and this energy could be better spent on higher value tasks. ‍ To offer a solution, Personio identified the need to build calendar integration into their software. The [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/) was the perfect fit as it allows them to easily add scheduling features to their software. By working with Cronofy they could continue to focus where their expertise lies – around enhancing and automating HR processes for their customers – and implement the required functionality in weeks. ‍ ## The Solution Cronofy enables Personio’s clients to connect to the calendars of users on their domain. This is handy when HR teams or hiring managers are trying to [organize an interview](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/interview-scheduling/). They can easily see when the interview panel members and meeting rooms are all free. Users can see a calendar view (similar to google calendar) within Personio when they set up an interview. They can add rooms, choose a free spot and send out a notification to chosen participants. > Previously, finding interview slots was like a game of sudoku with the calendars of interviewers, applicants and rooms. I often had to write down on paper when people and rooms were available and when this resulted in a common slot. Today, I can see all of it at a glance in Personio. — Martina Ruiß, Head of HR, Personio ‍ Using [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/) alongside the Calendar API means that if someone accepts or declines attendance at the interview, their response is reflected in Personio.‍ This means the end of back and forth email conversations and phone calls trying to organize the perfect time for everyone. HR and hiring managers can focus on high value tasks, like preparing for the interview itself! > We set up a deep calendar integration which enables our customers to easily manage interviews and schedules. Cronofy allows us to display room and employee availability inside Personio. Booking time slots with rooms has become so simple. Our users also love that they can track who accepted or declined interview invites. This way they have all necessary information in one central place and save valuable time. — Stefanie Häuser, Group Product Manager Recruiting, Personio Another application for Cronofy has been implemented by Personio’s Time Management team. They are using the API to track employee absences. The absence is logged in their software and automatically pushed to an employee’s calendar so that it is visible for all. > Absences such as holidays, sick days or even working from home need to be tracked in HR software like Personio but it’s also helpful for employees and their colleagues to be able to see this in their calendars. Employees have busy schedules and we didn’t want to add more scheduling tasks to their day. The Cronofy integration allows our users to easily see time-off scheduled in Personio in their company calendar (e.g. Google calendar) as it is pushed automatically, avoiding duplication of tasks and saving time. — Aleksandr Matijasevich, Product Manager, Personio ## Enterprise Connect Accessing the calendars of users is great but it just wouldn’t have made sense for Personio to build this into their solutions if for all customers each calendar had to be authorized individually. Imagine a new client having to onboard hundreds or thousands of team members separately. And if even one calendar isn’t added, the entire system is vulnerable to communication breakdowns. Launching [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/) for their customers proved to be a turning point. When a business starts using Personio to manage their HR needs they can get all their organization Calendar Connected in one go. The onboarding process is quick and straightforward.‍ #### Serious about Security When it comes to calendars, data security is our first concern. We understand that personal information is often stored in calendars and our goal is to prevent any breach. Personio is using our [EU data center](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/announcing-our-eu-data-centre/) to host all their calendar data in Germany, a country with some of the strictest data protection laws in Europe. Something that was important to them and their clients. ‍ ## Add real-time calendar sync to your HR solutions If you are a developer, [create your free account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) and start connecting to the calendars of your users to build great scheduling features. If you’re a product owner or just generally interested in learning more about the Cronofy API and its features, please get in touch via the form below. ### Pinpoint streamlines interview experiences with real-time scheduling Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. Case Study --- ### Seamless, automatic time management with JobAdder Industry-leading recruitment software provider JobAdder is dedicated to optimizing hiring processes everywhere by providing a unique user-friendly service with innovative features and clever integrations. Case Study --- ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- # 7 Ways to Keep Your Employees Engaged Over the Holidays The holiday season is well and truly here. Cue the never-ending stream of Christmas songs, gingerbread lattes, and questions about whom you’re spending the holidays with. While all of these things are inevitable, this time of year can lead to a drop in productivity, too. Employees are preoccupied with secret Santas and trying to decide what to have for their Christmas meal. The last thing on their minds is work. That’s why it’s important to create an atmosphere that both welcomes the festive period but also encourages employees to engage with their everyday tasks. As the year winds down it’s a time to reflect on what happened – good and bad – and what can be improved for the year ahead. It’s also a good time to wrap things up ready for a fresh start in the new year. So how do you keep your employees engaged over the holidays? Here are a few ideas. The holiday season is well and truly here. Cue the never-ending stream of Christmas songs, gingerbread lattes, and questions about whom you’re spending the holidays with. While all of these things are inevitable, this time of year can lead to a drop in productivity, too. Employees are preoccupied with secret Santas and trying to decide what to have for their Christmas meal. The last thing on their minds is work. That’s why it’s important to create an atmosphere that both welcomes the festive period but also encourages employees to engage with their everyday tasks. As the year winds down it’s a time to reflect on what happened – good and bad – and what can be improved for the year ahead. It’s also a good time to wrap things up ready for a fresh start in the new year. So how do you keep your employees engaged over the holidays? Here are a few ideas. The holiday season is well and truly here. Cue the never-ending stream of Christmas songs, gingerbread lattes, and questions about whom you’re spending the holidays with. While all of these things are inevitable, this time of year can lead to a drop in productivity, too. Employees are preoccupied with secret Santas and trying to decide what to have for their Christmas meal. The last thing on their minds is work. That’s why it’s important to create an atmosphere that both welcomes the festive period but also encourages employees to engage with their everyday tasks. As the year winds down it’s a time to reflect on what happened – good and bad – and what can be improved for the year ahead. It’s also a good time to wrap things up ready for a fresh start in the new year. So how do you keep your employees engaged over the holidays? Here are a few ideas. ## Embrace the holiday spirit For most people, the holiday season is a time of fun and job. Embrace it by letting employees decorate the office however they see fit. This gives them more control over their environment, increasing their agency and making them feel more at home in the office. You could also have holiday-themed team-building activities, buy some festive foods for the office, or have an office get-together where everyone brings in their favorite foods. Make sure everyone is given the chance to take part in the festivities, too. Leaving employees out makes them feel isolated and like they’re not a valued part of the team. Get their opinions on activities, and be sure to invite everyone – even the less-popular team members. ## Give them time off...if they want it Most employees want at least some time off during the holiday season. If your office requires someone to be around at all times, come up with a system that works for everyone. First-come-first-served systems aren’t always fair and can become like The Hunger Games of [paid time off](https://www.cronofy.com/paid-time-off-management/). Instead, find out who’d like to be out of the office during that time, then build the schedule from there. You may find that you have team members who don’t want or need the time off and can cover for those that do. ## Accept not everyone wants to celebrate For some people, the holiday season is a time of bad memories, not good ones. Other people simply don’t want to celebrate because it’s not their thing. Accept that, and don’t force them to take part in activities if they don’t want to. By all means invite them so that they don’t feel left out – you still want them to feel like they’re a part of the team – but don’t force them to take part in something they don’t want to take part in. Festivities should be optional, not mandatory. ## Don’t overplay the Christmas songs I went into a shop in mid-November and it was already playing Kelly Clarkson’s Christmas album on repeat. It’s still playing Christmas songs now. I feel for those poor employees, stuck listening to those songs over and over and over. There are only so many times you can listen to *Mistletoe and Wine* between now and Christmas. For the sake of employees’ sanity, don’t overplay Christmas songs. Alternate who’s in charge of the music choice instead. That way, there are different styles of music playing throughout the day and no one style of music – or one particular song – is overplayed. ## Have an inclusive Christmas party What one person sees as a fun activity another person may not. While you’ll never please everyone, get buy-in from as many people as you can on the venue, food offerings, and any activities that are planned. Don’t forget that employees with mobility issues will find some activities difficult, while those with dietary restrictions such as coeliac aren’t going to want to eat somewhere that doesn’t understand the importance of avoiding cross-contamination. ## Eradicate tedious tasks Nobody wants to waste time on tedious tasks over the holidays. Make employees’ lives easier by embracing automation. [Meeting room bookings](https://www.cronofy.com/meeting-room-booking/), [interview scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/real-time-interview-scheduling/), [training session scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/managing-staff-training/)...all these tasks and more can be automated to give employees more time to wrap up their end-of-year tasks. This helps to put everyone in a great position to start in the new year. It also means they waste less time on tedious tasks in the new year and have more time to fulfil their objectives. ## Reflect Take some time to reflect on what happened in the last year. What have you learned, both as a team and individually? What would you do differently, in hindsight, and what difference could that have made? When you've reflected on the past, look forward to the future, too: what's your plan for the following year? What obstacles might you need to overcome? What do you have to get excited about? Planning for the future helps you to avoid any obstacles that may arise. Forward planning also gets employees excited about the new year and what's to come. And what better way is there to engage with them than to let them know what they have to look forward to? ## Conclusion The holiday season can be great fun for everyone if you embrace the fact that we all celebrate in different ways. Just because employees are at work that doesn’t mean they need to forget that Christmas is almost upon us. So long as you find the right balance between celebrating the holiday season and getting the work done, you and your employees can enjoy the festivities while still meeting deadlines. --- # Here’s why BGF’s £15m investment into Cronofy will revolutionise scheduling Here's why this investment affirms our embedded scheduling vision, and why everyone who schedules meetings in their daily work lives should read this. Here's why this significant investment affirms our embedded scheduling vision, and why everyone who schedules meetings in their daily work lives should read this. I’m delighted to announce to you today that Cronofy has received a £15 million investment from [BGF](https://www.notion.so/Customer-Funding-Email-1ee55c6cc81e80a5b848e64fc28d3ca3?pvs=21), the largest and most experienced growth capital investor in the UK and Ireland. This is of course immensely exciting for the team and real affirmation of our embedded scheduling vision. But what does this mean for the company, and why should everyone who uses calendars in their daily work lives care? ## How outdated calendars started it all First, let’s take a step back to why Garry and I started Cronofy. We recognised a missing piece of the internet. Calendar systems were designed in the last century – it was an era never made for multi-person decision making, or the multi-tenant SaaS companies of today. Every recruiter scheduling job interviews, every medical secretary setting up appointments, every product manager adding scheduling to their app, confronts this pain every day. We shouldn’t be fighting legacy technology to get to our real work. Things had to change. Adam and Garry at a hackathon in 2017 ## Powering scheduling for 180,000 companies More than a decade and a billion calendar events later, Cronofy now enables real-time, secure scheduling through its integrated platform, which is used by over 180,000 organisations worldwide across a variety of sectors including recruitment, healthcare, and professional services. Here’s how: If you are a customer of our [API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer), you’ll have embedded Cronofy into your application and leveraged the power and capability of this reimagining of what is possible. Our [Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api) layer simplifies the complexity of integrating with multiple calendar services. Our [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/availability-api) puts high-performance querying and availability management into your developers’ hands. Our [UI elements](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) solve complex interface challenges for you. More recently, our [Scheduler API](/developer/scheduler-api) is giving you a fully managed scheduling flow with a few lines of markup. ## World's leading tech companies reducing time-to-schedule by 8000% If you’re a [Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) customer, you are a direct beneficiary of this technical infrastructure. Our pre-built [integrations](https://www.cronofy.com/ats-scheduling-integration-partners) into recruiting and CRM systems allow you to take advantage of all of the power of the Cronofy scheduling infrastructure, embedded into your workflow. Cronofy is a tool that you pick up where you need it, whenever you need it. Internal recruitment teams schedule job interviews faster to lock in the best candidates with Cronofy’s pre-built integrations into recruiting systems like SuccessFactors, Greenhouse and SmartRecruiters. Fintech powerhouse [Wise reduced their time to schedule job interviews](/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling) from 6 days to 90 minutes in this way. ## This is the vision that BGF has invested in So, what comes next? Cronofy will use the funding to go deeper into more scheduling use cases across more companies. We’re zeroing in on more capabilities, integrations, and even better performance. Together, we’re building a future where scheduling is easy, and everyone gets meaningful time back to focus on work that truly matters. [Read our investors' announcement](https://www.bgf.co.uk/insights/cronofy-investment/) ## A look at Cronofy through the years An early Cronofy All Hands in person back in 2019 The team at an All Hands in Bruges in 2024 The Cronofy team today in 2025 Adam and Garry at Cronofy's All Hands in 2025 ### Recruiting Brainfood - Candidate psychology in the hiring process Psychology perspective on the candidate experience for recruiters. Webinar 2024-03-27T10:00:00.000Z --- ### UI/UX Talk: Optimizing Patient Experience and Engagement for Telemedicine The Role of User-Friendly Interfaces in Telehealth Platforms Webinar 2025-02-26T16:00:00.000Z --- ### Panel Discussion: The Evolution of AI in FinTech Talent Acquisition in 2025 Discover new ways to work with AI and automation Webinar 2025-02-20T16:00:00.000Z --- # Personalized Interview Scheduling Links Create personalized scheduling links for interviews. Sync multiple calendars, offer instant availability, and simplify panel interviews across time zones. ## Scheduling links for quick coordination of candidate interviews Candidates choose the time slot they want based on your hiring team's availability. Once an interview time is booked it's added to everyone’s calendars automatically. Purpose-built for interview scheduling. [Scheduling Link Demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) Why scheduling links? **Booking Experience** Candidates can book the interview time slot that works best for them **Scheduling at Scale** Generate as many unique booking links as and when you need **Personalization** Add you brand logo, colours and language to your scheduling link page **No double bookings** Available time slots change to always show the latest availability > Scheduling panel interviews was impossible. In every single hiring process that we have, there's a panel interview involved, so it's a labour intensive process that you have to get right. I don't want our recruiters spending 30 minutes trying to schedule one candidate in a calendar with multiple people across time zones. — Joseph de Garr Wilkinson, Head of Talent, Agreena Step 1 ## Connect Calendars Connect the internal calendars of whoever needs an interview booked into their calendar. Authorization can be granted on an individual level, manual basis, or organizational wide. Step 2 ## Select meeting participants Choose the members of the interview and their time slots will then appear based on their real-time availability. Should a new event appear in their calendar or a member of the panel interview change, the times offered will automatically update to reflect this. Step 3 ## Generate a scheduling link Create a personalized scheduling link for candidates to select a convenient interview time from available slots. The candidates name, email and other meeting context are already added to the booking page, making it a smooth interview scheduling experience. Step 4 ## Prepare for interview Once a candidate has chosen their interview slot, it’s automatically added to the interviewers' team calendars. Candidates receive an invite for the interview in their email and calendar. Separate invites can also be sent to candidates. [Separate Invites ](/send-separate-calendar-invites-to-different-participants-in-a-single-meeting) Privacy and security first > We chose to use Cronofy because of the unique calendar link invites you can send to a client. You can send specific times to a client from which they can choose from for a meeting with you. Other calendar services don’t give the level of specialization Cronofy gives. — Jonathan McAlister, Client Service Associate, Asset Planning Corporation Schedule interviews in just a few clicks [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Cronofy is the European secure, flexible and cost-effective interview scheduling solution Cronofy powers scheduling for 180,000 companies, helping recruitment teams schedule interviews faster. ## Now you can enjoy being a recruiter Cronofy makes recruiting less stressful by saving you time spent scheduling interviews, so you can close roles faster and reduce your time-to-hire. [Talk to a specialist](#form-e920d3bb-bdfe-4761-944d-a0ddcc9a8f94) ## See why recruiters choose Cronofy **Schedule for hiring managers ** **Book into busy calendars** **Schedule panel interviews** **Load balance interviewers** ## Now you can schedule technical or multi-day interviews faster. Give your candidates one booking link to schedule multiple interviews with your hiring team in one go. You no longer need to request a candidate's availability or email back-and-forth. [Learn more](#form-e920d3bb-bdfe-4761-944d-a0ddcc9a8f94) ## See how this works in Greenhouse ### Schedule face-to-face stage interviews ## Got questions? ## Speak with a specialist to learn more about scheduling interviews faster. You also enjoy our special offer to new members from The Recruiter Life. ## Special treat for our friends from The Recruiter Life - Early access to the Cronofy 2024 Candidate Expectations Report - Recruitment process audit by scheduling experts - 3 months free on an annual plan - Dedicated onboarding support for your team [Talk to a specialist](#form-e920d3bb-bdfe-4761-944d-a0ddcc9a8f94) --- # Why Your Legal Scheduling Software Needs Calendar Sync Legal professionals spend up to 48% of their time doing administrative tasks. That’s time they aren’t working on cases and helping their clients. It also impacts their business as it these their billable hours. Instead, they spend their time on tasks that have nothing to do with their area of expertise, such as booking meeting rooms or finding time slots to schedule calls. Legal professionals spend up to 48% of their time doing administrative tasks. That’s time they aren’t working on cases and helping their clients. It also impacts their business as it these their billable hours. Instead, they spend their time on tasks that have nothing to do with their area of expertise, such as booking meeting rooms or finding time slots to schedule calls. Legal professionals spend up to 48% of their time doing administrative tasks. That’s time they aren’t working on cases and helping their clients. It also impacts their business as it these their billable hours. Instead, they spend their time on tasks that have nothing to do with their area of expertise, such as booking meeting rooms or finding time slots to schedule calls. Law firms use software to help lawyers manage their schedules, client relationships, and their working day in general. These often feature a calendar interface, but when these calendars aren’t synced to the lawyers’ calendars, it means that meetings and other commitments are present in two or more places. It can lead to double bookings, missed appointments, and poor customer service. In a sector that deals with urgent situations and sensitive information, it’s important that firms do all they can to deliver the best customer experience possible. [Calendar sync technology](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduling-apis/) allows legal professionals to sync their calendars with your software. It means that once they authorize your software to connect to their calendars, they don’t need to duplicate events. When a user creates an event in one calendar, it’s automatically added to the other synced calendars. Schedules are always up-to-date. It also reduces the risk of manual duplication errors. It’s a cleaner, more user-friendly process that requires less training. There’s no risk of double bookings, and any last-minute cancellations can be reopened and used for other appointments. Most importantly? It saves everyone time and unlocks powerful scheduling use cases like real-time scheduling and self-booking. Employees of all levels spend more of their time on high-value tasks and feel rewarded and [empowered to provide a better service](https://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2017/05/27/how-happy-employees-make-happy-customers/#abb954f5c350). Clients enjoy a better experience and so leave feeling happier. Happier clients means better reviews and greater business growth. Better scheduling can benefit everyone within the legal industry. Add calendar sync and real-time scheduling to your legal software and applications to give your staff and clients more time to spend on what really matters – both in their professional and personal lives. Here are some examples of how Cronofy-powered scheduling features can help you transform the scheduling experience of your users. ## Legal CRMs Keeping track of dozens – if not hundreds – of cases while communicating clearly with clients can be tough. CRMs provide all the features law firms need to manage day-to-day activities. These features usually include case management, client communication, and appointment booking tools. Ideally a lawyer shouldn’t have to log in to another tool to organize their day, which is why letting them sync their calendars to their CRM is key. When their calendars are synced, lawyers don’t have to waste time flitting between different SaaS tools or cross-referencing information. They can access everything they need from the same place. You can add calendar sync to your software with our [Unified Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/one-calendar-api/). Lawyers and other staff in law firms can then connect their calendars to your software no matter what calendar service provider they use. It works with all major calendar services – Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Google, and Apple. Two-way calendar sync – meaning that events created on your software are also added to the synced calendars – is only the first step though. It allows you to add more scheduling features to your software. A popular feature in CRMs is [online appointment booking](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/online-booking-calendar-api/). Once your software sees what’s in a lawyer's calendars, that data can be used to power booking interfaces. Using our Slot Picker, you can provide legal firms with an [embeddable booking component](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/) for their website – it’s ideal to add on the profile page of lawyer. The time slots that are offered update based on the lawyer’s availability, preventing any slots from being double booked .It can often be difficult for clients to find a time to meet with their lawyer. With solutions like the Slot Picker, potential clients can choose the time slot that work best for them. This removes the need for back-and-forth email chains or phone calls. Staff are freed up to work on other, higher value tasks. But online booking isn’t the ideal solution for everyone. Cronofy also let your clients generate unique self-booking links that can be shared by email, text, or chat. Admin staff can share these links with clients to let them book meetings in seconds. Clients can book meetings at their own convenience with their legal counsel. This is a more personal way for clients to book appointments than for them to call up and speak to a generic virtual assistant, which many law firms use. ## Case management software Case management software makes it easier for lawyers to keep track of the cases that they’re working on. It provides alerts, progress updates, and deadline tracking relating to the various cases that lawyers always have, on the go. This info can also be shared with clients to keep them updated on the cases. But to help lawyers and attorneys manage their schedules, the [case management software](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/case-management-software/) needs to know what’s in the calendars of these professionals. Especially when talking about very busy people who have a lot of commitments in their personal calendars. Lawyers often end-up having to switch between their [case management software and their calendars](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/casepeer-calendar-sync/) to see which task they can take on or if they can book a client meeting. This isn’t practical and can lead to double-bookings, cancellations and a poor customer experience. When lawyers connect their calendars – both business and personal – to case management software, it avoids any double-bookings in their schedules. Cases can be assigned to the lawyers who have the availability to deal with them. For example, if a client meeting needs to take place it can be added to the schedule of a lawyer who has a free time slot in their calendar. The case can then be assigned to them. Cronofy’s technology can be used to let lawyers connect their personal calendars to their case management software. All their events and commitments can then be displayed on the software calendar interface. If events are edited on the software they will also be edited on the calendar that they lawyer synced and vice versa. Lawyers don’t have to worry about duplicating information, data loss, and missed appointments. They can focus on their cases and on providing advice and value to their clients. An entire law firm can grant your case management software access to their calendars in just a few clicks with [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/). Any calendar hosted on their company’s domain can connect, but IT departments have full control over who is calendar connected and when. It takes out all the hassle of individual authorization, allowing everyone to benefit from calendar sync right away. You deal with sensitive information on behalf of your clients every day, and protecting that data is paramount. We're fully GDPR compliant and you only ever see the data that you need. ## Legal online marketplaces Finding the right lawyer when a problem arise can be tough. And for lawyers operating in a competitive sector, growing their clientele isn’t easy either. ‍[Legal marketplaces](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/legal-marketplaces/) drive 25% of new leads to law firms. As the popularity of online marketplaces continues to grow this stat is likely to increase. That’s why it’s key for lawyers to convert as many qualified leads into clients. Adding real-time scheduling and [booking solutions to an online legal marketplace](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/upcounsel-instant-call-scheduling/) helps to differentiate it from competitors while increasing the lead conversion rate. The first step is to ask lawyers if they’d like to connect one or several calendars to their profile when they sign-up. Once these calendars are authorized their marketplace schedule will sync with their other calendars. They won’t need to manually duplicate events. Lawyers can connect as many calendars as they need, which further ensures they won’t get caught up in double-bookings. Your software doesn’t have to see what these appointments are, though – you can set it up so that you only see their free/busy information, ensuring that private and sensitive data is protected. You can use that calendar information to add a booking interface to lawyers’ profiles that potential clients can use to schedule initial calls or appointments. They don’t have to do it during work hours – they can do it from home in the evening or first thing, before going to work. Lawyers, meanwhile, can acquire leads and raise their online profile. They get more leads without having to worry about organizing their schedule. Once their calendars have been synced to the marketplace, lawyers can choose what times they’d like to appear as available for calls or meetings. If they only want to dedicate one or two days a week to new clients, they can set this up using Cronofy’s Availability Rules – an embeddable UI JavaScript element. This gives them full control over their schedules and when meetings can be booked in their calendars. ## Court management software Courts are busy, fast-moving places. That’s why court management software is so important. They help admin staff to better manage every aspect of running a court smoothly, from schedules to paperwork to resource management. In a large organization such as the courts, employees need calendars to organize their time. It can also be useful to allocate calendars to various meeting rooms and resources. When these calendars are synced to [court management software](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/court-management-software/), staff can track who and what is available and when. They can book a room to hold a staff meeting and ensure that a projector is free. If someone is off sick the person in charge of shifts can find someone who is available to cover them. Resources can be booked in advance without the risk of double-bookings. Every aspect of a court runs as smoothly as possible, reducing delays and the need for rescheduling. Any event added to an employee’s calendar will be added to the calendar interface on the court management software and vice versa. No-shows to court appearances can also be reduced using Smart Invites. With Smart Invites, staff can see if the invite has been accepted, declined, or moved. If it hasn’t been accepted, they can chase up accordingly. This helps to reduce no-shows, which can cost courts thousands every year, and results in automatic arrest warrants in many US jurisdictions. ## Conclusion From paralegals to lawyers to judges, better scheduling gives time back to everyone. They can then use this time saved to work their cases and provide a better experience to their customers. With real-time, two-way, calendar sync, lawyers can focus on growing their clientele without having to worry about double-bookings or duplicating events between their software and their calendars. Everything syncs automatically. You can add powerful online booking features to your legal software and let clients choose the time slots they want, based on the real-time availability of the legal professionals they want to meet using Cronofy. Our Calendar and Scheduling APIs work with all major calendar services, helping to speed up your development time. We take care of the maintenance too, so that your team can focus on building better scheduling for your users. We built our API with security in mind, meaning that your data – and that of your users – will always be protected. Cronofy doesn’t only help you fast track your back-end development to add full calendar sync to your case management software, it also provides you with embeddable JavaScript components to save you front-end development time. To find out more about what features legal software companies are adding to their software with calendar sync, [visit our case studies](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/). --- # Interview Scheduling Software for Recruitment Teams Streamline your recruitment process with Cronofy's powerful interview scheduling software. Automate bookings, integrate with your ATS, and reduce time-to-hire. ## Stop Wasting Time Scheduling Interviews Let candidates self-schedule, or schedule interviews yourself without ever leaving your existing workflows in Paycor, SAP SuccessFactors, SmartRecruiters, Workday and more. Automate interview scheduling and remove the manual coordination that impacts time-to-hire. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams#ae139f357b70) [Talk to a human](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams#2711eb9c0889) > Within months of going live with Cronofy, what took us 6 days to schedule an interview, now has a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ## Feeling overwhelmed with coordinating interviews? You are not alone. Recruiters who manually schedule spend time: - Sending emails back-and-forth to find availability with hiring managers - Checking multiple calendars to match availability - Creating invites in Outlook or Google for every candidate - Double-checking invites to limit errors You risk losing great candidates with every minute wasted in this stage. ## They're no need to change how you work **Gets Live Interviewer Availability** **Auto-updates Confirmed Interviews** **Works With Your Existing Configuration** **Dedicated Support Team** **Enterprise-Grade Data Protection** ## Schedule from within your ATS Cronofy integrates into your existing workflows and tools, removing the need for context switching and manual data entry. Spend less time scheduling, and more time hiring top candidates. [ATS Integrations](/ats-scheduling-integration-partners) ## See ROI in days, not months Save salary dollars on recruiting admin from day one. With Cronofy, you can instantly solve manual scheduling for any interview use-case and unlock more capabilities as you go. No need to wait six months for a complex rollout. ## Intuitive to use, powerful under the hood Any Cronofy product you’ll use is designed to be intuitive, with all the complexity hidden away in our powerful temporal grid. Connect to the calendars and conferencing your organisation use with the right level of access, one by one or at an enterprise level. Check real-time availability no matter the number of participants. Stay secure, compliant and in your data jurisdiction of choice. ## Explore our interview scheduling capabilities ## Automate Any Interview, No Matter How Complex Schedule single, multi-person, or panel interviews globally. Send candidates personalized self scheduling links and and let them book time into your calendar. [Candidate Scheduling Links](/scheduler/scheduling-links) ## Start every interview with a structure you can trust When interview scheduling relies on memory, things go wrong. Tags are missed, job titles are incorrect, shadowers get forgotten and the candidate experience suffers. Cronofy templates give recruiters a consistent, reusable structure so every interview is set up correctly without starting from scratch or risking errors. [Explore Cronofy Templates](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/product-roundup-standardize-every-interview-flow-with-smart-templates#9d257d3ee678) ## Automatically match the right people and rooms across pools every time Combining shadowers, hiring managers and meeting rooms to find an available slot for candidates shouldn't become a time-consuming blocker. Cronofy does the work for you by automatically matching available resources across selected pools so interviews are scheduled with the right people, in the right place, without the back-and-forth. [Explore Cronofy Templates](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/product-roundup-standardize-every-interview-flow-with-smart-templates#9d257d3ee678) ## Impress candidates from day one Fill roles faster by removing delays in scheduling. Interviews are booked instantly, hiring teams stay responsive, and candidates aren’t left waiting or guessing. [Explore our candidate experience research](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#106d19c67b32) ## Schedule from wherever you work Go beyond your ATS and schedule from where your team works and collaborates already, such as Teams, Office, and Slack. [Discover the Cronofy Scheduling Agent](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/product-roundup-standardize-every-interview-flow-with-smart-templates#9d257d3ee678) > Cronofy has significantly reduced the time we spend coordinating interviews. Their sequence template feature has been an efficient way to schedule multiple interviews with a candidate, without our team coordinating calendars manually. — Stephanie Romero , TA Strategy and Experience Specialist, UKG ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Agreena recruiters automate panel interview scheduling and save 5 hours a week each Agreena helps farmers profitably transition to regenerative agriculture and companies achieve sustainability goals. Case Study --- ### Hiring coordinator now schedules interviews in 30 seconds from within BambooHR See how a hiring coordinator from ONWA now schedules interviews in 30 seconds using Cronofy within BambooHR, and learn more about how she was able to upskill thanks to claiming back hours from manual administrative work. Case Study ## Book a demo and see how to schedule without leaving your ATS --- # Cronofy Careers Join the Cronofy team, we love big thinkers. Help save the world time by making scheduling the seamless and automated experience it should be! See our open positions. ## Temporal infrastructure connecting agents, systems and teams. Come build it with us. We are witnessing a once-in-a-decade shift in how software works. AI is reshaping every workflow that depends on time. Cronofy has spent over 10 years building the infrastructure layer that makes it possible: the Temporal Grid. Trusted by 400 leading SaaS products and powering over 180,000 businesses worldwide, including GoDaddy, Wise, Indeed and Squarespace. This is the moment we've been building toward. [View open positions](https://www.cronofy.com/careers#07801af6f1c3) About Cronofy Our culture and principles Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure layer at the heart of how work gets done. We've spent over a decade building the orchestration layer that keeps workflows in step. And as every business races to unlock actual outcomes from AI, the infrastructure connecting agents, systems and teams has never mattered more. Every person who joins now can have a direct hand in shaping what comes next, with real opportunity to grow fast for those who share our principles. [Our principles](https://www.cronofy.com/about#457361696b77) ### Purpose To make time work for people, not against them. --- ### Mission To build the temporal infrastructure that keeps agents, systems and teams working in step - so every workflow that depends on time runs reliably, at scale, and without friction. --- ### Vision A world where the coordination of time is invisible. Where people focus on decisions and outcomes, not scheduling and admin. Join us in building the infrastructure for how the world coordinates time. ## Open positions > Cronofy is an Engineer's dream - we tackle interesting problems, a culture of constant improvement and a focus on maintaining a healthy balance. There’s the freedom to investigate and solve problems, and the support of talented colleagues. If you want to grow and do your best work, you won’t find many companies that enable it this much. — Adam Whittingham, VP of Engineering, Cronofy The view from inside Perks of the job **Holidays** 25 days + public holidays of the country you are based. Public holidays are added to your holiday allowance and you can take them at any time. **Pension** 5% (gross) pension matched for UK employees provided by Smart Pension. Local pension schemes are also provided for employees outside the UK. **Healthcare** Fully comprehensive private healthcare plan provided by Bupa for our UK team members. Private healthcare is also provided to employees outside the UK. **Medicash Plan** Claim back your day to day healthcare expenses including dental, optical, health consultations etc. and also includes discounted gym memberships and other perks. **Health & wellbeing** EAP (Employee Assistance Scheme) providing 24/7 access to all areas of support, and includes up to 8 face to face sessions per year with a qualified counsellor. **Parental leave** 100% for 12 weeks for mothers and 100% salary for 4 weeks for fathers in the UK (which can be taken at any time). Parental leave includes adoptions. **PD days** 6 Personal Development days per year, which can be spent on training, events, learning, or even charitable events and volunteering. **Equipment** A Macbook Pro and all the equipment you need for a home office. We also provide a Pleo card for additional expenses like travel and accommodation when visiting our offices. **Paid sick days** Up to 12 paid sick days per year in the UK. **Flexible working** Flexibilty to work in a way that suits you and your personal life. We're not clock watchers! **Investing in you** Ongoing support with career development, qualifications and training. **Company offsite** Join our All Hands in Person (AHIP) every 6 months, we’ve already visited Nantes, Palma and Bruges! ## Life at Cronofy Cronofy is a distributed team with offices in Nottingham, London and Amsterdam. We support remote, office, and hybrid working, and we invest in bringing people together. In addition to monthly team meetings, we run a company-wide All Hands in Person every six months. We've already been to Nantes, Palma, Bruges, Paris, Reims and beyond. Balance matters here. Flexible working is the norm, not the exception - and we mean it. We're direct with each other. Honest feedback, regular 1:1s, and 360 reviews aren't checkbox exercises at Cronofy - they're how we've built a team that trusts each other and moves fast. Our hiring process We value transparency, so for more information about our recruitment and selection process, please view our hiring process docs page where you’ll find how we hire for all our roles, our interview criteria and any other questions! [View hiring process](https://docs.cronofy.com/interviewing-with-us/) Articles & News The view from inside ### Behind the scenes: Cronofy hits Amsterdam! Every six months Cronofy organises a companywide meet up. This May, we met in Amsterdam to give our teams the chance to see our recently opened office and the sights this wonderful European capital has to offer. Blog Post 2023-06-12T15:01:00.000Z --- ### Competency frameworks: what they are and how we built ours How does your company measure your team's individual performance? Our Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, explains how he built a competency framework that's used across all departments at Cronofy. Blog Post 2023-01-10T08:46:00.000Z --- ### Behind the scenes: Cronofy does Valencia! Find out what the Cronofy team got up to on our bi-annual company meet up. This time, we hit the beautiful Spanish coastal city of Valencia! Blog Post 2022-12-20T03:09:00.000Z --- # Product management: How to increase product engagement Every day we work with top Product Managers at Rightmove, JobAdder, GoDaddy, and Infor, who use our APIs to add scheduling to their platforms. They want to improve their products and hit their goals. We've gathered the best ways to measure and increase user engagement in your SaaS product. Every day we work with top Product Managers at Rightmove, JobAdder, GoDaddy, and Infor, who use our APIs to add scheduling to their platforms. They want to improve their products and hit their goals. We've gathered the best ways to measure and increase user engagement in your SaaS product. The world of SaaS products is fiercely competitive. At the end of 2021, the entire industry was [valued at $145 billion](https://www.statista.com/statistics/505243/worldwide-software-as-a-service-revenue/), with more products being released all the time to address any business need. Whether it’s a CRM for a Sales team, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for a HR or Recruitment team, or a financial automation platform for a Finance team, these products embed themselves into the running of a business and make the lives of the people working within a department easier. ‍ The role of the Product Manager is complex and crucial to the success of a product. In such a competitive environment, you need to be data-driven, knowledgeable, and intuitive to stay ahead. According to a 280 group survey, [one out of five products](https://pm.280group.com/challenges-in-product-management-survey-results) fail to meet the customer needs, which puts the pressure on any SaaS business to have a well-performing Product Manager who can pinpoint these gaps and make improvements. ‍ Product engagement is generally at the top of a Product Managers list of KPIs. This can help to answer critical questions – is your product delivering what your users want? Where are they getting stuck? Which features provide the most value? Engagement needs to be consistently tracked in order to effectively gauge the performance of a product and make improvements. ‍ ## How is product engagement measured? Different Product Managers have different ways of measuring product engagement, but one of the most popular methods is through calculating Product Engagement Score (PES). This is calculated using three different factors: adoption, stickiness, and growth. Adoption refers to how much of the product is used, stickiness relates to how often users are in a product, and growth is the sum of new and recovered accounts or visitors divided by dropped accounts or visitors. Once you know these totals, you can calculate your PES by adding them together and dividing by three. The higher the score for all of these factors, the more valuable the product is to the user, and has become something they can’t do their jobs efficiently or effectively without. Product Managers who do this successfully achieve [63% lower customer churn rate](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/311870/customer-centricity.aspx), as well as 50% higher productivity. ## How do I increase product engagement? So you know your tool is being used by your business customers, but could you increase the amount of time they spend on your platform? Do you have all the features your user needs to keep them engaged and make their lives easier? We’ll take you through the experts top tactics to increase product engagement, from flow to features. ‍ - **Give them no reason to leave** - **Automated scheduling** - **Ease of use** - **Integrations with other market-leading tools** - **Let your users guide your roadmap** ## Give them no reason to leave As a Product Manager, you'll look to ensure your product meets all of a business user’s needs and keeps them within the platform for a smooth, seamless experience that improves their working days. If there are any features missing, this can create a frustrating user experience as they will have to leave the product and find what they need elsewhere, and ultimately could be the catalyst for a business finding another solution. In terms of profit, the importance of customer retention cannot be understated; according to research from Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can [increase profits by 25% to 95%.](https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/the-economics-of-e-loyalty) [‍](https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/the-economics-of-e-loyalty) [‍](https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/the-economics-of-e-loyalty)A way to avoid churn and keep your customers in your product for longer or improve “stickiness” is to anticipate their needs, and create features to satisfy those needs. It’s important to think about your target audience and their roles – what features would make their lives easier? What are their daily frustrations, how can you solve their problems? Giving your user no reason to leave your platform and meeting all of their needs also increases loyalty, making it more likely to be used by more members of the company and be ingrained into the business operations. ### Automated scheduling Many SaaS products such as a CRM or ATS concern the relationship between a business and an external client or candidate. An important contributing factor towards strengthening these relationships is having an effective flow of communication. Scheduling – whether it’s meetings, calls, or interviews – is an intrinsic part of their journey, which makes it bizarre that users generally have to leave a platform and schedule through a frustrating back-and-forth exchange of emails. Being able to schedule within a product improves everyone’s experience – it saves time for the user of the product and makes a positive impression on the external party. For example, a Manager using automated scheduling to arrange a meeting [speeds up scheduling time by 95%](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduling-apis), saving them hundreds of hours per year. However it’s important to keep in mind that while automated scheduling is a highly valuable product feature, it’s very complex and time-consuming to build. For an already stretched product development team,[ building scheduling automation ](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/build-vs-buy-scheduling-automation-software)in-house is out of the question. In this case, APIs are a viable option to broaden the scope of your product. ## Ease of use Ease of use is a central pillar of product usability. Usability comprises all user experience (UX) elements relating to the ease with which users can learn, discover content and do more with a design/product. As a Product Manager, you’ll want your user to enjoy using your product and be able to perform the tasks they need to with ease, even if they’re using it for the first time. Consistently testing using common usability metrics like Time to Complete task, Completion Rate, Error Free Rate, and Expectation Rate will ensure your product is easy to use. UX writing and design helps your user navigate and flow through your product, making it critical for product engagement and retention. A key example of engagement through UX writing comes from Senior UX writer at Google, Maggie Stanphil; at a recent event she mentioned that they had changed “Book a room” to “Check availability” for hotel booking on Google, and the engagement rate increased by 17%. UX writing is all about speaking in a human, clear way and avoiding any jargon that could alienate your users. Effective microcopy, descriptions, CTA buttons etc all make the product easier to understand and lead users to an action. ‍ ## Integrations with other market-leading tools In today’s digital world, a business will use many different products for each function. According to a BetterCloud report, organizations worldwide use an average of [80 SaaS applications](https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-2020-state-of-saasops-report/). Integrations with third-party products embed your product more naturally in a department’s workflow, making it more necessary to their process and reducing churn rate. They help your product to constantly show its value in many different ways. Your product aims to improve a specific business process, but ultimately it's part of a bigger picture. When you integrate with other apps, you show how your product fits into the big picture of accomplishing tasks and solving problems. This increased productivity contributes to a stickier user experience that discourages customer churn. For example, Zapier found that [Typeform ](https://www.typeform.com)users who integrated with Zapier to push Typeform data to their other services showed about 40% less churn than users who used Typeform on its own. ## Let users guide your roadmap User feedback is the most valuable source of information toward improving and adding new features to your product. What better way to guide your product roadmap than by the businesses who use it everyday? Making these improvements keep your users happy and loyal to your product, as they feel they have a direct impact on your product management, having their opinions heard and actioned. Being transparent and keeping users in the loop about the changes being made makes the user feel valued. In [one survey on the ROI of transparency](https://www.labelinsight.com/Transparency-ROI-Study), 94% of respondents said they are likely to be loyal to a brand that is transparent, and 73% said they’d be willing to pay more to do business with a more transparent company. If you build the features that your users ask for and hold value to them, this will naturally keep them engaged with your product. Having a way for users to make suggestions or pinpoint issues within the product will likely inspire the most feedback. For example, Google’s “People also search for” feature comes with the option to provide feedback on the results and improve their search engine. ## Product engagement is a continuous process Improving product engagement is a case of asking yourself, what features will improve our users’ day and make their role easier? The best thing about the process is that there are so many ways to improve and increase product engagement. Whether it’s integrations, new features, or ease of use, every change you make can improve the user experience and boost engagement with your product. ‍ ‍*Are you looking to improve product engagement with automated scheduling? Take a look at our **[Scheduling APIs](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduling-apis)** – they integrate seamlessly with your existing product, so your customers don’t need to go anywhere else. They can even be white-labeled and updated with your branding!* --- # Embedded infrastructure, consolidated workflows and contextual data: how winning platforms compete in 2026 See how leading platforms are preparing for 2026 by reducing tool sprawl, consolidating workflows, and unlocking contextual AI insights. Users no longer want a collection of disconnected tools. They want platforms that carry them through entire workflows and surface intelligent insights powered by real contextual data. In 2026, the winners will be the products that embed infrastructure, consolidate journeys, and unlock the data that makes automation meaningful. Whether across HR Tech, CRMs, or Healthcare applications, users are becoming more tired of tool sprawl, and they’re increasingly consolidating around platforms that own entire workflows, not solutions that solve one problem. This shift isn’t slow or theoretical. It’s already reflected in churn rates, adoption curves, and expansion metrics across SaaS. The products winning today, and the ones heading into 2026 with momentum, share three things: 1. They embed infrastructure instead of rebuilding it 1. They own workflows end-to-end 1. They capture the contextual data that powers AI automation Embedded infrastructure is your competitive advantage Engineering teams are already stretched and roadmaps are already filled with plans for 2026, and somewhere in that backlog you have features that would genuinely differentiate your platform, drive customer expansion, and set you apart from competition. Then you add another integration to the list, and task your team with rebuilding something that already exists. Whether it’s calendar integrations, communication tools or data capturing, this non differentiated work takes significant engineering time, and that’s the infrastructure trap. Time is spent rebuilding foundations that already exist, while competitors who embed proven infrastructure instead of building it in-house redirect that capacity into features that set you apart. By 2026, this velocity compounds into a significant competitive advantage. Embedded infrastructure isn't outsourcing your platform, it's strategic prioritization. You're deciding to own the workflows and experiences that differentiate you, while integrating the foundational infrastructure that doesn't. The winning platforms in 2026 will be the ones that were disciplined about what to build and what to embed. Platforms that own the journey will win Your platform might be excellent at what it does, but users likely still need to leave it to complete critical actions. In HR Tech, hiring stretches across scheduling links, manual note taking and feedback tools. In CRM, sales cycles span pipeline boards, calendars, emails and call notes. In Healthcare, patient care happens across scheduling, communication, and documentation systems. Every context switch is a chance for information to be lost, and every tool transition is a reason for a customer to wonder whether another platform could do the job more cleanly. Users do not want more tools, they want fewer tools that carry them from start to finish without friction. When workflows happen inside your product end-to-end, retention improves, expansion becomes easier, and the data you capture becomes more powerful. The winning platforms in 2026 won’t be defined by feature count, but by workflow ownership. Contextual data is the AI advantage Generic AI features will be everywhere in 2026, but the platforms that stand out will be the ones that build intelligence tied to their domain, with data that reflects real decisions made inside their workflow. That is only possible with contextual data. If interviews, discovery calls or patient consultations happen in external tools, you lose the signals that make AI useful. When workflows are consolidated inside your platform, you capture structured actions and outcomes, which opens the door to real intelligence: automated interview scoring, deal forecasting, risk stratification, learning progression signals, and more. The winning platforms in 2026 will be the ones who unlocked access to that data via consolidated workflows, allowing them to build domain-specific automations. Your 2026 readiness checklist These three elements don't exist independently, they're a system. Embedded infrastructure lets you move quickly to consolidate workflows. Consolidated workflows keep users inside your platform, generating rich contextual data. That data powers AI features that drive retention and expansion. Each element makes the others more valuable, and together they create a moat that becomes hard for competition to breach. By early 2026, winning platforms will have made decisions on these fronts: - **Infrastructure:** What foundational systems are you embedding versus building, and how much roadmap are you saving by not rebuilding them internally? - **Workflows:** Where do users still have to leave to complete their journey, and which workflows will you consolidate next year? - **Data:** Are you collecting the context and outcomes that power AI, or is that information scattered in external tools? How Cronofy helps you get there The platforms that will win in 2026 aren't the ones making these decisions in Q1, they're making them now. Cronofy provides a single infrastructure layer that lets you embed meeting scheduling and outcome capture inside your platform without months of internal engineering. This means you consolidate workflows faster, retain users who would otherwise leave for more complete solutions, and capture the contextual data required for automation that truly differentiates you. See how Cronofy can accelerate that path here. ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # How to Build an Effective Employee Onboarding Process Many employers make the mistake of thinking that hiring is the hardest part of an employee’s journey. While it is important, it’s only the beginning.The onboarding process is as equally important as the hiring process, if not more so. It’s the start of their (hopefully long and enjoyable) career working for you, meaning that it’s crucial that you get it right. Many employers make the mistake of thinking that hiring is the hardest part of an employee’s journey. While it is important, it’s only the beginning.The onboarding process is as equally important as the hiring process, if not more so. It’s the start of their (hopefully long and enjoyable) career working for you, meaning that it’s crucial that you get it right. Many employers make the mistake of thinking that hiring is the hardest part of an employee’s journey. While it is important, it’s only the beginning. The onboarding process is as equally important as the hiring process, if not more so. It’s the start of their (hopefully long and enjoyable) career working for you, meaning that it’s crucial that you get it right. A poor onboarding process leads to a higher employee churn rate and a poor employer brand. In fact, up to [20% of employee churn](http://blog.clickboarding.com/18-jaw-dropping-onboarding-stats-you-need-to-know) happens in the first 45 days. That really doesn’t give you very long to make a great impression. On the other hand, if an employee experiences a great onboarding process, they’re 69% more likely to still be there three years later. So how do you create an effective employee onboarding process? ## Get all the hardware ready More than [42% of employees](https://www.hrzone.com/talent/acquisition/no-laptop-no-desk-no-phone-a-disappointing-welcome-for-42-of-the-worlds-new) have started a job only to find that they don’t have the relevant equipment to work on. This includes a phone, a computer, and even a desk! Be sure that you have all the equipment ready for your new hire before they start at your company. Even if they borrow someone else’s equipment while theirs is on its way, at least ensure that they have something to work on. ## Set them up with the right software There are lots of programs and applications that we use on a daily basis. Make sure there’s a company-wide list of what software different roles require, and if there are any licenses that need updating when new people take over the role. If any new licences need acquiring, try to do this in advance. If this isn’t isn’t possible, at least invite the new hire to the software so that they can activate it themselves on their first day. Ensure that your new hire is set up on the most important programs before they start. It’s important that things like email addresses, calendars, and other day-to-day programs are ready and waiting for them so that they can get started right away. ## Give them time to train There’s a lot to learn and a lot to take in when you first start a new job, so give them time to learn everything. Schedule training sessions into their calendar in advance, but don’t overwhelm them. For training sessions that will take longer – for instance, using a complicated software – get different people to do each stage of the training process. This gives them the opportunity to meet other members of the team. It’s also a good chance for other team members to reinforce their knowledge. You could even set them up with a mentor. This gives you more time to spend with the rest of the team and helps employees who may want to move to a more managerial role in the future get some experience. ## Don’t overwhelm them First days can be overwhelming. There’s a lot to take in, and your new employee may not remember everything straight away. Don’t throw a ton of information at them as soon as they walk through the doors. Let them process it, and, if needs be, give them company policies and documents to take home and read at their own pace. They’ll be much more likely to take it in if they can read and process it at their own pace, not someone else’s. ## Set clear objectives Don’t just sit them down at a desk and tell them to get to work. Make it clear from the start what you expect. Ask what they need from you to be successful in their new role, too. Continuous improvement is a key part of a successful onboarding process. The sooner you set out these objectives, the sooner your new employee can start to work toward them. Setting clear objectives sets them – and you – up for success. ## Communicate company values A company’s culture is one of the core elements that makes us stick around. It’s therefore important that you communicate your company’s core values. This can be done with policies and documents, as well as including them in regular team meetings from the start. While they may not contribute at first, they will get a feel for how the team interacts and may be able to offer a fresh perspective on old problems. Continuous improvement, embracing feedback, and learning from failure are just some of our values at Cronofy. ## Use their fresh perspective Your new employee will only be new for so long. Use this to your advantage. Get them to look at pages and processes that you think need an overhaul. Their fresh pair of eyes will help you to see what’s wrong much faster and can suggest new ways to fix it that you may not have thought of. ## Make them feel welcome On average, it takes a new hire eight months to reach their full productivity. That’s why a well-organized, well-thought out onboarding process is so important. The more organized your onboarding process is, the faster your employees can begin to contribute to your team. A disorganized onboarding process reflects badly on you and your company. It will lead new hires to think that that’s the kind of experience they can expect during their time there. First impressions matter, so be sure to make a good one. Ultimately, you want to create a warm, welcoming environment for your new employee. The more comfortable you make them feel, the faster they’ll get settled and can get to work. What are your top tips for a successful employee onboarding process? Let us know over on [Twitter](https://www.twitter.com/cronofy) or [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/cronofy)! ### How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? **[Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019/)** ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Standardize Every Interview Setup With Templates Built For Scale Learn how Cronofy templates help recruiters streamline interview coordination with a reliable structure that reduces errors, saves time, and improves consistency. Struggling to keep interview invites consistent and error-free? We've enhanced templates to help recruiters reduce errors, stay aligned, and save time. Read on to explore new ways to scale interviews without sacrificing accuracy or control. Interview scheduling shouldn’t be a memory test or a copy-paste gamble. Too often, recruiters are stuck rebuilding interview setups from scratch or scrolling through past interviews to find a reusable invite. This increases errors, inconsistencies and wasted time. This month’s updates make it easier to: - Bring consistency to your scheduling process without locking down flexibility - Automatically combine multiple pools (people or rooms) into a single interview invite - Adjust participants in an interview, even if you are not part of the calendar invite Read on to explore how these improvements reduce rework and help you move candidates forward, faster and more confidently. ## Set Up Interviews With a Structure That’s Already Figured Out Most interview delays start with *minor* workarounds - those quick fixes teams use to keep things moving. But when every role has its unique interview flow and every recruiter builds their interviews differently, these workarounds don’t scale. With no shared standard, teams rely on memory and manual edits, leading to messy tags, accidental reuse of details like candidate names, and a disjointed experience for candidates and internal teams. We’ve upgraded scheduling templates to fix that. Our new smart templates give you a more structured, reusable setup that pre-fills key details for each interview type, such as mandatory descriptions, interviewer selection, and tags, so you don’t have to start from scratch each time. You can also use dynamic placeholders to personalize each request automatically so details like the candidate’s name are always accurate without manual editing. Templates are now your smart scheduling companion that further reduces manual admin and ensures consistency across your entire organization. #### How this benefits you: **For recruiters and hiring managers** - **Remove the need for manual rework and memory-based scheduling:** No more digging for past invites or re-entering the same details across roles and stages. - **Schedule candidates in a few clicks:** It also enables much faster scheduling with fewer errors, even across complex multi-stage interviews with a setup that’s ready to go. **For TA Leaders** - **Deliver a consistent experience with confidence:** Templates bring structure to how interviews are scheduled across teams, roles, and locations. Now, you can trust that every candidate and internal stakeholder gets a unified experience. Even better, when templates are updated, those changes instantly apply across the board. This allows you to stay in control without micromanaging the process. - **Standardize without locking teams in:** Recruiters can still make changes on the fly, giving them autonomy where it matters. - **Get better insights on how interviews are scheduled across your hiring org:** With a structured setup, interviews are clearly labelled. This makes it easier to report on key metrics like time-to-schedule and confidently identify bottlenecks. [See how to create templates](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/public-link-and-templates#2856a54cd9f7600675c4bf51f60e8591) ## Combine Multiple Resource Pools Without Manual Coordination Previously, you could automatically add an interviewer from a pool when creating an interview invite. But if you needed to find a match across multiple resource pools - like an interviewer, a shadower, and a meeting room - you still had to coordinate those manually. That extra effort added more steps to your scheduling and slowed down hiring. Now, you can combine multiple pools in a single interview invite. Need a technical interviewer from a pool, a shadower from another pool, and an available meeting room? Cronofy automatically selects a valid combination across all pools, so you never book interviews without a place to meet or miss training opportunities for new team members. [See how to create pools in Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/creating-groups#d3bcc54c5ad4) ## Modify Interview Participants Without Disrupting Calendar Invites Interview plans constantly change, whether a secondary interviewer drops out or a meeting room becomes unavailable. But making adjustments to a scheduled interview used to mean cancelling the event or waiting on interviewers to manually make changes in the calendar invite. Now, as a recruiter, you have more control and can change or add interview participants, even if you are not part of the original invite. This update helps you: - Keep interviews on track even when participants change or a meeting room is no longer available - Make updates instantly: Edit calendar invites without chasing interviewers - Avoid cancelling and rebooking interviews to fix one detail - Manage internal changes - like adding new participants without impacting the candidate invite ## Your Next Steps to Gaining More Control in Your Interview Process These new capabilities are available to all Cronofy Scheduler users. Try them today to start experiencing a smoother scheduling process for all, or [contact our support team](https://www.cronofy.com/guides) for assistance. Are you new to Cronofy and curious about these features? Book a personalized walkthrough and discover how we can help put you in the driver’s seat of your recruiting process. [Speak to a Scheduling Expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. Blog Post 2024-08-20T11:00:00.000Z --- ### Automate and Optimize: Best Practices for Managing Large Interviewer Pools Are you tired of the scheduling gymnastics that come with managing large interviewer pools? The constant back-and-forth, the endless calendar checks, the inevitable overload for some while others sit idle — sound familiar? Let’s explore how automating your interview scheduling can be a game-changer for your team. Blog Post 2024-10-10T11:39:36.942Z --- ### How time-to-schedule is impacting your time-to-hire You've heard of time-to-hire as one of the most widely used metrics in the recruitment industry. But do you measure your time-to-schedule? It could be having a detrimental effect on your hiring. Blog Post 2023-11-30T11:26:00.000Z --- # A Practical Guide to Reimagining the Telehealth Experience Lead the user experience transformation in your Telehealth platform. Discover how product teams are streamlining patient journeys, reducing no-shows, and delivering care experiences that feel simple, safe, and human. ## Telehealth UI/UX, Reimagined: Your Practical Guide Lead the user experience transformation in your Telehealth platform. Discover how product teams are streamlining patient journeys, reducing no-shows, and delivering care experiences that feel simple, safe, and human. We've gathered a practical step-by-step guide backed up by user research to get you started. [Download Guide](#form-0effdc8c-733c-4ad1-8dab-8d141262e1e1) ## Is your Telehealth experience creating friction for patients? You are not alone. - **Product teams are under pressure to delivery better care journeys with fewer resources:** UX matters more than ever, but only if it's done right. - **The smartest teams know they don't have to build everything from scratch:** third party tools can help create seamless patient experiences faster. Get the intel on how leading platforms are transforming their Telehealth UX, and where to focus your next product update. **How to design emotionally intelligent user experiences** **Where to streamline the patient scheduling journey** **How leading product teams are using third-party APIs** --- # Choosing your scheduling software Choose the right scheduling software for talent acquisition. Streamline hiring, reduce admin tasks, and enhance candidate experience with our expert insights. ## Streamline your hiring process Learn how to select the best scheduling software for your talent acquisition needs and explore essential factors to consider, such as ease of use, automation capabilities, and integration options. Make informed decisions to optimize your recruitment strategy. ## Make the right scheduling choice for your team **Easy of use** User-friendly scheduling software enhances adoption, ensuring a seamless experience for both teams and candidates. **Automation Capabilities** Automation streamlines scheduling tasks, reducing administrative burdens and improving efficiency in the hiring process. **Integration Options** Robust integration with existing systems ensures smooth workflows and minimizes manual data entry efforts. Easy of use ## Streamline your interview scheduling workflow User-friendly scheduling software simplifies the hiring process for teams and candidates. Look for an intuitive interface with automated availability sharing, making it easy for teams and candidates to coordinate interviews. Cross calendar compatibility and browser integrations will also ensure a smooth experience that reflects positively on your organization. [Cronofy Interview Scheduler](/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) Automation Capabilties ## Efficient, precision scheduling Automating scheduling revolutionises the hiring process through the elimination of manual tasks and reducing human error. Advanced scheduling systems can automatically sync calendars, send personalized invitations, manage time zones, and handle rescheduling requests, allowing talent acquisition teams to focus on high-value activities such as candidate engagement and strategic decision-making. [Learn about combined availability](/scheduler/combined-team-availability) Integration Options ## Connect to you existing workflow and tools Integration depth and breadth allow your scheduling software to connect effortlessly with existing HRIS, ATS systems, and communication tools, creating a unified ecosystem for talent acquisition. This level of integration eliminates data silos, reduces duplicate entries, and enables real-time information flow, ultimately enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of the entire recruitment process. [View integrations](https://www.cronofy.com/integrations) > Manual scheduling was setting me back so far, especially when you have to chase people or respond to interview requests. There was no breathing space. It was a huge ordeal. — Tanya Towner, Human Resources Coordinator, Ontario Native Women's Association (ONWA) About Cronofy ## Experts in Interview Scheduling Automation Our scheduling tools are used by talent and hiring teams globally to solve their interview scheduling challenges. We help hiring teams be efficient with their time, automating manual tasks and giving recruiters the space to focus on quality sourcing and candidate experience. [Learn about Cronofy](/about) **Scheduler** Learn more about our Scheduler and speed up scheduling for your team by 95% **Integrations** See integrations with Cronofy and supercharge your existing software **Developer APIs** Get your developer account to integrate scheduling features within your product or application using our APIs Our Happy Customers [View Customer Success Stories](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies) ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### GoDaddy integrates real-time appointment scheduling for business customers If you have a small business, a website is crucial. GoDaddy offers all the tools entrepreneurs and businesses need to build their online presence. Case Study International support ## Multi-language and timezone support Cronofy is built for a globally connected world. Our candidate self-booking links support multiple languages and any timezones that your team and candidates are in. Privacy first ## Built for compliance Cronofy is built with security and privacy in mind. Calendars host private and sensitive data that need to be protected – we never compromise on our commitment to keeping this data safe. You can choose from **six global data centers** to host your data from for peace of mind. [View Privacy & Security Hub](/privacy) Candidate Experience ## Self-scheduling links Let candidates choose a time slot they want based on your hiring team's availability. Once an interview time is booked it's added to everyone’s calendars automatically. Purpose-built for interview scheduling. [Learn more](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/scheduling-links) Try scheduling automation today Try the Scheduler Get a Developer Account --- # BambooHR sales enablement ## Interview scheduling for BambooHR Sales Enablement ## Now, recruiters can schedule any type of interview without leaving BambooHR. Cronofy empowers BambooHR customers to schedule any type of interview without needing to leave their ATS. Recruiters who use Cronofy eliminate calendar Tetris and save 3-5 hours every week scheduling interviews for candidates. [See use-cases](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/use-cases/interview-scheduling) ### See how recruiters can schedule interviews for hiring managers Duration: 2:53 "How does Cronofy work with BambooHR?" Once you install Cronofy from your BambooHR marketplace, a **“schedule interview”** button is enabled within the BambooHR hiring module and you can start sending interview requests to applicants. "What types of interviews can I schedule with Cronofy?" You can schedule any type of interview, even complex ones. 1:1s, Panel interviews, back-to-back interviews and group interviews. "How long does it take to implement Cronofy?" You can start scheduling interview requests as soon as you install Cronofy into your BambooHR account. See how you can [schedule 1:1s](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/bamboo-hr/screening-calls-and-1on1). "Is Cronofy free?" BambooHR customers can try Cronofy free for 2 weeks. Cronofy only charges active accounts, which means you can save more money during low hiring seasons. "Will my hiring managers need to sign up to Cronofy before I can view their calendar availability?" No, your hiring manager only needs to accept your invitation. Cronofy’s integration with BambooHR makes it easy for everyone in your organization to turn on scheduling. "Do we need to go outside BambooHR to schedule interviews?" No. Scheduling is embedded within your BambooHR account once you install the Cronofy app. Enterprise Privacy & Security ## Independently certified for security & HIPAA compliant. We built Cronofy with security in mind. Science, medical and legal teams schedule with Cronofy’s privacy-first technology. Users even have the power to choose where their data is hosted with our international data centers. [Privacy & Security](/privacy) ## Set up a consultation Feel free to use link below in order to fill out the form so we can set up a consultation with your customer. [Set up consultation](/B) ## Cronofy & BambooHR Sales Training Complete the Cronofy sales training in 15 minutes and test your knowledge for a chance to win $70 shopping voucher! [Start training](https://forms.gle/3nNuESmL5KeE71us9) ## Essential reading ### Agreena recruiters are saving 5 hours a week Case study --- ### Find out what's important to Candidates across the globe Report --- ### See how Cronofy works compared to Goodtime Comparison --- # Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, **US-based ****[Handshake](https://www.joinhandshake.com/)**** is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, including Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Princeton, Wellesley, Howard, Illinois, UT-Austin, Michigan, Georgia and hundreds more. By bringing all of these schools together in one network, Handshake makes it easier for employers to recruit at more schools, which increases the opportunities for students from every school and background.** The transition between student life and professional environment can be hard and confusing, especially when students look for internships. This is why universities have career centers that help students decide which career path they want to follow. Counselors are there to help students, but meeting with hundreds of students means keeping a challenging schedule. > Support from the Cronofy team has been exceptional. We were able to implement a two-way calendar sync feature that was a top request from our career services users in less than one month. This feature has reduced the administrative burden of scheduling appointments for our career services partners, allowing them to spend more valuable time with students. — Jade Pathe, Product Manager, Handshake With Handshake, this process is entirely streamlined. Counselors can use the calendar interface to block out time and indicate when they are available to meet with students. Students simply have to log on to the Handshake platform and book the timeslot that works for them to confirm the appointment. ‍ ## The Challenge Before Cronofy, that meant counselors had to log on to Handshake to check their schedules and see when they had appointments, separate to their own personal calendar on Google, Outlook or other systems. It could also lead to double-bookings if they had committed to something before checking their Handshake calendars. This is what happens when tools and applications aren’t synced with our main calendars. Missed appointments and having to reschedule costs time and money, and adds to everyone’s workloads. The Handshake team was looking for a solution to improve the appointment booking process. They identified calendar sync and Cronofy’s Calendar API as the technology that would help them provide booking based on counselors’ real-time availability and push appointments directly to their calendars. > Implementing Cronofy was painless – they provide a simple and clear API that allowed me to have the integration live to customers in less than one month. — Drew Zader, Senior Software Engineer, Handshake ## The Solution Two-way calendar sync is now implemented in the Handshake application for career center users. It leverages Cronofy’s technology and works with all major calendar services, which was an important requirement from the start. Many universities use calendar services like on-premise Exchange and Office365 for their calendar tools. These services are known for being hard to integrate with. Cronofy removes this hurdle. Handshake developers were able to focus on creating a great appointment scheduling feature for their users. The [two-way calendar sync](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) helps counselors keep both their Handshake and university calendars up-to-date. When a student books an appointment in Handshake, the timeslot will appear as busy in the counselor’s calendar. There’s no risk of double-bookings as everything updates in real-time. When a timeslot is booked in the counselor’s university calendar, a one-time event will also be created in Handshake, ensuring that students see that time marked as busy. University staff and students are already reaping the benefits of two-way, real-time calendar sync. Career centers have quickly adopted this new feature with over 1720 connected calendars. That’s 19% of Handshake users leveraging Handshake’s new appointment scheduling feature. This has helped get the appointments tool live at 83% of Handshake schools. [University users](https://www.joinhandshake.com/universities/) love the simplicity and quickness of the integration: ‍ It only takes the counselors a few minutes to activate two-way calendar sync. They authorize calendar sync through Cronofy and can revoke that access at any time. ### Create great scheduling features with calendar sync If you want to build seamless real-time scheduling into your software and applications – no matter the calendar service – then check out our [Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/). We provide you with guides, tutorials, and live support to help you build and create to your heart’s content. ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- ### Cronofy launches Whereby API integration to deliver seamless scheduling and integrated video calls in one package Cronofy is integrating with Whereby's public API to bring users robust scheduling capabilities and customizable video conferencing in one streamlined offering. Read on to see how this is defining the future of meeting creation, and how you can get started today. Blog Post 2024-08-27T11:00:00.000Z --- ### How a scheduling integration with Cronofy freed thousands of hours for BambooHR users BambooHR’s dual focus on candidate experience and removing administrative fatigue led them to integrate Cronofy’s embedded scheduler to help save recruiters thousands of hours from manual scheduling. Case Study --- # Getting Started with Cronofy Your first steps into the Scheduler with Cronofy. Learn how to setup up your account and start scheduling. ## Getting Started Welcome to **Cronofy**! This powerful and user-friendly scheduling tool is perfect for managing complex scheduling needs. In this article we will help you setup your **account**, add the Cronofy **extension** to your browser, and set your **calendar** availability. In addition, you will find information about **organisational** **units** and their setup, setup **conferencing** for all members and more. Just follow the simple steps below to get started. Click on the **icons** below to move to the section you want. **Q: What is the Cronofy Scheduler?** A: The Cronofy **Scheduler** is a simple tool for complex scheduling tasks. It basically generates scheduling links that your invitees can open and choose a free time to book with you, based on you availability in real time. Your availability is provided by your Google or Microsoft calendar which can seamlessly connect to Cronofy, so that you can create events hassle free. **Sign Up and Login** Click to be taken to this section. **Organisational Unit** Click to be taken to this section. **Your Preferences** Click to be taken to this section. **Scheduler Web-Extention** Click to be taken to this section. ## Sign Up and Log In **Q: How do I sign up with Cronofy?** A: The Scheduler offers a straightforward SSO sign up process, allowing you to choose between **Google** or **Microsoft Office 365** (via Graph API) based on your preferred calendar provider. 1. To sign up click on create an account, choose your desired data center and click continue with either **Google** or **Microsoft Office 365.** **Work email**, is for only the developer login or specific users and will not work for other users. 1. After wich we will ask you to **authorize** Cronofy to access to your calendar. For more information on what **data** we process and whan access we have to said data, you can visit our [Data Management Policy](https://docs.cronofy.com/policies/data-management/). 1. Finally you will need to create an **OU** (Organizational Unit) in Cronofy and give it a name. If you have been invited to Cronofy by another user you will be asked if you want to **join** their OU. Cronofy offers a **14 day free trial** for new accounts, after which regular charges apply accounting to our [pricing](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing) page. **Q: When is a developer account needed?** A: A developer account is not needed to for everyday users of the Scheduler but is used in order for developers to create their own scheduling features using the API. If you have an developer account you need to sign in using the **Work email **tile**.** **Q: What information does Cronofy store and use?** A: Nggyu Limited, Cronofy Limited and/or Cronofy B.V. (we, us, our, Cronofy) is committed to protecting your privacy and personal data. This policy sets out how Cronofy collects, handles and stores data to meet our data protection standards, fulfil the rights of our customers, end-users and meet the requirements set out by regulators and the law. You can visit our [Data Management](https://docs.cronofy.com/policies/data-management/) page to learn more about how we securely process and store your data. Any further questions about this can be addressed to our [support](mailto:support@cronofy.com) team. **Q: How do I login to Cronofy?** A: To login you can choose again between **Google** or **Microsoft Office 365** (via Graph API) based on your preferred calendar provider. You must sign in with SSO (Single Sign-On) by clicking the "Continue with " option. Ensure you choose the correct data center associated from the **dropdown**, with your account when you registered. **Work email**, remember is for only the developer account and will not work for most users. ## Set your Preferences **Q: What are preferences in Cronofy?** A: Preferences are where you define the times you are available, how events are setup, conferencing, working hours, event location and more. We split preferences in Cronofy in two categories: **Availability** Here is where you will define the time you are available, in turn we will translate these to time slots that a invitee can choose from. **Event Details** Are where you would set the technical parameters of events like conferencing, rescheduling options etc. The choices you make here will be set as **defaults** when you create a new request and when someone book with you through your **public link.** When you first access Cronofy you will have some default ones, like a standard work week availability - 9 to 5 etc. **Q: How to setup your preferences?** A: **Preferences** are located in the left-hand menu on the main page. Set these in accordance with your needs. These are always set initially to default values, so you don't need to change them to start scheduling with Cronofy. - **Your work** **hours**, the time you are available during the week. Click to drag and edit your availability in the table below. - **Included** **calendars**, you will already see the calendar you signed up with, and you can add more to share your availability. - **Interview** **times**, set automatic **placeholders** in interviewers' calendars that can be shared as available slots with a candidate. - **Duration**, how long you would like events to be. - **Scheduling** **period**, the period you would like to offer slots to recipients. - **Buffers**, the minimum number of minutes that must be free before and after calendar events created with these preferences. - **Minimum** **notice**, how much notice would you like to have ahead of an event. **Q: How to setup a public booking link?** A: A reusable **static** link for you to share anywhere, where people can book events with you. The parameters of these events are determined by the **preferences** you set. Visitors can provide their **details** before scheduling a meeting, and you can set one additional information prompt for them to fill out. **Primary organisational **unit determines under which organisation the event is booked, which will set the appropriate branding. **Data capture** sets prompts for the invitee to fill out before they can book with you. You can collect the phone number and/or an additional prompt, which can be any question or statement you would like. **Generate new public link **if you need a new public link. It will decommission the old one, making it unusable. **Q: How to setup conferencing?** A: You can add conferencing services by: 1. Head to **Preferences.** 1. **Event details** and click **“Add Conferencing Service”** 1. Choose your provider and click **connect**. 1. You will taken to an authorization flow, in which you will authorize the provider with Cronofy. 1. Done! You can then choose your default conferencing in **Event** **Details.** Alternatively, you can add them in **[your account.](https://app.cronofy.com/user/conferencing_services/new)** If your preferred option is not there you can contact our [support](mailto:support@cronofy.com) and we will try to help you. ![configure conferencing]() **Q: How to adjust the times you are available?** A: You can add more calendars to your account and share their availability across them. Keep in mind that you still can only have one **target** **calendar**, where event will be placed. You can change the target calendar in event details any time. To add more calendars: 1. Head to **Preferences.** 1. **Event details** and click **“Add Calendar Services”** 1. Choose your provider and click **connect**. 1. You will taken to an authorization flow, in which you will authorize the provider with Cronofy. 1. Done! You can now choose which calendars to take into account when sharing by clicking to the **+ symbol i**n availability and change your target calendar in **Event** **Details.** ![configure calendars]() ## Setup your Organization **Q: What is an organizational unit or OU in Cronofy?** A: An **organizational** **unit** or **OU** in Cronofy is the environment your account will reside in, like a workspace. Once you sign-up to Cronofy, you will be **prompted** to create one by naming it, unless you have been invited to one. You can **invite** **users** in this OU to **share** **availability** between yourselves and give them roles. **Q: How do I join a specific OU?** A: To join a specific organization, you will need to have been **invited** by an owner of that organization. This happens via the **invitation** **email** you will receive, once you have it you will be given a choice to **Sign** **in** or **Sign** **up** **with a new scheduler **account, if you don't have one yet. **Q: Can I create additional OUs and schedule from there?** A: To create a **new** OU you can click on your account name on the bottom left corner in the dashboard. Then click on the **"Create a new org Unit"** **Q: How do I invite more people in my OU?** A: This is the standard way to invite users to your OU (Organisational Unit). To invite users manually head to: **OU settings -> Members** -> **Users** Scroll all the way down and select **Invite** **Users.** This will open the the invite tab (see screenshot) Now you can enter the emails (up to 20 at a time) of the users you want to invite to your OU. Bellow that you will find the roles selector which determines the role if the users you invite. You can read more about roles in [this article.](https://www.cronofy.com/guides/user-onboarding/manage-organization-user?preview=true&dataset=production#da72d871a065e8f8fd2b8e7dcfd72421) The users will then receive an email prompting them to accept your invite, which is valid for 48hrs. ![invite]() ## What your invitees will see: ![email invite]() **Q: Can I add more users in bulk?** A: Enabling directory sync allows us to automatically set up accounts for all of your organization’s users and periodically check for new users, simplifying the onboarding process. To start, sign up with your **workplace admin account**, choose your desired data center and click continue with either **Google** or **Microsoft Office 365.**  **(Work email**, is for only developer accounts which are not needed here.) After that we will ask you to **authorize** Cronofy to access to your calendar. Finally you will be prompted to create an **OU** (Organizational Unit) in Cronofy and give it a name. If you have been invited to Cronofy by another user you will be asked if you want to **join** their OU. Make sure you have the owner role in Cronofy. Go to: **OU settings → Members → Organization Accounts** Only users with the owner role will be able to see the option above. From here you will need to connect your workspace to create a service account, to sync your directory. **Google** 1. Click on "**Connect to Google Workspace**." 1. Download the Cronofy app from the Workspace Store. 1. Use your google **admin** account to authorize the connection. **MS 365** Cronofy needs to make two separate connections: one to your directory and one to your calendars. 1. First, connect your directory using the authorizing account. 1. Then, select "Connect using MS Graph" if you are using it. For an **Exchange** (on-prem) setup : Follow [this guide](https://docs.cronofy.com/calendar-admins/enterprise-connect-office365-exchange/configuring-service-account/). Note: The service account needs to be authorized with a admin account, if it doesn’t work, then you lack the required permissions and need to reach out internally to resolve this. Go back to: **OU settings → Members → Organization Accounts** you should now see an service account there. To start syncing users, click "**Settings**" on the service account that provides access to your organization’s directory. On the settings page, enable provisioning using the toggle, and click "**Save**." **Google Workspace,** one connection provides access to both calendars and the directory. **Microsoft Office,** has it on 2 separate and you need to select the "**directory**". All users should now start syncing and we will create Cronofy accounts for them. ## Download the Scheduler Extension **Q: How do I install the Scheduler extension?** A: Our web extension enables you to easily create a request from **any** browser tab. It woks with our ATS integrations and **automatically** detects the invitees email. **Available for :** - **[Google Chrome](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cronofy/anglfpgnejdnlomjepkpjlfnhigepkip?hl=en)** - **[Mozilla Firefox](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/cronofy/)** - [**Microsoft Edge**](https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/cronofy/lbdiedeaaaohjkebpinhcifflnedfiil)**.** Click the links above to install the extension on your browser. If your IT department manages extensions, admin **approval** may be required. Once installed, sign in to the extension as you would for your account—this only needs to be done once. **Q: Can I install the extension in bulk in my organization?** A: An admin in you company can auto-install the extension for all users on their browser. --- # Your Applicant Tracking System Needs Calendar Sync. Here's Why. Cronofy’s clients Personio and MHR build innovative HR software and help organizations initiate and manage strong relationships with candidates and employees alike. They are also always looking for ways to improve their products and that’s why they chose the Cronofy Calendar API to add real-time interview scheduling into their Applicant Tracking Systems. Cronofy’s clients Personio and MHR build innovative HR software and help organizations initiate and manage strong relationships with candidates and employees alike. They are also always looking for ways to improve their products and that’s why they chose the Cronofy Calendar API to add real-time interview scheduling into their Applicant Tracking Systems. Cronofy’s clients Personio and [MHR](cronofy.com/case-studies/calendar-sync-hr-mhr/) build innovative HR software and help organizations initiate and manage strong relationships with candidates and employees alike. They are also always looking for ways to improve their products and that’s why they chose the Cronofy Calendar API to add real-time interview scheduling into their Applicant Tracking Systems. To manage relationships with candidates, save time, and stay organized businesses rely on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Software like these have transformed the recruitment process for every business, from the smallest company to the largest multinationals. Using an ATS – either as a standalone software or as part of a Human Capital Management (HCM) platform – helps recruiting managers and agencies be more efficient when filling vacancies. ## Applicant Tracking Systems are already saving businesses time Finding and hiring talent is costly and time consuming but critical to the growth of any organization. With an ATS, a lot of historically manual processes can be automated. There are no more risks of deleting an important email for example – all communications can be handled through the ATS. At its most basic, an ATS can scan through the resumes submitted by applicants to assess which ones are a good fit for the position being advertised. Some of the ways they can do this include looking for keywords and checking for spelling errors. More advanced ATS also handle communications and can be integrated to job boards to advertise jobs and collect resumes. Some of them can also get additional details on applicants via social media. ## Adding Interview Scheduling to your Applicant Tracking System Finding candidates that fit the profile a company is looking for is time consuming, but that’s only the first step. The skills of the candidates need to be tested and interview times need to be arranged. Even if emails and text messages can be sent from an ATS, the recruiters still need to be the ones arranging times for interview. Video interviewing tools and online skill-testing tools can help, but face-to-face meetings still need to be arranged by the recruiters. Automating part of the interview process is possible through real-time calendar sync. By connecting the calendars of the interview panel to the ATS, recruiters – in-house or working for an agency – can access the [availability](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/availability-api) of the people who are needed to hold the interviews. Available time slots can be shared with candidates who can then pick the time that works best for them. One of the advantage of this solutions is that it not only simplifies the interview process for the recruiters but also simplifies the process for the candidate, too. Candidates don’t have to take awkward phone calls at work or answer a chain of emails to find a time that works for everyone. One click is enough for an interview time to be agreed and added to everyone’s calendars. It’s that simple. ## Real-Time Scheduling with the Cronofy Calendar API Cronofy’s Real-Time Scheduling plug-in allows Applicant Tracking Systems providers to build real-time scheduling into their solutions. Some ATS might have the ability to sync with [Outlook](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api) or [Gmail](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api) calendars but developing an integration for each major calendar service can be a nightmare to build and maintain. The Cronofy Calendar API was built to solve this challenge. It works with all major calendar services and solves the challenge of integrating with every calendar serivce. The Calendar API is also maintained by Cronofy’s developers on our client’s behalf. Cronofy’s Real-Time Scheduling can be described as a super-powered Calendly. ATS developers can use it to build systems that will allow recruiters to organize interviews between multiple participants, no matter what calendar service they use. For HR software vendors, adding this feature helps them to offer a new innovative tool that will help recruiters save time and improve the [candidate experience](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/candidate-experience/) for job applicants. It’s also useful to differentiate their offers from their competitors in a highly competitive market. ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Scheduler Real-time scheduling for teams. ## Schedule complex meetings without the email back and forth A new approach to scheduling that enables teams to schedule meetings in real-time and get on with their important work. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) Multi-person scheduling ## Real-time booking links for one click meetings Built for teams to schedule without friction, Cronofy coordinates the availability of multiple people to seamlessly schedule meeting times. Stop asking everyone for slots for multi-person meetings, just send real-time booking links instead! [Scheduling Links](/scheduler/scheduling-links) Easy rescheduling ## Allow rescheduling without lifting a finger Plans change and any scheduling tool should allow seamless rescheduling no matter how complex the original meeting was. You can choose whether or not you allow rescheduling on every booking link. International support ## Multi-language and timezone support We live in a connected world and it's important that any tool speaks the language of the people you're booking with. Cronofy booking links support multiple languages and any timezones that your team and customers are in. > The versatility of Cronofy’s Scheduler is pretty remarkable. Multiple teams with very different needs can take advantage of Cronofy’s seamless interface and integration with our existing tools. I couldn’t imagine doing my job without it. — Christopher Snider, Community and Clinic Success Manager, Tidepool Schedule where you work ## Plug-ins for browsers and email tools you already use Schedule direct from your Outlook or Gmail. The Cronofy email add-ins automatically generate links for the people that you're emailing. So you get complete personalization and customization without double entry. The browser extensions will recognize the contact details from popular business apps like Hubspot and Lever so you can schedule without leaving the tools you use everyday. [Get the extensions you need](/scheduler/plug-ins) Enterprise Connect ## Setup zero-touch enrollment for hassle free team onboarding With zero-touch enrollment, your IT team can auto enroll any number of accounts from your Google or Microsoft directory without needing interviewers to lift a finger. Our admin permissions also allow you to set preferences like working hours on your interviewers behalf. Privacy & Security ## Independently certified for security and privacy with HIPAA compliance We built Cronofy in Europe with security in mind. Science, medical and legal teams schedule with Cronofy’s privacy-first technology. Users even have the power to choose where their data is hosted with our international data centers. ## Get started today No credit card required Try scheduler [Speak to a specialist](/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic) --- # From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Introducing Meeting Agents by Cronofy — an API extension that turns meetings into actionable insights with built-in recording and transcription. Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. At Cronofy, we’ve always believed that scheduling is just the beginning, making it possible for meetings to take place. Today, we’re excited to announce Meeting Agents, an upcoming extension of our API that transforms your scheduling workflows by capturing meeting recordings and transcripts. With a single integration, you’ll do more than just book meetings - you’ll unlock the value of what happens inside them. ## Why we built Meeting Agents Scheduling meetings has never been easier, but what happens after the call is still broken. Key takeaways get lost in scattered notes, follow-ups are missed, and teams rely on disconnected tools to bridge the gap. At the same time, user expectations have shifted. They now want their tools to do more than just schedule - they expect them to capture discussions, summarize action items, and automatically update CRMs, ATS platforms, and internal systems. In a world where every workflow is becoming automated, platforms that fail to deliver this kind of experience risk falling behind. But for most teams, building that capability is hard. Recording, transcribing, and summarizing meetings means: - Managing multiple vendors and APIs - Navigating inconsistent behavior across platforms like Zoom, Teams, and Meet - Ensuring privacy, compliance, and secure data handling - Building and maintaining custom infrastructure We’re launching Meeting Agents to solve these challenges. Built on Cronofy’s proven scheduling infrastructure, they allow product teams to manage the full meeting lifecycle all through one vendor. ## What Meeting Agents deliver Meeting Agents will be embedded directly into calendar events created via Cronofy, just like conferencing links, making it easy to add advanced meeting capabilities without additional integrations or services. For existing Cronofy customers, it will be a seamless upgrade. For new users, it promises to accelerate time-to-market for scheduling and meeting automation features, delivered with the same reliability, privacy, and compliance standards Cronofy is known and trusted for. ![Example transcript of Cronofy Meeting Agent]() **Capture every conversation** No separate services, no complicated setups. Meetings scheduled via Cronofy can now be automatically captured and transcribed, so nothing gets lost. **Simplify multi-platform support** Connect once to Cronofy and support Zoom, Teams, and Meet without the need for separate integrations or provider-specific logic. **Build smarter workflows** Whether you’re building for HR Tech, coaching platforms or enterprise workflows, Meeting Agents give you a new layer of data to work with. Use transcripts to power features like sentiment analysis, topic clustering, structured feedback, and more. **Scale with confidence** Meeting Agents run on the same infrastructure already trusted by healthcare, finance, and enterprise teams worldwide. Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified, so you can add new capabilities without introducing new risk or sub-processors. ## Ready to go beyond scheduling? Join our upcoming webinar to get an exclusive look at Meeting Agents before they launch. We’ll walk through how to add them to your scheduling workflows and explore what product teams can build with the insights that follow. [Webinar Registration](https://www.cronofy.com/webinars/introducing-cronofy-meeting-agents) If you'd prefer a tailored walkthrough, [book a call](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/meeting-agents#85726821a8ed) with our team and get an early preview of how Meeting Agents can work for your use case. Here’s to workflows that start with scheduling and continue after the meeting. ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### New to Cronofy’s White Label API? So am I - Let’s Break It Down Together You’re a developer who needs to build out a scheduling workflow within your application. You’ve found Cronofy’s White Label API, but aren’t quite sure how the pieces fit together. I’m new here too, so let’s figure it out together. Blog Post 2025-03-31T13:56:00.000Z --- # Video interviews are essential to hiring processes, here's why Video interviews are key to most modern hiring processes, they are taking over from phone interviews in many cases. They allow recruiters to filter candidates better and establish more personal relationships while saving time and stress for everyone involved. Video interviews are key to most modern hiring processes, they are taking over from phone interviews in many cases. They allow recruiters to filter candidates better and establish more personal relationships while saving time and stress for everyone involved. Video interviews are key to most [modern hiring processes](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/deliver-a-first-class-hiring-experience/), they are taking over from phone interviews in many cases. They allow recruiters to filter candidates better and establish more personal relationships while saving time and stress for everyone involved. > **According to Cronofy customer, EasyRecrue:** "Talent acquisition teams save up to 60% of screening time with on-demand video interview features." ### Pre-recorded video interviews In a pre-recorded video interviews the candidate is asked to connect to a hiring platform where they will be able to record the answers to a few pre-defined questions. Every candidate applying to a given role will be answering the same questions which will allows for standardisation. The recruiters can easily compare answers to decide which candidates to move to the next stage of the hiring process. This also guarantees a transparent interview process and ensures equal opportunity is given to every candidate. Recruiters can implement pre-recorded video interviews to offer more flexibility to candidates and employers. Because candidates can record their answers in their own time, there is no need to juggle multiple schedules. Managing the complex coordination involved in organizing interviews with recruiters, candidates and hiring managers can be time consuming and challenging. Pre-recorded interviews become even more useful if the candidate and recruiter are in different time zones. They will also test a candidate’s tech savviness and ability to work autonomously as these interviews are something they will have to prepare and conduct on their own. Pre-recorded interviews are often used in the early stages of the interview process to filter through large numbers of candidates while looking beyond the information on a CV. The recordings are then reviewed by recruiters and/or AI tools to analyze the candidates’ behavior, reasoning and communication style. This type of interview offers convenience for all parties. There is less stress for the candidates as they don’t have to travel to an office and the recruiters can review the recordings from each applicant whenever suits them. **Tips for candidates:** - Don’t compromise on presentation just because it’s not a live interview. - Make eye contact, imagine that the webcam is the interviewer’s eyes. - Prepare. Just because the questions are already pre-defined doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t prepare answers to common interview questions, they will be asked! - Use the fact that it’s a recorded interview as an opportunity to select the time and environment that’ll help you feel comfortable. **Tips for recruiters:** - Work on your scorecards! Pre-recorded video interviews are a great opportunity to use an objective and scientific process to grade candidates’ performances. - Ask for a second opinion. It’s good practice for recruiters to ask their colleagues for a second opinion on how they think a candidate performed in order to remove individual bias. ### Live video interviews These interviews are essentially just an in-person interview organized through a video conferencing tool. They can be used to continue the screening process before deciding to invite a candidate to a face-to-face interview, or they can replace face-to-face interviews altogether. That’s what’s happening around the world today as many recruiters and hiring managers are working from home and can’t meet with candidates in person. As mentioned previously, video interviews are convenient as they don’t require the candidate or recruiter to travel. Live interviews can also be recorded by the interview panel and shared with colleagues to get more opinions on a candidate. When teams are split across different geographic locations, recordings can be used to ensure that every member of the hiring team has had the opportunity to see the candidate in the interview setting. Compared to a telephone interview there are more opportunities to evaluate things like interpersonal skills and mannerisms when both parties see each other’s face. Stress is also often reduced for the candidate as they are still in a familiar environment and will feel more in control. A challenge that can arise with the need to conduct every interview remotely comes down to organizing the tasks that candidates are often asked to complete and present back to the panel. Communication before the interview becomes even more important to ensure that the candidate is prepared and has all the tools and materials they’ll need to be successful. Simple things like a virtual white board or the ability for the candidate to share their screens cannot be overlooked. Like for every live interview, it’s key to find a time when the candidate, hiring managers and recruiters are available. Scheduling tools that let the candidate pick a time slot that works for them are recommended to prevent delays, limit email back-and-forth and deliver a great candidate experience that will benefit the employer’s brand. The recruiter will also want to book a meeting room for privacy. **Tips for candidates:** - It’s your time to shine, look and behave professionally. - Be aware of nonverbal communication signals. Don’t have a posture or gestures that you wouldn’t have during an in-person interview. - Testing is really important. Check that you can connect to the video conferencing tool, test your internet connection beforehand too! - Don’t hesitate to ask questions before and during the interview especially if you aren’t sure about a technical aspect of the video interviewing process. **Tips for recruiters:** - Invest in a scheduling tool that allow you to automate interview scheduling while letting candidates pick time slots based on your real-time availability. - Use AI tools to analyze communication skills in order to remove bias and to provide every candidate with the same opportunity to succeed. - Make sure that the calendar invites you send to candidates [include video conferencing links](https://www.cronofy.com/conferencing-services/) and clear instructions on how to use the tool. While the current health crisis has made video interviews more essential to delivering first-class hiring process they aren’t a trend that will disappear when the situation goes back to normal. It’s easy to imagine a world where a majority of interviews will be held over video conferencing tools. It’s important that businesses invest in the technology and process to operate that transition seamlessly and that candidates acquire the habits they will need to be successful video interviewees. Cronofy’s scheduling technology is already embedded into the products of many providers of video interviewing software. [Conferencing Services](https://www.cronofy.com/conferencing-services/), the new core feature of our API let users add phone and video conferencing links to calendar events in order to enable fully automated interview scheduling processes. This is key to enable recruiters to reduce the delays and keep candidates engaged while decreasing the time and cost to hire. --- # 2026 Meeting Efficiency Survey: What happens after the meeting ends? Meetings are where decisions get made and then lost. We surveyed employees across departments and seniorities about how they capture — or fail to capture — what happens in them. Read on to see what our findings reveal about where existing tools fall short, and why embedded meeting intelligence is becoming a real expectation inside the products people already use. ## 2026 Meeting Efficiency Survey: What happens after the meeting ends? Meetings are where decisions get made and then lost. We surveyed employees across departments and seniorities about how they capture — or fail to capture — what happens in them. Read on to see what our findings reveal about where existing tools fall short, and why embedded meeting intelligence is becoming a real expectation inside the products people already use. [Click here to get your report](#form-c7b3db52-9f9a-4f03-b1b4-600bb0b5ca58) ## Are your users drowning in meeting admin? Our findings show a clear need for change: - **Meeting are failing right now:** 52% cite a lack of clear follow-up actions as the top reason meetings become ineffective. - **Teams sink hours into meeting admin:** Employees spend 1-3 hours per week on meeting admin, with the burden falling hardest on senior staff who can afford it the least. - **SaaS platforms are missing out on a huge revenue opportunity**: Users are already spending $17.40 per user, per month on standalone AI notetakers. Get the intel on how teams are navigating meeting admin challenges, and calculate how much revenue you could capture by embedding meeting intelligence natively inside your application. **How much time different teams are spending in meetings and related admin** **Why individual AI notetakers are a compliance risk that can't be ignored** **Calculate how much additional revenue you could capture from notetakers** **How to drive adoption for notetaking tools inside your product** --- # Smart ICS Calendar Invites Trackable ICS attachments that you can use to invite anyone to calendar events. ## Track accepts and declines with smart ICS attachments Smart Invites from Cronofy give you complete tracking of your ICS attachments and they get auto added to people's calendars. [Start integrating](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) [Documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/smart-invites/) ## ICS attachments that are smarter Get notified when recipients accept or decline invites. When you create a Cronofy Smart invite, you provide a call back URL for our platform to post updates to. So whenever a recipient accepts, declines or even proposes a new time, your application is kept in the loop. Unlocking new communication and workflow possibilities for your customers. Trigger an auto confirm when someone accepts or a rescheduling option when someone declines. Whatever makes sense for your domain you can now do. [Read the docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/smart-invites/) ## ICS attachments that actually work No more sending someone an invite that they have to manually add to their calendar or giving them a manual download. Cronofy Smart Invites can be attached to emails you send so that they automatically get added to the recipients calendar. Just like any other calendar invite. Improve no-show rates, stop double booking and help your users organize their schedules. ## Create your developer account and start building Sign up --- # Top recruitment trends and predictions for 2024 We reflect on the changes we’ve seen within the recruitment industry in 2023 and predict what’s to come in 2024. 2023 has been a somewhat challenging year for recruiters. From tech giant layoffs to shrinking recruitment teams, there has been a feeling of widespread hiring uncertainty. Many have used this time to overhaul their processes and up their technology stack to improve productivity. With this in mind, what is the outlook for the recruitment industry in 2024? We hosted a webinar with Hung Lee in partnership with Recruiting Brainfood and gathered the top predictions from the industry experts: Global Director of TA at Visa Celinda Farias Appleby, Recruitment consultant and creator of the Recruiting Future podcast Matt Alder, and our CEO Adam Bird. ## ## Rise of AI AI has undoubtedly had a significant impact on industries across the board this year and it only looks set to keep growing in prominence in 2024. It has truly transformed the way hiring is done. So how should recruitment teams adapt? Matt shared his thoughts on the future of AI and what it will mean for recruiters. “When we look into the future, these AI tools are only going to get better. There will be a time where it will be indistinguishable whether someone's using AI or not. I think it's fantastic from a recruitment and marketing perspective, but it does put everyone at the same level. So how do you differentiate yourself? We are fast approaching a situation where we've got AI talking to AI, and we're trying to recruit people from this.” "I think what we see as we move forward is we have to transform the recruiting process, to assess people in different ways, to automate things in different ways. And I think that, we'll see lots of companies putting things in place to try and spot AI generated applications, but it just won't work. So we need to think about our processes and how to adapt them to what’s happening.” Matt predicted AI will be widespread throughout recruitment tools both existing and new. “I think that what we'll find in 2024 is that there'll be a lot of automation and AI baked into the tools that potentially you're already using as the vendors strive to keep up with the market over the next 12 months.” ## Candidate experience But how much is too much AI? Do we still prioritise human touch during the hiring process? There’s a unanimous response from candidates that they still want that human connection – they don’t just want to talk to a bot. Yes, certain stages of the process should be automated, but not at the cost of relationship building. Celinda acknowledged that candidate experience has been poor quality and needs to change in 2024, which is why it’s top of so many recruiters priorities for the coming year and is being built into their planning. “I think poor candidate experience has a lot to do with the fact that our fellow recruiters have taken a hit from their career. So for the past three years, our numbers dwindle, our application rates grow, but the right processes aren't in place to deal with it. A lot of organisations are going through foundational work since it's been slow. Businesses are building new career sites, getting new ATS's, and there's a lot of HR technology spend that's going on. Couple that with lowering your number of recruiters and not having the processes in place to keep up with that demand. “My prediction for 2024 is that we're going to bring more recruiters back, whether it's in house or working with agencies, you're going to see an uptick of more humans in the process. Because I do think that the volume of jobs will increase for companies. And hopefully with this there will be a resurgence of recruiters coming back. I urge all of our recruiters to bring that energy that they felt like they were being ghosted and just be real human in your own with your own candidates and turn it around because I do think it's going to take real real human touch to change it.” ### Responsiveness in recruitment What I will say is we're in a hyper connected marketplace where you go to Amazon and you expect something in two days shipped at your door and you're wearing it oftentimes less, right. And I think as we look at the five generations that are in the workplace, we at least you know, elder millennial here we have grown accustomed to being ghosted, ignored, fighting our way through utilising tools to get through, but I don't think Gen Z or Gen alpha are gonna tolerate that much longer. And so I see them because Gen Z is in our workforce, but they're coming in masses year over year. And pretty soon they're gonna they're gonna have a stronger threshold, they're gonna be we're gonna be talking about Gen Z, like they talked about us Millennials for a long time. And they're gonna want that AI driven and there shouldn't be a reason for you not to go into the career site and say, I'm a data scientist five years experience. I only want to work in New York City and a job pop up because it's not that hard, I think at this point with Gemini and Bard and and chat GPT ## Diversity and Inclusion Unfortunately there have been mass layoffs of D&I roles within the past year. There has been a profound struggle to achieve the ambitious objectives set out by companies when they originally hired these executives. Celinda weighed in on why she thought this was. “I think in 2020, in the United States, many people answering the call of George Floyd and we came up with diversity goals. And they started at the very top, giants like Amazon, coming up with these very quick responses to the riots in the United States with these diversity goals, but a lot of companies have failed. And when you fail at public statements coming from the heads of your company, somebody has to lose a job. I think that's had a lot to do with the heads of DEI losing their jobs." It is ultimately down to company culture, and changing this isn’t easy as everyone needs to be on board, as Celinda goes on to explain: “Your CEO can say something, your public statement can say something, and you can hire someone that's accountable, but if no one else under you is marching to the beat of that drum and supporting that person and the CEOs goals, then you have a culture problem.” But D&I needs to be prioritised by businesses if they want to appeal to the younger generation. A recent EY survey showed that more than 3 in 4 Millennials would leave employer if DE&I initiatives not offered. This is now spreading into neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is being talked about more as more people are becoming aware of the symptoms and getting diagnosed. Matt explained companies will have to adapt their hiring process to meet neurodivergent needs. “The other area, which hardly ever gets talked about, is neuro inclusion. And I think that is one of the things to think about for 2024. We've talked a lot about automation and assessment, which are great things for recruiting, but what I think we have to be very aware of is, are these ways of working neuro inclusive, are we cutting out neurodivergent people because of the type of processes that we're putting in place. "It’s been discovered that around 20% of the workforce is neurodivergent, and only 3% of those people have actually got a diagnosis. So by being neuro inclusive within your organization, you're getting the most out of your workforce, because everyone's brain is different. So as we move forward with AI, we need to keep this in mind.” ## Chatbots and personalization Following on from the topic of AI, we’ve started to see an increase in chatbots on career pages, to help candidates with those first touch points and instantly respond to their queries. There’s debate over whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, once again taking away the human element, however speeding up the process. Our “everything now” society generally wants and expects things in all areas of their lives as fast as possible, so are chatbots a good way to fulfill this need? Matt spoke about how chatbots feed into the focus on personalization that we’ll see in the coming year. “There'll be much more discussion and a drive towards personalization in career sites. So we've seen that at the top end in the last few years with career site systems that serve specific content depending on what people are doing. But I think that chatbots and conversational AI takes that to a whole new level and gives people that personalized experience. " I think it's important to distinguish between those old chatbots that used a decision tree and what's available now with conversational AI plugging into databases and pulling relevant personal information. So I think that the companies who do these kinds of things first, they're gonna be all over this next year. But it takes a very long time for it to work its way through the market.” However there is some conflict between privacy teams and recruitment teams on this matter, using personal data can be a tricky situation for a business to contend with. Especially those who are highly security and privacy focused such as financial or legal organizations. Adam explained why there would be issues in the coming year when attempting to implement personalization and why it may be roadblocked. “I think the challenge is, personalization implies that you know about the individual. There's a big cultural difference between the approach to data privacy in the USA, and that in Europe. And so I think personalization sounds wonderful and desirable, until you realize that actually, in order to benefit from that, people are going to have to give up elements of their data and privacy. "If you want to know about someone, you're going to have to learn about them from other data sources, you then get into really precarious ground with training models on that data. The EU AI act is going to present a real challenge to this, because who owns that data? Where should that data be used? What's the appropriate use of that data? Everything is in flux.” ### Personalisation in recruitment ## Recruitment productivity tools Scheduling automation was mentioned as one of the top parts of the process to be automated, recruiters need to start using an effective tool for this purpose. And not one that can just handle to simple 1-2-1 interview scheduling, but also multi-person and complex use cases. Adam spoke about what recruiters could expect from scheduling automation in the coming year. “I think what's been really interesting about the AI paradigm is this idea of an assistant that sits alongside what you're doing, because for recruiters, the ATS runs the process. That's where the workflow is and everything else should essentially be subservient to that and support that process. A lot of AI tools are augmenting that process. And that's in many ways, how we designed our tooling, as an augmentation of the existing ATS with automated scheduling.” ATS platforms will also transform into Talent Intelligence platforms, harnessing the power of AI to get to know candidates better and make smarter hiring choices. ## Conclusion It looks set to be another big year in terms of advancements and changing processes in recruitment. It’s imperative to keep up with the latest trends and harness the power of technology to stay ahead. Recruiters, hold on tight – 2024 is going to be a wild ride!* * [*Watch the full webinar*](https://www.cronofy.com/webinars/recruiting-brainfood-hr-trends-and-predictions-2024)* in partnership with Recruiting Brainfood here!* ### Calendar hygiene: a guide to cleaning up messy calendars HR Tech Is your calendar messier than a teenager’s bedroom? Time for a spring clean – read on for our top calendar hygiene tips. --- ### How to Create a Recruitment Outreach Strategy Recruitment Founder of QuickMail.io, Jeremy Chatelaine, shares his actionable recruitment outreach strategy to help recruiters have more conversations with qualified candidates. --- ### Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What Metrics Truly Matter Recruitment In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. But are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Talent Acquisition experts Stephanie Baysinger, Mary-Kay Baldino, and José Manuel Delgado Garcia share their thoughts. --- # How TimeTap offers seamless scheduling solutions with Cronofy TimeTap’s scheduling solutions are used by companies around the world to help manage their increasing workload efficiently. TimeTap’s scheduling solutions are used by companies around the world to help manage their increasing workload efficiently. **From small to large enterprises and across all industries, keeping up with a busy schedule is time-consuming and a considerable source of stress.** **Having one platform to book and manage all appointments can ease the burden of an increasingly busy professional life.** With a 24/7 online scheduling system, client management, unlimited appointments, and many other features, [TimeTap](https://www.timetap.com/) has taken on the challenge of eliminating time-consuming administrative tasks, allowing companies to focus on the growth of their businesses. TimeTap’s scheduling solutions are used by companies around the world to help manage their increasing workload efficiently. TimeTap allows their users to publish their schedule and have an unlimited number of bookings at any given time. Using their easy scheduler – that can be either hosted on their platform or embedded on their users’ websites – customers can book appointments online. Once the appointments are made, email notifications and text reminders are sent automatically enabling users and their customers to stay connected. ## The Challenge [TimeTap](https://www.timetap.com/) is always looking to improve their service by listening and responding to the needs of its customers. Users can publish their availability, manage their schedule, and book appointments online. However, it still meant having to manage multiple calendars. In their pursuit to streamline their scheduling solutions even further, the team at TimeTap decided to offer their users the possibility to sync their calendars with the application. For users who choose to sync their calendars, the time picker needs to reflect its user’s schedule in real-time as well as the need for the feature to work with all calendar providers used worldwide. While an integration with Google calendar was already in place, they needed expertise in integrating with Exchange, Office 365, and Outlook.com. Building two-way calendar sync features that work with all major calendar providers can take months, while the maintenance of those connections is ongoing for developers. This prompted them to seek a partnership that enables them to provide real-time calendar sync features to their users and that’s what brought them to Cronofy. ## The Solution The team at TimeTap use the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/) to allow their users to sync their calendars with the online platform in real-time. Users are given the choice to sync their calendars with the online application. When setting up, users are prompted to authorize Cronofy to connect to their calendar of choice. TimeTap uses this information to display their existing events and display their availabilities when customers want to book an appointment. When scheduling is managed via TimeTap any changes will be added to the calendar synced with the application. It all happens in real time, which means there is no risk of double-bookings or appointments being missed. Full calendar sync from Cronofy has enabled the team at TimeTap to reach customers worldwide no matter what calendar provider they are using. ### Create great scheduling features with full calendar sync from Cronofy Take the hassle out of integrating with individual calendar providers with the Cronofy Calendar API. If you’re a developer [sign-up for free](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) and start building straight away with our easy-to-use SDKs and sample apps. If you’re a product owner or simply interested to find out more about Cronofy API please get in touch via the form below. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # Cronofy plays a key role in non-profit organization digital transformation We caught up with Chris, Founder of Sightlines Group. Learning all about his latest project, how it was impacted by COVID-19 and how they've used Cronofy's API. We caught up with Chris, Founder of Sightlines Group. Learning all about his latest project, how it was impacted by COVID-19 and how they've used Cronofy's API. We caught up with Cronofy client, Chris Barber, Founder of [Sightlines Group](https://sightlinesgroup.com). Learning all about his latest project, how it was impacted by COVID-19 and how they've used Cronofy's API - to provide communities in Brooklyn, New York with a range of services through the non-profit organization, The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. ### ‍**Hi Chris, great to chat to you today. Do you want to start by telling us a bit about you and your company?** **‍**I founded my company, Sightlines Group in 2001. I have a background in organizational training and development, and software development. It’s a bit of an uncommon mix, but this skillset is really useful for the projects that we consult on. Recently we’ve worked with a mix of global financial and technology companies, foundations, and city and state governments, the work is really varied. I tend to get involved in longer projects that last two or three years where we have a chance to see through changes in culture and technology. ‍ ### ‍**Chris, you’ve recently implemented the Cronofy API for a non-profit organization that you’re working with? Can you tell us a bit about them?** **‍**Yes, we’ve been working for about two years on a digital transformation project for the country’s first community development organization, [Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation](https://restorationplaza.org), located in Central Brooklyn, NY. Since their founding in the 1960s, they have become a force in the community and a general source of support for individuals and families. ‍ ### ‍**So what was the challenge and can you tell us a little more about the project that you’ve been working on?** **‍**Restoration has a really broad offering of vital support, which they fund through many different channels including individuals, private foundation grants, and public sector contracts. Grants and contracts come with research-based guidance on how to carry out a program - and all of them require data capture - but in the nonprofit sector a data standard has yet to emerge. The result is often a tremendous amount of duplication, data overlap, and double-entry for staff, which is no one’s intention, but it does mean staff spend too much time in front of a computer and not enough time with human to human contact.Restoration’s leadership and staff have been tireless in their efforts to use current technology to improve their services, and also to improve their own day to day experience of providing these services. Broadly, leadership wanted to achieve two things. First, they wanted to be able to tell the full story of the change they were making in the community. Many of their grants and contracts required staff to enter data in separate, proprietary systems. That meant, for example, that if Restoration helped someone receive benefits in 2017, and then a job in 2018, and then they helped their child gain work experience in 2019, all of these data points would be spread across different systems that didn’t speak to one another. Leadership wanted to bring everything into a single data warehouse so they could tell a single story about their clients and community. Second, leadership wanted to use automation to allow clients to book their own appointments and fill out their own intake forms from their phones or computers, all of which would free up enormous amounts of staff time. This is where Cronofy came in! ‍ ### ‍**How does Cronofy fit into this unified data vision?** Cronofy allowed us to build a robust scheduling system that is practical for both clients and staff. Due to the complexities of real-life scheduling, with myriad calendars, locations, rules, etc., this was next to impossible using off-the-shelf scheduling tools, or even other scheduling APIs.When a client comes to Restoration’s website to request help, they begin the process. They first indicate what kind of help they need, for example, accessing health insurance. Then they provide a little information about where they live, what language they speak, and what other needs they may have. Next, the system looks across 50+ staff to see who can provide that service, speak that language, and who is allowed to see this person based on various geographical and contractual requirements. It then uses Cronofy to query the calendars of each qualified staff person. The catch, and to my knowledge only Cronofy makes this possible, is that staff can set rules for when they are available to provide each service. This means that Stan Staff Person can say he’s available to help people with health insurance only in the afternoons, because it takes a fair bit of time, and he wants to reserve his mornings for other work. Or Yemisi Staff Person can say she’s only available to help people with health insurance on Mondays and Wednesdays at the Fulton Street Office.All of this is invisible to the user, who just sees a simple interface where they can select a location, day, and time that works for them.With Cronofy, we found a solution that respects both personal and work commitments of staff. Staff can add their child’s soccer parent-teacher phone call at 2PM, and instantly that slot will be removed from availability so no client will accidentally book that time. This is starting to put an end to the many scheduling hacks that people have had to use over the years.Pre-COVID, we actually found that in just the first two and half months of this year, about 300 hours of administrative time were saved by introducing the new online system, and staff were able to spend more time helping people instead. Cronofy’s role in the platform is responsible for a significant portion of that. > "Cronofy seamlessly integrates with our data collection technology, without clients noticing they're interacting with anything other than our branded platform. It allows us to turn on a dime to add new features and flexibility. In the short time that we’ve been using it it has saved staff hundreds of hours of administrative work, and we expect that benefit to continue to grow." ‍ ### **Stan Lyubarskiy, Director of Quality Assurance, Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation a3nd what changed with COVID-19?** **‍**A lot changed with Covid. Covid immediately impacted so many people in so many different ways, and Restoration responded immediately. Cronofy’s flexibility and ease was pretty critical.By the end of March, 2020, it was clear that Restoration needed to provide many new temporary and emergency services, and to provide them all remotely. Developing and launching new programs is always a challenge, and technology often makes it even more difficult.The addition of video conferencing to the Cronofy API couldn’t have come at a better time for us—it’s been vital in adapting to virtual meetings and session bookings. We removed the locations feature and made everything virtual but of course one day we will need to put them back, and we can do that with minimal development time, due to Cronofy’s API. ‍ ### ‍**Thanks so much for your time, Chris. We look forward to hearing how the project continues to develop!** --- # Can Technology Help with Workplace Diversity? When companies are diverse, their employees are happier and more engaged. This means they save money on hiring, giving them more money to invest elsewhere. Diverse companies not only save money, but they earn more, too. Businesses that hire more women make, on average, 15% more than companies with fewer or no women. Businesses that are culturally diverse earn 35% more than companies that aren’t. And yet the lack of diversity in business is still an issue. When companies are diverse, their employees are happier and more engaged. This means they save money on hiring, giving them more money to invest elsewhere. Diverse companies not only save money, but they earn more, too. Businesses that hire more women make, on average, 15% more than companies with fewer or no women. Businesses that are culturally diverse earn 35% more than companies that aren’t. And yet the lack of diversity in business is still an issue. When companies are diverse, their employees are happier and more engaged. This means they save money on hiring, giving them more money to invest elsewhere. Diverse companies not only save money, but they earn more, too. [Businesses that hire more women](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nazbeheshti/2019/01/16/10-timely-statistics-about-the-connection-between-employee-engagement-and-wellness/#7db3b1322a03) make, on average, 15% more than companies with fewer or no women. Businesses that are culturally diverse earn 35% more than companies that aren’t. And yet the lack of diversity in business is still an issue. According to research conducted by TNG in 2018, 73% of people believe that they’ve been discriminated against when applying for a job. Criteria include: age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, appearance, weight, and health. That’s a whole lot of ways we can be judged, both consciously and unconsciously. Technology – when built and implemented correctly – can help to eliminate this. It can even teach us more about diversity. From hiring right through to exit interviews, technology can help you build more diverse, more successful teams. ## Writing job descriptions Job descriptions are the first thing candidates see. They’re often someone’s first impression of your company. Get it wrong, and you exclude candidates just in how you describe responsibilities or the company itself. We don’t realize it, but [many of the words that we use are gendered](https://www.recruitmentgrapevine.com/content/article/2019-03-29-women-are-30-less-likely-to-get-called-for-an-interview-than-men). ‘Lead’, for example, is seen as masculine, while ‘train’ is feminine. We don’t consciously notice these differences, but they affect how we feel and whether we decide to apply for a role. That’s why tools like [Textio](https://textio.com) are important. They pick up on these subconsciously gendered words and phrases we use so that we can avoid using them when writing job descriptions. They grade the gendered words in a job description and offer neutral alternatives so that the role will appeal to the most qualified candidate, whatever their gender identity. Cisco, one of Textio’s users, has seen a [10% increase in female applicants](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/09/textio-helping-cisco-atlassian-improve-workforce-diversity.html) since using Textio. Its time to hire has gone down, too. Atlassian, meanwhile, used to have 10% of its technical roles filled by women. Women now make up 22.9% of its technical roles. ## Filtering candidates We’ve all heard about how AI can filter through resumes. You might use an ATS that does this yourself. Filtering them in this way is not only faster, but it also helps to eliminate recruiter bias. This ensures that the right people are put through to the interview process, not just someone who fits the idea in the hiring manager’s head. However, this type of software is still open to bias. Hiring managers often enter criteria or keywords into the software that they’re looking for on resumes. While this is usually geared toward skill sets, there’s nothing stopping them from including other criteria too, such as where a person studied. It may also fall foul to gendered language in the same way as job descriptions can. ## Interviewing process AI Robot Vera has been conducting interviews since last year on behalf of [PepsiCo](https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252438788/PepsiCo-hires-robots-to-interview-job-candidates).[Tengai](https://www.tng.se/tengai) takes this a step further. It's a robot interviewer that incorporates AI. The idea is to help with the early stages of the recruitment process, before candidates meet a human interviewer. This saves hiring managers time during the hiring process while also improving the quality of hires. Interviews can also be conducted using virtual reality. This allows candidates to be interviewed on an even footing – they can be given the same appearance, then placed in a series of scenarios they’d face on a typical working day. They’re then assessed on their skills alone. Technology can also help to conduct interviews with candidates that cannot attend in-person because of mobility or care issues. With employment so high, it’s important that businesses don’t confine themselves to one place – or a person's availability to attend an interview in person – to fulfill a role. ## Working environment and equipment One area that technology really excels is when it comes to the equipment we use in the workplace. For those of us that are differently abled, technology can be the difference between us being able to take a role or having to turn it down. Back pain costs the US economy billions every year. Motorized height-adjustable desks are one way to avoid the[ 13 million days off taken every year because of back pain](https://www.hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/wellbeing-news/back-pain-causing-3-million-people-take-time-off-work/57123). They’re also beneficial for people with long-term back pain that can’t stand up all day and lack the strength in their arms or hands to use a desk that requires them to adjust the height manually. Elevators can also make a huge difference for anyone with chronic pain or in a wheelchair. Even if a wheelchair-using employee works on the ground floor, they may still need access to upper floors for meetings. Failing to provide them with an elevator limits the number of meeting rooms they have access to, which could delay important meetings for simple accessibility reasons. Providing employees with laptops instead of desktops can also help those with chronic illnesses. Should they have a day where they’re unable to make it into the office, they can still work from home. Allowing employees to work from home reduces the average number of sick days an employee takes from [2.6 days to 2.4 days a year](https://workplaceinsight.net/home-workers-take-less-sick-days-than-office-based-colleagues/). In the UK alone, sickness absence is estimated to cost employers £29 billion a year. Anything companies can do to decrease this cost will save them money in the short- and long-term. Adaptive equipment such as alternative mice and keyboards are also available for those that can’t use the traditional equipment provided. As someone who used to get RSI and back pain in her previous role but no longer suffers from it despite spending longer at a computer than I used to, I can attest to how much of a difference the right equipment can make. ## Taking time out The traditional one-hour lunch break doesn’t suit everyone. Some people need to take breaks throughout the day instead. For instance, someone who needs to take prayer breaks can block these times out in their calendars so that teammates don’t accidentally schedule a meeting for during this time. Women who need a private room to pump their breastmilk could reserve rooms where they can do this privately if one isn’t already available for them to use. Employees who have Apple Watches can use the reminders it sends to ensure that they move about regularly. They can use this break to make a coffee, get some fresh air, or walk around the block to stretch their legs. All these activities ensure that employees aren’t stuck at their desks all day, helping to prevent lower back pain becoming an issue. ## Employee training It’s important to teach employees how to deal with the different scenarios they may experience. VR training can teach team members how to handle troublesome customers or colleagues. It can also teach them what is and isn’t appropriate conduct. For example, it could show employees a set of scenarios. They can then discuss why and why this isn’t appropriate so they know what to do if they're faced with the situation in real life. Chatbots can conduct similar training, helping to educate employees about diversity practices. They can then collate the data to inform future training and discover areas in which the company needs to improve. ## Getting and receiving employee feedback Employee feedback is one of the best ways for businesses to be held accountable in their diversity practices. Sending regular feedback questionnaires to everyone within the company helps HR teams to see if diversity policies are being followed through. A tool such as [FourEyes](https://getfoureyes.com/) can be used to create the questionnaire then use AI to analyze the data for any patterns. This saves HR teams hours of time aggregating data or setting up formulas and macros in Excel. Employee feedback can also be collected after onboarding and exit interviews to search for ways that the company can improve. Over time, the data can be collated to look for recurring patterns such as how often someone leaves a particular role or department. Technology can also be used to create spaces for employees to report inappropriate behavior. Allowing this to be done via a chatbot takes away the self-consciousness that can come with talking about sensitive issues in person. HR teams may then receive more detail on the issue, which means they’re in a better position to deal with what happened. ## Conclusion There’s no denying that, as humans, we’re prone to bias. So long as the technology around us isn’t programmed by people that are equally biased, it’s one of the best ways for us to ensure that our workplaces are welcoming for everyone, no matter what their background is. How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? [Find out in our interview scheduling survey.](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019) --- # Here’s why candidate churn means your HR Tech customers will churn, too Have your users complained about candidate drop off? It's not about fit or interest. It's about how long it takes to get an interview on the calendar. See why embedding meeting scheduling inside your application could become your secret weapon to retaining customers. Have your users complained about candidate drop off? It's not about fit or interest. It's about how long it takes to get an interview on the calendar. See why embedding meeting scheduling inside your application could become your secret weapon to retaining customers. Your customers are losing candidates in the interview process. Not because the candidates aren't qualified or interested, but simply because scheduling an interview takes too long. Most HR Tech platforms treat this as a candidate experience problem. But for your business, candidate attrition is a customer retention problem. Here’s why disjointed interview scheduling could be the biggest Achilles’ heel for your HR Tech platform: How candidate drop-off is costing you retention Research from Cronofy found that 41% of candidates have already dropped out of the recruitment process when it took too long to schedule an interview. Another 50% say they won't recommend or engage with a brand again after a frustrating interview booking experience. When your customer's candidate pipeline leaks, they don't blame their own process. Instead, they think of all of the wasted admin hours — hiring managers who were double booked, candidates who accepted another offer while waiting three days for interview times, and the hours their recruiters spent playing calendar tetris to find availability. This will come up in renewal conversations, either with your customer or behind your back. ## Your customers could be shopping around for an end-to-end solution Teams that want to be efficient in 2026 won’t be using platforms that force them to use external scheduling links, or that are unable handle availability for multi-person panel interviews with ease. Although it looks basic on the surface, interview co-ordination is one of the biggest time drains for hiring teams, and if your platform isn’t cutting time-to-schedule down to a few clicks, you’re at risk of them looking for the next best thing. ## Bolting on scheduling solutions on top of your platform is making things worse The obvious fix for hiring teams is adding on a scheduling integration, but this puts your platform at risk. Both recruiters are candidates are clicking away and the co-ordination experience becomes fragmented between your tool, their calendar, emails, and external tools like Calendly that fall apart when it comes to anything more than 1:1 interviews. The result? Your platform loses stickiness, and teams are left to tab-hop, chase availability, and lose context on roles. Embedded scheduling could be your secret retention weapon By embedding scheduling infrastructure directly into their hiring workflows, you can create a seamless end-to-end experience. Here’s how: [Cronofy's embedded scheduling solution](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/hr-tech) keeps candidates and recruiters inside your platform's experience. Gone are the external links, context switching, and abandoned booking flows. The infrastructure handles what breaks at scale: coordinating multiple interviewers across different calendar systems, calculating time zones automatically, sending confirmation and reminders, and last-minute changes. [Meeting Agents](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/meeting-agents) add another layer of support, cutting down more admin work for recruiters by automatically transcribing interviews. Your platform gets the data layer it needs to power features like interview quality scoring and automated feedback, providing an end-to-end experience. For your customers, this means candidates move through the interview process faster, and saves time for hiring teams: - Recruiters spend less time on admin - Hiring managers see fewer scheduling conflicts - Hiring teams get back more time to source candidates and create a better candidate experience When Business Draft embedded Cronofy's scheduling API directly into their ATS, they saw a 70% reduction in administrative tasks for their users and a massive reduction in no-show rates. More importantly, scheduling became a differentiator that strengthened their customer satisfaction and retention. #### Prevent candidate drop-off and learn more about [scheduling for HR Tech here](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/hr-tech). > Since launching with Cronofy, it has drastically helped our customer base. Some of them have reduced up to 70% time spent on manual tasks, and a large portion of that comes from scheduling. — Ty Peck, CEO, Business Draft ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # Seamless, automatic time management with JobAdder Industry-leading recruitment software provider JobAdder is dedicated to optimizing hiring processes everywhere by providing a unique user-friendly service with innovative features and clever integrations. Industry-leading recruitment software provider JobAdder is dedicated to optimizing hiring processes everywhere by providing a unique user-friendly service with innovative features and clever integrations. **Industry-leading recruitment software provider ****[JobAdder](https://jobadder.com/)**** is dedicated to optimizing hiring processes everywhere by providing a unique user-friendly service with innovative features and clever integrations.** Using JobAdder, recruiters can do everything from implementing job portals to managing customer relationships all from one convenient location. One important element of the service is giving customers the ability to seamlessly sync tasks in JobAdder with their own native calendar of choice. To achieve this, JobAdder employed the use of the Cronofy API. ## How it works Cronofy can be activated with ease in JobAdder’s ‘Apps & Add Ons’ section, enabling users to schedule tasks from within JobAdder that will automatically be populated into their external calendar. On initial authorization, JobAdder uses Cronofy’s ‘[List Calendars](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/#calendars)‘ functionality to allow users to select the calendar they wish their JobAdder Tasks to be synced to. The CRUD operations on calendar events ensures JobAdder Tasks are synced with those in the user’s calendar. > Cronofy’s adaptability and simplicity is very appealing. JobAdder teams received great support and training when setting up the Exchange Service integration, which was greatly appreciated! Cronofy also does not require a lot of maintenance after set up, which is hugely beneficial. — Sarah Lee, Digital Marketing Specialist, JobAdder Ultimately, Cronofy creates a link between a JobAdder user’s main workspace and their nominated external calendar that allows users to better manage their workflow and to benefit from efficient automatic time management as a result. Calendar notes are created automatically in real-time from within JobAdder and as Cronofy is compatible with all email providers, users don’t have to think twice once it’s set up. Automatic task scheduling features prevent double handling and eliminate the potential for human error involved in managing calendar notes, ensuring that the appointments of recruiters, employers and jobseekers run smoothly. JobAdder’s extended functionality through its integration with Cronofy allows it to offer even more value to its customers and ensures a competitive edge in the demanding recruitment software market. > At JobAdder, we pride ourselves on simplicity and accessibility and look for similar attributes in any integration we choose to provide to our clients. When we evaluated Cronofy as a potential calendar integration, we found it to be an extremely user-friendly and effective solution to help us connect JobAdder tasks with the user’s external calendar. Since partnering with Cronofy, our clients have found it to be easy to set up and a great “set and forget” feature. Cronofy is an excellent value add to our clients who constantly move between using JobAdder and their external calendar during their day, improving their overall workflow. We have found that Cronofy helps us to achieve what we aim to do for recruitment professionals all over the world: to alleviate a lot of the manual administrative tasks associated with recruitment. Integrating with partners like Cronofy who make the process seamless also reduces the number of questions and issues that get raised to our Support team, which results in a win-win situation for everyone. — Erin Chmelik, Product Manager, JobAdder ### Give your service JobAdder’s slick efficiency If you’re a developer, [sign up for free](https://app.cronofy.com/session/new) and begin coding straight away. If you’re a product owner or just generally interested in learning more about Cronofy and how it’s used, please get in touch via the button below. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # How to overcome the challenges of managing a remote or distributed team Business leaders across the world are currently looking after their teams from afar. Many are now in a position they haven’t found themselves in before. Business leaders across the world are currently looking after their teams from afar. Many are now in a position they haven’t found themselves in before. Most likely not by choice, managers and business leaders across the world are currently looking after their teams from afar. Many managers are now in a position they haven’t found themselves in before. What’s different? Probably almost everything. Like with anything new or unknown, managers will need support and guidance. There’s no end of advice on what employees need in this situation but a lot of this advice seems to ignore that managers are employees too! It’s not an easy transition for employees - managers and non-managers alike. Whether people are used to working from home or usually enjoy having the occasional day away from the office, they’re bound to feel restricted and may be struggling. Striking a balance between operating business as usual and acknowledging the enormity of the current situation is the current challenge for any worker. There is wisdom to be inherited from previous testing times and some more experienced leaders may have advice or tips from surviving earlier times of business or workplace pressure – it’s worth asking them! Recognizing that people need their anxieties acknowledged and to be given support to help them achieve as much as possible in these unusual circumstances. No doubt for those who thrive in an office environment there have been some growing pains as we all adapt to the ‘new normal’. This blog post aims to call out the obstacles, issues and red flags to watch out for when managing a remote team. More importantly we will demonstrate ideas for solutions to overcome challenges and spot silver linings in the new regime of remote work, with best practices and wisdom from our team. Here is our advice for great remote management: ### **Make sure your team have what they need** Being thrust suddenly into remote work will have been easier for some companies than others and easier for some employees than others. To make the transition to working from home as comfortable as possible there are certain equipment requirements – a laptop or assistance in ferrying more bulky equipment home to set up a workstation that resembles that of the office as closely as possible. There are legal responsibilities to ensure that workers have the right equipment but just from a simple wellbeing aspect it’s important. At Cronofy we were lucky to be fairly prepared for the transition to remote work but the increased use of [video conferencing](https://www.cronofy.com/conferencing-services/) has meant we’ve invested in web cams for some of our team who didn’t quite have adequate in-built cameras to do this well. For any more than a few days at home it’s important that employees aren’t ‘slumming it’ on the sofa with just a laptop. Having a setup with a desk, screen and a good chair will also help with getting into a professional mindset in an environment that may not usually have that purpose. Make a point of asking about this regularly – requirements may come out of the woodwork as time passes. ‍ ### **Be present and available** As well as physical equipment like appropriate furniture, a monitor and computer it’s important that managers try to **be available** for any ad hoc support that may be needed. Getting the balance right here may take time. Managers are used to additional demands on their time and hopefully enjoy supporting others, but recent changes in working practice may mean that at least in the short term these demands increase. An open-door messaging policy (on Slack for example) is ideal for this. Remind team members of it - people often feel guilty asking for help and being remote just adds an additional barrier! If as a manager productivity is a concern, having ‘office hours’ where team members know they can approach for things or set up video calls is also another good solution. Interruptions are a key consideration. Unlike in an office, you can’t read the room and sense when people are trying to get their head down to focus on a project or block out time to write. Daily communication between team members about their rough plans can help with this. A virtual morning stand-up to discuss projects and requirements is a great way to get an idea of what’s on everyone’s plate for the day. Encourage team members to say if they need a chunk of time to focus on something in particular so that you know not to bug them. They might be allowed to mute chat or change their status to ‘busy’ so that others in the wider company are also aware. Sharing calendars is also even more useful when working remotely as it’s easy to see meetings or times when people have commitments. > “When in the office it’s relatively easy to spot if someone is having a bad day or might just want a chat. The situation is completely different when working remotely. This is why I have endeavoured to communicate to my team that I’ll never take their requests for catch-ups as an interruption to my day.” **Jeremy Bourhis | Head of Marketing, Cronofy** ### ‍ ‍**Communicate, communicate, communicate** Overcoming the physical distance of working remotely always has its challenges but these can be amplified for managers and teams who have not chosen this life long-term. > *“Aim for honest, consistent, and adaptive communication” * *‍***Forbes** Cronofy’s leadership team commented on the challenges of text communications and cited a variety of types of communication as a solution to this as well as extra consideration for each methods limitations. > *“Another challenge is that most of the chat on a day to day basis is now text based, and not in person. Text chat is hard, because it lacks tone and can be easily misconstrued. I’ve been making a conscious effort to add personality to chat where previously I hadn’t needed to*.” *‍***Karl Bagci | Head of Operations, Cronofy** Battling the lack of spontaneity of communication when remote can also pose an issue. It might feel unnatural to have to go out of your way to talk to someone in another team but reaching out will do wonders for your own day and almost certainly theirs! ‍ ### Collaboration and connectivity It’s well documented that people work and collaborate better when they are more personally connected to each other. This connectivity or the organic bonding that happens on team nights out or lunches can be hard to replicate and maintain with remote teams, let alone in the current climate with no access to such activities. A [Harvard study](https://www.inc.com/dana-severson/after-studying-lives-of-724-men-for-79-years-harvard-reveals-1-biggest-secret-to-success-happiness.html) conducted over 79 years proved that social connections are vital to happiness and success – both in and out of the workplace. It’s important that managers introduce ways to facilitate these relationships even when their teams are distributed. Video calls help to increase emotional connection as you can see people’s faces and there are many cool ideas such as virtual lunches, quizzes or happy hour on a Friday that have proved successful for remote teams. It could be as simple as just being more accommodating of the need for informal communication needs in existing more but usually more formal interactions though. > *“We’ve been allowing more time in meetings for them to naturally run into people talking about their personal lives. This compensates a little for the lack of natural interaction with their colleagues and again, helps the team feel more closely connected.”* *‍***Karl Bagci | Head of Operations, Cronofy** It’s an unusual situation that we’re in and the managers at Cronofy have stressed the importance of maintaining strong connectivity between the leadership team. We’ve upped the weekly management meeting touch points by adding short catchups every other morning so that company matters and policies can be addressed regularly and reactive policies can be introduced as soon as they are needed. ‍ ### Be human One of the biggest drawbacks of remote working is the lack of human contact and the difficulty in picking up on non-verbal cues. An employee might be able to ‘perform’ for formal meetings but very much be struggling behind the scenes. In an office scenario sighs, tormented expressions (or in fact those of happiness and delight) are very easy to spot and hence tune in to the mood and emotions of team members. It’s challenging but important to find new ways to be intuitive. It’s also important to be human. Whilst it’s the job of a manager to lead and encourage, honesty and vulnerability are equally valuable. Pretending everything is fine or behaving like an impenetrable superhuman may mean that team members are less likely to open up so aim for realism and share some of your struggles or frustrations whilst remaining professional. Employees will appreciate and respect their managers more if they’re truthful with them - levelling with them when they don’t have all the answers. Remember that it’s okay to say ‘I don’t know’ and seek advice. > ‍*“I consider myself a pretty upbeat person but this current situation is hard for everyone. As a manager it is important that I keep the team in good spirits but I don’t want the members of my team to feel like they can’t have a bad day. Because I also have bad days. I’ve found that sharing the highs and lows with my team has made the highs a lot more enjoyable and the lows a whole lot easier to overcome!”* *‍***Jeremy Bourhis | Head of Marketing, Cronofy** ‍ ### Trust your team Focus on results. As much as it’s important to check in with people, micromanaging is counterproductive, especially with a remote workforce. There are exceptions of course, if you just welcomed a new starter for example. Asking for an update on every single little task or criticizing the *way *that they execute things is unlikely to reap rewards and more often than not will make people less productive. Bad management is one of the biggest reasons for staff turnover. In fact 69% of people who have experienced micromanagement consider changing jobs and 39% actually leave (Trinity Solutions). The same applies for managing from afar. There’s always a fine line between good management and micromanagement – offering enough so that people have clear direction and feel supported is important but telling them how to do their job and execute every little step is overbearing and can lead to severe health problems and negatively impacts morale in employees. In a team that has built trust people are usually more committed to achieving results and while checking in regularly is important it’s vital that if results are being achieved managers don’t feel the need to constantly badger and control their teams. Now more than ever there is need for a bit of understanding and flexibility. Some days may be slower and others very productive. Some days might require overtime and other days an early finish to pop to the shops and beat the queues. Just like in an office there will be fluctuations in productivity. But added to that people are stressed, anxious, sick of being at home and may need to keep different hours or take more breaks, just to stay sane. At the end of the day if the work is being achieved and employees are available for their planned commitments then that should be enough. > “We’ve taken to home working so much better than I ever expected. I can hand on heart say that I’ve not seen any downturn in productivity in the transition to home working. We trust people to work their hours, and deliver their work - and they do, time and time again.” *‍***Karl Bagci | Head of Operations, Cronofy** There’s an important lesson here too. Considering how important this trust is when you are hiring for new roles will pay dividends down the line. When building a team it’s worth factoring ways to establish this implicit trust, even as early as the interview. ‍ ### Share learnings as best you can Whereas in an office setting if someone needs help they can just tap you on the shoulder and ask for it, with remote work these conversations tend to happen in private. Once again the onus is on managers to be mindful of this issue and ensure that as much as possible the office environment is replicated. Try to actively share learnings and problem-solving conversations so that others can benefit. It’s good practice to chat using forums that are as public as possible as a rule so that others can receive the simulation of overhearing office chat. It’s always about relevance though and is a judgement call. Having a Slack channel for minute-by-minute discussion and solutions between members of a direct team can be balanced with sharing finished items or results on a more public and companywide channel. ‍ ### Be supportive > *“The best advice I’ve had is that while we say we’re working remotely, this isn’t normal. What we’re doing is working remotely during a pandemic, and that’s different. People are at home with their partners, children, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, broken boilers and whatever else. So we need to be more patient than usual, and always be kind.”* *‍***Karl Bagci | Head of Operations, Cronofy** There’s bound to be a real mix of comfort levels amongst employees suddenly thrust into this quasi-remote working life. Some may thrive instantly then waiver as it proves longer and more tedious. Others who struggled at first might later settle into the routine but still need checking in on. The communication and frequent check-ins should be maintained with a special consideration for the extra pressures and stresses that the team might be experiencing. ‍ ### Make sure that you’re supported One of the major challenges facing managers of new remote working teams is getting the balance right between being honest and human and allowing some vulnerability to peak through in order to be relatable and approachable. On the other hand, a manager clearly stressed and overwhelmed by the entire situation will have a negative impact on their team’s wellbeing and productivity. Anxiety is a particularly contagious emotion. It’s also a very natural one at times like this. And it’s important that leaders have their own support and outlets for stress too, so they are in the strongest position to provide support for their teams. Ideally ensure that as a manager you have a balance of both a mentor figure (ideally your own manager) and peers (people on the same seniority level as you). If this can’t happen within your company, seek counsel and support elsewhere through friends or business connections that have similar roles or pressures to you. > “As a manager you are often in a situation where you need to reassure and support your team. That’s totally normal and it’s your job. What’s important is to remember that you need help sometimes too! Don’t hesitate to schedule regular catch-ups with your peers where you can share the challenges you face and find solutions together. Manage remotely but don’t manage on an island!” **Jeremy Bourhis | Head of Marketing, Cronofy** ### Stick to processes as much as possible It’s highly likely that managers and their teams will be missing physical contact and the environment of the office. Breakout areas, team brainstorms in a meeting room or monthly retrospectives are all things that perhaps we never knew we’d miss but keeping to this routines as much as possible is vital in such a volatile and changing world. So much is changing for everyone - more change if not necessary is stressful. There are many great tools that can be used to simulate these closely. Don't just add tools for the sake of it, it’s a balance. Where possible try to discover new ways of using tools that your team is already familiar with. At Cronofy we’ve enjoyed having success with some new tools like MetroRetro for collaborative brainstorms for example but also found new ways of using Whimsical for wireframing joint participation projects such as landing pages and website design in a space that multiple people can easily access. As a manager spend some time exploring existing tools but also ask the team – they may have had a good experience in a previous role and have suggestions. ### **Learn what you can** However frustrating being catapulted into this quasi-normal remote working world, there are lessons and learnings to be taken for the future of remote work policy on a company and team level. For those who weren’t prepared technologically or with the correct equipment, there’ll be a takeaway of ensuring that all employees have the flexibility to work from anywhere.This is true at company and employee level. Whatever the policy on remote work pre-COVID19 it’s undeniable that having measures in place to allow remote working even if it’s not all the time is likely to save companies money and increase productivity. A doctor’s appointment need not mean an entire lost afternoon if working from home is an option. A sick child might not mean a day off for a parent if flexibility can be offered. ‍ > “I would rather be working in the office but I’m amazed by how much I have learnt as a manager over the past few weeks. From using existing technology to fill the gaps left by remote working to encouraging more regular interactions within the team I know that Cronofy is a business that can successfully operate a fully remote model.” *‍***Jeremy Bourhis | Head of Marketing, Cronofy** It’s not all doom and gloom! While there are certainly going to be challenges in what is an undeniably alien situation for many it’s possible to find silver linings. Embrace new opportunities where you can and ask for help when needed. Some of the Cronofy team have commented on how much better they have got to know people with the higher emphasis on informal and personal chat. And although all the video meetings and calls can feel disruptive they really have proved that it’s possible to collaborate professionally and enjoy social interactions even when the workforce is spread out. --- # Compliance Centre Cronofy Compliance Center Learn how Cronofy handles Security and Compliance At Cronofy security is at the core of everything we do. Customers of the businesses that use Cronofy services have confidence that Cronofy takes their security seriously and employs best practices to ensure their privacy is never compromised. The nature of the data Cronofy handles on behalf of its clients requires security to be core to the approach to building, scaling and managing our service. As part of meeting these high standards, Cronofy has worked hard to ensure security standards are ISO 27001, 27701 & 27018 certified, as well as SOC 2 Type 2 attested. The company represents security at the highest level, with the Chief Technology Officer taking the lead on all security initiatives. The executive management team approve information security policies and standards and all employees receive training on these policies on an annual basis. Security is an integral part of the culture at Cronofy. The people who are building, scaling and managing Cronofy are fundamental to providing a secure service to our customers. We support our employees by **having a set of policies, procedures and playbooks in place, to ensure that expectation is consistently clear for all**, and the correct information is easy to find if they’re uncertain. Choose a subject to learn more **People Security** **Product Security** **Infrastructure and Network Security** **Security Compliance** --- # Rethinking Recruitment: More Coordinators Don't Always Improve Time-to-Hire See how modern teams improve time-to-hire without adding headcount. Simple, actionable steps to improve efficiency and move your team away from low value tasks and towards high value tasks. There are many scenarios where attaching people to problems creates bottlenecks, scaling up coordinator teams during high-volume hiring seasons is one. We look at why this is no longer an efficient approach and what modern teams do differently today. Many HR professionals start their careers as recruitment coordinators, and perhaps a distant memory now, you are familiar with the logistical nightmare being one is. Chase hiring managers for available times, schedule candidates, reschedule, send reminders, rinse, repeat. Primarily responsible for setting up and managing interviews through a hiring process, [recruitment coordinators](https://www.aihr.com/blog/recruiting-coordinator/#:~:text=Recruiting%20Coordinator%20career-,What%20is%20a%20Recruiting%20Coordinator?,company%20policies%20and%20legal%20requirements) are an essential piece of the talent operations puzzle. So, it’s no surprise that more coordinators are hired to share and minimize the burden as hiring volume increases. ## The bottleneck of a coordinator-driven recruitment process The traditional approach of scaling recruitment coordinators during periods of growth often creates a vicious cycle of hiring and firing coordinators to match unpredictable hiring volumes. Despite workforce planning efforts, scaling coordinators is inherently reactive– there’s no control over how quickly you close roles for new coordinator hires or how soon they can be productive. Existing coordinators drown under a growing pile of work, holding out hope for reinforcements that might not arrive in time. Worse, training new coordinators happens during a hiring storm where expectations are high. The result? A constant risk of errors and missteps, keeping your team in a cycle of operational fighting. ## What modern teams do differently Returning to your time as a recruitment coordinator, you might remember your day-to-day being mostly repetitive and uninspiring. Traditional recruitment teams accept that this - tedious, repetitive, uninspiring work - is how talent operations teams are built and a rite of passage to climb the TA/HR ladder. On the other hand, modern recruitment teams understand that technology is an enabler and lean into automation to streamline and minimize inefficiencies, empowering teams - newbies or experts, to focus on high-impact tasks. Take scheduling interviews as an example; according to Cronofy’s Candidate Expectations Report, [56%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#ae57a23ff9d5) of candidates drop out due to frustrating scheduling experiences. Additionally, [70%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#959b1c9f9206) of candidates consider the recruitment process’s smoothness a key factor in accepting offers. As Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations at [Wise](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling), explained, relying heavily on coordination teams for interview scheduling created significant administrative burdens. By automating these tasks, their team could focus on more strategic responsibilities, reducing bottlenecks and improving efficiency in the process. > Within months of going live with Cronofy, what took us 6 days to schedule an interview, now has a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise ## You are not displacing coordinators It’s natural to feel torn about fundamentally shifting how your team operates even when you recognize the dire needs. There’s a real fear of displacing the people who work tirelessly to keep interviews moving forward, adapt to changing priorities, and ensure candidates don’t get lost in the shuffle. But rethinking your process to leverage more automation doesn’t mean taking coordinators out of the picture. The real opportunity is that you can now enable them to upskill and become strategic players. When ONWA enabled interview scheduling with Cronofy, Tanya Towner, an HR coordinator at ONWA, got some time back in her day to upskill and focus on other tasks, such as giving new candidates great onboarding experiences. Read the full story [here](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/hiring-coordinator-schedules-interviews-in-30-seconds-bamboohr-cronofy). Some examples of what your coordinators could be spending their time doing include: - Partnering with recruiters to uncover insights about candidate drop-offs and inefficiencies in the pipeline - Supporting hiring managers with market data and streamlined processes to make better hiring decisions Realigning your coordinators and connecting their day-to-day to hiring outcomes ultimately improves candidate experience, time-to-offer, and future-proofs your team. ## How do you modernize your recruitment process? Start by evaluating your current processes, [identify your gaps](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/six-step-guide-to-identify-recruitment-gaps) and [prioritize impactful changes](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/time-to-change-recruitment-game-plan). Automation is an opportunity, not a threat; lean into it. Challenge yourself by asking these questions: what repetitive tasks could you eliminate? How could you enable your coordinators to deliver a better candidate experience? Being a great talent leader today means caring about the fundamentals again and guiding your team through change to achieve the results you want. Want to see how interview scheduling automation with Cronofy can improve your time-to-hire? [Reserve a team demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Switching interview scheduling tools? Here’s what you need to know Your recruitment process is only as strong as the tools behind it. Explore what makes a vendor stand out and how to navigate the switch without hurting your reputation at work. Blog Post 2024-09-16T08:00:00.000Z --- ### Hiring coordinator now schedules interviews in 30 seconds from within BambooHR See how a hiring coordinator from ONWA now schedules interviews in 30 seconds using Cronofy within BambooHR, and learn more about how she was able to upskill thanks to claiming back hours from manual administrative work. Case Study --- # Thanks for contacting Cronofy # Thanks for getting in touch! Schedule a time to talk below. [Schedule your call now](https://app.cronofy.com/pls/YpnZ-VK2) In the meantime, you might be interested in: ### 5 AI Features You Can't Build Without Meeting Data Meetings are a goldmine of information that gives your SaaS platform's AI the capability to produce intelligent insights. We dive into the world of CRMs to see what kinds of data you need in order to build key AI features that stick. Blog Post 2026-01-21T12:24:50.855Z --- ### Introducing Cronofy Meeting Agents: From Scheduling to Insights See how Cronofy is helping product teams go beyond scheduling and turn every meeting into a source of structured, actionable insight. Webinar 2025-11-05T16:00:00.000Z --- ### 5 ways SaaS platforms can use meeting data to power AI features Meeting data rarely flows into SaaS platforms - users rely on standalone notetakers, and the insights end up elsewhere. When transcripts, recordings, and summaries flow directly into your product, they let you build AI features that weren't possible before. Here are five ways to put that data to work. Blog Post 2026-02-11T13:43:31.851Z --- # Coordinate meetings inside your product From scheduling and rescheduling to capturing outcomes and triggering actions, power every step of meetings as they happen. ## Coordinate the full meeting lifecycle inside your product Let users schedule meetings, record calls, generate AI summaries, and trigger follow-up actions in your product without needing to build or maintain complex calendar and conferencing integrations yourself. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) ## Scheduling is just the start of what your product needs to manage Attendees change, meetings are rescheduled, and what happens during them needs to be captured and acted on. Without a unified system, scheduling, updates, and outcomes are split across tools, leaving crucial steps and data out of sync. Cronofy manages the full lifecycle, so your product can move from scheduling through to action without the burden of building complex workflows yourself. Calendars and availability ## Connect users' calendars and keep their availability in sync Cronofy handles authorization, permissions, and ongoing updates across providers for you through a managed authorization flow, branded for your application. Whether users connect with full Read-Write access, or choose a Free/Busy only connection, you get reliable, real-time availability in your product without engineering overhead or sync issues. [Read the availability docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/) Integrated conferencing ## Automatically provision conferencing links Let users schedule meetings with conferencing details included automatically, whether using Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or other providers. Ensure every meeting is ready to happen, without manual setup or missing links. [Read the conferencing docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/conferencing-services/) Rescheduling ## Keep track of meetings as they change Handle rescheduling, cancellations, and participant updates automatically. Ensure calendars, conferencing, and attendees stay in sync and significantly reduce no-shows for users. [Read the events docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/calendars-events/) Meeting intelligence ## Capture what happens in every meeting Record meetings, generate transcripts and AI summaries, and capture structured data across platforms. Remove the need for manual note-taking or external tools and enable your product to trigger follow-ups, updates, and workflows based on meeting outcomes. [Learn about Meeting Agents](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/managed-availability/) Agentic Workflows ## Let agents coordinate and act across the lifecycle Give AI-agents the context they need to manage meeting workflows on your users behalf. From coordination to follow-up, meetings can be managed end-to-end without human intervention. [See the MCP docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/mcp-server/) ## Choose an integration path With human support and clear developer documentation, get started quickly with the best option for your platform and combine approaches as you scale. ### Need full control? Build custom meeting workflows with our API. --- ### Want to launch fast? Embed scheduling with a pre-built UI. --- ### Building with Agents? Handle agentic workflows with our MCP server. ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) > It was either going to take us stopping everything that we were doing to build a significantly more robust calendar integration, or to find someone that can do this for us. When we came across Cronofy, we realised we’ve been looking for something like this. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer, Heal.me ## Powering time for over 180,000 companies Ship with confidence without increasing operational risk. ### Compliance built-in GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO certified. Unlock regulated markets while building trust. --- ### Regional deployments Data stays in-region with data centres across the US, UK, EU, and APAC. --- ### Reliability at scale High-availability infrastructure with 99.99% uptime, even when providers fail. ## Replace fragmented integrations with one system Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure is the foundation for every meeting workflow, bringing together availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence in one modular system. At the core is the Temporal Grid, built on decades of experience handling the hardest parts of meeting workflows. It unifies calendars, availability, conferencing, meeting data, and compliance, taking away the complexity of building the underlying infrastructure yourself, so every capability you build with feels simple and intuitive from day one. Because everything runs on the same grid, you can power the full meeting lifecycle from day one, or start with the capability you need today and grow into richer workflows and agent-driven automation over time on the same foundation. [See all capabilities](/home) ## Launch faster and build products users stick with From startups to enterprise platforms, teams use Cronofy to launch embedded scheduling experiences faster. ### Ship meeting workflows faster Skip the complexity and launch faster with pre-built capabilities, while your team stays focused on what makes your product different. --- ### Power native experiences Ship experiences that keep users inside your platform, not bouncing between external tools, so workflows stay connected and consistent. --- ### Stay reliable as you scale Handle edge cases and provider downtime automatically, so workflows continue to run smoothly as your product scales. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) ## Powering SaaS applications of all sizes ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- # The Judge Group is transforming interview scheduling The Judge Group is an international professional services firm, specializing in recruitment and staffing services who are transforming interview scheduling with Cronofy. The Judge Group is an international professional services firm, specializing in recruitment and staffing services who are transforming interview scheduling with Cronofy. The Judge Group is an international professional services firm, specializing in recruitment and staffing services but with expertise in learning and consulting. They operate across the US, Canada and India from over 30 locations and 50 Fortune 100 companies use their services. Founded in 1970, The Judge Group has been operating for over 50 years. 32 years ago, they were a small staffing firm with sales around $1m a year - they set out on a growth journey and haven't looked back since! Headquartered outside suburban Philadelphia, the company has gone from strength to strength, evolving into a $500 million professional services company with a total workforce of 5,000. They still have a staffing component, but have expanded to offer training, have an information technology consulting practice and operate across three different countries. The ambitious firm plans to double in size over the next seven years. ## **The Challenge** The Judge Group were in the process of moving their email operations to the cloud and reviewing their efficiency. They were busy and had lots of work and despite how hard the pandemic hit the recruitment industry; they were growing.. Maintaining productivity was crucial. This led them to evaluate areas where time and money could be saved. The expression ‘minutes mean millions’ came to mind. With a large team of recruiters reaching out to candidates, thousands of hours were being invested in email back and forth, chasing candidates and hiring managers and trying to coordinate meetings and interviews. It was around this time that the CIO, Ken Krieger, started to notice lots of messages in emails offering for people to book time in someone’s calendar to meet. He realized the time-saving opportunity and approached his team. He discovered that many of their recruiters on the ground had already realized the opportunity for improvement, and employed their own solutions. Many of the team members were already using off-the-shelf scheduling tools which they had signed up for independently. The Judge Group saw a potential issue for compliance and data being compromised, as well as consistency in their service. Security and privacy was a big concern for the company, and maintaining the data securely could only be achieved using a centrally adopted tool that the company had control over. The Judge Group embrace technology and are committed to using it to improve their processes and efficiency - as well as the experience for their clients and candidates. ‍ At any given time the company is dealing with 8 million applicants, so it sparked the idea to improve the way that they schedule interviews and explore the benefits that using a tool for this purpose would bring to the business. Judge Group explored a few different options, doing their due diligence and involving their Security Officer to ensure that compliance and high standards required for the data protection needs were met. ## The Solution After exploring several solutions they weren’t satisfied with the approach to security on offer and the ability to accommodate at the scale they required. While in conversations with a vendor who they were discussing a separate project with, they were told about Cronofy. The Judge Group had a need for a tool that could accommodate a high volume of users and Cronofy was able to deliver on that front. They also liked the way the relationship felt like a partnership from the get go. > What stood out was that I felt from the very first conversation I had a direct relationship, we felt like we had some input. What I found with Cronofy is before we were customer, as a customer, and after we've been a customer, they’ve treated us the same. We felt like we were being listened to. And that meant something. — Ken Krieger, Executive Vice President, Judge Group Cronofy were also able to provide ‘sold-out’ introductory sessions on the Scheduler for blocks of 200 of the team at a time, over zoom - an important factor in the internal buy-in and adoption of the tool. The Judge Group liked that the Scheduler was easy to use and one thing that helped them to make the final choice was the addition of a permanent booking link feature to the product so their team had the flexibility to offer a personalized booking experience when appropriate but people in certain roles could also add a link to their footer and allow people to book in as and when they needed to. Always safe in the knowledge that the personalized availability rules would ensure team members kept full control of their calendars and schedules. > The Scheduler is a feature rich product. And every one of our objections was solved within a week or so in terms of new development. It's something that from an ease of use standpoint - it's very easy to use. And in terms of the common use cases, I think it’s really well thought out. — Ken Krieger, Executive Vice President, Judge Group Implementation was also something that happened quickly. Something The Judge Group attributes to “probably a combination of having smart people on both sides”. Using Cronofy’s documentation, as well as through close collaboration, The Judge Group’s Engineering Manager coordinated delivery with our Engineering and Support teams, and delivered the integration in under two weeks. Currently they have around 800 staff members using the tool with plans to increase this in the coming months. > In the recruitment industry, which contracted by around 17% as a result of the pandemic, The Judge Group are going from strength to strength - our adoption of technology and partnerships with businesses like Cronofy has contributed a big part in us maintaining that efficiency and momentum. — Ken Krieger, Executive Vice President, Judge Group Cronofy are very excited about the beginning of this partnership and we can’t wait to see how The Judge Group will continue to add scheduling to their existing processes. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # A Recruiter's Guide to AI and Automation Lead the AI transformation in your recruiting organization. Discover how TA leaders are using AI and Automation to streamline hiring, reduce recruiter workload, and enhance candidate experience without losing the human touch. ## A Recruiter's Guide to AI and Automation Lead the AI transformation in your recruiting organization. Discover how TA leaders are using AI and Automation to streamline hiring, reduce recruiter workload, and enhance candidate experience without losing the human touch. [Download Guide](#form-c5d9e832-b34f-42ba-963f-48146667f981) ## Are your recruiters drowning in applications? You are not alone. - **Talent Acquisition teams are doing more with less:** AI and Automation can help, but only if implemented effectively. - **Candidates expect a seamless experience:** 81% still value human touch, so striking the right balance is key. Get the intel on how top TA teams navigate AI and Automation to accelerate hiring productivity. **How 12,000+ candidates use AI** And what hiring teams can do about it **Where to use AI in hiring** From interview scheduling to offers **Discover what actually works** and what's just noise **How leading teams automate interview scheduling ** Streamlined interview scheduling inside your ATS --- # Perfectly synchronized online bookings with Appointedd Appointedd is an intelligent booking software that uses Cronofy to automatically ensure no user receives an appointment that clashes with another. Appointedd is an intelligent booking software that uses Cronofy to automatically ensure no user receives an appointment that clashes with another. **[Appointedd](http://appointedd.com)**** provides a gorgeous online booking and CRM service for businesses. It enables their customers to take bookings on their website, Facebook page or through a branded microsite.** **‍**They give their customers a great online booking experience, but they wanted to make it more than just great. Most online booking platforms require their users to manually maintain their availability to ensure their customers aren't making bookings when they're not available. By synchronizing availability from their customers' calendars with their online booking platform, Appointedd automatically removes slots as soon as something is booked in. So be it a booking they've made manually, a business meeting, or something more personal, their customers know that if it's in their calendar, they won't receive a booking that clashes. ## How it works They do this by using Cronofy’s [Push Notification service](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/#push-notifications) to notify their platform of any changes to their customers’ calendars. Rather than having to poll their customers’ calendars, the Appointedd platform is notified any time a customer changes something in their calendar. This makes the functionality simple to build and inexpensive to run. ‍ And it’s not just about availability. Appointedd can also push bookings directly into their customers’ calendars the moment they are made, putting the information their users need right where they need it the most. ‍ The [Event Creation service](https://www.cronofy.com/developers/api/#upsert-event) allows them to insert bookings into their customers calendars and keep them up to date. Like all of our customers, the real business benefit comes from being able to do this for all calendar services through one API. You don’t have to build and maintain integrations to all of the calendar services your customers could be using. Instead, Appointedd focuses on delivering an exemplary booking and CRM experience and lets Cronofy deal with the complexities of calendar integration. > The integration with Cronofy has been a fantastic value add to our clients. Often, our customers run their whole business on Appointedd, so being able to fully synchronise their Appointedd calendar with their personal calendar means they can manage their time most efficiently. ‍ The two-way synchronization means that they never have to duplicate any work, and their whole life is managed in one place – so whether it’s an important meeting, a customer appointment or their child’s birthday party, they know that Appointedd and Cronofy have them covered. ‍ The integration itself was a straightforward project and the lines of communication were open between our two development teams. The API is well documented, and the technology itself is super powerful. We would recommend an API integration with Cronofy to anyone looking to hook external calendar functionality to their app. — Leah Hutcheon, Founder and CEO, Appointedd ### Make your scheduling as seamless as Appointedd's If you're a developer, [sign up for free](https://app.cronofy.com/session/new) and begin coding straight away.If you're a product owner or just generally interested in learning more about Cronofy and how it's used, please get in touch by via the link below. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # How to Measure the ROI from Your HR Software This is a guest post by Dave Foxall. Just to establish the obvious: you didn’t buy your new HRMS as a pleasing ornament, nor as a way of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ – you bought a new HRMS as a business investment and as such, you hope for (need!) to see a return on that investment. Maybe that return is purely financial, including reduced HR costs and overheads, or perhaps you’re looking for greater efficiency – the most popular reason for implementing HR tech cited in a recent survey from Software Path. But if you want to prove that return – to a doubtful C-suite, perhaps – you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and measure it. This is a guest post by Dave Foxall. Just to establish the obvious: you didn’t buy your new HRMS as a pleasing ornament, nor as a way of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ – you bought a new HRMS as a business investment and as such, you hope for (need!) to see a return on that investment. Maybe that return is purely financial, including reduced HR costs and overheads, or perhaps you’re looking for greater efficiency – the most popular reason for implementing HR tech cited in a recent survey from Software Path. But if you want to prove that return – to a doubtful C-suite, perhaps – you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and measure it. *This is a guest post by Dave Foxall. *Just to establish the obvious: you didn’t buy your new HRMS as a pleasing ornament, nor as a way of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ – you bought a new HRMS as a business investment and as such, you hope for (need!) to see a return on that investment. Maybe that return is purely financial, including reduced HR costs and overheads, or perhaps you’re looking for greater efficiency – the most popular reason for implementing HR tech cited in a recent survey from [Software Path](https://softwarepath.com/guides/hris-report). But if you want to prove that return – to a doubtful C-suite, perhaps – you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and measure it. ## Benefits of measuring HRMS ROI Calculating ROI is no five-minute task and it’s as well to be clear on why you’re investing yet more time and resources in measuring the effectiveness of an investment in time and resources. [Measure HRMS ROI](https://www.hrmsworld.com/why-measuring-hrms-roi-improves-your-hr-department-s-functionality.html) and you’ll get: - Confirmation that your original HRMS business was sound (or not). - An up to date benchmark on the efficiency of your HR processes. - Feedback on the selection and implementation of your HRMS. - A steer on your future HR technology strategy. ## Start before you begin The first step is to go back to before you started seriously looking for the right HRMS. You had a business case that justified the time and expense. That outlined the expected benefits and improvements. Whether those benefits were in terms of cost, efficiency or resources, the business case points you towards the data you need to gather and analyze as part of your ROI exercise. Examples of the kind of data that may be relevant include: - The flow of HR transactions - Specific HR processes - Employee engagement - Changes to HR expenditure - Management time spent on HR ## What did your HRMS actually cost? Once you know what data to look for and where, you can begin calculating and the first step is to know exactly what you spent. The [total cost of ownership for a HRMS](https://www.hrmsworld.com/hrms-cost-and-budget-guide) includes: - The ticket price – either a license fee or regular pay-as-you-go installments to the vendor. - Implementation – staff time (project team and meetings, stakeholder groups, etc.), user training, possibly HRMS consultancy fees, any hardware/storage costs (if on-site). - Maintenance – the vendor’s maintenance/support package, other contracted ‘extras’, staffing costs for anyone involved in keeping the HRMS up and running). - Upgrades – the cost of keeping the system up to date. ## What did you get for your time and money? Going back to your HRMS business case and the project goals, and the data sources you identified as reflecting any improvements, assess what benefits have accrued. Possibilities include a boost to HR performance KPIs, time savings, an impact on [employee retention](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/reduce-employee-churn-rate/) and/or turnover, faster or more efficient HR transactions, better staff engagement (either overall or in relation to specific HR activities), or possibly fewer sanctions or penalties for non-compliance with labor laws. ## The $64,000 question: was it worth it? Did you save or gain more than you spent? Remember, not all savings and gains will be in monetary terms so in the case of, for example, improved employee engagement, you need to make a decision as to whether the investment was worth it. Similarly, even if your savings outweigh your expenses, is it by enough to have made the whole project worthwhile? And if your HRMS seems to have cost you more than the value of its benefits, what can you learn from that if you’re not to repeat the experience on other projects? Of course, in a few hundred words or so words, this is inevitably a broad brush look at HRMS ROI. To drill down to the next level, take a look at this [HRMS ROI guide](https://specialreports.hrmsworld.com/how-to-calculate-hrms-roi-in-5-simple-steps/). Dave has worked as HR Manager for the Ministry of Justice for a number of years, he now writes on a broad range of topics including jazz music, and, of course, the HRMS software market for HRMS World. --- # Cronofy brings streamlined interview scheduling for hiring teams using Paycor Cronofy, a leading provider of embedded scheduling infrastructure for HR technology, is partnering with Paycor, a leading provider of human capital management (HCM) software. This new partnership is set to bring Cronofy’s automated interview scheduling capabilities directly into Paycor’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) solution, empowering hiring teams to schedule candidates at speed and scale, all without leaving their Paycor window. Cronofy is set to bring streamlined scheduling to Paycor users through a new partnership. Read on to see how this new integration will be a game-changer for teams who want to co-ordinate interviews at scale all without leaving their Paycor window, and how Cronofy is already saving hiring teams hundreds of hours. Cronofy, a leading provider of embedded scheduling infrastructure for HR technology, is partnering with Paycor, a leading provider of human capital management (HCM) software. This new partnership is set to bring Cronofy’s automated interview scheduling capabilities directly into Paycor’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) solution, empowering hiring teams to schedule candidates at speed and scale, all without leaving their Paycor window. ## How will the partnership work? By plugging in Cronofy’s scheduling with a simple integration into their ATS, Paycor users will eliminate delays from back-and-forth interview co-ordination for both candidates and talent teams. Cronofy is already saving hundreds of hours for talent acquisition teams like [Wise](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling), who took scheduling complex interviews from 6 days to 90 minutes inside their ATS. With Cronofy, candidates can easily self-book interviews at times that suit them best using real-time interviewer availability, drastically reducing waiting times and streamlining the hiring process. ## Who is this integration made for? This integration will be a game-changer for teams who want to co-ordinate interviews at scale, without adding even more tools that take them away from their ATS and take months to implement. From simple 1:1s to multi-person interviews, recruiters will now be able coordinate interviews end-to-end all inside Paycor. Regardless of interview type or complexity, companies using Cronofy inside Paycor will be able to deliver a smooth self-serve booking experience to candidates using real-time availability. This also enables HR leaders to reduce time-to-hire and get even more value out of Paycor, without adding new separate systems or increasing headcount. ## Why Paycor and Cronofy are at the cusp of hiring innovation Paycor joins a growing number of ATS & HRIS platforms already partnering with Cronofy to power interview scheduling for their product. This new partnership underscores both companies’ commitment to innovation and efficiency in talent acquisition. Through its API, Cronofy gives product teams the building blocks to embed scheduling features quickly and reliably, without derailing roadmaps or firefighting brittle integrations. This enables HR tech platforms like Paycor to deliver in-product scheduling experiences that keep users and candidates engaged, while freeing up product and engineering teams to focus on delivering the innovations that really set their platform apart. Talent acquisition teams will be able to get a preview of how scheduling with Cronofy works at the Cronofy (#3217) or Paycor booth (#3719) at HR Tech Vegas, September 16-18, 2025, remotely with Cronofy’s team, or on [Paycor’s marketplace](https://marketplace.paycor.com/en-US/apps/582563/cronofy). The integration is set to be rolled out to Paycor users in Q4 of 2025. [Learn more](/interview-scheduling-in-paycor) ### Help Interviewers Share Availability Faster We’ve made enhancements that give interviewers more control over their time commitments and reduce manual effort for recruiters. You can now also use Separate Invites in templates, and we’ve added the ability to regenerate public links with a single click. Blog Post 2025-05-30T10:29:00.000Z --- ### How time-to-schedule is impacting your time-to-hire You've heard of time-to-hire as one of the most widely used metrics in the recruitment industry. But do you measure your time-to-schedule? It could be having a detrimental effect on your hiring. Blog Post 2023-11-30T11:26:00.000Z --- ### Workflow Automation with AI: New Tech, Same Problems There's an exciting opportunity to automate business workflows with AI agents, but is it that straightforward? Cronofy's CEO Adam Bird breaks down the right (and wrong) scenarios to implement these tools. Blog Post 2025-02-27T12:42:18.774Z --- # Interview scheduling alternative to Prelude Considering Prelude alternatives? Use Cronofy's calendar and scheduling APIs and SDKs for GCal, Outlook, Apple and Microsoft calendar integrations, integrate today. ## Saying goodbye to Prelude? Enjoy what you loved about Prelude but get more. Scheduling features and flexibility for greater control over your interview scheduling processes and workflows. [Talk to a migration specialist](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) **Schedule technical interviews** **Book into busy calendars** **Schedule on behalf of others ** **Rotate interviewers** ## Why customers are migrating from Prelude to Cronofy Interview Scheduling Specialists ## Schedule Single and Group Interviews Whether it's a technical interview or panel interview, Cronofy transforms your scheduling routine from mundane to magic — taking both candidate and interviewer availability into consideration for every stage. No more back and forth and painful workarounds. No need to request candidate availability. [Candidate Scheduling Links](/scheduler/scheduling-links) Interviewer Selection Rules ## Interviewer Workloads Make the best use of your hiring team's time by ensuring everyone gets a fair share of the workload with automated interview rotation and easy-to-set limits. [Talk to a specialist](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) Combined Availability ## Find Any Interviewers' Availability Guarantee suitable interview times for your team and candidates. No back-and-forth coordination. - Sync partial or entire team calendars in one go - Combine multiple interviewers’ availability to schedule panels - Works with Outlook, Office365 and Google calendars [Combined Team Availability](/scheduler/combined-team-availability) Rescheduling ## Powerful Event Editing Easily handle last minute changes without starting from scratch or involving multiple team members. Reschedule interviews on behalf of anyone in your organization and update times and dates for a scheduled interview. [Talk to a specialist](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) Secure and Compliant ## Serious Data Security We never compromise on data security and compliance. We are independently audited and certified and let you choose between 6 data centers, including one in Germany, for all our customers serving EU citizens and who must be GDPR compliant. [Data Centers](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/data-centers/) > Our recruiters can now own the end-to-end hiring journey. They can make sure that **candidates are having a great experience**, but are able to do it in a much more seamless way. The fact that Cronofy integrates with Lever means they’re **spending a lot less time on the admin, everything just works**. — Joseph de Garr Wilkinson, Head of Talent, Agreena Get started with Cronofy today [Schedule Consultation](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Scheduling for Business Communications Business communications are vital for companies to talk to their employees and customers. The more effective the communication method, the more time it saves. Business communication can take many forms: emails, text messages, even chatbots. As technology progresses, businesses are looking for more and more ways to keep in touch with their customers and employees. This helps to keep them engaged, make them feel like they’re a part of something, and boosts the company’s brand. Business communications are vital for companies to talk to their employees and customers. The more effective the communication method, the more time it saves. Business communication can take many forms: emails, text messages, even chatbots. As technology progresses, businesses are looking for more and more ways to keep in touch with their customers and employees. This helps to keep them engaged, make them feel like they’re a part of something, and boosts the company’s brand. Business communications are vital for companies to talk to their employees and customers. The more effective the communication method, the more time it saves. Business communication can take many forms: emails, text messages, even [chatbots](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/calendar-sync-chatbots/). As technology progresses, businesses are looking for more and more ways to keep in touch with their customers and employees. This helps to keep them engaged, make them feel like they’re a part of something, and boosts the company’s brand. However, sometimes a simple text, email, or chatbot exchange isn’t enough. Sometimes businesses need to schedule appointments with their employees or customers to get more information. Businesses then manually check schedules to find suitable times or they call customers at times when they can’t answer the phone. Adding embedded scheduling into business communications means that businesses can schedule follow-up calls or appointments without end users needing to leave the software. It’s a faster, twenty-first century approach to scheduling that makes everyone’s lives easier. Let’s take a look at some of the ways scheduling can work with business communications to provide the best experience for everyone involved. ## Send surveys Surveys don’t require people to meet face-to-face and can be used to collect qualitative data that they can use to compare different people’s experiences and look for patterns. However, sometimes they need further information. What can they do in these situations? If the employee or customer wants to expand on their answers, they can be offered the chance to schedule a call based on the real-time availability of a representative. Any appointments added to the representative’s calendar sync with the software automatically and vice versa. This ensures that they never find themselves double-booked, no matter how many meetings they have scheduled in. Customers can book an appointment at their own convenience, based on their own schedule, instead of awaiting a phone call and it inevitability ringing when they’re unable to take the call. This gives a more customer-focused impression, meaning that even unsatisfied customers may be more likely to return. The [Slot Picker](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/) can be embedded into chatbots, allowing appointments to be chosen from within the software. The more steps someone has to do to take action, the less likely they are to do so. Offering them the chance to book an appointment from within the conversation reduces this risk of inaction. It also saves them time because everything they need to book the appointment is already onscreen. ## Schedule training sessions Business communications can be used for more than just receiving feedback and scheduling calls, though. They can also be used for employees to book themselves on to training sessions. Without needing to leave the HR software that they use every day, they can be offered lists of locations, days, and times that are available, each option based on their previous answer. Training slots can close once enough people have registered using [Bookable Events](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api-alpha/bookable-events/), which tracks the number of people registered to an event. This ensures that no event is ever over capacity, even if two people fill in the form at the same time. Everything updates in real time. If the employee is connected to the HR software, the training session can be automatically added to their calendar. It can even work out the best times for the employee to attend the training session based on their current schedule, ensuring that they’re not offered a training session when they have a meeting. ## Book paid time off Paid time off is vital for employee health and wellbeing. However, many employees don’t take advantage of their entitled vacation days because it’s too complicated to book it and they think they’re being discouraged from doing so. When their calendars are synced with their HR software, they can schedule it without leaving their HR software. Anything that involves their schedule can be booked via the HR software that they use. This could be in the form of a chatbot, a booking flow within the HR software, or even an embedded calendar. The dates can then be sent to their line manager to approve. This could also be done from within the HR software, saving the line manager’s time, too. ## Medical appointment scheduling Effective appointment scheduling is imperative for doctors’ offices and hospitals. The traditional method of patients calling to schedule an appointment is time-consuming for everyone involved. Allowing them to book their appointment online is both faster and allows them to schedule an appointment at their own convenience, even if that’s outside of operating ours. Before booking their appointment, they could speak to either a chatbot or a staff member in a chat window about their symptoms. Based on their symptoms, they can be advised on what to do next, whether that’s schedule an appointment to speak to a doctor, pick up a prescription, or get some rest. Since this is more discreet than booking appointments and discussing symptoms over the phone, patients may be more upfront about why they wish to see a doctor, something which some people may be reluctant to do over the phone in case they’re overheard. This helps healthcare practitioners to offer more accurate advice to the patient, helping them to get answers faster. ## Conclusion No matter how much technology progresses, business communications will always be a part of running any organization. Adding effective scheduling into business communications makes it better for employees and customers alike – they can get answers to questions sooner, book appointments based on their schedules, and avoid any double-bookings or miscommunications. Businesses, meanwhile, have a direct line to their employees and customers so that they always have the latest information and are seen as accessible and honest. The easier it is for someone to communicate with a business, the more their know, like, and trust factor increases. It’s therefore important for businesses to do everything in their power to improve this. --- # Best alternative to building calendar integrations Skip the complexity of building calendar integrations in-house. Cronofy’s API delivers secure, scalable calendar integrations for reliable scheduling. ## It's a calendar integration, how hard can it be? Calendar sync is just the tip of the iceberg - what’s underneath is downtime, availability logic, and timezone traps. Cronofy takes care of it all behind the scenes, so your team can focus on building. [Chat with us](https://www.cronofy.com/build-or-buy-calendar-integrations#8e4f1af9ea82) Start integrating > It was either going to take us stopping everything that we were doing to build a significantly more robust calendar integration, or to find someone that can do this for us. When we came across Cronofy, we realised we’ve been looking for something like this. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer, Heal.me All the hard parts of scheduling, already solved Building calendar integrations sounds simple, until your engineering team is deep in sync bugs and scheduling edge cases. Here’s what Cronofy gives you, without the build burden. **Reliability** **Speed** **Performance** **Availability** **Timezones** **Compliance** Reliability ## Calendar integrations that don't break Calendar APIs fail, providers go down, and sync bugs happen. When you build calendar integrations in-house, your team owns every outage and every missed meeting as a result. Cronofy’s sync engine handles failures behind the scenes. It caches real-time availability, so even if providers go dark, your users can still book. With 99.99% uptime and failover logic built in, integrating Cronofy means your devs stay focused on shipping features - not fixing calendar issues. [See our status page](https://status.cronofy.com/) Speed ## Support that gets you to production, fast Building calendar integrations and scheduling features isn’t just complex, it’s slow. Development teams can spend weeks navigating calendar provider documentation, building custom logic, and dealing with edge cases. With Cronofy, you’ll receive full support from Day 0 with a dedicated technical advisor to help you map your integration, avoid costly missteps, and accelerate time to value. Performance ## Booking experiences your users expect When you build scheduling in-house, your app has to make multiple API calls to different providers every time a user checks availability or books a meeting. That adds latency and slows down the experience. With Cronofy, one API call gives you real-time availability across all connected calendars - delivering faster bookings, lower latency, and a smoother experience for your users. Can't get your head around scheduling? [Chat with us](https://www.cronofy.com/build-or-buy-calendar-integrations#8e4f1af9ea82) Availability ## Complex logic you don't need to handle Availability logic is where DIY scheduling gets messy. Working hours, buffer times, and multi-person bookings require your developers to rebuild logic that’s harder than it looks. Cronofy takes that complexity off your plate. You define the rules, and our API handles the rest. Whether it’s 1:1 or multi-attendee scheduling, users only see the times that work. [Learn about our Availability API](/case-studies) Timezones ## Timezone handling that doesn't break your flow Timezones turn even simple scheduling use cases into a mess. Daylight saving shifts, recurring events, and automatic timezone detection can create endless edge cases for your team to fix. Cronofy handles timezone logic automatically. Our API normalizes everything behind the scenes, so your users always see accurate availability - no matter where they are, or what time of year it is. Compliance ## Compliance that keeps your users' data secure Calendar integrations means handling sensitive data. When you build them yourself, compliance falls on your team. Cronofy takes that off your plate. We’re GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 compliant, and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. With secure data hosting in six global regions and built-in access controls, Cronofy helps you meet enterprise requirements. [View Privacy & Security](/privacy) ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z ## Get technical advice from our team --- # Six tips for optimizing your sales process Building an effective sales process is crucial to your business’s success. Bar Zaig, Head of Product at sales prospecting platform Datanyze, shares how automated scheduling for sales calls and other top tips can help create your most efficient sales process yet. Building an effective sales process is crucial to your business’s success. Bar Zaig, Head of Product at sales prospecting platform Datanyze, shares how automated scheduling for sales calls and other top tips can help create your most efficient sales process yet. No matter what industry you’re in, optimizing your sales process can lead to growth you never thought possible. But too often, we get stuck in the mindset that nothing needs to change because we’re making sales. You may think the sales process you built when your company was just starting is the same one you should have years later, but if you’re not looking for chances to rework that process into something greater, you could be missing out on many potential clients. Optimization never ends, but these tips are a good place to start. ‍ ### 1. Develop an effective sales prospecting plan A good [sales prospecting plan](https://www.datanyze.com/blog/sales-prospecting-plan) matters whether you’re a startup or top company in your field. This essential set of instructions guides your salespeople, from targeting the right audience to turning those potential buyers into dedicated customers. In addition, your sales prospecting plan drives your sales teams' day-to-day actions, ensuring they waste no time trying to procure the wrong targets. The key to an [effective sales prospecting plan](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/5-key-attributes-to-being-successful-in-a-startup-sales-job) is knowing exactly who you’re prospecting. Start by creating ideal customer profiles, or ICPs. If you have previous sales data to utilize, analyze it thoroughly to understand who is most interested in your products, but don’t stop with just your analytics. Do further research into your industry and ask yourself a few questions: - Who buys from your competitors? - What elements do your competitors' marketing plans include? - What do sales funnels look like in your industry? The more time you spend doing this research, the more your ICPs will improve, and the less time you’ll spend targeting the wrong audience. ‍ ### 2. Nurture conversation between your sales and marketing teams You shouldn’t expect your marketing team to be closing sales. However, allowing sales and marketing to operate in silos is a mistake. For your marketing team to create strong ICPs and subsequently campaigns targeting the right audience, they need access to your sales team's research and discussions with that audience. Nurture relationships between your sales and marketing teams. That may mean organizing a weekly or monthly meeting between each unit, or you may want to partner salespeople up with marketing managers to encourage closer connections and foster more frequent conversations. The marketing and sales teams should consider themselves extensions of the same team, as they are striving for the same goals, although they are at different points of the journey toward those goals. If your marketing team understands the customer, they’ll create better campaigns, resulting in better leads for the sales team. ‍ ### 3. Lose the spreadsheets and implement a CRM How many spreadsheets does your sales team share every day? Tracking customer journeys is crucial for the success of a sales team. Your team members should know where their prospects are on the typical customer journey. They should always be asking themselves these questions: - Is it time for a follow-up? - Do they need additional information? - Did they request another meeting? Having all that information on multiple spreadsheets means that it’s easy for someone to fall through the cracks and that someone may have ended up being an incredibly lucrative client. Implementing a CRM provides a much easier way to keep track of your potential buyers. A CRM is a platform that enables your sales team to nurture relationships with leads and clients, seeing the entire customer journey at a glance. This creates a more efficient, organized sales process that impresses prospective clients. It consolidates all communication, be it email, call, or demo so this information is instantly available to any salesperson who needs it. There are many CRMs to choose from depending on your business needs. For small to medium businesses, choosing a platform like [Hubspot](https://www.hubspot.com/) would be best as it has a “freemium” model that can grow and evolve with your business. For larger companies, [Salesforce](https://www.salesforce.com/) is the CRM solution to beat. It excels in terms of feature set and ever-growing range of innovations, including AI. ‍ ### 4. Automate your sales meeting management Many sales teams use email to arrange meetings, which leads to a lengthy back-and-forth between them and the client trying to find a time. Combine this with manually adding meetings into the calendar and you’ve cost valuable time out of a sales team’s day. Time that could be better spent on your sales prospecting plan or nurturing relationships. Automation is the key to getting time back. You can rest assured that you’re using your time more effectively through automated sales call scheduling. With [Cronofy](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) you can share your sales exec’s real-time availability to let prospects book a time in themselves that suits their schedule. They can do this while still respecting the salesperson’s availability in their calendar, to ensure it’s a convenient time for everyone. Not only does this save your sales team time but also improves the customer experience. They can book calls without being chased, according to their schedule. [Automated sales call scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/sales-calls-scheduling) also includes call management. No more worrying about your calendar reminders about upcoming calls. Through Cronofy’s scheduling automation platform, you can see your pending, upcoming, and canceled calls at a glance, so you’ll know who needs to be followed up. ‍ ### 5. Track and analyze your sales data Once you close a deal, the customer journey has only begun. The customer’s data is crucial to your success. Keeping track of these customers will allow you to continue to make sales and upsell them in the future, and their information gives you a critical insight into their demographic. Now you’ve made that sale, you know how that demographic responds to your product and marketing. You know more about their needs and how you can fulfill them. If you have a CRM, this will help to maintain a sales data record. You should also plan meetings for your sales and marketing teams to review those records and talk about trends. Especially as a startup, analyzing sales data as it comes in is essential. When you create your first ICPs, you likely don’t have much data to build them off of, which is why your additional research on your industry and competitors is vital. However, once you have that sales data, you need to rework your ICPs. After gaining your clients and learning how they operate, you can better picture your target audience and learn to market to them. ‍ ### 6. Ensure your sales process is scalable and timeless One of the biggest mistakes a startup can make is to build processes that only work at their current size. You want your business to grow, so you need to ensure your processes evolve as your company evolves. Overcomplicating or having too many manual processes within it can lead to an inability to maintain the overall sales process as it scales. In addition to scalability, you should ensure your process is timeless. Maybe some of your competitors are seeing success by looking for leads on a new subreddit, but success is likely a fad. Once that fad fades, you’ll essentially be building your strategy from scratch. Building automation into your sales process will ensure it’s future-proofed for your company, no matter how big it grows. As it’s constantly maintained and updated by the software providers, you can be sure whatever platform you choose to use is timeless. ‍ ### Conclusion Optimizing your sales process starts with building the right ICPs by collecting and analyzing sales data. Next, you should look for new ways to optimize your sales strategy. The best way to do this is through the bespoke automation, analytics, and applications that are readily available to sales teams. Take advantage of the tools and platforms that are out there and you will create the slickest sales process for your team. ‍ ‍ *Bar Zaig is the Head of Product at **[Datanyze.](https://www.datanyze.com)** Datanyze is a unique B2B contact assistant enabling salespeople all over the world to connect with their ideal prospects.* --- # Internal Training vs External Training: Which is More Effective and Why? I’m probably in the minority when I say that I love a good training session. Not the boring kind where the person sat next to you is falling asleep because they missed out on their morning coffee, but the interesting, engaging kind where you learn something new and leave feeling empowered. I’ve experienced both these kinds of training sessions in the last few years. Some have been truly painful, regurgitating information that I already knew and full of groupthink. Others have been inspiring and thought-provoking, filling me with new ideas I couldn’t wait to execute. Whether the course is interesting and engaging or making you reach for the free coffee, there are two ways these courses can be conducted: internally and externally. Internal training is taught by someone who works for your company, while external training is taught by someone outside of it. When it comes to deciding on the best form of training for your team, it can be difficult to determine who is the best person to hold the session and why. What are the benefits to internal training sessions? Are external training sessions worth the cost? Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of each. ‍ Internal training Internal training sessions are conducted by someone that already works for your company. This is often someone from HR, but not always – it depends on the purpose of the session and who the best person for the job is. For a product demonstration, for example, a sales person may be better suited to the role, or for a more technical demonstration a developer may be a good fit. Pros Internal training sessions are easy to set up as you already have everyone and everything that you need. Because of this, it’s also quicker and cheaper to organize. A senior team member training junior team members can help to build relationships and a team dynamic. The person conducting the training session may even learn something new from their junior team members. Internal training sessions don’t just inform new hires or offer refreshers to older team members, though. They can also reinforce the tutor’s knowledge and help them to find any gaps in it. Discovering these gaps in their knowledge means that they won’t get caught out in the future and can improve their sales pitch. ‍ Cons Internal knowledge has its limits. The longer we work for a company or with a particular person/team, the easier it is to fall into the trap of groupthink. We’re also more likely to become isolated and stuck in our ways of doing things, which, long-term, can be detrimental. In the age of technology, every industry is changing rapidly. Teams or companies that live in a silo risk falling behind their competitors, potentially damaging the brand and business by the use of old-fashioned techniques. ‍ External External training is conducting by experts or influencers from outside of your company. They may be someone your company already has a relationship with – such as a supplier – who has been brought in to give more information on a product or feature, or an industry expert who can share the latest trends to help teams stay ahead of competitors. This type of training can also be done at external events (such as Unleash or the Festival of Marketing) or online (such as Copy School, Forget the Funnel, and Codecademy). ‍ Pros External training sessions break up groupthink and offer a fresh perspective on how things are done. This can have a dramatic effect on company culture and the way things are done moving forward (either in a positive or a negative way). External training sessions also give teams the chance to learn from industry experts. The knowledge shared by people like Andrew & Pete or Janet Murray in their corporate training sessions can be invaluable. They help companies to snap out of their ‘tradition is the only way’ mentality and view things from a new angle. In ever-changing industries such as HR or marketing, this is vital for teams who want to stand out. It also future-proofs team’s and company’s knowledge because they’re learning from someone whose job it is to pay attention to industry trends. These tutors also have experience working with dozens – if not hundreds – of businesses, giving them more experience and helping them to pick up on patterns that they can share with training sessions. ‍ Cons External training is more expensive than in-house training. It can also take longer to organize. After all, the best people are busy. Should you go for the online training option, sessions or courses are often limited to a certain number of slots, or only open for sign-ups a few weeks a year. This can be difficult if you’re looking for courses for employees to take part in and they’re not open when you need them. ‍ Conclusion Neither type of training is better than the other. What matters is what’s best for you and your team. Before you start to organize your training session, it’s important to know what you – and they – want to get out of it. This will help you to research the best people for the job, whether that’s in-house or someone from outside of the company. Consider your options before deciding, as there may be someone you didn’t think of initially who’s the perfect person to conduct the training session. Don’t let your personal biases affect your decision – just because you enjoyed someone’s training session five years ago, that doesn’t mean that their training session is as relevant now as it once was. Influencers get left behind all the time, so be sure that the one whose session you enjoyed previously is still on top of industry trends and can therefore get you and your team ahead, too. I’m probably in the minority when I say that I love a good training session. Not the boring kind where the person sat next to you is falling asleep because they missed out on their morning coffee, but the interesting, engaging kind where you learn something new and leave feeling empowered. I’ve experienced both these kinds of training sessions in the last few years. Some have been truly painful, regurgitating information that I already knew and full of groupthink. Others have been inspiring and thought-provoking, filling me with new ideas I couldn’t wait to execute. Whether the course is interesting and engaging or making you reach for the free coffee, there are two ways these courses can be conducted: internally and externally. Internal training is taught by someone who works for your company, while external training is taught by someone outside of it. When it comes to deciding on the best form of training for your team, it can be difficult to determine who is the best person to hold the session and why. What are the benefits to internal training sessions? Are external training sessions worth the cost? Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of each. ## Internal training Internal training sessions are conducted by someone that already works for your company. This is often someone from HR, but not always – it depends on the purpose of the session and who the best person for the job is. For a product demonstration, for example, a sales person may be better suited to the role, or for a more technical demonstration a developer may be a good fit. ### Pros Internal training sessions are easy to set up as you already have everyone and everything that you need. Because of this, it’s also quicker and cheaper to organize. A senior team member training junior team members can help to build relationships and a team dynamic. The person conducting the training session may even learn something new from their junior team members. Internal training sessions don’t just inform new hires or offer refreshers to older team members, though. They can also reinforce the tutor’s knowledge and help them to find any gaps in it. Discovering these gaps in their knowledge means that they won’t get caught out in the future and can improve their sales pitch. ‍ ### Cons Internal knowledge has its limits. The longer we work for a company or with a particular person/team, the easier it is to fall into the trap of groupthink. We’re also more likely to become isolated and stuck in our ways of doing things, which, long-term, can be detrimental. In the age of technology, every industry is changing rapidly. Teams or companies that live in a silo risk falling behind their competitors, potentially damaging the brand and business by the use of old-fashioned techniques. ‍ ## External External training is conducted by experts or influencers from outside of your company. They may be someone your company already has a relationship with – such as a supplier – who has been brought in to give more information on a product or feature, or an industry expert who can share the latest trends to help teams stay ahead of competitors. This type of training can also be done at external events (such as Unleash or the Festival of Marketing) or online (such as Copy School, Forget the Funnel, and Codecademy). ‍ ### Pros External training sessions break up groupthink and offer a fresh perspective on how things are done. This can have a dramatic effect on company culture and the way things are done moving forward (either in a positive or a negative way). External training sessions also give teams the chance to learn from industry experts. The knowledge shared by people like [Andrew & Pete](https://www.andrewandpete.com/) or [Janet Murray](https://www.janetmurray.co.uk/) in their corporate training sessions can be invaluable. They help companies to snap out of their ‘tradition is the only way’ mentality and view things from a new angle. In ever-changing industries such as HR or marketing, this is vital for teams who want to stand out. It also future-proofs team’s and company’s knowledge because they’re learning from someone whose job it is to pay attention to industry trends. These tutors also have experience working with dozens – if not hundreds – of businesses, giving them more experience and helping them to pick up on patterns that they can share with training sessions. ‍ ### Cons External training is more expensive than in-house training. It can also take longer to organize. After all, the best people are busy. Should you go for the online training option, sessions or courses are often limited to a certain number of slots, or only open for sign-ups a few weeks a year. This can be difficult if you’re looking for courses for employees to take part in and they’re not open when you need them. ‍ ## Conclusion Whether you choose internal or external training, the ultimate goal is to improve your team's skills and processes. One area where this improvement can be immediately applied is in your recruitment and onboarding procedures. Efficient i[nterview scheduling](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams), for instance, can be a direct outcome of well-executed training sessions. Consider your options before deciding, as there may be someone you didn’t think of initially who’s the perfect person to conduct the training session. Don’t let your personal biases affect your decision – just because you enjoyed someone’s training session five years ago, that doesn’t mean that their training session is as relevant now as it once was. Influencers get left behind all the time, so be sure that the one whose session you enjoyed previously is still on top of industry trends and can therefore get you and your team ahead, too. ## Applying Training Outcomes Before you start to organize your training session, it’s important to know what you – and they – want to get out of it. This will help you to research the best people for the job, whether that’s in-house or someone from outside of the company. Training, whether internal or external, often leads to process improvements across various aspects of your business. One area where the benefits of training can be quickly realized is in streamlining your recruitment process, particularly in interview scheduling. ### Enhancing Interview Scheduling Processes Both internal and external training can provide insights into better time management and communication skills. These skills can be directly applied to improve your interview scheduling process: - **Internal training benefits:** Team members who've undergone internal training on your company's specific processes can apply this knowledge to create a more efficient, company-specific interview scheduling system. - **External training advantages:** External training often introduces new tools and technologies. This exposure can lead to the adoption of automated scheduling systems that simplify the interview process for both recruiters and candidates. By implementing improved interview scheduling techniques as a result of your training efforts, you can: 1. Reduce time-to-hire 1. Improve [candidate experience](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#db2e0bc29da7) 1. Increase hiring team productivity 1. Ensure better coordination across different time zones Remember, the goal of any training is to enhance your team's capabilities and efficiency. By focusing on practical applications like interview scheduling, you can demonstrate the tangible benefits of your chosen training approach. ### Team of One: How Solo-HR Professionals Can Run Efficient HR Functions Managing HR solo? You’re not alone. It’s increasingly common for HR professionals to juggle everything—from hiring to payroll to engagement—without backup. Handling it all doesn’t mean you have to do it manually. Here’s how you can gain back time for what really matters. Blog Post 2024-11-11T09:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. Blog Post 2024-05-24T09:00:00.000Z --- # Candidate expectations report 2024 ## Candidate Expectations Report 12,000 candidates, 7 countries; what have we learned about their expectations, frustrations, and preferences? Get a scoop into our 2024 report. [Download insights](#form-89c77bd4-4052-4241-939b-95a87993c6c7) ## Get your exclusive copy of the preliminary insights --- # Send Appointment Reminders with Calendar Sync Keep everyone in the loop with real-time notifications of events, appointments and reminders for your application. See how we connect to calendars. ## Send Appointment Reminders with Calendar Sync > The integration itself was a straightforward project and the lines of communication were open between our two development teams. We would recommend an API integration with Cronofy to anyone looking to hook external calendar functionality to their app. — Leah Hutcheon, Founder and CEO, Appointedd ## Reduce the cost of missed appointments Whatever the reason for a missed appointment, they can cost companies hundreds of dollars a day if not more. When a client forgets to notify a business about their change of plans, restaurant tables, beauty treatments and doctor’s appointments are lost. With the [Cronofy Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/), appointments can be automatically added to a customer’s calendar. If the customer needs to make any changes or cancel their booking, they can do so from their calendar app of choice. Their changes will then be sent to everyone affected in real-time. ## Keep personal appointments private Handling a customer’s appointments can mean dealing with sensitive data, and having access to personal calendar information that your user doesn’t want you to see and that you don’t need to access. Most of our clients only want to see if a user is free or busy. If that’s the level of detail you need, your customer data will be encrypted and protected by Cronofy – there’s no need to worry about handling private data on your end. ## Prevent double-bookings Double-booking is a common problem for both companies and customers. Busy personal and professional schedules can conflict and it can be difficult to find a time when everyone and everything is free. The Cronofy [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) helps to prevent this by setting up booking flows offering available time slots. If that time becomes unavailable, it’s removed from the booking system. When the user books an appointment it is added to the synced calendars. Should your users wish to change their booking time, you can set up our API to only suggest new times where their requirements are met. ## Avoid late arrivals Journeys can be unpredictable: traffic or bad weather can lead to customers turning up late or missing their appointments. Cronofy allows for geolocation details to be added to a calendar event. A calendar notification can then be sent to the customer informing them of what time they need to leave to make their appointment on time. That means there’s less chance of customers getting stuck in a traffic jam and not showing up. --- # Text Message Reminders vs Calendar Reminders: Which is the Best Choice for Your Software? Text message reminders are a common way for companies to remind customers of appointments. It’s no wonder when 95% of the US owns some sort of cell phone. They’re a cheap and effective way for businesses to remind customers of upcoming appointments. The cost of missed appointments adds up fast, costing the US healthcare industry $150 billion every year. One study found that sending text message reminders resulted in patient no-shows being reduced by 5%. Text message reminders are a common way for companies to remind customers of appointments. It’s no wonder when 95% of the US owns some sort of cell phone. They’re a cheap and effective way for businesses to remind customers of upcoming appointments. The cost of missed appointments adds up fast, costing the US healthcare industry $150 billion every year. One study found that sending text message reminders resulted in patient no-shows being reduced by 5%. Text message reminders are a common way for companies to remind customers of appointments. It’s no wonder when 95% of the US owns some sort of cell phone. They’re a cheap and effective way for businesses to remind customers of upcoming appointments. The cost of missed appointments adds up fast, costing the US healthcare industry [$150 billion every year](https://www.healthmgttech.com/missed-appointments-cost-u.s.healthcare-system-150b-year). One study found that sending text message reminders resulted in [patient no-shows being reduced by 5%](https://www.phonetree.com/blog/text-message-appointment-reminders-effective/). This small reduction in do not attends (DNAs) could save the US healthcare industry $50 million a year. Calendar reminders offer similar benefits to text message reminders: they’re cheap, they can be sent automatically, and they can help to reduce DNAs. But what are the differences between calendar reminders and text message reminders? Let’s take a look: ## Text reminders work for everyone, calendar reminders work for those with smartphones It’s estimated that [2.87 billion people worldwide](https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/) will have smartphones by 2020. That’s up from 1.86 billion in 2015. In 2015, [98% of the US had 4G coverage](https://bgr.com/2015/03/23/lte-coverage-map-united-states/). While we couldn’t find more recent stats, this coverage will have inevitably increased since then. This doesn’t mean that 98% of the US population have smartphones, though. [95% own some sort of cell phone](http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/), while 77% own a smartphone. No matter what cell phone you have, you can receive a text message. That means that companies don’t need to think about their target audience’s adoption of smartphones when implementing text message reminders. Calendar reminders, on the other hand, only work for those with smartphones. This means that customers who don’t have one could miss out on important updates. It’s therefore important for companies looking to add calendar reminders to think about their target audience and what their adoption rate of smartphone technology is. ## Text reminders can get expensive, calendar reminders are free When you use a text message API, you’re charged for every text that’s sent. While this is usually only a few cents, when you have hundreds or thousands of patients to contact every month, it quickly adds up. Text messages are also limited to 160 characters per message, which means businesses need to think carefully about what they put in those messages. This means important location information, or details on what someone needs to bring to their appointment, sometimes gets left out. Calendar reminders are free to send. This means multiple reminders can be sent for the same appointment at no extra cost. While the text of the push notification needs to be kept short to grab a user’s attention, additional information can be added to the calendar event itself to inform patients of everything they need to know. Patients also have more control over calendar reminders – they can set up a notification for when it’s best for them instead of (or as well as) when the software decides to send it. In calendars, geolocation data can be added to events at no extra cost. Information such as what to bring with them can also be added to the notes of the calendar event. This could be anything from a list of their current prescriptions to samples to be sent away. ## Text reminders only come through to phones, calendar reminders can automatically sync with other devices The average text message is read within the [first three minutes of delivery](https://thenextweb.com/future-of-communications/2015/02/09/sms-vs-push-vs-email/). However, unless you’ve got text message forwarding set up on your Apple devices, your text messages will only come through to your phone. It’s easy for them to get lost or forgotten in a sea of texts from family and friends.Calendar reminders are visible on multiple devices if someone has synced their calendar. This means everything from a laptop to an Amazon Echo can remind patients of their upcoming appointments. All their calendar events can be synced across multiple devices, making it easier for them to remember their schedules. ## Text messages require sending another message when changes happen, calendar sync can be updated at any time If an appointment needs to be rescheduled, canceled, or otherwise amended, text message reminders require another message to be generated so that users are aware. This costs more money, particularly if multiple people are affected.Calendar reminders can be updated an infinite number of times for free. This means additional information that isn’t known when the calendar event is created – such as the location – can be added at a later date. These are then pushed to the calendars of affected users. ## Text messages require knowing a customer’s phone number, calendar reminders don’t While 90% of text messages are read within three minutes of delivery, some may feel uncomfortable sharing their phone number out of fear of sales calls and survey texts. Businesses now also have the option to send users messages via WhatsApp instead. Unlike text messages, messages sent via WhatsApp don't have a character limit. This means companies can send more information in one message. However, like with calendar reminders, messages sent via WhatsApp are dependent on a user having a smartphone. While 84% of 25 to 34-year-olds and [78% of 35 to 44-year-olds use WhatsApp](https://www.statista.com/statistics/611208/whatsapp-users-in-the-united-kingdom-uk-by-age-group/), messages sent via this platform are much more likely to get lost when customers are in the middle of conversations. We’ve all been caught up in a group conversation with 124 unread messages when friends are discussing their latest holiday antics…WhatsApp allowing business customers to use it for free also puts text message service providers in jeopardy. It’s a more cost-effective way for businesses to stay in touch with customers, meaning more businesses can take advantage of it. However, it relies on customers actively installing WhatsApp on to their phones. Calendar reminders don’t. All smartphones have calendars, meaning that there’s little effort on the end user’s part once their phone is set up. Companies also don’t need a customer’s phone number to send them a calendar reminder. This can be done using a Smart Invite instead. This looks like an ICS file to the end user, but it allows the business sending the invite to track if the appointment has been accepted or not. Calendar reminders are a less invasive way to inform patients of upcoming appointments. Customers don’t have to share personal data such as their phone number, but they are guaranteed to always have the latest information. ## Conclusion Text message and calendar reminders have similar uses, but they fit different target audiences and use cases. Text messages can be useful to remind patients to book check-up appointments, while calendar reminders are more cost effective for medication or appointment reminders, particularly when synced with other smart devices. Recurring appointments could even be added to patients’ schedules automatically, saving receptionists and patients time booking appointments. Whether your company can benefit more from calendar reminders or text message reminders really depends on how you’re looking to help your users. Different services require different things. However, there’s no reason you couldn’t use both if you felt it was the best option for your customers. To find out more about adding calendar reminders to your software, [contact us today](https://www.cronofy.com/learn-more/). --- # Reports - Help Articles Learn how to generate reports for your Organizational Unit in Cronofy to understand key scheduling data and user availability. ## Reports Generate **reports** in Cronofy to support your reporting needs and gain deeper insight into your scheduling activity. These reports allow you to understand key scheduling data and user availability. **Q: What reports can I download?** A: You can download your all the request in .csv form form your request tab. Request tab → Click **export**. The export button is on the top right hand corner under Create Request. **Q: Can I have an overview of my users availability?** A: Availability reports give OU owners and scheduler admins insights into their team member’s **weekly availability slots** for the next four weeks. These insights can help us figure out if team members are filling up enough available slots to meet our hiring goals. **How to access the availability report:** To access your availability reports, go to your “(**OU) Settings**,” then click on “**Selection** **Rules**,” and open the selection rule for which you want to evaluate the availability report. Once you’ve opened the selection rule, the list of possible hosts for a meeting will be listed. Under that list, click on “**Availability** **Overview**.” You can further filter the overview by selecting what duration the availability should be for and and the type of availability (all working hours or only selected interview times). ## How to read it: Members with no slots during the week → **Grey** Members with 3 or more green days in the week → **Green** All else → **Orange** The circles next to a host’s name represents their availability for the next **4 weeks**. To see an overview of the weekly availability, hover over the first circle to see the availability for the current week. The **second** **circle** represents the upcoming week, and so on. --- # Cronofy pricing Learn more about Cronofy pricing ## Learn more about Cronofy's pricing ### How Cronofy's active user pricing works Duration: 2 [Book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/pricing-calculator#0bc6f43ef5e967f16c9e84ef0e776a20) [Pricing calculator](https://bit.ly/Ccalculator) > Within months of going live with Cronofy, what took us 6 days to schedule an interview, now has a median time-to-schedule of 90 minutes. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise Book a demo ## See Cronofy interview scheduling in action for recruiters ## FAQs **Q: Who’s an active user?** A: An active user is someone who has been added to a calendar event. A user is considered active even if they do not show up for a scheduled event or if they were a part of a cancelled event. **Q: Are there other charges for implementation or support?** A: No, Cronofy doesn’t charge you extra for implementation or support **Q: What calendars work with Cronofy?** A: Cronofy syncs with Google, Office365, Outlook and Exchange calendars **Q: How do I contact Cronofy?** A: You can reach us at support@cronofy.com **Q: How much do I pay to use the Cronofy API?** A: Learn more about Cronofy API[ here](https://www.cronofy.com/api-pricing). Resources for talent acquisition leaders ### Gain key hiring process insight from our latest Candidate Expectations Report Report 2024-06-19 --- ### Agreena recruiters are saving 5 hours a week each Customer Story 2023-06-15 --- # Better healthcare scheduling now to reduce stress for tomorrow Digital Transformation is a huge focus in the world of business. With the current situation many organizations are taking stock of their digital offering. Digital Transformation is a huge focus in the world of business. With the current situation many organizations are taking stock of their digital offering. Digital Transformation is a huge focus in the world of business. With the current situation many organizations are taking stock of their digital offering, processes and tools and either voluntarily upgrading or an upgrade has been necessitated. In part by a recent shift to remote working and the need for more sophisticated technology to enable effective operation. Digital Transformation is a buzz word that you may already be familiar with if you work in Healthcare Tech. In this sector it refers to the use of digital technology to modify the existing procedures, culture and patient experience to meet the requirements of an industry that needs to keep reinventing itself. Technology has been disrupting the healthcare industry for some time. Currently this need has been amplified and digital transformation needs to both accelerate and be adopted more widely – better healthcare scheduling plays a big role in this. Cronofy isn’t a Healthcare Tech provider but we help dozens of businesses deliver better healthcare scheduling across the world. In this blog post we’ll share our learnings and observations on how real-time, automated scheduling can transform Healthcare. It helps reduce stress for patients and healthcare professionals as well as achieve greater efficiency for everyone involved. ‍ ### **Appointment scheduling** When considering how scheduling can impact the healthcare process the first thing that often comes to mind are medical appointment bookings. That’s natural because booking an appointment can be a cause of stress for the patient – delays, rescheduled appointments, etc. – and missed appointments are a huge financial strain on healthcare providers. The annual [cost of missed appointments](https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/clinical-it/article/13008175/missed-appointments-cost-the-us-healthcare-system-150b-each-year#:~:text=The%20total%20cost%20of%20missed,%24150%20billion%20figure%20is%20reached.) is $150 billion in the US alone. But for patients the first appointments they need to book will often be with their healthcare insurance providers. Finding out if their insurance covers them for various care will be an ongoing conversation throughout the process too. This conversation can be a time consuming and frustrating back and forth whether by email, phone, a form-fill or some other type of communication. Because these appointments are often time-sensitive an online booking system is an ideal solution as it lets the customer book a phone or face-to-face appointment based on the real-time availability of an advisor. The booking can be done at any time, including outside office hours. It helps reduce the stress of having to wait for a call-back or confirmation. The advisors on their end have a clear view of their schedule and can manage their available and busy times. This flexibility is also a huge benefit when it comes to booking appointments with a healthcare professional. Health issues can happen at any time and it brings a lot of reassurance to book an appointment and know that a treatment is coming. Real-time scheduling can reduce the stress for everyone involved so the focus is put on providing care and enhancing the patient experience, rather than taken up carrying out administrative tasks. Medical appointments come in many shapes and forms. The usual process is for a patient to call the reception of their medical practice during office hours or a fixed time window in the morning for a same-day appointment. The administrative staff will then work to find a time where they can see their doctor. Often just getting through to the practice can be a chore and source of stress. Waiting in line or on hold is time consuming and adds unnecessary anxiety to the process – particularly when most practice’s opening hours mirror those of the average working day. In effect this is no different from similar appointment processes in other industries. Using the right scheduling technology for making and monitoring the appointment can transform the entire process. The booking can be done at the convenience of the patient and can even be added to the patient’s calendar automatically. Reminders can be sent to decrease no-shows and it’s possible for these to be native within a patient’s usual schedule management system, like their email calendar. Cancellations also need to be taken into consideration to maximize the capacity of healthcare practitioners. Being able to automatically propose a freed-up slot to a patient who wanted an earlier appointment helps improve the patient experience. That’s all possible with automated scheduling technology. ‍ ### **Remote consultations** Like video interviews in HR Tech, remote consultations have become increasingly popular. They aren’t an answer to all situations where a consultation is required, but can be a great alternative to having a patient come to their medical practice or to the hospital. They also have advantages over phone consultations. The face-to-face video contact feels more personal. It can help both practitioner and patient to feel more connected and any concerns or emotions are easier to pick up on. Remote consultations help provide better healthcare on-demand. Because there is no need for the patient or the doctor to commute, they can happen almost instantly based on everyone’s availability. They are also less likely to overrun. Precise time slots are booked and require no buffer either side for travel and arrival check-in. We see scenarios where patients are able to book a consultation via a healthcare marketplace and speak to a doctor, via a video conferencing service in a few minutes – certainly usually the same day if desired. In situations where there is a contagion risk, virtual appointments also help protect society as patients who present a risk don’t have to be in contact with other people on public transport. The healthcare practitioners also don’t put themselves at risk of exposure and there is no risk of spreading a disease further on the practice site, for example in the waiting room where there will likely be other patients. On a human level it can also be another way to relieve stress for the patient and to put their care and wellbeing at the centre of the process. This system is also less time consuming for the patient and this can hugely enhance their experience. A lot of the hassle that goes a long with things like travel, taking time off work and the worry of potentially running late is entirely removed. In many scenarios not needing to travel or be around others is hugely beneficial. There are situations where particular physical illnesses present mobility barriers and create independent transportation issues. Some mental health concerns can also have anxiety attached. For example, with actually travelling away from home or being in a medical facility of any kind. These can be eliminated by the use of appointment booking technology and the automated scheduling tools that enables it. In practice the appointment booking is similar to any face-to-face appointment although it would be more likely to be booked online than over the phone. The calendar invite or push notification sent to the patient to confirm the remote consultation can include a link to a video conferencing service automatically. It’s hassle-free for both the organizer and patient. ‍ ### **Healthcare marketplaces** We’ve observed an increase in healthcare marketplaces looking to provide better scheduling processes to their users and have worked with several to set up automated scheduling. Healthcare marketplaces come in all different shapes and sizes, from at-home care services to remote consultation booking. [Docplanner Group](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/medical-appointment-scheduling-docplanner/) and [Zesty](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/healthcare-scheduling-zesty/) are both examples of our clients who are leading the charge in digital healthcare. They’ve adopted automated scheduling, powered by Cronofy’s API, to enhance their online offering. When a customer wants to book a healthcare service through a marketplace, the scheduling process will often be the first impression they will get of an organization. They will need to trust and rely on them for their well-being. It’s important to make a good first impression and to make the process as simple and user-friendly as possible. The healthcare scheduling appointment process needs to be seamless and stress-free. That’s why allowing bookings to happen at any time, based on real-time availability is critical. It’s also why marketplaces require the healthcare professionals who deliver advice through these online services to sync their calendars to the platform. It prevents double-bookings and lessens the impact of missed appointments as cancellations are immediately reflection and can also very likely be re-allocated. ‍ ### **Well-being and fitness** Another trend in Healthcare Tech is the rise of apps and tools aiming to decrease the need for medical visits and prescribed treatments. From diet plans to exercise regimes there are more and more solutions available for personal use but also for enterprises who want to encourage their employees to be healthier. The ability to add events to calendars – for check-ups or reminders – is very important in order to help the users stick to their plans. Overall, we are observing an increase in scheduling use cases for Healthcare. These use cases focus on using digital tools to improve the patient experience. Putting the patient first while also easing the admin burden on very busy healthcare professionals is paramount to improving the process for all parties and technology adoption can deliver just this. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have only put an additional spotlight on some of these technologies. Improved scheduling processes and remote appointments have become necessity. We expect that even when the world is back to “normal”, automated scheduling will continue to be used to improve the patient experience, reduce costs and stress, for both patients and healthcare professionals everywhere. --- # Greenhouse interview scheduling Schedule streamlined interviews from inside Greenhouse with Cronofy. Book a demo! ## Send candidates self-scheduling links Coordinate and automate any type of interview from inside your Greenhouse workflow. Spend less time scheduling and more time closing hard-to-fill roles. [Book 1:1 demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) **Bulk-schedule screening calls** **Set up panel interviews** **Book into busy calendars** **Coordinate sequenced interviews** Go further with Cronofy in Greenhouse Greenhouse vs Cronofy for Greenhouse - 1-to-1 - Panel - Combined panels and dynamic pools - Allow private events - Send separate invites - Add candidate profile and interview kit to interviewers' invite ## Turn on advanced scheduling faster Ditch the six-week wait. Start scheduling interviews immediately with our plug-and-play extension that can be customised over time. Bring the whole team on board quickly and seamlessly with dedicated onboarding support. [Talk to a specialist](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ## Schedule multi-person and multi-stage interviews Cronofy makes scheduling feel like magic — taking both candidate and interviewer availability into consideration for each interview stage. No more back and forth and painful workarounds. Within your Greenhouse workflow, simply bind multiple interviewers’ calendar availabilities and invite candidates to interview panels or sequenced interviews. [Self-Scheduling Links](/scheduler/scheduling-links) ## More control and visibility for coordinators Control your interviewing experience — choose who gets added to interviews, who can cancel and reschedule, and know precisely when key events are happening. No more chasing anyone down or emailing back and forth. Automate routine scheduling tasks and workflows with templates that can be changed anytime. [Combined Team Availability](/scheduler/combined-team-availability) ## Add context to hiring workflows Before each interview, Cronofy will aggregate candidate profiles, feedback, and job interview kits into each calendar invite. Every interviewer gets all the context they need to make better hiring decisions. [Talk to a specialist](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ## I want to learn more about this > Cronofy has significantly reduced the time we spend coordinating interviews. Their sequence template feature has been an efficient way to schedule multiple interviews with a candidate, without our team coordinating calendars manually. — Stephanie Romero , TA Strategy and Experience Specialist, UKG ## Automate interview scheduling in Greenhouse [Book 1:1 demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Help Interviewers Share Availability Faster Discover how Cronofy’s latest updates to Interview Times and scheduling templates make it easier for interviewers to share availability, reduce manual work for recruiters, and streamline interview coordination across teams. We’ve made enhancements that give interviewers more control over their time commitments and reduce manual effort for recruiters. You can now also use Separate Invites in templates, and we’ve added the ability to regenerate public links with a single click. Delivering a great interview experience for candidates relies on seamless coordination across teams, clear visibility into shifting interviewer priorities, and the ability to move quickly without adding extra manual work for hiring teams. Our latest updates provide both recruiters and interviewers with more flexibility and control at every step, making it easier to share availability, manage invitations, and maintain consistency throughout the process from kickoff to offer. Read on to discover what's new. ## Interviewers Can Now Add Their Own Availability in Cronofy We built Interview Times to help recruiters navigate the constantly shifting availability of interviewers by turning their time commitments into flexible calendar placeholders. This enabled recruiters to unlock more interview capacity and reduce cancellations. Now, interviewers can add their available times directly within the organizational unit to which they belong. Recruiters still have complete visibility and can use these committed times to schedule high-stake interviews; they just no longer need to do all the heavy lifting. This also ensures interview slots are ready sooner, even during kickoff. This update complements existing Working Hours preferences, providing your team with even more flexibility in how interview availability is shared, captured, and acted upon. [Learn more about Interview Times](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/product-roundup-maximizing-interviewer-availability-for-competitive-hiring#9d257d3ee678) ## Regenerate Your Public Link Anytime Cronofy public links simplify scheduling by letting candidates book time directly. However, when shared in a public channel, such as a LinkedIn post or forwarded email, they can result in unwanted meetings being added to your calendar. Now, you can regenerate your public link with a single click. This automatically disables the old link, so you stay in control of who can access your availability. It’s ideal for recruiters doing a lot of sourcing or anyone who no longer wants to receive appointments through a public link they’ve already shared. ## Build Templates That Include Separate Invites for Interviewers and Candidates Separate Invites brings a new level of context and personalization to Cronofy scheduled meetings. By customizing event titles and descriptions for different participants in one meeting, you can send your invites with confidence, knowing each participant receives precisely what they need for a productive meeting. Now, you can add separate invites to your templates. This means that for specific interview types, your template can include a clean confirmation for the candidate and Interviewer-only content, such as scorecards, prep notes, or interview kits. This update enables faster and more consistent scheduling of recurring interview types, with invitations ready to send every time. [Discover Separate Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/send-separate-calendar-invites-to-different-participants-in-a-single-meeting) ## Easily Offboard Former Employees in a Few Clicks It’s common for interviewers, hiring managers, or recruiters to leave your organization. We’ve now made it much easier to offboard former users so they no longer appear in your scheduling flow or host selection. This gives admins tighter control over user access across your organization and ensures fewer accidental assignments during interview setups. ## Equip Your Team to Deliver a First-Class Candidate Experience These updates make interview scheduling even more efficient, especially for teams managing high-volume hiring. Interviewers can share availability faster, recruiters spend less time coordinating, and your entire hiring team stays one step ahead. New to Cronofy? Explore how modern teams eliminate manual scheduling and delight candidates from day one. [Speak to a Scheduling Expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### How to improve your hiring experience for candidates and the hiring team Practical strategies for elevating the hiring experience for everyone involved. Webinar 2024-03-26T17:00:00.000Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Video 0:46 --- ### Candidate Expectations and Preferences Exclusive insight on what candidates expect and want from the hiring process. Report --- # Dogfooding: How we use our Scheduler product internally No, it’s not a new diet craze - ‘Eating your own dog food’ is one of the best product testing practices for a business to implement. We explain how and why we use it within Cronofy. No, it’s not a new diet craze - ‘Eating your own dog food’ is one of the best product testing practices for a business to implement. We explain how and why we use it within Cronofy. If you work in the tech industry, you've probably heard the term 'dogfooding' before. For those who haven't, it's the practice of [using your own products internally](https://www.techopedia.com/definition/30784/dogfooding). The benefits of dogfooding are undeniable; it ensures the team consistently sees their own offerings through their customers' eyes and can easily pinpoint areas of improvement. It also makes it more likely they'll discover problems and bugs quicker, so they can rectify them before launching to the public – this is why the practice is prevalent within the tech industry. What better way to test the success of your product than to use it yourself? In terms of marketing, dogfooding ensures a team can speak knowledgeably and comfortably about the products they’re promoting, as they’re already using them every day. They know the products inside out, and they’ve probably been continually suggesting improvements along the way. It’s a practice we know is effective, which is why the Cronofy team consistently uses our Scheduler product throughout our working days, as we get to make the most out of the great tool we’ve created! It’s useful for every team, from Marketing to Recruitment, and serves as the perfect organization hack by automating tedious or recurring admin. We’ve made sure the Scheduler integrates with most of the tools we work with daily and all calendar providers, so that we can take advantage of the product’s benefits on a multitude of daily tasks. So what do we use our products for in our workday? Here we’ll share the key ways we use our Scheduler internally to make our working processes more efficient and save ourselves time. ### Scheduling internal meetings via Slack Slack skyrocketed in popularity during COVID and the subsequent rise in remote working; the platform generated $902 million in revenue between March 2020 to April 2021, which was a [43 percent year-on-year increase](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/slack-statistics/). With colleagues miles instead of desks apart from each other, digital messaging platforms were crucial to maintaining communication. The remote working model has been continued by many businesses post-lockdown, with Cronofy being one of them. We use Slack daily for discussions, sharing work, and keeping up to date with the rest of the business. As we’re so active on Slack, we built an integration for our Scheduler to make scheduling meetings with other team members quick and simple. First, a user creates the link in their Scheduler account, using both their and the other attendees' availability. Pasted as a message in Slack, this link unfurls as a time-picking box. They can then select the time that suits them best – no need for back-and-forth messaging – which automatically updates in your Scheduler account and both of your calendars. It’s the ideal time-saving tool that makes finding the right time for a meeting easy. If the times in the immediate future don’t work, they can still click to see more times and availability in the browser. ### Marketing and sales emails with the HubSpot integration The success of sales and marketing emails increasingly relies on personalization; [a recent survey of 1,000 US adults](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/personalizing-the-customer-experience-driving-differentiation-in-retail) from Epsilon showed that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. Customers want to feel brands are communicating to them as an individual, not just one of many. We wanted to ensure we achieved this, even when sending mass email campaigns. We created a Cronofy integration for Hubspot so personalized scheduling links can be generated automatically for our email campaigns. If they like one of our new features or want to know more about our products highlighted in the email, recipients can use the link to book a demo or call with one of our team in two clicks. These links use the recipient’s information, already stored in Hubspot, their email address and name, and takes them to a calendar of potential dates and times - it even populates the title above the calendar with their name for a truly personalized experience. These slots update in real-time, so there’s no chance of double-booking - which is particularly important when sending a campaign email to a large number of people. As the recipient can schedule in only a couple of clicks, we’ve found it increases the number of demos booked from email marketing, and improves the experience prospects have with us - before they’ve even met us in person. It directly shows potential customers how our tools work, even before they’ve got on a call with us. > “We use the Hubspot Scheduler integration to embed personalized booking links in our marketing email. This enables us to automate sending emails to our clients and prospects while letting them choose an available time for demo calls in the calendars’ of their dedicated Account Managers. We reduced the Marketing & Sales team workload and increased the uptake on demo requests.” ‍ **Jeremy Bourhis | Head of Marketing** ### Interview scheduling with our ATS The [war for talent](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/post-pandemic-war-for-talent-interview-scheduling-competitive-edge) has never been more fierce, with the digital skills gap in particular desperately needing to be filled. As a tech company, we’ve personally felt this level of competition, pitted against other recruiters all looking for the perfect tech hire. In a world of instant gratification, having a quick response and interview scheduling turnaround is one of the best ways to get ahead and stand out to candidates. At Cronofy, our hiring managers and recruitment team all use the Scheduler to speed up the interview scheduling process, which in turn speeds up time-to-hire. Our Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle, has found the Scheduler saves him hours each week compared to his previous recruiting jobs, where he would have to chase up availability via call or email manually. We have several different stages to our hiring process; from initial screening to formal interview, to chats with the team to assess cultural fit - we need to schedule them all in our calendars. With these various stages comes candidate data and a complex communication trail. Using HRIS software is key to organizing the recruitment process; we use an ATS to store candidate information. Our Cronofy Google Chrome extension works with our ATS to automatically pull the candidate information from their saved profiles. Our team simply opens up the candidate profile and clicks the Cronofy extension to create a scheduling pop-up, which automatically populates with the candidate's information. The recruiter can create a personalized interview scheduling link in a couple of clicks, ready to be attached to their invitation email. The Scheduler integrates with all conferencing services, ensuring the booking experience is frictionless whether the interview is set to happen in person, or remotely. > “The ROI on using the Scheduler for interview scheduling is immeasurable. I can provide candidates with my full availability in just a couple of clicks, and they have the flexibility to choose times that work for them. This makes makes a great first impression – I’ve received so many positive comments on the ease and simplicity of booking interviews with us. We’re able to move candidates through the interview process quicker, giving me more time to focus on what's important - building our employer brand, marketing our roles, and sourcing candidates.” **Mark Harbottle | Head of Talent** ### Support calls with the Zendesk plugin Customer service is an intrinsic part of business success in any industry, with [96% of customers](http://info.microsoft.com/rs/157-GQE-382/images/EN-CNTNT-Report-DynService-2017-global-state-customer-service-en-au.pdf) stating customer service as important in their choice of loyalty to a brand. For a tech company, having a highly knowledgeable, quick-response Support team is crucial. We implemented Zendesk to help our Support function deal with queries more effectively and help our customers succeed. Sometimes it's important to recognize that a demonstration or conversation is needed to resolve a customer issue or ensure that the scheduling integrations/partnership is being used to its maximum potential. When that happens, the team is always ready to hop on a call with a customer. Being able to schedule this from within Zendesk is a real time-saver and makes this process seamless. Our team can quickly add a personalized, one-time use scheduling link when they reply to a customer’s ticket within the existing thread. The plugin automatically embeds all of the contact details for the customer into the booking link, meaning it just requires two clicks for the agent and two clicks for the customer to book a call. And as the Scheduler integrates with all conferencing services, it’s a surefire way to ensure the customer service journey is smooth as well as personalized. The customer chooses a time that suits them, but the Scheduler’s customizable Preferences, like Availability and Buffers that our team have defined, mean the time is always going to be convenient for everyone. ### External meetings through our Gmail plugin Like many other businesses, we use Google Workspace as our email and calendar provider. The team wanted a way to conveniently send meeting booking links to external recipients we’re emailing, such as sales prospects or potential business partners. Our Product team created the Scheduler plugin for this purpose; to eliminate the back-and-forth emailing that so often happens when trying to organize external meetings, and save time for both our team and the recipient. This functionality is perfect for sales calls in particular, as it leaves them more time to focus on research and preparation for optimum sign-up potential. If more than one team member needs to be on the call, say a sales person and a developer, we can use the Scheduler's Combined Availability feature to cross reference both calendars and only offer the recipient slots where all those team members are available. We can even schedule meetings for another colleague, for example a busy manager or someone who is currently out of office, with our [Schedule On Behalf Of ](https://docs.cronofy.com/scheduler/schedule-on-behalf-of/)feature. This function means there’s never an issue of leads getting lost just because someone isn’t working that day. We can help our sales team members pick up and respond to business faster, even when they’re absent, creating a better experience for the prospect. > “I always use the Gmail plugin to schedule sales calls and demos – it’s the easiest and quickest way to organize the best time for both myself and the prospect. I feel it gives off a positive impression of our brand right from the start of our communication and instantly proves to them how beneficial it is to use our tools for scheduling.” **David Jiang | Technical Account Manager** Our team might not always want to offer their entire calendar to someone they meet, within the standard one, two or three week view. When the meeting needs to happen within a certain time frame or is linked to a specific project, sharing Custom Times allows our team members to customize their availability to suit that particular meeting. *Are you interested in using our Scheduler with your existing tools? You can **[sign up for free](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler)** to try it out for yourself!* *OR **[book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo)** to find out how our Scheduler for Enterprise can transform your business operational efficiency and save hundreds of wasted hours.* --- # Cronofy's newest security accreditations As part of our ongoing commitment to security, we've completed our ISO27001:2013, ISO270018:2019, and SOC2 security audits and added a brand new ISO27701:2019 certification to our list! As part of our ongoing commitment to security, we've completed our ISO27001:2013, ISO270018:2019, and SOC2 security audits and added a brand new ISO27701:2019 certification to our list! We're pleased to announce we’ve completed the latest set of ISO27001:2013 and ISO270018:2019 security audits with flying colours, and have added a brand new ISO27701:2019 certification to our list. We also successfully completed our SOC 2 Type 2 attestation for the third year running! ### **What is ISO27701:2019?** ISO27701:2019 is a data privacy extension of ISO27001 and ISO27002. ISO27701 sets guidelines for how personally identifiable information (PII) should be managed and processed using a Privacy Information Management System (PIMS) and directly relates to requirements found in data protection regulations, like GDPR and CCPA. ‍ ### **What is a PIMS?** A Privacy Information Management System (PIMS) is a set of policies and privacy controls that set out how an organization collects, stores, processes, and generally handles PII. This provides Cronofy customers with the reassurance that their data is being handled in line with the highest of standards. Like with GDPR, within ISO27701 and the PIMS, there are strict controls around the collection and protection of PII, and the rights a person has to access their PII. These controls and policies are the foundation upon which our PIMS is built. ‍ ### **Why is this important to Cronofy customers?** The maintenance of our existing accreditations demonstrates our ongoing commitment to the highest [security standards](/privacy). Following the requirements and guidance of ISO/IEC 27701 and implementing a PIMS provides Cronofy customers with further reassurance that we meet the highest standards for the assessment, treatment, and reduction of privacy risks. Couple this with our existing accreditations, and Cronofy customers can rest assured that their data is in the safest hands. ‍ ### Independent Auditing An independent audit company, [A-LIGN](https://www.a-lign.com/), audited and validated our controls to achieve our certifications. Throughout the audit, Cronofy demonstrated a comprehensive approach to mitigating information security risks and the secure management of data. ‍ ### Continuous Improvement As part of running an effective information security program, Cronofy is committed to continually improving the standards in ISO27001, ISO27018, ISO27701, and SOC 2. Cronofy will be assessed for ISO certifications every three years, with annual surveillance audits. We renew SOC 2 Type 2 attestation every year. These certifications help Cronofy ensure that we operate, maintain our ISMS and PIMS, and protect our customers' data according to the standards. We're incredibly proud to have achieved these accolades while remaining HIPAA and GDPR compliant. You can request a copy of our certifications [here](https://my.pima.app/p/cronofy/compliance-reports). ‍ *Want to learn more? Email us at **[privacy@cronofy.com](mailto:privacy@cronofy.com)** to find out more about our stance on security.* --- # How to Create a Better Learning Environment for Your Employees Encouraging employees to always be developing their skills is good for their mood, career development, and even team bonding. When you offer employees the chance to learn and grow, it shows that you value them. This makes them more effective in their role – both because they’re expanding their skills and because they don’t feel like just another cog in the machine – and therefore makes your business more successful, too. Encouraging employees to always be developing their skills is good for their mood, career development, and even team bonding. When you offer employees the chance to learn and grow, it shows that you value them. This makes them more effective in their role – both because they’re expanding their skills and because they don’t feel like just another cog in the machine – and therefore makes your business more successful, too. Encouraging employees to always be developing their skills is good for their mood, career development, and even team bonding. When you offer employees the chance to learn and grow, it shows that you value them. This makes them more effective in their role – both because they’re expanding their skills and because they don’t feel like just another cog in the machine – and therefore makes your business more successful, too. From attending conferences online to making classes more interactive, technology makes staff training easier than ever. Here are just some of the ways technology helps you to create a better learning environment for your employees. ## Make training part of company culture [Training](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/managing-staff-training) should be seen as a key part of company culture. It’s only when employees are supported and guided in their growth strategies that they can really excel. However, it can be difficult to for employees to find the time to work on their skills around their busy schedules. Automating certain tasks, such as speeding up data entry using Excel macros, gives them more time to spend on expanding their skills. Other repetitive tasks, such as [organizing meetings](https://www.cronofy.com/meeting-room-booking/), can also be automated by adopting features such as calendar sync. When a team’s calendars are connected to a booking software, the meeting organizer can select the meeting attendees, then leave the software to work out the rest. It can even work out the most suitable meeting room and schedule the meeting around the availability of that room. ## Give employees easy access to the training resources they need Employees need the right equipment for their training session so that they can get the most out of it. This could involve laptops, projectors, screens, or even parking spaces. In a large organization the availability of these resources can’t always be guaranteed. Connecting the calendars of these resources to a [booking software](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/bookings-and-cancellations/kings-and-cancellations/) allows them to be reserved in advance. Training sessions can even be scheduled based on the availability of the necessary resources. The schedules of guest speakers can also be connected to your booking software, meaning that you can book a training session based around both their schedule and the schedules of everyone that needs to attend. Nobody needs to miss out because they’re on vacation or at another training event. It’s not always necessary to attend training events in person anymore, though. Many conferences now offer e-tickets, which allows employees to attend without the extra expenses of travel or hotel stays. This saves your business money while employees still get to develop their skills. E-tickets often come with the chance to rewatch lectures after the conference is over, which can also be a valuable resource. It also means employees can watch talks at a time that is most convenient for them and don’t have to miss out on anything because of time differences. ## Make learning more engaging We’ve all had to sit in a cold, dank room surrounded by colleagues while someone talks at us all day. Sometimes what can be explained in an hour is dragged out into an all-day event to justify guest speakers or room rental. This isn’t an effective, fun, or engaging training method. When employees can use technology, learning instantly becomes more engaging. Training modules can be turned into games; meetings can be simulated or even attended in VR, and employees can get their questions answered instantaneously by a chatbot. Chatbots can help employees both inside and outside of a training room – should a new hire have any questions, for example, they can ask the chatbot and get an answer straight away. This means they don’t have to disturb their colleagues to get answers, and they don’t have to wait around for their colleagues to be free, either. Your latest hire can get to grips with things and start helping the team faster. In-house training can also be made more interactive with the use of virtual reality. Virtual reality can be particularly useful for dangerous jobs where on-the-job training isn’t always possible, but where it’s important for employees to develop their skills before completing their tasks for real. It can also be beneficial for training sales teams or telemarketers in how to deal with difficult customers, or to teach pilots how to fly before they go up in the air. Virtual reality can also benefit remote-working employees as they can feel just as much of a part of team meetings as those who are there in person. They can also be more immersed in client meetings. ## Growth is important for people and businesses Retaining highly skilled employees is one of the most difficult tasks that a business faces. Finding a way to keep them is important if your business is to grow, though. One of the ways in which businesses can help to attract and retain the best employees is by offering them the opportunity to constantly learn and expand their knowledge. The most successful people are always learning new things, so it makes sense that these people, in turn, help to build a successful company. Investing in employees’ skills is a win-win situation, it prevents staff from going to the competition and helps to build a business’s [employer brand](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-build-a-strong-employer-brand-image/). The more advanced and interesting the development package, the more attractive it is to employees. One of the ways employers can make this attractive to employees is to invest in the right technology for the job. The better the technology available to employees, the more control they have over their schedule and the faster they can develop their skills. ‍ How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? ‍**[Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019)** --- # Why I’m joining the AI & automation trend in recruiting, but tearing up the script This year marked my third visit to RecFest, and second time getting up on stage and preaching to a crowd about something I’m really passionate about. But how did it go? Here’s what I did differently to cut through the AI noise, and how I’m saving time by using automation in the right places. This year marked my third visit to RecFest, and second time getting up on stage and preaching to a crowd about something I’m really passionate about. But how did it go? Here’s what I did differently to cut through the AI and automation noise, and how I’m saving time by using them in the right places. I walked onto the stage knowing that AI in hiring is a hot topic. 25% of all the talks that day had AI in the title, but this was different. I don’t want to encourage the TA community to implement AI because it’s a buzzword; I wanted to break down exactly how AI and automation can be used to provide a greater return on your time, and allow you to do the things that provide the most value to your recruitment processes. My presentation was structured around our [upcoming annual Candidate Expectations report](https://www.cronofy.com/2025-candidate-report-early-access). We surveyed 7,000 candidates around the world to get their honest opinions on the state of recruiting right now, and how they’re using and thinking about AI. The results were fascinating, so I’ve picked out a few highlights for those who couldn’t make it. ## Balancing AI and Automation with the Human in Hiring One on hand, hiring teams are under more pressure than ever. Application volumes are higher, processes are longer, and candidates expect to move quickly through the process. Despite this, **over half of candidates** still told us that the human touch is vital in the hiring process. When it’s missing, they notice. ## The cost of losing the human touch When candidates have a bad experience, we know they don’t keep it to themselves. Candidates told us that they simply wouldn’t recommend your business after a frustrating interview booking experience — and some will actively warn colleagues, peers and friends in your industry. Scheduling is a particular danger zone. **41% of candidates have left a recruitment process entirely because it took too long to schedule**. Yet, this is something you have complete control over. That’s before we even get to the interviews themselves. With each additional round, inefficiencies compound, and so does candidate frustration. By the time you get to the offer stage, you may have already lost some of your best candidates simply because your process felt slow and impersonal. ## Why automation alone isn’t the answer It’s tempting to think: *“If speed is the issue, let’s automate everything.”* But over-automation can strip away the empathy, connection and trust that candidates need in order to say “yes” above all other offers. I know the market is tough, but competition is still rife for the very best candidates. The truth is, automation isn’t about replacing recruiters — it’s about **freeing them up**. When done right, it removes the repetitive, low-value admin so that your team can focus on the high-value touch points that matter most. ## Three ways to keep the human in automated hiring ## **1. Automate admin, not empathy** Start by identifying the tasks that slow your team down but don’t require emotional intelligence, like scheduling, reminders, or message templates. These can be fully or partially automated without losing any personal connection. This immediate time saved can be reinvested into activities that *do* require human judgment and empathy: giving personalised feedback, having meaningful conversations, and proactively updating candidates. These are the things that candidates will remember. ## **2. Upskill your team** Automation is only as good as what you do with the time it saves. The time I’ve saved through automated interview scheduling has allowed me to provide 1:1 and group coaching to our Hiring Managers on interviewing. It’s also allowed me to provide personalised feedback to every single candidate that interviews with us. The upshot is we’re not only hiring *quicker*, but we’re making higher *quality* assessments and even *better* hires. In other words: if you’re going to remove some of the mechanical work from your day, make sure you’re equipping yourself, and your team, to do exceptional things. ## **3. Personalise at scale** Automation doesn’t have to be generic. Tools can now pull information directly from your ATS to automatically populate emails, calendar invites and messages with each candidate’s name and job titles (for example). I’m a huge fan of tools that plug directly into ATS tools; your ATS is your source of truth, and it becomes easier to adopt or up skill on something that is easier to access. This means you can send 50 invitations in minutes, and still make each one feel like it was written for that person. The candidate gets a seamless experience and your recruiters keep their focus where it belongs. I explain how this works in a short clip from my presentation below: ### How can you automate while staying in control of your hiring process? Duration: 1:37 ## What this looks like in practice At Cronofy, we’ve seen first-hand how balancing automation and human touch transforms hiring. Wise are a wonderful example, and I spoke about them in my presentation. Before implementing automated scheduling, it took them an average of **six days** to book in an interview. By using Cronofy within SmartRecruiters, they have been able to reduce their time-to-schedule from six days to **90 minutes**. ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Duration: 0:46 Not only were they moving quality candidates through the process faster — reducing the risk of dropouts — but they also started receiving *unprompted positive feedback* from candidates about how easy and smooth the scheduling experience was. That’s a huge boost to your employee brand and free marketing! This is what happens when automation is used thoughtfully: the process becomes faster *and* more personal. ## A framework for getting started Wondering where to start? I can’t give you the answers, but these steps might be a good foundation: ## **1. Audit your process** Map out each step from application to offer. Identify the slowest points and the most repetitive or time-consuming tasks. These should be your focal points and quick wins. ## **2. Automate the bottlenecks** Choose tools that integrate with your ATS to handle scheduling, reminders, and standardised communication. ## **3. Reinvest the time** Use the hours you save to deepen relationships with candidates and hiring managers, ensuring every interaction adds more value than time spent on the administrative tasks. ## The balance is the point My presentation at RecFest wasn’t really about AI or automation. It was about balance. The goal isn’t to become a fully automated hiring machine — it’s to use technology to remove friction so your team can focus on the parts of hiring that technology can’t replace. Ultimately, no matter how advanced AI becomes, candidates don’t remember the tool that scheduled their interview, or the product that transcribed their conversation. They remember the person who made them feel seen, valued and excited to join your company. This is your USP that no other organisation can replicate, and this is your opportunity to lean into it and stand out. If you can automate for speed while doubling down on human connection, you don’t just hire faster — you hire better. ## Final reflections I think I was surprised by the number of people who are finding challenges in providing a human touch to a process, and wanting to understand how AI and automation can solve this problem. It feels like an oxymoron; using technology to provide more of a human touch. That’s why I’m encouraging you to think deeply about the type of experience you want your candidates to have, the type of process you want to create, and ultimately what tool or product is going to help you achieve that. [Speak to a Scheduling Expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### Help Interviewers Share Availability Faster We’ve made enhancements that give interviewers more control over their time commitments and reduce manual effort for recruiters. You can now also use Separate Invites in templates, and we’ve added the ability to regenerate public links with a single click. Blog Post 2025-05-30T10:29:00.000Z --- ### How time-to-schedule is impacting your time-to-hire You've heard of time-to-hire as one of the most widely used metrics in the recruitment industry. But do you measure your time-to-schedule? It could be having a detrimental effect on your hiring. Blog Post 2023-11-30T11:26:00.000Z --- ### Workflow Automation with AI: New Tech, Same Problems There's an exciting opportunity to automate business workflows with AI agents, but is it that straightforward? Cronofy's CEO Adam Bird breaks down the right (and wrong) scenarios to implement these tools. Blog Post 2025-02-27T12:42:18.774Z --- # How Business Draft’s conversational ATS schedules candidate interviews with Cronofy’s White-Label API Business Draft is a modern applicant tracking system (ATS) that’s helping teams hire better talent, faster. We speak to Ty Peck, CEO of Business Draft, to hear more about how they’re delivering superior candidate and talent team experience with simplicity and text message communication at the core of their product. Business Draft is a modern applicant tracking system (ATS) that’s helping teams hire better talent, faster. We speak to CEO Ty Peck to hear how they’re delivering superior candidate and talent team experience with simplicity and text message communication at the core. > Since launching with Cronofy, it has drastically helped our customer base. Some of them have reduced up to 70% time spent on manual tasks, and a large portion of that comes from scheduling. — Ty Peck, CEO, Business Draft Success for Business Draft **70% reduction in administrative tasks for their users** **Massive reduction in no-show rates thanks to in-text rescheduling** **Eliminated back-and-forth phone calls for recruiters booking in screening calls** Business Draft is a modern applicant tracking system (ATS) that’s helping teams hire better talent, faster. We speak to Ty Peck, CEO of Business Draft, to hear more about how they’re delivering superior candidate and talent team experience with simplicity and text message communication at the core of their product. ## The problem: # Long waiting times creating communication problems to candidates “The average candidate is out of a job for 27 weeks,” explains Ty. With frequent ghosting and long wait times before they hear back updates from recruiters, the product philosophy behind Business Draft puts candidate transparency and streamlined communication at the forefront. After founding two successful software businesses, Ty explains how he was tired of being slowed down by legacy ATS problems. “There’s a lot of legacy platforms out there that just aren’t very innovative. They’re so big that change is hard to incorporate. I was always frustrated that when they did have a specific feature, it was hidden behind a paywall.” “Hiring is expensive already. What we really wanted to do was include everything within our service at no additional cost. We believe in a product that’s affordable for everybody.” That’s how Business Draft was born. They began by designing the user experience from a candidate’s perspective first, then looked at what was slowing hiring teams down. “If it’s not easy for the candidate, they won’t want to apply,” Ty puts simply. “One of the biggest bottlenecks we’ve heard from our customers is their recruiters picking up the phone, calling candidates, and manually scheduling interviews. It just doesn’t need to happen.” > Traditionally, candidates get a call from a recruiter, but they don’t recognize the number, so they might not pick up the phone. They let it go to voicemail, then have to call the recruiter back to schedule the interview, but the recruiter doesn't answer because they're talking to somebody else. Streamlining that back-and-forth phone tag was a big challenge for us. ## The solution: # A white-label interview scheduling experience that fits right inside a modern ATS Introducing automation to solve the recruiter screening challenge was key. When it came to deciding whether to build interview scheduling functionality in-house or to outsource, Ty took this up with the development team. > We like to own a lot of things in software, so we looked into building it. We asked ourselves — is the time and money investment good ROI for us at this stage in time? ### How do you choose between building vs buying scheduling? Duration: 00:54 Initially, they picked a provider which wasn’t fit for purpose. “That really gridlocked us. There is quite a bit of complexity that happens with scheduling, so we decided to partner with who would be the best fit for our organization, which was Cronofy.” Choosing a provider that understands complex ATS scheduling needs was key. Business Draft opted to solve this challenge with Cronofy’s White-Label API, which allowed them to customize the look and feel of their scheduling experience, ensuring it felt native to their application. For Ty, ensuring an easy integration for his engineering team was at the top of the agenda. > There's a lot of different APIs that we work with, beyond scheduling, and most are pretty poorly documented. With Cronofy, this process was actually pretty clean and simple from an API documentation and build perspective. [Cronofy's White-Label API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/white-label-api) is a toolkit of scheduling building blocks (calendar sync, availability logic, UI components) that lets product teams embed and fully customize scheduling workflows within their own application, without the pain of having to build and maintain calendar integrations themselves. [Learn more](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/white-label-api) ## The result: # Automated communication and one-click scheduling secures top candidates Now, Business Draft can give candidates the power to easily schedule and reschedule interviews through text, without having to reach out to a recruiter. “A key feature of our platform is auto communication to candidates. They will get a text message from the company offering an interview with a calendar link, asking them to pick a time that works best for them,” explains Ty. Combined with easy scheduling, Business Draft ensured interviews get booked by enrolling candidates into a five-day text and email drip campaign, massively reducing no-show rates as they no longer face the barrier of having to coordinate their calendars with recruiters over the phone. ### How does Business Draft ensure candidates can easily book interviews? Duration: 00:50 Speed-to-hire is a key metric for Business Draft’s users, and booking interviews early is getting them ahead of their competitors. When it comes to industries like home care, the race for hires is fierce. “There’s about five thousand home care companies in the US alone, and they’re all fishing out of the same pond of candidates. It’s one of the biggest industries for no shows, because candidates get scooped up by a competitor. The goal is to get the interviews booked as quickly as possible. We have a feature where the hiring company can turn on Auto Advance, which automatically sends the candidate a congratulatory text message to book in their first interview if they pass the knockout questions. They don't even need to get screened, our platform will auto-schedule a meeting with them and the hiring team.” End users are reaping the benefits of getting hours back per week for their recruitment teams, too. “Since launching with Cronofy, it has drastically helped our customer base,” shares Ty. “Some of them have reduced up to 70% time spent on manual tasks, and a large portion of that comes from scheduling.” The decision to add scheduling automation to complement their cutting-edge ATS toolset was a no-brainer. > We're in 2025. If you could have an automation built out to do something for you, and you’re still having to manually schedule interviews, you're probably living in the past. ### How did Business Draft reduce manual tasks by 70% with automation? Duration: 00:50 Talk to an expert about your scheduling needs ## Speak to our specialists ### Redefining calendars: AI-powered recruitment automation Mercu now booking interviews via WhatsApp Learn how Mercu, the AI-powered recruitment automation for volume hiring, revolutionized their product offering by integrating Cronofy’s scheduling API. Case Study --- ### How a scheduling integration with Cronofy freed thousands of hours for BambooHR users BambooHR’s dual focus on candidate experience and removing administrative fatigue led them to integrate Cronofy’s embedded scheduler to help save recruiters thousands of hours from manual scheduling. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study --- # Cronofy is now ISO27001 certified We are pleased to announce that Cronofy is now certified to the ISO27001 information security standard. We were delighted to complete the audit with zero major or minor non-conformities. We are pleased to announce that Cronofy is now certified to the ISO27001 information security standard. We were delighted to complete the audit with zero major or minor non-conformities. We are pleased to announce that Cronofy is now certified to the ISO27001 information security standard. We were delighted to complete the audit with zero major or minor non-conformities. This shows that our processes, the way we build our products and operate day-to-day is consistent and thorough, and already in line with the ISO27001 guidelines. We want to make sure that you can schedule everything, for everyone, safe in the knowledge that data will be processed and secured to the highest standards. ### What is ISO27001:2013? ISO27001:2013 is an information security standard, set out by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), which specifies the requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving platforms and processes (otherwise known as the ISMS). The standard also sets out requirements for the assessment and treatment of information security risks. ### Serious about Information Security When you use Cronofy, you’re sharing potentially sensitive information with us. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we protect that data and we take that responsibility very seriously. That’s why information security will always be, a first-class concern to us. It’s always at the forefront of minds – whenever we’re building or developing any aspect of our service. We understand that our customers care deeply about the security of data, and it’s something we feel equally strongly about. We want our customers to know that they can trust us to process and handle their calendar and event data – always securely and to the highest standards. The ISO27001 standard, as well as the other standards achieved by Cronofy, serves to demonstrate the fact that we have a world-class Information Security management system in place and ensure confidence in the way we handle all your data. ‍ ### Independent Auditing To achieve this certification, Cronofy’s compliance was audited, and validated, by an independent audit company, A-LIGN. Throughout the audit, Cronofy demonstrated a comprehensive and thorough approach to mitigating information security risks and the secure management of data. ‍ ### Continuous Improvement As part of running an effective information security program, Cronofy is committed to continual improvement in line with ISO27001. Cronofy will be assessed every three years, with audits in between those. This certification helps Cronofy ensure that we are operating, and, maintaining our ISMS and are protecting our customers’ data, in line with the standard. We’re really pleased to now be ISO27001 certified, as well as SOC2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant, as well as a member of the EU-US Privacy Shield. Want to know more? Email us at [privacy@cronofy.com](mailto:privacy@cronofy.com). --- # Interview scheduling: streamline hiring processes and make your team more efficient Interview scheduling automation to streamline recruitment processes to make teams more efficient. Find out how to harness automated scheduling to help you: - improve speed-to-hire - secure quality candidates - enhance the candidate experience - reduce scheduling and rescheduling time from 3-5 days to 2-3 hours How would your hiring process change if you could save 300 hours a year by automating interview scheduling? --- # The Candidate Expectations report 2022 is now live! We partnered with Opinium and surveyed 6,500 candidates around the world to determine what candidates really want from the recruitment process, with the aim to help recruiters get ahead and win the war for talent. We partnered with Opinium and surveyed 6,500 candidates around the world to determine what candidates really want from the recruitment process, with the aim to help recruiters get ahead and win the war for talent. We’ve launched our second annual [Candidate Expectations report](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-report-2022-download)! ‍ We work with thousands of recruiters around the world and know how competitive the industry is, especially when recruiting for those sectors experiencing a skills gap, such as technology and finance. This competitive environment combined with the pandemic and rise in remote working has completely changed the hiring landscape. Recruiters have to adapt to avoid falling behind. ‍ This is why we partnered with Opinium to survey 6,500 candidates in the US, UK, France and Germany who had applied for a job within the last 12 months. In our Candidate Expectations report, we determine what candidates really want from the recruitment process, with the aim to help recruiters attract top talent and meet their talent acquisition targets. ‍ We uncovered some surprising insights, particularly in terms of the emotional impact of interview scheduling delays – for example, 88% of candidates in the 18-34 age bracket said their mental health was affected by a slow interview scheduling process. Some other stand-out statistics from the report: - **83% of senior candidates** would drop out of the hiring process if interview scheduling took **any more than a week** - **British interviewees **were the most likely to leave the recruitment process if there were **scheduling delays** - **35% of candidates** want interview scheduling to be **automated** - **64% **agreed switching to a more virtual world during the pandemic had led them to **expect more from an employer's technology.** We’ve also featured insight from industry thought leaders within the report to discover what they thought of the results and what they would advise recruiters to take from this research. ‍ Many recruiters don’t think to prioritize the interview scheduling experience, however our research has shown it is an intrinsic part of the hiring process. When interview scheduling is done badly, it results in lost talent and a negative brand perception. ‍ [Download the report now](https://www.cronofy.com/candidate-expectations-report-2022-download) to dig deeper into the results. --- # From 5 roles per month to 500: How to keep your customers as their hiring grows Have your users complained about candidate drop off? It's not about fit or interest. It's about how long it takes to get an interview on the calendar. See why embedding meeting scheduling inside your application could become your secret weapon to retaining customers. Your customers growing shouldn't trigger them churning. Here's how to make sure your HR tech platform has a key feature that helps hiring teams co-ordinate interviews in just a few clicks, not days (without taking your product team months of development time.) Your HR Tech platform built a hiring module your customers love. They post jobs, review candidates, and manage their recruitment pipeline entirely within your platform. Then, they start to grow. Five roles per month becomes fifty, then five hundred, and the volume of interviews they’re booking means your platform just isn’t fit for scale. Suddenly, they're shopping for another ATS. Most HR Tech platforms hit this retention cliff when their customers' hiring needs outpace what feels manageable inside their system. Here’s what’s actually happening, and how to overcome it: Buyers are consolidating in 2026, and you might not make the cut Hiring teams are tired of context-switching between systems, paying for overlapping functionality, and maintaining hacky workarounds for interview co-ordination that take them outside of their core hiring tool. They want platforms that handle the entire job without forcing users to jump to external tools or copy-paste information between meeting invites, emails, and their applicant tracking information. Clunky scheduling interfaces and long email threads chasing availability just aren’t fit for purpose anymore. If your product still relies on external tools or forces users out of your interface to complete essential tasks, you'll lose deals and renewals to competitors who give users an end-to-end experience. ## Where platforms lose scaling customers Most HR Tech platforms don't lose customers because their core features stop working. They lose them because essential workflows become bottlenecks as hiring volume increases. Scheduling is the clearest example. At five roles per month, manual scheduling feels manageable. A recruiter can send a few meeting links without drowning in admin work. At fifty or five hundred roles per month, scheduling breaks everything. Recruiters spend hours coordinating availability across multiple interviewers and time zones. Candidates wait days for interview confirmation. Hiring managers complain about calendar chaos, and ultimately lose quality candidates. Your customer has two options: accept significant manual overhead and hire more coordinators, or adopt a standalone scheduling tool that pulls critical workflow steps outside your interface. Both hurt retention. The first creates frustration with your platform's limitations. The second trains users to see your platform as incomplete, and opens the door to competitors. #### **Impact:** Lower CSAT scores, extended time-to-hire, and account churn. ## Solid scheduling infrastructure for retention The platforms which are keeping customers through their hiring troughs and peaks have embedded scheduling functionality directly into their ATS that lets users schedule in a few clicks, not days. [Cronofy's scheduling and meeting infrastructure](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/hr-tech) addresses this scaling challenge. Cronofy embeds directly into your platform's hiring workflow — your users never have to leave your interface to schedule interviews. The infrastructure handles the complexity that emerges at scale: coordinating multiple interviewers across different calendar systems, managing time zone calculations automatically, triggering confirmation and reminder workflows, and simplifying rescheduling without manual coordination. Cronofy is already the go-to scheduling provider for leading HR tech platforms like UKG, Personio, Teamtailor, Pinpoint, and more. [See our customer stories](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies) What customer retention looks like when scheduling just works If they can schedule interviews smoothly in your hiring module, your customers' growth trajectory changes. A small team hiring sporadically schedules interviews with the same ease as an enterprise team running hundreds of interviews per week, no matter if it’s 1:1s or complex panel interviews. When buyers evaluate your platform or customers renew contracts in 2026, they're thinking about whether it can grow with them. This keeps customers from churning when their hiring needs change. They shouldn’t be shopping for a more robust ATS, because your platform should already handles their volume, and they shouldn’t need a standalone scheduling tool if everything happens inside your system. #### **Impact:** Higher retention rates and stronger expansion revenue as customers grow. Build for the customer you'll have, not the one you have today If you’re planning to keep your retention rates and expansion revenue up, it’s time to think long term. The winners are opting for infrastructure that works at every stage of that growth curve. They embed the capabilities that customers will need at scale, so those customers never hit a ceiling that forces them to look elsewhere. Scheduling infrastructure is at the heart of this. As hiring volume grows, it becomes the key differentiator between a platform that feels complete and one that feels like it's missing essential pieces. #### In 2026, buyers will choose platforms that feel complete. Want to make sure yours is the one they stay with? Learn more about what Cronofy does for [HR Tech here](https://www.cronofy.com/solutions/hr-tech). > Although on the surface it seems simple, we knew scheduling was very complex, and we knew we wanted to launch quickly. That’s why opting for Cronofy’s API was the obvious choice. — Jascha Zittel, Co-founder, Mercu ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # About Cronofy Time is the one constraint that teams, systems and agents all share. Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure layer built around it, powering the full meeting lifecycle from availability control and scheduling through to recording, transcription and intelligence. About Cronofy Temporal infrastructure connecting agents, systems, and teams Our mission ## Unlocking the context graph for time Time remains the fundamental constraint teams can’t escape. As they scale, adding tools, workflows, and AI agents to the mix, the complexity of keeping everything in step compounds. People connect to make decisions. Decisions drive actions. Actions need to happen at the right time. Teams hit a productivity wall. Cronofy is the temporal infrastructure layer that keeps agents, systems, and people working in sync. We unify availability control, coordinate the full scheduling lifecycle, and unlock meeting intelligence so that every interaction that depends on time runs reliably, at scale, and without friction. The temporal grid powers Cronofy’s capabilities everywhere, whether embedded in a SaaS product, leveraged by AI agents, or used where teams already work. Cronofy’s infrastructure is the foundation for teams keeping pace with how fast AI is challenging what software can do. Our story ## Reimagining temporal infrastructure after a decade of edge cases Cronofy was founded in Europe in 2014 by two engineers frustrated by how disconnected schedules were from everything else that mattered. While others focused on building cleaner booking interfaces, Adam and Garry were thinking several layers deeper. Time isn't just a container for appointments. It governs how systems record, and how teams work. Business scheduling involves complex logic, not just individual decisions. Calendar data must be secure and controlled. The platforms companies rely on need to stay in sync, in real time. Without the right infrastructure, context stays locked in someone's head, and every system that needs it has to interrupt a person to make decisions. Those interruptions accumulate, pulling teams out of their flow for low-level scheduling decisions and meeting admin. The intelligence meetings generate stays disconnected from the systems where work actually gets done. Agents enter the picture, trying to act autonomously but get left waiting on humans to fill the gaps. At scale, the productivity cost becomes enormous. A reimagining was needed: not just of calendar tools, but of the infrastructure layer that connects meetings to everything that depends on them. Building that layer for over a decade by solving every edge case imaginable gives Cronofy the depth of experience that puts it in a category of one. Today, Cronofy's temporal infrastructure powers meeting and scheduling workflows for over 180,000 businesses worldwide. Working at Cronofy ## Join the team building the infrastructure for how the world coordinates time We're building the infrastructure layer that gives time back to the people and teams who need it most. Freeing teams from coordination overhead, turning meetings into actionable intelligence, and giving AI agents the temporal context to deliver unprecedented productivity gains. In 2025, we received a £15 million investment from BGF to support this very mission. Cronofy is at that exciting stage where every person who joins the team can have a major hand in our success and rapidly advance their careers in the process. At Cronofy, we know that an inclusive working environment is the single best approach to ensure high-performance and inspire innovative thinking. The magic happens when we bring multiple perspectives together to solve the temporal problems of today and tomorrow. This requires that everyone at Cronofy has equal opportunity to grow, learn, deliver their best work, and develop their careers. [See open roles](https://www.cronofy.com/careers#07801af6f1c3) ## Our Principles ## Tell the truth Honesty is not just the right thing to do. Lies and half-truths can feel expedient in the short term, but the freedom gained from confronting the truth is where high performance and trust come from. ## When this baby hits 142kph... The magic happens when we operate at a speed that we can maintain long-term. We favor guidelines over rules and constantly prioritize value delivery without sacrificing the future. ## Back from the future We immerse ourselves in the future. We continuously question and challenge norms in order to find better answers to the scheduling problems of today and tomorrow. ## Stop & look around once in a while Knowledge work requires deep focus and mental energy. Social time together as well as away from work is critical to high performance and personal wellbeing. ## Explore to exploit We are relentless in our exploration of learning what is effective to drive growth for us and our customers. Together we overshare learnings gained from testing ambitious hypotheses in the open. We never want to miss an opportunity to exploit these insights and maximise return on effort. Let's talk numbers **180k+** Companies using Cronofy **1Bn+** Events processed **4.8** G2 Rating **95%** Customer satisfaction score Leadership Team Meet the founders ## Adam Bird **CEO & Co-founder ** Adam is a highly technical and experienced technology entrepreneur with a passion for continuous improvement that pervades every aspect of his life. A lover of cycling and craft beer but he never really got on with having a beard for that hipster hat-trick. ## Garry Shutler **CTO & Co-founder ** Garry has wide-ranging experience as a tech leader including being lead developer at Zopa, the world’s oldest and Europe’s largest peer-to-peer lending service. He’s tackled many challenges that involve scale, highly sensitive data, and where a high degree of accuracy and high level of availability is paramount. He's a husband, father, cyclist, and avid proponent of the Oxford comma. Our office locations **Amsterdam** Mr Treublaan 7 Amsterdam 1097 DP The Netherlands **Nottingham** 1 Broadway Nottingham NG1 1PR UK **London** Runway East 20 St. Thomas Street London SE1 9RS UK **New York** 228 Park Ave S New York NY 10003 USA --- # Notifications - Help Articles Learn how attendees get notified and reminded about event changes and how you can keep track and manage event notifications when scheduling with Cronofy. ## Notifications Cronofy’s event notifications are a crucial part of the experience. This guide explains email notifications reminders and what happens when people cancel. **Q: Who gets notified about event changes?** A: In an event a **coordinator**(creator), **host** and **invitees** get email notifications about events booked, event changes and cancelations. Certain actions do not notify all participants. Look further down for more information. **Q: How do I get notified about changes of an event?** A: By default, all notification occur via your email provider with an email from Cronofy that is automated. **Q: Will I receive a reminder prior to the event commencing?** A: Reminders can be setup in the preferences and will send email reminders to you as a host. This will not send reminders to any other participants. Preferences → Event details Don’t forget to Save! **Q: Will my invitee receive a reminder prior to the event?** A: At this time its not possible to send automatic reminders to invitees. ### Create a Scheduling Request --- ### Public Links --- # How to reduce interview scheduling delays and speed up hiring Discover how leading companies are maximizing interviewer availability to hire top talent faster. Learn how to navigate calendar hygiene hurdles and scale your hiring without losing quality or burning out. Is your interview process bottlenecked by availability and calendar hygiene challenges? You’re not alone. Watch the playback of this discussion to discover what we’ve learned from leading global organizations about how they are reimagining interviewer availability management to dramatically reduce time-to-hire without sacrificing hiring quality or burning out their teams. You can download the presentation [here](https://cdn.sanity.io/files/ygfbhkqr/production/b1e34fe7656f1db6f9600439bf94a1d893eb3a28.pdf). You’ll learn actionable tips on increasing interview capacity, maintaining candidate and interviewer engagement, and accelerating hiring productivity. Discover smart ways to increase interview capacity and hire top talent faster --- # 5 AI Features You Can't Build Without Meeting Data Meetings are the goldmine of information that gives your SaaS platform's AI the capability to give you real intelligence. Read on to see what kinds of data you need to build key AI features for your product. Meetings are a goldmine of information that gives your SaaS platform's AI the capability to produce intelligent insights. We dive into the world of CRMs to see what kinds of data you need in order to build key AI features that stick. Sales conversations contain the signals that give AI the intelligent edge: whether a deal is stalling, what objections came up, when to follow up. But if that data lives in reps' heads or scattered across note-taking tools, your AI features are building on guesswork, and risk becoming another tick-box to say that you’ve implemented AI in your product without it being genuinely useful. Here are five key AI features for CRMs to build that depend entirely on meeting data, and why CRMs that don't own this layer will lose to platforms that do. 1. Deal risk scoring that actually predicts pipeline health **You want to:** Flag deals going cold before they slip through the cracks. **Why you need meeting data:** Meeting frequency, cancellations, and declining engagement are the earliest indicators of deal risk. Without automated capture of who attended, when (and how many times) meetings got rescheduled, and how long gaps are between touchpoints, your scoring model could be seriously inaccurate. **The data gap:** If reps manually log this context (or don't log it at all), your AI is working with incomplete signals and placing too much burden for manual work on the reps’ behalf. Instead, scheduling should happen on your platform so this data gets actively tracked without input. 2. Next-step recommendations reps will genuinely want to follow **You want to:** Suggest the right next action based on where the deal stands. **Why you need meeting data:** The difference between "schedule a demo" and "send pricing" depends on what was discussed in the last call. Meeting transcripts and structured data about participants, topics, and outcomes give your AI capabilities the context to recommend actions that make sense, not generic nudges reps ignore like ‘send email’. **The data gap:** Generic next-step prompts without the right level of personalization feel like busywork. Contextual recommendations that use call notes actually move deals forward. 3. Auto-generated meeting summaries that populate CRM fields **You want to:** Turn conversations into structured data without manual note-taking. **Why you need meeting data:** Meeting summaries only work if your platform captures, transcribes, and structures what happened. This isn't about storing a blob of text, but about extracting deal stage signals, objections, stakeholders, and commitments, then pushing them directly into the right CRM fields. **The data gap:** Third-party note-taking tools create data silos. If meeting intelligence doesn't flow back into your CRM automatically, reps still do double entry (and might not fill things out properly.) 4. Pipeline velocity tracking that shows where deals stall **You want to:** Identify bottlenecks by analyzing how long deals sit between stages. **Why you need meeting data:** Time-to-schedule is one of the biggest velocity killers. If it takes 6 days to book a follow-up because of email back-and-forth, deals are going to drag. If meetings get rescheduled multiple times, momentum dies. Meeting data shows you exactly where friction happens, and which reps need help. **The data gap:** Pipeline reports show what is stuck. Meeting data shows exactly where the deals are being kept waiting. 5. Follow-up automation that doesn't feel robotic **You want to:** Send contextual reminders and follow-ups based on what was discussed in previous meetings. **Why you need meeting data:** Automated follow-ups only work if they're relevant. "Just checking in" emails get ignored, but "Following up on the pricing question from Tuesday's call" will get a response because it proves you were paying attention. That level of personalization requires structured data about what actually happened in the meeting. **The data gap:** Without meeting context, automation feels generic. With it, automation feels human. Why most CRMs can't deliver this These features aren't optional anymore. Sales teams expect integrated AI capabilities to reduce admin work, not create more of it. But here's the catch: you can't build intelligent automation on top of fragmented, manually-entered meeting data. If your users are jumping to Calendly to schedule, Zoom to meet, and Gong to capture notes, your CRM never owns the meeting layer. You're stuck integrating with external tools that control the data (and the deal velocity). **The solution:** Cronofy is the infrastructure that turns calendars, meetings, and follow-ups into a structured data layer feeding your CRM's own agents and copilots. Bridge your infrastructure gap for more intelligent AI Your AI features are only as smart as the data they're built on. If meeting data lives outside your platform, your automation will always feel incomplete, and your customers will consolidate around the product that owns the full workflow. Cronofy embeds scheduling, meeting recording, transcription, and structured summaries directly into your platform, replacing multiple external tools instantly. Your platform handles everything, users stay in one place, and your AI finally has the signals it needs to work. [Learn more](/developer/meeting-agents) ### Should you Build or Buy Scheduling Infrastructure? Let's explore the pros and cons of building or buying scheduling software. Learn how third-party scheduling APIs can save time, cut costs, and enhance operational efficiency for businesses in industries like Recruitment, Telehealth, and EdTech. Blog Post 2025-06-18T16:19:00.000Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # Calculate how much revenue you're losing to AI notetakers The global market size for AI notetakers is set to hit $757.6 million USD in 2026. Fill in this calculator to estimate how much of that could be coming from your users trying to patch notetaking gaps in your product. ## Calculate how much revenue you're losing to AI notetakers The global market size for AI notetakers is set to hit [$757.6](https://market.us/report/ai-note-taking-market/) million USD in 2026. Fill in this calculator to estimate how much of that could be coming from your users trying to patch notetaking gaps in your product. [Talk to us about your needs](https://www.cronofy.com/ai-notetaker-revenue-capture-calculator#form-478241c7-b67e-46b4-bdba-aa1f48ccab2e) [Learn more about Meeting Agents](/developer/meeting-agents) ## Ready to talk to us about your notetaking and recording needs? After submitting the form, you'll be able to book time with a member of our team. In a 30 minute call, we'll walk through your goals, help you define your specific use case, and answer any technical or product questions you have. ## Learn more about what meeting data can unlock ### 5 ways SaaS platforms can use meeting data to power AI features Meeting data rarely flows into SaaS platforms - users rely on standalone notetakers, and the insights end up elsewhere. When transcripts, recordings, and summaries flow directly into your product, they let you build AI features that weren't possible before. Here are five ways to put that data to work. Blog Post 2026-02-11T13:43:31.851Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- ### 5 AI Features You Can't Build Without Meeting Data Meetings are a goldmine of information that gives your SaaS platform's AI the capability to produce intelligent insights. We dive into the world of CRMs to see what kinds of data you need in order to build key AI features that stick. Blog Post 2026-01-21T12:24:50.855Z --- # Balancing AI and Automation with the Human in Hiring Lead the AI transformation in your recruiting organization. Discover how TA leaders are using AI and Automation to streamline hiring, reduce recruiter workload, and enhance candidate experience without losing the human touch. ## A Recruiter's Guide to AI and Automation Lead the AI transformation in your recruiting organization. Discover how TA leaders are using AI and Automation to streamline hiring, reduce recruiter workload, and enhance candidate experience without losing the human touch. [Click here to get your guide](#form-96502202-b183-4758-95db-feab06c2415c) ## Are your recruiters drowning in applications? You are not alone. - **Talent Acquisition teams are doing more with less:** AI and Automation can help, but only if implemented effectively. - **Candidates expect a seamless experience:** 74% still value human touch, so striking the right balance is key. - **Giving over what you know to automation can be daunting**: We talk about the ways in which you can protect your calendar from unwanted meetings, and eliminate copy-and-paste mixups to meeting invites Get the intel on how top TA teams navigate AI and Automation to accelerate hiring productivity. **What 7,000 candidates think** And what hiring teams can do about it **How to stay in control of your process** What features you should look out for **Discover what actually works** and what's just noise **How leading teams automate interview scheduling ** Streamlined interview scheduling inside your ATS --- # How Calendar Sync Can Improve Your One-On-One Meetings Regular one-on-one meetings are an important way to keep employees engaged. They can raise any issues before they develop into something more serious as well as receive feedback on their performance. Here’s how calendar sync can help you to better organize and track your one-on-one meetings. Regular one-on-one meetings are an important way to keep employees engaged. They can raise any issues before they develop into something more serious as well as receive feedback on their performance. Here’s how calendar sync can help you to better organize and track your one-on-one meetings. Regular one-on-one meetings are an important way to keep employees engaged. They can raise any issues before they develop into something more serious as well as receive feedback on their performance. This feedback helps them to further develop their skills and progress in their career. All of this is vital to ensuring that employees remain engaged. And, with only [34% of the US workforce engaged](https://news.gallup.com/poll/241649/employee-engagement-rise.aspx), this is more important than ever. Especially when you factor in how much this costs – up to [$550 billion per year in the US](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nazbeheshti/2019/01/16/10-timely-statistics-about-the-connection-between-employee-engagement-and-wellness/#7db3b1322a03) alone. Yearly appraisals can be used to agree and measure personal development plans, but weekly one-on-ones play an equally important role. In smaller businesses, organizing weekly meetings and yearly appraisals is a challenge. Organizing them for larger organizations with thousands of employees is even harder. After all, there are only a handful meeting rooms. You can’t magically find more just because you need them. Once you’ve scheduled those meetings, how do you track that they’ve happened? How do you measure their impact on employee engagement? Here’s how calendar sync can help you to better organize and track your one-on-one meetings...no matter how many you need to schedule. ## Automated scheduling In the US, each employee wastes [520 hours every year](https://www.samanage.com/company/news/us-businesses-wasting-up-to-1-trillion-annually-on-repetitive-tasks/) on repetitive tasks that could be automated. This equates to $1.8 trillion lost every year. Failing to automate repetitive tasks leaves employees with less time to work toward their goals and objectives. This leads to a poor employee experience and higher employee churn rate. When HR software is calendar synced, employees don’t need to waste time scheduling any form of meeting. When rooms and resources have their own calendars, their availability can be factored in when organizing meetings too. Organizers don't need to flit between different schedules or different apps to find a suitable time: software can use the schedules of people and rooms to work out the most suitable times to meet. This avoids double-bookings and scheduling conflicts for everyone and everything involved. Rescheduling can be done automatically without HR teams needing to get involved, saving everyone time. ## Attendance tracking Sometimes, because of circumstances outside of employees’ control, they can no longer attend their appraisal. Calendar sync allows HR teams to track meeting attendance from the HR software they use every day.HR teams and managers can also track attendance through room booking confirmations. If someone doesn't confirm their attendance in a room, this shows HR teams that they haven’t attended the meeting. They can then speak to the manager and employee involved about re-organizing the appraisal.HR systems can also record if regular one-on-ones are organized, and the impact that this has on them. Are employees that have fewer one-on-ones more likely to leave? Do some managers have more engaged team members because they meet with them more often? HR teams can then use this data to look for patterns that may occur within teams or within a company. With this data, they can report back to managers and provide them with feedback on how they’re performing in their role. They can then improve their performance and by association, the engagement of their team. ## Goal tracking Companies can also use one-on-ones to set goals for employees’ progression. This gives them something to aim for, ensuring that they don’t fall into the monotony of repetitive tasks and become disengaged. It also gives employees control and agency over projects, making them feel more engaged and valued in their roles. It’s important during meetings to set the right goals. SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based) give employees the ability to measure their progress while also giving them a deadline to hold them accountable. SMART goals also give their line managers something to measure. Employees and their managers can track progress using a shared calendar. Information such as deadlines, future meetings to discuss goals and objectives, and notes of what to discuss in meetings can be placed in employees’ calendars. This keeps their objectives visible, reminding them to work toward them regularly. Employees can store agendas and meeting notes in the notes section of their calendars. This ensures that they have a record of what they agreed in an easy-to-find location. If they organize their workload in their schedules, they can also set reminders to work on a particular task related to their goals. This keeps it front of mind and means they don’t get distracted by other day-to-day activities. Deadlines can also sync with HR software or project management software, making it easier for employees to manage their schedules. Their calendars can store everything they need to know. They don't need to duplicate information between multiple places, meaning they're less likely to forget upcoming projects or deadlines. Deadlines and reminders ensure that goals are always at the forefront of employees’ minds, encouraging them to work toward them regularly. ## Schedule follow-ups Scheduling meetings often takes more time than it should. Staff members have to check their calendar, their colleague’s calendar, and the availability of a room before anything is booked. When all of these things are calendar synced, none of these steps are necessary. The availability of attendees and a meeting room are used to propose times by the HR software. Follow-ups can be scheduled at the end of meetings to ensure that everyone knows when to meet next. This can be done in seconds when HR software is calendar synced, meaning that they don't need to lose five minutes at the end just to schedule the next meeting. If they want to meet on the same day and time every week, this can be set up as a recurring meeting in their calendar. Even if someone tries to schedule a meeting with them on that day, the attendees will come up as unavailable. ## Conclusion Regular one-on-ones are an important part of an employees’ development with a company. It allows employees to air out any issues that arose during the week, ensuring that they can be dealt with promptly and don’t develop into more serious issues that cause employees to leaving.It’s also a place for employees to receive feedback on their progress. Managers can present them with areas that they need to improve and develop. They can also provide positive feedback to show employees where their strengths lie and what could develop into a future career path.Scheduling these meetings automatically gives HR teams and managers more time to spend helping employees and reduces how long they waste on repetitive tasks.Calendar sync doesn’t just help to organize meetings though – they can help during and after the meeting too. Employees can record notes, agendas, and to-dos in their calendars, or sync their schedules with HR or project management software so that they can always see the latest deadlines.They can also set calendar reminders to ensure that they take action or chase something up related to their goals.Check out our use case to find out more about adding calendar sync to your [performance appraisal software](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/performance-evaluation-scheduling/). How long do recruiters waste scheduling interviews? [Find out in our interview scheduling survey](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/interview-scheduling-survey-2019) --- # Candidate expectations report 2024 ## Candidate Expectations Report 12,000 candidates, 7 countries; what have we learned about their expectations, frustrations, and preferences? Get a scoop into our 2024 report. [Download insights](#form-de6b4575-295c-4d46-aa23-d2bfd6f95fe2) ## Join the waitlist to get an exclusive copy --- # Panel Discussion: The Evolution of FinTech Talent Acquisition in 2025 If 2024 was the year of discovering the possibilities of AI and automation, 2025 is set to be the year they truly transforms the Talent Acquisition landscape. But how can you ensure you stay a step ahead of the hiring trends for a lasting impact? If 2024 was the year of discovering the possibilities of AI and automation, 2025 is set to be the year it truly transforms the Talent Acquisition landscape. But how can you ensure you stay a step ahead of the hiring trends for a lasting impact? Watch the replay of this session with Cronofy's Head of Talent, Mark Harbottle and our panel of experts **Ana King** - Head of People and Talent at SAPI (prev Twilio, Trainline, Google) and **Adam Gordon** - Co-founder of Poetry (prev iCIMS, Candidate.ID, PwC) who unpacked how teams are adopting these new tools into real processes and workflows in the fintech space. ** Key Topics Covered** - The evolution of talent acquisition in the industry - AI-powered tools that can optimize hiring processes - Practical insights for businesses considering AI implementation in 2025 **Additional Resources** - Access a copy of the presentation [here](https://cdn.sanity.io/files/ygfbhkqr/production/3adc9e5c59072c98e96afdfdcb7f327f7535e206.pdf) - Download the 2025 Hiring in Fintech Report [here](https://cdn.sanity.io/files/ygfbhkqr/production/fa9459abc24260b2b34ee3416f60b458b3dd2c10.pdf) Discover new ways to work with AI and automation --- # Unlock meeting data to power your AI strategy Turn meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams into recordings, transcripts, and AI summaries to power post-meeting action and intelligence. ## Unlock meeting data to power your AI strategy Meeting Agents run entirely on Cronofy’s infrastructure, turning meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams into recordings, transcripts, and AI summaries to power post-meeting action and intelligence. Start testing with 24 free hours of recording. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) ## Meetings hold the context your product needs Meetings contain some of the richest signals in any workflow, but that data rarely exists in a form systems can use. Capturing it requires coordinating conferencing integrations, recording pipelines, transcription, and AI processing, while managing sensitive data and compliance requirements while users are left relying on manual notes or external tools. Cronofy provides the infrastructure to access, capture, and structure meeting intelligence, so your product can act on what actually happened. Recording ## Capture audio and video recordings Give your users a record of the meetings they want to capture, directly inside your product so they can review and reference exactly what happened without relying on external tools. - Capture audio and video recordings from every meeting - Support Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams - Deliver files ready for in-app playback Transcription ## Analyze recordings with diarized transcripts Automatically structure meetings into searchable, actionable data your product can understand and build on. - Transcription is hosted entirely on Cronofy’s infrastructure - Generate speaker-attributed transcripts with timestamps - Use transcript data to power things like scorecards and insights AI summaries ## Automatically generate meeting summaries Remove the need for manual note-taking or external tools by surfacing summaries inside your product. - Deliver summaries as ready made outputs - Build on the summary to highlight key moments and next steps - Populate records and trigger follow-up workflows inside your product Agentic workflows ## Power automation and agentic workflows Give agents the context they need to understand conversations and take action on behalf of users. From follow-ups to workflow updates, agents can move from conversation to execution without manual input. ## Meeting capture built with compliance at the core Most meeting capture APIs focus on outputs. Meeting Agents are built around where data runs and who has access to it. ### Single processor by design Cronofy, an EU-based provider, runs the entire meeting capture workflow on its own infrastructure with no third-party vendors or subprocessors. --- ### Region-specific deployments Meeting data is processed and stored only in the selected region, with dedicated data centres in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Singapore. --- ### Compliance built-in Cronofy is GDPR and HIPAA compliant, with SOC 2 and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certifications. Ship new capabilities without increasing risk. ### Get started with Meeting Agents Duration: 04:00 ## Start capturing meetings in minutes Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ## Built on the infrastructure that powers meetings Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure is the foundation for every meeting workflow, bringing together availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence in one modular system. At the core is the Temporal Grid, built on decades of experience handling the hardest parts of meeting workflows. It unifies calendars, availability, conferencing, meeting data, and compliance, taking away the complexity of building the underlying infrastructure yourself, so every capability you build with feels simple and intuitive from day one. Because everything runs on the same grid, you can use Meeting Agents on their own and grow into richer workflows and agent-driven automation over time on the same foundation. [See all capabilities](/home) ## Choose an integration path Deploy meeting agents rapidly as a standalone solution, or use them as an extension of Cronofy's temporal infrastructure to support the entire meeting workflow with one integration. ### Standalone Use the Meeting Agent API to dispatch instantly using a meeting join URL, or schedule them to join at a specific time. This works as a standalone integration, with no dependency on scheduling. --- ### Fully integrated Attach a Meeting Agent directly to the calendar event when scheduling meetings via Cronofy. If the meeting is updated or rescheduled, everything stays aligned with the right session. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) ## Frequently Asked Questions **Q: What are Meeting Agents by Cronofy?** A: Meeting Agents are a unified API for capturing meeting recordings, transcripts, and AI-generated summaries from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. They handle meeting access, recording, and data delivery so product teams can focus on building differentiated AI features and meeting workflows, without maintaining bots or conferencing integrations. **Q: How can I start using Meeting Agents?** A: It’s quick to get started with Meeting Agents. Create a free account and start testing with 24 free hours meeting recording. You can review the documentation and how to get started [here](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/). **Q: How is Meeting Agents pricing structured?** A: Meeting Agents are priced based on monthly usage, with all costs inclusive of meeting recording, transcription, and data processing. The first 24 hours of usage are free to facilitate testing, then pricing scales as follows: - 0–4,000 hours / month: $0.79/hour - 4,001–8,000 hours / month: $0.69/hour - 8,001–16,000 hours / month: $0.59/hour - 16,001+ hours / month: contact us Charges are metered per second so you only ever pay for exactly what you use. A minimum monthly commitment of $99 applies when using the standalone Meeting Agent API. **Q: How do Meeting Agents work?** A: Meeting Agents can be deployed in a number of ways - Dispatch an agent to any meeting ad-hoc via a single API call. - Schedule a Meeting Agent to join a meeting at a specific time. - Attach an agent to a calendar event when creating or updating it **Q: What are Cronofy’s security and compliance credentials?** A: Cronofy is a European company, built with compliance at our foundation. Cronofy is GDPR, HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. You can view detailed information about our [compliance policy here](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy). **Q: Where will meeting data be stored?** A: You choose where your data is processed and stored. Cronofy operates six data centres in: Australia, Canada, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All meeting data is processed exclusively within your selected region. **Q: Which conferencing platforms do Meeting Agents support?** A: Meeting Agents currently support Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. **Q: What languages are supported?** A: We support the following languages: Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Swiss German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malay, Dutch, Flemish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Chinese. **Q: Will my users be able to opt-out of meeting recording?** A: Yes. You control when Meeting Agents are dispatched, and end users can accept or decline an agent joining a call. Cronofy provides the infrastructure, while integrators retain full control over recording behaviour. **Q: Can the Meeting Agent be white-labeled?** A: Yes. The name and avatar displayed by Meeting Agents are fully configurable to match your product. --- # How to deliver the experience candidates want Companies have been beating the drum of improving the candidate experience for decades. Every new shift in society, business, and technology elicits more reasons for talent acquisition teams to refocus their efforts on improving the candidate experience. Today, disparate factors converge to make the candidate experience matter more than ever. In this webinar we want to help you understand how you can transform your standard hiring process into a hiring experience candidates actually stay in! Navigating change is nothing new for talent acquisition teams. One key area of recruiting that continues to evolve is the importance and focus on candidate experience, and aligning what candidates **actually** want with the hiring process your organization offers. Today, disparate factors converge to make the candidate experience matter more than ever. In this webinar we will help you understand how you can transform your standard hiring process into a hiring experience candidates stay in! Backed up by research we’ll look at the **pre-application**, **application**, **interview**, and **offer** experience by giving you hands-on advice on improvements that can be made. In this discussion between Adam Bird from Cronofy, Karin Philippczyk from SmartRecruiters and Stephanie Baysinger previously with Marqeta, we’ll talk through these three key actions to improve throughout the hiring funnel: - What candidates expect today - Steps TA teams can take to meet their needs - Which metrics to track Insights on the experiences that candidates tell us and the strategies TA teams need to action to meet their needs. ### Candidate Expectations Report 2023 --- ### SmartRecruiters Hub --- ### Recruiting Brainfood - Candidate Expectations Webinar 2023-09-28 Join Hung Lee and a panel of expert guests as they dig into the Report insights for 2023, and how it compares to the last two years. --- # How to Keep Recruitment Human-Centric in The Age of AI Enhance recruitment efficiency with AI-powered interview scheduling automation. Learn how blending technology with human-centric strategies reduces time-to-hire while maintaining candidate engagement. Discover actionable insights for optimizing your hiring process. AI is transforming recruitment, making it faster and smarter to hire talent. But no technology can replace the importance of human connection. Let’s explore how to balance AI, automation, and personal interaction to enhance your hiring process. From resume screening to chatbots, the promise of AI seem endless. However, while AI brings significant efficiency to certain processes, it’s important not to overlook the value of human intuition and personal interaction in recruitment. In 2024, the challenge for recruitment leaders is understanding how to best integrate AI while ensuring a candidate-centered and human-focused approach. ## AI’s Growing Role in Recruitment AI has become a vital part of the hiring process. Here are some of the ways this technology is making an impact: - **Content Creation:** In the attracting stage, AI helps generate recruitment content like job ads and company profiles that resonate with the target audience. - **Conversational AI:** In the screening stage, AI chatbots can handle first-round conversations, answer common candidate questions, and gather basic information. - **CV Review: **AI can quickly review and summarize CVs, highlighting key qualifications and experiences. - **Personalized Rejection**: In the hiring stage, AI can generate tailored rejection messages, providing candidates with feedback that maintains a positive relationship, even if they aren’t selected. Across all these stages, AI-driven solutions help recruiters manage large applicant pools, increase efficiency, and reduce time-to-hire. ## The Balance Between AI and Human Touch While AI can improve efficiency, there are parts of recruitment where human input is irreplaceable. - **Building Relationships: **One of the most crucial parts of the process is building trust and relationships with candidates. Personalized communication, especially in high-touch points, needs a human touch. - **Cultural Fit Evaluation: **No algorithm can fully grasp the nuances of factors such as cultural fit within a team or company. While AI can analyze qualifications and competencies, it struggles with nuances in conversations. This requires empathy, emotional intelligence, and personal interaction. - **Complex Decision-Making: **AI excels in data-driven decision-making but may falter when complex judgment calls are required. For example, determining a candidate’s potential based on non-traditional career paths or educational backgrounds often requires intuition and holistic analysis that these tools cannot fully replicate. AI tools are most beneficial when used to amplify human efforts rather than replace them. The key is to know when to lean on AI and when to rely on human intuition. ## Do you Need AI or Automation? There’s a common misconception that AI and automation are the same, but they serve different purposes in recruitment. While AI is often seen as the future, not every task requires such advanced technology. Here’s how they differ: - AI: Simulates human intelligence to analyze data, learn patterns and makes decisions beyond predefined rules. - Automation: completes repetitive tasks with preset rules. For instance, interview scheduling is a task you can automate and see significant improvement without waiting for AI to do its magic. Using Cronofy to automate inteview-scheduling, [Wise](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling) cut their time-to-schedule from 6 days to just 90 minutes, dramatically improving their hiring efficiency. In some cases, automation is the magic you need. ## Looking Ahead, how do you Steer Your Team in the Right Direction? AI is transforming recruitment, but it’s not the only solution. Automation can provide quick wins and significant efficiency improvements without the use of AI. As technology in recruitment continues to evolve, you must think strategically about how to leverage new tools. Here are our tips: - Implement AI and automation to free up your team’s time for more strategic tasks, where fit. - [Embrace AI responsibly](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/hrtech-2024-recap). AI should assist, not replace human roles. The future looks promising with AI, however, the most successful leaders will be those who can blend AI’s efficiencies with the human touch that truly elevates the recruitment process. Ready to see how interview scheduling automation can streamline your recruitment process? Schedule a demo with Cronofy today to improve your time-to-hire and team efficiency. [Speak to a scheduling expert](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Easier Bookings and Cancellations with Calendar Sync ## Easier Bookings and Cancellations with Calendar Sync > We love the fact that once the integration was completed it will now be a simple process for our users to connect their accounts to Cronofy. Since we get users with varying IT skills it was important for us to keep the process quick and easy. Mission accomplished! — Tapan Karambelkar, Product Manager, ResBook ## Save time, book online Online booking can save both you and your client time, but connecting to the APIs of multiple calendar softwares is time-consuming and requires ongoing maintenance. Our [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/availability-api/) connects to all calendar services, allowing for a client’s availability to be synced to your booking system in real-time. As soon as a slot is taken up, it’s removed from the booking system’s calendar. ## Send booking details to a customer's calendar It can be easy for a customer to forget to add their booking to their calendar. Even more so if they have to juggle between personal and professional calendars. This can lead to double-bookings or missed appointments for them, and lost revenue for the business. With [Cronofy’s Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/features/), details of the booking can be sent straight to the customer’s calendar and synced to their other calendars. Should anyone need to make any changes, they can be done from the booking system or the calendars. The event will then be updated in real-time. ## Avoid missed appointments When a customer can no longer make an appointment, it can get expensive, especially if they don’t cancel and free up the slot for someone else. With Cronofy, customers can make changes straight from their chosen calendar service. Notification about the changes can be sent to other attendees and to the booking system, and, if necessary, automated messages can be created to get in touch with the customer for confirmation. ## Don't compromise on privacy While businesses need to know details of their customer’s bookings, they don’t need to access other personal details held into calendars. Our Calendar API ensures customer’s privacy throughout. You can choose to only see relevant calendar events details such as free/busy information. Customers, meanwhile, don’t need to share sensitive information about medical appointments or nights out which makes it a lot easier for them to agree to share their calendars with booking systems. ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Calendar Sync and Online Booking for College Visits and Admissions Campus visits are a huge part of the college application process. They help students to experience college life for the first time and make more informed decisions about where they want to study. Blog Post 2018-07-20T11:00:00.000Z --- ### Perfectly synchronized online bookings with Appointedd Appointedd is an intelligent booking software that uses Cronofy to automatically ensure no user receives an appointment that clashes with another. Case Study --- # The Growth of Online Marketplaces Online marketplaces are the perfect way for potential customers to find everything from a plumber to a new pair of shoes. And it looks like consumers agree – ecommerce sales for products and services are set to reach $4 trillion globally by 2020. Online marketplaces are the perfect way for potential customers to find everything from a plumber to a new pair of shoes. And it looks like consumers agree – ecommerce sales for products and services are set to reach $4 trillion globally by 2020. Online marketplaces are the perfect way for potential customers to find everything from a plumber to a new pair of shoes. And it looks like consumers agree – ecommerce sales for products and services reached [$4.921 trillion in 2021](https://mycreditsummit.com/online-shopping-statistics/). Online marketplaces connect customers to service providers faster and quicker than any other method. All it takes is a query on their favorite search engine, then they can find a marketplace that caters to what they’re looking for. Users can then search that marketplace based on their requirements. These could be anything from location to the type of service provided to the type of product they need, right through to specific details like the color of a garment or the type of gardening someone specializes in. Some marketplaces focus on one particular area, such as Uber, which focuses on providing a taxi service for its users. Others, such as eBay, provide users with a variety of products and/or services. Each type of marketplace has its own benefits for the product owner, vendor, and user. ## Why have online marketplaces grown so fast? Online marketplaces are easier for everyone involved. Vendors get to attract customers for less than they would using other methods such as newspaper adverts (which are costly and increasingly less effective), or branding on the side of a van. Online marketplaces are a great way for them to advertise their services, providing much more detail about what they can do than any other method beyond their own website. However, running a website is a time-consuming investment, and many businesses simply don’t have the time to do it. With online marketplaces, they can share evidence of their work and updates with customers without worrying about maintaining a website. Online marketplaces operate using two payment models: the first is a flat monthly or annual fee, and the second is via commission. Depending on how much business a vendor generates will depend on which method is more useful to them. The more money they make, the more they will lose through commission. However, smaller service providers may lose money if upfront fees are too expensive. Online marketplaces allow vendors to include as much information as possible so that customers can make an informed decision. The more information vendors include, the more they and their customers can benefit. An ad in a newspaper or magazine, on the other hand, is limited to the amount of information it can contain. This then means that anyone who does reach out to a service provider will be less qualified, and even if they ask for a quote they may be less likely to convert. Customers get much more in-depth, tailored search results in marketplaces than they would using any other method. This means they’re more qualified before they reach the vendor’s page. Customers can also see ratings and reviews from previous customers, which provides social proof, further helping them to make informed decisions. The more positive the reviews are, the more likely someone is to convert. Any negative reviews that vendors receive they can use to improve the products and/or services that they offer. Compare all of this to doing things the offline way: customers have to find recommendations from friends or relatives. If they’re new to the area, they have to look in local newspapers or magazines. There's no guarantee of the service provider's quality of work without recommendations, though. They could end up paying for a service or product and receiving a sub-par end result. When it comes to products, visiting stores can often be better, as customers get to try on shoes and outfits, which ensures a better fit. However, many online marketplaces such as Etsy or eBay allow vendors to sell custom-made garments that fit proportions more precisely than clothing that’s bought off the rack. Customers benefit from a tailored approach like no other, providing them with one-of-a-kind garments that they wouldn’t find anywhere else. ## Who do online marketplaces benefit? In short, everyone. Customers who work full-time can find what they need regardless of what time of day it is. They don’t have to find time during the workday to make a phone call, or take time out of their lunch to contact someone. They can do their research at their own convenience, and, if the marketplace also offers [online booking](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/online-marketplaces/), they can book when they’re ready, too. A couple of decades ago, this wasn’t an option. If you needed something, you had to take time out of your day to find and purchase what you needed. This meant spending lunch breaks on the phone or having to travel if what you needed wasn’t located nearby. It was an arduous way of finding products. Vendors, meanwhile, were limited to spending money on print advertising, where they couldn’t accurately track the ROI. This meant that they risked wasting money on advertising methods that we're guaranteed to reach the right audience. With online marketplaces, vendors can track the ROI they receive from using it, helping them to determine if it’s a valuable tool for them. When they make changes to their profile, add updates, or receive a review, it’s easy for them to track the impact this has on their business. Whatever their business model, they have the power to be more reactive than ever. ## Conclusion The benefits of online marketplaces differ depending on the industry that you’re in. For those that provide clothing, it can give customers the opportunity to purchase custom-made garments without worrying about how close they live to the garment maker. Garment makers can also improve the reach of their products by advertising online. It can be a longer process from start to finish, but the end result is tailored to the customer’s tastes. More tailored results are the main benefit of all online marketplaces. Wherever someone is, whatever they need, they can find someone able to provide just what they’re looking for. If they’re looking for something that’s service-based and does need to be tailored to their location, they can search for people that work within that area and specialize in what they need. Online marketplaces are a versatile, user-friendly way for customers to find the products or services that they need. Vendors, meanwhile, can reach a wider audience without investing as much time or money. To find out more about adding booking and scheduling features to your online marketplace, [check out our use cases](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/). --- # Putting something on a swan - the transformation of Cronofy’s visual identity Developing how your company describes and represents itself is a challenging and enlightening journey. You have to revisit long held assumptions and confront the reality of what your customers and the market value. I absolutely believe that you can only do this effectively with outside help. Developing how your company describes and represents itself is a challenging and enlightening journey. You have to revisit long held assumptions and confront the reality of what your customers and the market value. I absolutely believe that you can only do this effectively with outside help. Developing how your company describes and represents itself is a challenging and enlightening journey. You have to revisit long held assumptions and confront the reality of what your customers and the market value. I absolutely believe that you can only do this effectively with outside help. I’ve jokingly likened this process to us morphing from [Maurice Moss from the IT Crowd](https://theitcrowd.fandom.com/wiki/Maurice_Moss) (fiendishly intelligent, dependable and ultra-nerdy) into [Neo from the Matrix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_(The_Matrix)) (futuristic, omnipotent manipulator of spacetime). I’ll let you be the judge of whether that’s an accurate summation but I wanted to share how we went about the transformation and what we learnt along the way. ## In the beginning Garry and I started Cronofy to build a missing part of the Internet, the infrastructure for managing time. Whilst other companies focused on nice UIs for simple booking flows, we knew that to truly fix scheduling we had to look under the surface. The problems were very much not skin deep. All scheduling happens as part of a workflow. Be that a job application, a sales process, a medical investigation or innumerate other examples, we’re always scheduling in the context of something. Any scheduling we do, therefore, must retain that context so that we can continue with our work without interruption. When an interview time is selected by a candidate, the recruiting software should be updated so that the interviewers have the correct feedback forms to hand; an account executive can plan their demo prep and the sales pipeline automatically reflects their activity so their manager can quickly understand how effectively they are performing; etc, etc. In the business context this is further complicated by very often having to coordinate multiple people. Interviews are often conducted by panels, sales people need the support of sales engineers, success managers have to corral multiple stakeholders. To truly support the scheduling demands of modern businesses an embedded solution is required that has been designed from the ground up to support the most complex, multi-person requirements. Alongside this it needs rich privacy & security controls to support the information security needs of the most careful businesses. Neither of these core tenets can be retrofitted if this is to be delivered effectively. The infrastructure, and the business that runs it, has to be designed from the bottom up to cope with these demands. But, in delivering this you cannot sacrifice scale or performance. If you want the world’s most demanding companies to rely on your scheduling infrastructure embedded into their workflows, there is no room for mediocrity. You have to continuously commit and deliver. Whilst we’ve achieved all of this from a product and service perspective it became increasingly apparent last year that we were a long way from people recognising this in the way we present ourselves. ## Time for change The catalyst for this was our participation in the [Startup Core Strengths](https://www.startupcorestrengths.com/) growth program. We’ve always spent time with our customers. But through the program we got to know them on a deeper level – really learning what drives them, what they want from a product like ours, and the language that they use to describe it. It became clear that our existing messaging was confusing people and misrepresenting Cronofy’s world-class capabilities. We engaged [Sara Gordon](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarakategordon/) to bring her expertise to work with our customers, the team and the market to help us distill the essence of what makes Cronofy so valuable. Customers come to us to solve their complex, multi-person scheduling problems at scale, but they also need us to protect their data and always be working. We spent a lot of time making sure that the messaging language was authentic to who Cronofy are. We’re terrible actors so we had to make sure that we weren’t trying to commit to language that didn’t feel natural. We evolved our principles to ensure that the way we communicate would authentically represent the way we operate. Collaborating around Miro boards, we revised and honed the language we were planning to use. The team were getting increasingly excited as this new, more confident, positioning and messaging started to become real. But seeing our new voices in our old clothes didn’t feel right. There was an uncomfortable dissonance between the new language and the visual identity we were still utilising. We desperately needed an update. Fortunately, already having a world-class service meant that we weren’t trying to put lipstick on a pig. Instead we had an incredibly capable swan dressed in dad-wear and it was time for it to put something else on. Enter [Philip Blaikie](https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipblaikie/) and [Joe Kibria](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-kibria-1115972a/). Instead of engaging a design agency and sending them away to come back with a solution. We decided to work collaboratively and iteratively on finding a solution. A very Cronofy approach that afforded us two very important benefits. Firstly Philip, Joe and Sara could help us understand and participate in the process and the reasons behind decisions as they were made. As a team we needed to fully embrace this new visual language. We favour guidelines over rules and thus giving the team the context of decisions around colour choices, photography treatments, etc was going to be crucial to ensuring full adoption. Having a brand guardian sign off on every output would have been counter to everything we do. Secondly, by being part of the process, we could quickly feedback on the authenticity of a design route for us. We are a straightforward, unblinkingly truthful company. Any visual representation we chose had to truly resonate with our principles for it to stick. ## Back from the future The result of this you can see around you. A new look Cronofy ready for our next chapter. We’ve leant heavily on Swiss influences, the nation most renowned for accurate timekeeping, giving a minimal finish which prioritises performance over superfluous decoration. Our colour palette is pared back to off-black and crisp white for superb clarity and accessibility. While accents of hot red speak to efficiency and our trailblazing spirit, but aren’t overused. Typography is set in At Geodesic – a geometric humanist sans-serif by [Arillatype](https://arillatype.studio/font/at-geodesic) with pleasing circular letterforms reminiscent of clock faces. It’s precise and confident with great readability in over 100 languages. All topped with a brand mark that’s bold but straightforward and instantly points to what we do. In true Cronofy style we’re releasing this incrementally. We update our service more than ten times a day so we apply the same approach to the deployment and evolution of our visual identity. We’ve released a simple reskin now, but you’ll also see updates to our use of photography and illustration styles which better represent the human aspects of what we do. Arriving at this point in the way Cronofy presents itself to the outside world feels like an important milestone. Our customers knew, better than we did, the value they see from their ongoing relationship with us. Being so focused on the tech and the service meant that we’d been missing an opportunity to demonstrate to even more people how we could help. The journey continues as we embrace all of the time challenges businesses face and become the go-to scheduling infrastructure for high performance companies globally. ### Behind the scenes: Cronofy does Valencia! Find out what the Cronofy team got up to on our bi-annual company meet up. This time, we hit the beautiful Spanish coastal city of Valencia! Blog Post 2022-12-20T03:09:00.000Z --- ### Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Blog Post 2024-06-19T12:00:32.123Z --- ### Behind the scenes: Cronofy hits Amsterdam! Every six months Cronofy organises a companywide meet up. This May, we met in Amsterdam to give our teams the chance to see our recently opened office and the sights this wonderful European capital has to offer. Blog Post 2023-06-12T15:01:00.000Z --- # Surface user availability inside your product Give your product a real-time view of user availability, and the control to coordinate time automatically across users and agents. ## Connect calendars and surface user availability inside your product Give your product a real-time view of user availability, and the control to coordinate time automatically across users and agents. [Get started](https://www.cronofy.com/product-builders#31580f3d94659e890afd561357237706) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) ## Turn availability into something your product can act on Coordinating user availability means handling providers, time zones, conflicts, and real-world constraints, not just reading calendars. As workflows become automated, time becomes a shared constraint across your product, users and agents. Cronofy handles this complexity for you, so your product can coordinate time reliably - whether driven by users or handled autonomously. Calendar sync ## Connect users' calendars and keep their availability in sync Cronofy handles authorization, permissions, and ongoing updates across providers for you through a managed authorization flow, branded for your application. Whether users connect with full Read-Write access, or choose a Free/Busy only connection, you get reliable, real-time availability in your product without engineering overhead or sync issues. [Read the calendar authorization docs ](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/calendars-events/) Webhooks ## Keep in sync with real-time push notifications Cronofy's sync engine continuously monitors your users' calendars and notifies your application based on the rules that you specify. Because we track events your application creates separately to events that the user create in their calendar, you can just be notified about what is important. [Read the push notification docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/push-notifications/) Availability ## Automate complex meeting setup Combine availability across people, time zones, and calendar providers, and embed scheduling directly into your product. Let users coordinate and book meetings automatically, without manual back-and-forth. [Read the availability docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/) Agentic workflows ## Give agents the context they need around availability Let users define their availability preferences with working hours, buffers, and booking rules so they can find time that actually works, without needing to switch tools or rely on manual coordination. Use this context around availability and defined constraints to let systems and agents coordinate time on behalf of users automatically, without disrupting the flow of work. [Read the managed availability docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/managed-availability/) See how we power the full lifecycle ## Choose an integration path With human support and clear developer documentation, get started quickly with the best option for your platform and combine approaches as you scale. ### Need full control? Build custom meeting workflows with our API. --- ### Want to launch fast? Embed scheduling with a pre-built UI. --- ### Building with Agents? Handle agentic workflows with our MCP server. ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) > Cronofy's Calendar Sync is now a crucial part of our application; it saves us substantial development time and helps us offer a superior product. — Tom Luce, CTO and Co-founder, Pinpoint ## Powering time for over 180,000 companies Ship with confidence without increasing operational risk. ### Compliance built-in GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO certified. Unlock regulated markets while building trust. --- ### Regional deployments Data stays in-region with data centres across the US, UK, EU, and APAC. --- ### Reliability at scale High-availability infrastructure with 99.99% uptime, even when providers fail. ## Replace fragmented integrations with one system Cronofy’s Temporal Infrastructure is the foundation for every meeting workflow, bringing together availability, scheduling, and meeting intelligence in one modular system. At the core is the Temporal Grid, built on decades of experience handling the hardest parts of meeting workflows. It unifies calendars, availability, conferencing, meeting data, and compliance, taking away the complexity of building the underlying infrastructure yourself, so every capability you build with feels simple and intuitive from day one. Because everything runs on the same grid, availability stays accurate and in sync, allowing users and systems to reliably find, book, and coordinate time without conflicts or manual work. [See all capabilities](/home) ## Build experiences users can rely on Product and engineering teams use Cronofy to make availability easy to act on. ### Coordinate time faster Launch and scale meeting workflows without building complex integrations yourself. --- ### Power reliable experiences Keep availability, calendars, and meetings in sync so everything works as expected. --- ### Stay reliable as you scale Handle edge cases and provider downtime automatically, so workflows continue to run smoothly. ## Build with expert guidance Work with a dedicated technical advisor to design your integration and get to production faster. Ongoing support helps you scale and adapt as your product evolves. The same level of support on every plan. [Talk to an expert](/book-a-demo-api) ## Powering SaaS applications of all sizes ### Handshake is driving student engagement with two-way calendar sync US-based Handshake is an innovative network that links universities, students, and potential employers. Handshake works with the career centers of 475+ colleges of all types, Case Study --- ### Real-time scheduling helps 8x8 power better video conferencing experiences 8×8 is a California-based leading provider of cloud communications solutions including enterprise voice, meetings and messaging. Case Study --- ### Real-time availability is at the core of Teamtailor’s interview scheduling Teamtailor is an innovative end-to-end recruitment software that combines career sites with applicant tracking systems. Case Study ## Start building Sign up and connect up to 20 accounts for free, with 24 hours of meeting recording included - no credit card required. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) --- # Calendar Sync and Online Booking for College Visits and Admissions Campus visits are a huge part of the college application process. They help students to experience college life for the first time and make more informed decisions about where they want to study. Campus visits are a huge part of the college application process. They help students to experience college life for the first time and make more informed decisions about where they want to study. Campus visits are a huge part of the college application process. They help students to experience college life for the first time and make more informed decisions about where they want to study. However, there are many parts to coordinate. From tours to interviews to meeting sports coaches, that’s a lot to squeeze into one day. For welcome centers and admissions staff responsible for coordinating these, there are a lot of moving parts to factor in. Colleges that use online booking provide a more welcoming, user-friendly experience to visitors. This reassures parents that the institution cares for their child’s wellbeing, makes students feel more welcomed into the environment, and ensures everything runs smoothly. Let’s take a look at the different areas where calendar-synced online booking platforms can create a better process for colleges and their visitors. ‍ ## Book everything online When colleges connect their calendars to online booking software, it makes it easier for visiting students (and their families/teachers) to plan out their day. Everything from the day they choose to visit to the activities they do on the day can be planned out in the same place, at the same time. Should attendees connect their calendars to the booking software (or the software use [Smart Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/)) booking information can then be pushed to their calendars. This ensures everything they need is in one place. There’s no need for visitors to carry around reams of papers or memorize their itineraries. > Everything from the day they choose to visit to the activities they do on the day can be planned out in the same place, at the same time. Any updates to the itinerary can then be pushed to attendees’ calendars. Organizers don’t need to make numerous phone calls, write bulk emails, or send mass text messages. It’s a simpler, more cost-effective way to inform everyone of any updates in real-time. As the calendar event is updated automatically it also means visitors don’t need to update their schedules to avoid any conflicts. If visitors wish to change anything – such as which classes to try – when this is updated on the booking platform it can automatically be pushed to their calendar. This means there’s less effort involved on their part and they don’t need to worry about updating the appointment in their calendar. Software could even cater for group or school bookings. The day’s itinerary can then be pushed to students’ calendars automatically. Welcome centers can even limit the number of people allowed to attend on a particular day or to a certain event, ensuring that everyone gets the attention they need and no event is overbooked. ‍ ## Organize the day College welcome centers often have set times when outsiders can visit. When the online booking software syncs with visitors’ calendars, they can be sent a time-to-leave notification before the welcome center opens. This ensures that they get there on time and have all day to explore, helping them to make a more informed decision. Geolocation data can also be added to calendar events, helping visitors to navigate large and complex college campuses. Information such as where to meet for college tours can also be included in the notes of calendar events. For students who are at a crucial time in their lives, this feature takes some of the stress out of navigating a new place. The more technology is used to make their lives easier, the more likely they are to feel positively towards the college and therefore decide to go there. The opening times of places to eat and things to do around the campus could also be added to calendar events. This prevents visiting students from turning up five minutes after lunch has finished or turning up at the library before it’s even open. > When students can see their schedule in one place, they can make sure there's plenty of travel time between each activity. They also don’t need to search in their bag for paperwork or maps or appointment information – all this information can be included in calendar events. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have a cell signal, either – calendar events are available offline. Seeing their schedule mapped out in one place helps them to plan out their day and add in any last-minute activities they may decide to take part in. It also helps them to find information on the nearest places to take a break, have something to eat, or relax in between activities. ## Schedule admissions interviews Admissions interviews are an important and stressful time for students. It’s the final part of the evaluation, when the college admissions team meets students in-person for the first time. Giving students everything they need to know in one place helps to remove some of the stress involved so that they can prepare more in advance. Students can choose the best interview slot based around their schedule for the day – or vice versa. The interview can then be pushed to their calendar to avoid any chances of double-bookings. > Students can choose the best interview slot based around their schedule for the day – or vice versa. Information such as whom their interview is with or which building it’s located in can also be included in the calendar event. This gives them time to prepare, research, and ensure they arrive in enough time. Students can use the same feature to book meetings with sports coaches, professors, and students that they may wish to speak to. All these things can be scheduled in seconds. Students can then focus on enjoying their day and not worrying about what comes next and where. ## Conclusion Calendar sync makes it easier for colleges to provide a well-organized, accessible itinerary to visitors. This gives them a positive impression and can be the difference between students choosing or not choosing to study there. From planning out the day to experiencing the day itself, students and their relatives can have everything they need in one place. There’s no need for them to carry around mass amounts of paperwork. Everything they need can be stored in their calendar. Colleges can notify attendees of any changes as soon as they happen. They don’t need to write bulk emails or text messages. A quick update to the calendar event, and everyone is updated. Calendar sync is a cheaper and more eco-friendly way of organizing schedules for institutions that are always looking for ways to stand out from their competitors. For information on how to add calendar sync to your online booking platform, [contact us today](https://www.cronofy.com/contact-us/). --- # Calendar API for integrated scheduling applications Calendar APIs for connecting with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Outlook and more. Start building customized scheduling applications with our unified Calendar API today. ## Integrate the most reliable real-time calendar sync API The Cronofy calendar API is the choice of SaaS applications who care about reliability and performance at scale. Connect with Google, Microsoft and Apple calendars, even on-premise Exchange, with a 99.99% service guarantee. Get started [Talk to a human](/book-a-demo-api) > Cronofy's Calendar Sync is now a crucial part of our application; it saves us substantial development time and helps us offer a superior product. — Tom Luce, CTO and Co-founder, Pinpoint Unified Calendar API ## Integrate your customers' calendars with one API A mature series of API end-points optimized for calendar sync operations. Connecting your app to Google, Microsoft and Apple calendar services as well as on-premise Exchange. No need to setup up credentials or go through security reviews for each service. Cronofy just works for you out of the box. Your users authorize access through an authorization flow, branded for your application, which allows you to limit the data that you need. Just want free busy access but still want to create events, we've got you covered. [Explore the calendar & events docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/calendars-events/) Webhooks ## Keep in sync with real-time push notifications Tracking real-time changes is crucial to driving application workflows. Cronofy's sync engine continuously monitors your users' calendars and notifies your application based on the rules that you specify. Because we track events your application creates separately to events that the user create in their calendar, you can just be notified about what is important. [Read the push notification docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/push-notifications/) Integrated Conferencing ## Add conferencing to any of your calendar events Automatically generate unique conferencing links for calendar events. Cronofy automatically supports integrated conferencing like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. You can also allow your users to authorize access to their Zoom, GoTo and Webex accounts, enabling you to use them in the same way. Cronofy manages the different connections and APIs, you focus on delivering what's important for your users. [Read the conferencing docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/conferencing-services/) UI Elements ## Embed real-time slot selection UI Embed a customizable and intuitive calendar interface into your application. Present combined availability of your team or users and offer time slot selection to customers. Support multiple timezones and languages. [Date time picker UI element](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/date-time-picker/) Bulk Onboarding ## Automatically onboard users with Enterprise Connect Fast track your app onboarding with Enterprise Connect, our authorization scheme for your enterprise customers. A single approval from a domain admin allows your application to onboard calendars automatically. Without your users having to do anything. This also gives you access to meeting rooms and resources for organizing on-site meetings. [Read the Enterprise Connect docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/authorization/enterprise-connect/) Calendar Access Modes ## Choose the right level of calendar access Cronofy supports multiple calendar access modes, including Free/Busy-only connections for privacy-sensitive and enterprise environments. This allows your application to check availability and power scheduling without accessing event titles, descriptions, or attendee details, reducing adoption friction and supporting stricter internal policies. [Read the Calendar Access Modes docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/authorization/access-modes/) > Clients around the world entrust their data to Iron Mountain. Ensuring that their information – as well as our employees’ calendar data – was secure was a critical part of our work with Cronofy. Thanks to their Enterprise Connect feature we were also able to onboard all of our inside sales teams in one go. — Kevin Fitzgerald, VP Inside Sales, Iron Mountain Start building with the most reliable calendar API No credit card required Start integrating [Speak to a specialist](/book-a-demo-api) --- # SuccessFactors interview scheduling automation Automate manual scheduling in SuccessFactors with Cronofy. Streamline interviews, sync calendars, and book candidates in minutes. Start scheduling smarter today! ## Solve Manual Scheduling in SuccessFactors Make hiring productivity a focus thorough interview scheduling automation. Get candidates booked in clicks, not days from inside SuccessFactors. [Learn more](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-successfactors#a7e2b331238d) ## Enable seamless scheduling for any interview from day one ## Find Interviewer Availability Anytime Guarantee suitable interview times for your team and candidates. No back-and-forth coordination. - Sync partial or entire team calendars in one go - Combine multiple interviewers’ availability to schedule panels - Works with Outlook, Office365 and Google calendars [Combined Team Availability ](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/combined-team-availability) ## Schedule Any Interview in Minutes Cronofy is your complete interview scheduling solution that gives candidates and hiring teams a great experience. - Send candidates self-scheduling links - Coordinate multi-person, multi-stage interviews - Schedule interviews on behalf of hiring managers - Manage interviewer pools with intelligent workload distribution [Candidate Self-Scheduling Links](/scheduler/scheduling-links) ## Streamlined Scheduling From Day One Add powerful capabilities into SuccessFactors Recruiting without implementation headaches or extensive training so your team can focus on closing roles faster. - All the power of Cronofy in one setup - No SAP consultant required to maintain - Start scheduling from day one with our browser extension [SuccessFactors Integration](/integrations/success-factors) ## Enterprise-Ready Solution Cronofy is a privacy-first provider built for global teams who value data security and sovereignty. - Schedule candidates across time zones and 19 languages - Coordinate interviews across multiple employer brands in one place - All interview data stays in SuccessFactors - Give your team access to exceptional support [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ## Speak to an expert about Cronofy scheduling for SuccessFactors > Cronofy has enabled us to speed up our scheduling process significantly. The often time-consuming search for available times for appointments is no longer necessary. As soon as a scheduling link has been sent, it only takes a few minutes for candidates to book in. Like this, we can offer them a positive experience and save valuable time within our team. — Natascha Postrak, Talent Acquisition Specialist , Haufe Group ### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? Blog Post 2024-07-15T14:00:40.161Z --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Switching interview scheduling tools? Here’s what you need to know Your recruitment process is only as strong as the tools behind it. Explore what makes a vendor stand out and how to navigate the switch without hurting your reputation at work. Blog Post 2024-09-16T08:00:00.000Z Automate interview scheduling in SuccessFactors [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # Secure Calendar Sync for Case Management Software Users don’t need to flit between multiple apps to schedule appointments when your software syncs to their calendar service of choice. ## Secure Calendar Sync for Case Management Software Users don’t need to flit between multiple apps to schedule appointments when your software syncs to their calendar service of choice. > One of UpCounsel’s main value propositions is connecting customers with highly qualified attorneys quickly and effortlessly. With Cronofy, our users can schedule calls with lawyers within minutes. Our lawyers also love it because they spend less time coordinating calls and instead can focus on helping their clients. — Jaya Pareek, Product Manager, UpCounsel ## Say goodbye to manual errors When employees have to manually duplicate information between multiple locations, errors are inevitable. This can cause double-bookings, employees or clients being given the wrong information, and unnecessary stress. Providing a calendar within case management software allows lawyers to document their hours and schedule meetings with clients, but it’s still open to errors. Double-bookings can still occur if they don’t cross-check multiple calendars, flitting from one app to another to organize their time. When lawyers are already short on time, it’s not an ideal scenario for anyone involved. ## Give your users secure, two-way calendar sync Avoid any chance of double-bookings by adding calendar sync to your software. No one needs to leave your software or cross-reference any other schedules when they can connect their calendars to your software. Cronofy is a secure way to provide your users with two-way calendar sync. Our calendar API works with all major calendar services, meaning you can provide calendar sync to as many users as possible without the hassle of working with multiple calendar APIs. You work with one calendar API, and we provide all the calendar connectivity you need. ## Add a real-time booking interface to your software Provide your users with an easy way to schedule meetings with their clients by using calendar sync to build a real-time booking interface into your software. You could build this in-house, or you could save even more development time by using our embeddable JavaScript components. Availability Rules allows lawyers to set their hours they want to be available for meetings. They can block out times for personal appointments or lunchtime, ensuring they won’t get double-booked. Clients can then login to the client portal and book an appointment with a lawyer using Availability Viewer. ## Send booking links to clients Alternatively, lawyers can generate a booking link to send to their clients when they need a schedule a meeting. Clients can then pick a time that works for them, based on the lawyer’s real-time availability. Providing a better booking experience for your users saves lawyers hours of admin time every week, while clients are given a better customer experience, making them feel more valued by their legal representation. --- # Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding safe information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. Data protection often dominates the privacy conversation, but as technology advances and hiring volume increases at your organization, your recruitment team will likely need to balance being transparent with candidates while protecting sensitive information and keeping internal conversations private. This challenge isn't just about following the law, but also about ensuring a positive candidate experience and maintaining trust within your organization. ## **Navigating the Transparency-Privacy Paradox in Recruitment** Transparency is essential for building trust and ensuring a positive [candidate experience](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#be088ba06865). However, balancing this with the need to protect sensitive information is a constant challenge. You might often find yourself dealing with: - **Oversharing sensitive information with candidates: **In the quest to be transparent, there’s a risk of oversharing, which can lead to breaches of confidentiality. This not only compromises sensitive company data but can also affect how candidates perceive your organization and impact your legal standing. - **Under-informing internal stakeholders: **Failing to adequately inform stakeholders—such as hiring managers or HR teams—about the candidates or recruitment process can result in miscommunication and inefficiencies. Leaving stakeholders out of the loop complicates decision-making and slows the hiring process. ### **It all comes down to managing different information needs** Different parties involved in the hiring process – candidates, hiring managers, and interviewers – require different types of information. Managing these varied needs can be complex. Candidates need clarity on the process and their status, while the hiring team may need detailed insights into candidate qualifications. Ensuring that each group gets the relevant information without unnecessary detail complicates the process and can lead to either information overload or critical communication gaps. ## ## **How do you strike the right balance?** Developing clear communication protocols is essential. However, traditional methods like manually segmenting information among different stakeholders can take a lot of work, especially when managing various levels of access to information. Here are some best practices on how to manage transparency and privacy: - **Develop clear communication protocols:** Create guidelines that specify what information needs to be shared and with whom. This ensures that everyone involved in the recruitment process is informed appropriately without overstepping communication boundaries. - **Leverage scheduling automation:** Interview scheduling tools, such as Cronofy, offer features that allow you to customize calendar invites for different attendees in the same meeting. This ensures each party receives information relevant to their role without unnecessary details. For example, one Cronofy customer uses this tool to ensure no irrelevant links or texts are included in the invites sent to candidates. This keeps communication clear and relevant, enhancing the candidate experience. This also prevents candidates from seeing interviewers’ information, ensuring they cannot bypass the recruiter by contacting the interviewer directly. - **Implement role-based permissions: **Utilize role-based access control to manage who sees what information. For instance, a feature enabled by Cronofy for a customer restricts interviewer access to candidate profiles, allowing them to see only the profiles of candidates they will interview, and not all applicants. # ## **Your Next Steps To Managing Stakeholder Information In Your Recruitment Process** Although daunting, you can build a strong employer brand without compromising sensitive information. Moreover, streamlining communication throughout the recruitment process enhances candidate experience and boosts your team's efficiency. Functionalities like Cronofy’s Separate Invites offer a practical solution for balancing privacy and disseminating interview information to the appropriate parties, ensuring your process is both transparent and secure. Interested in seeing [Separate Invites](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/send-separate-calendar-invites-to-different-participants-in-a-single-meeting) in action? **Not using Cronofy yet? **[Schedule a demo now ](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter)to see how Separate Invites and our comprehensive scheduling tools can streamline your hiring process and improve time-to-hire. **Already a Cronofy user? **Access Separate Invites today. [Log in to your account](https://app.cronofy.com/scheduler) to use this feature in our web app or through your Applicant Tracking System with the browser extension. ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Recruitment Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? --- ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- # Free Scheduling Health Check | Diagnose Calendar UX Issues & No-Shows Struggling with no-shows, double bookings, or rescheduling issues? Book a free scheduling health check with Cronofy. Get a personalized score, expert feedback, and a detailed report - no sales pitch, just insights. ## Book a Scheduling Health Check - it’s like a code review, but for scheduling. Powering scheduling infrastructure for 100s of companies, we’ve seen thousands of scheduling flows. This time, we’ll help you review your own. Now, you can save yourself months of development time with just one consultation. We’re offering limited 30-minute diagnostic session slots and personalized reports on your scheduling project. No hard sell, no catch — just a one-to-one technical session. [Book a diagnostic, not a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/free-scheduling-health-check#104a13f351f7) ## How the health check works We’ll spend 30 minutes walking through your current scheduling setup and evaluate it against our 20-point checklist across six core areas. You’ll receive a PDF report outlining your score, key gaps, and actionable recommendations on how to make your scheduling flow more efficient. **Walkthrough of your current flow** **Checklist-based scoring** **Personalized recommendations** ## What issues might be uncovered? Even with a tool or custom solution in place, critical gaps can still slip through. These are the most common and costly issues we see: **Increased no-show rates** **Manual or broken rescheduling** **Double bookings and conflicts** **Timezone handling errors** ## Ready to find the friction in your scheduling flow? [Book my health check](https://www.cronofy.com/free-scheduling-health-check#104a13f351f7) ## Frequently Asked Questions **Q: Who is this for?** A: This is for product and engineering teams responsible for scheduling experiences, whether you're using a third-party tool or have built your own flow. It's especially useful if you're seeing friction, support tickets, or missed meetings. **Q: What happens during the session?** A: We’ll spend 30 minutes walking through your current scheduling setup and evaluate it against our 20-point checklist across six core areas. You’ll receive a PDF report outlining your score, key gaps, and actionable recommendations on how to make your scheduling flow more efficient." **Q: What kind of feedback will I get?** A: You'll receive a PDF report with your overall score, section-by-section breakdowns, and clear suggestions to improve your scheduling flow. **Q: What tools or setups can you review?** A: Anything from custom-built solutions to tools like Calendly, Nylas or proprietary systems. We’ve seen thousands of scheduling workflows and can offer useful insight on just about anything with a booking flow. **Q: Do I need to be using Cronofy already?** A: No. The health check is tool-agnostic. We’re here to help you spot friction and offer useful recommendations, regardless of whether Cronofy is in the picture. **Q: How technical do I need to be?** A: You don’t need to bring code. Just show us how your flow works from a user or admin perspective, and we’ll handle the rest. **Q: What does it cost?** A: It’s completely free, no strings attached. If we spot a way Cronofy could help, we’ll let you know, but only if it’s a genuine fit. ## Book my health check --- # How to build native interview scheduling and AI summaries inside your ATS Add native interview scheduling, recording, and AI-generated summaries to your ATS. How product teams build the full interview lifecycle with Cronofy. When scheduling and meeting capture happen outside the ATS, interview data stays disconnected from the rest of the hiring workflow. Owning that layer keeps recruiters in one place, gives candidates a consistent experience, and gives product teams the data foundation to build AI features that are actually useful. Here's what that looks like in a working prototype, built on Cronofy's temporal infrastructure that unifies availability control, the full scheduling lifecycle, and meeting intelligence in a single layer. ## 1. Let users connect their calendars to your application Availability control is built on the temporal grid. It starts with letting users connect their calendar to your application. Cronofy handles authorization, permissions, and ongoing sync across Google, Microsoft, Apple and Exchange through a single flow, branded for your application. Whether users connect with full read-write access or choose a free/busy only connection, you get a real-time view of availability in your product without the engineering overhead. **How it works** Users connect their calendar directly from within the application in under a minute. Once the OAuth flow completes, Cronofy's sync engine starts monitoring their calendar immediately and delivers real-time change notifications back to your application via push notifications. Recruiters see their agenda without switching to a separate calendar tab, and any changes are reflected automatically. ### How to let users connect and sync their calendars to your HR Tech application using Cronofy Duration: 02:01 Product teams can offer full read-write calendar access or a free/busy-only connection, depending on how much calendar context the workflow requires. The authorization flow is fully brandable, so users see your product's identity throughout. Calendar connection in this demo is built on [Cronofy's Individual Connect](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/authorization/individual-connect/), an OAuth 2.0 authorization flow that connects users to their calendar provider through a single, managed integration. Cronofy handles the full token lifecycle, so there's no per-provider credential management in the application. Once connected, Cronofy's sync engine continuously monitors each connected calendar and keeps the user's real-time availability up to date. Decide the level of calendar access offered to users in the form of full read-write connection, or free/busy only connections for use cases where privacy matters. ## 2. Let users book interviews from candidate profiles without leaving your application Users switching between your ATS and their calendar to schedule a single interview is a time tax that compounds across every hire. Cronofy brings scheduling into your application so recruiters can book directly from a candidate's profile, against real availability, without breaking their workflow. Cronofy supports two scheduling modes: booking directly on behalf of a user, and generating a self-scheduling link for the candidate to pick their own time. Both modes support single and multi-person scheduling so a recruiter can coordinate availability across an entire interview panel in the same flow. Both modes are built on the same availability engine. Because they run on the temporal grid, they scale across any combination of participants, systems, and scheduling contexts without additional integration work. Cronofy queries the connected calendars in real time, surfaces only free slots, and writes the confirmed event back to all participants' calendars alongside the user's default conferencing link when scheduling virtual interviews. #### *Option 1) Book now:* The recruiter sees available slots from connected calendars and books the interview directly within the app. Whether booking for themselves or coordinating across multiple interviewers, Cronofy finds the slots where everyone is free. The event lands in all participants' calendars immediately. ### How to schedule interviews with real-time availability in your ATS using Cronofy's Book Now feature Duration: 03:31 The "book now" flow uses [Cronofy's Availability API](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/scheduling/availability/) to query multiple connected calendars simultaneously and surface only the slots where all required participants are free. The [Create Event API](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/events/upsert-event/) then writes the confirmed interview to all participants' calendars in a single call. Conferencing links are generated automatically via [Cronofy's Conferencing Services](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/conferencing-services/) at the point of booking. #### *Option 2) Give candidates a self-scheduling link:* The recruiter sets a duration, availability window, and time constraints, then generates a link for the candidate to self-schedule. Works for individual recruiters or across a panel, with the link only surfacing times when all required participants are available. ### How to let candidates self-schedule interviews inside your ATS using Cronofy's Scheduling API Duration: 04:03 The scheduling link flow is built on [Real-Time Scheduling](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/scheduling/real-time-scheduling/). The application makes a single API call specifying the participants, duration, and time constraints. Cronofy returns a booking URL that reflects live availability across all required participants. When the candidate selects a slot, Cronofy writes the event to all calendars and notifies the application via webhook. ## 3. Let users automatically record, transcribe and summarize interviews After an interview, recruiters and hiring teams are expected to write up notes, provide feedback, and populate interview summaries and scorecards. Without a native solution, most of that happens outside the ATS across personal notetakers and documents, disconnecting the data from the rest of the hiring workflow and application. Cronofy's Meeting Agents keep all of that data and context inside your application. Running on the temporal grid means meeting intelligence works across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, connects to the same calendar and scheduling layer, and stays within Cronofy's own infrastructure rather than routing through third-party processors. This not only saves recruiters time on manual write-ups and summaries, but also gives product teams a whole new data foundation to build on. A Meeting Agent can be attached to an interview at the point of booking, or dispatched ad hoc by pasting a meeting link into the candidate profile. ### How to add interview recording, transcription and summaries to your ATS with Cronofy Duration: 06:19 #### *Option 1) Attach at booking* The recruiter's notetaker is automatically scheduled to join the call at the right time. Interview recordings, transcripts and AI-generated summaries are then fed back to the candidate's profile page directly inside the ATS. #### *Option 2) Send ad-hoc* Recruiters can paste a Zoom, Google Meet or Teams link into the candidate profile at any point. The notetaker is then dispatched to join the call. Recording and summarization in this demo is built on Cronofy's [Meeting Agents](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/meeting-agents/). The application schedules an agent via a single API call, passing the meeting URL and a callback endpoint. The agent joins the call as a bot, with no software installation required for participants. Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom are supported out of the box. Once the meeting ends, Cronofy notifies the application via [webhook callback](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/meeting-agents/callbacks/), delivering the recording, transcript and AI-generated summary. The application then uses the [resource download](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/api/meeting-agents/resource-download/) to retrieve the audio and video recording. All data capture and processing takes place within Cronofy's own data centers. Meeting data is not shared with third parties or used to train models. ## 4. Generate interview scorecards from every interview When interview data lives inside your application and infrastructure, you can start building intelligent features on top. The transcript and AI-generated summary delivered by Cronofy's Meeting Agents unlock the raw material needed to populate interview scorecards for your users, surfacing the right evidence against each criterion without the recruiter having to rely on memory or scattered notes when providing feedback. Once the interview recording and transcript are delivered back to the application, the structured data can be passed through an LLM integrated within your application to extract and map responses against your scorecard criteria. That output can then be used to pre-populate scorecard fields automatically, with recruiters reviewing and editing the proposed feedback rather than writing it from scratch. ## Keep the hiring workflow connected inside your product The four capabilities above cover the full interview lifecycle, from availability control through scheduling coordination to meeting intelligence, without the recruiter leaving the ATS at any point. That's what the temporal grid makes possible: a single, enterprise-proven infrastructure layer your capabilities run on, rather than a set of point solutions you have to hold together yourself. ![Cronofy's temporal infrastructure]() Teams that keep users inside their product own that data layer. Teams that don't are left integrating with external tools that control it instead. If you're building an ATS and want to understand how Cronofy fits into your architecture, [explore](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) our docs or [get in touch](https://www.cronofy.com/contact) to see what these capabilities could look like in your application. ### 5 ways SaaS platforms can use meeting data to power AI features Meeting data rarely flows into SaaS platforms - users rely on standalone notetakers, and the insights end up elsewhere. When transcripts, recordings, and summaries flow directly into your product, they let you build AI features that weren't possible before. Here are five ways to put that data to work. Blog Post 2026-02-11T13:43:31.851Z --- ### What are the best calendar APIs for scheduling in 2025? Whether you're building from scratch or using a unified API, here’s how the top Calendar APIs compare in 2025. From real-time syncing to multi-user availability and embedded scheduling, these APIs power smarter and faster user experiences across your application. Blog Post 2025-07-24T10:16:00.000Z --- ### From Scheduling to Insights: Announcing Cronofy Meeting Agents Cronofy is excited to announce Meeting Agents, extending our API to help product teams capture what happens inside meetings with automatic recording and transcription built directly into your scheduling workflows. Blog Post 2025-10-22T07:00:00.000Z --- # Build vs Buy: Scheduling automation software Scheduling software is growing in popularity, but is complex to build in-house. In this guest post Iliya Valchanov, Co-Founder and CTO of fast-growing remote-work platform 3veta, broaches the question: should you build or buy scheduling automation software? Scheduling software is growing in popularity, but is complex to build in-house. In this guest post Iliya Valchanov, Co-Founder and CTO of fast-growing remote-work platform 3veta, broaches the question: should you build or buy scheduling automation software? Building software can be an exciting journey. However, in our fast-evolving tech industry, many great ideas go to market daily. This means that every extra day you spend developing, your competitors spend selling their product. Generally, you’ll want to build the modules that capture the value proposition of your product yourself, but buying parts of your system is an effective way to accelerate your time-to-market. ‍[Scheduling automation](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) is growing in popularity, saving considerable time for businesses and individuals alike. They can use this automation for scheduling meetings, interviews, and appointments. However, automated scheduling is one of the most complex features to self-build. In this article, I'll draw on my own product development experience to best advise whether you should build or buy your scheduling automation software and where it is in your product roadmap. Each product has to go through several different stages. The first three of them are pretotyping (optional), prototyping (required), and MVP (required). We realized that we should buy our scheduling automation at the MVP stage of product development. I’ll briefly explain what each stage looks like to provide some context. **Pretotyping** Testing market demand with minimal resources before building actual product **Prototyping** Creating a working model to demonstrate and refine software functionality **MVP** Simplest version of product with core features for user feedback ## Pretotyping Pretotyping is a term that I first heard from ['Pretotyping It' by Alberto Savoia](https://www.pretotyping.org/). Alberto’s main point is that you should build the right 'it' before you build 'it' right. He disincentivizes any software development before you are absolutely sure that you've got the proper demand. For instance, if you have an idea for a new product, build a sales page with a ‘Buy’ button before it has been created. In this way, you'll see if anyone is actually going to buy it. If you spend $1000 on ads and no one has tried to purchase your product – there's no point in building it. Understandably, many Developers are wary of taking this approach. It sounds outrageous to sell a product that doesn't exist. But the more I work with products, the more I realize that while this is extreme, pretotyping points us in the right direction regarding product development. ## Prototyping Prototyping is much more natural. When talking about a product prototype, we usually mean a first version of the product, which is very rough. It doesn't work perfectly and hasn't covered any edge cases. A prototype usually does the main job and shows what a product could be. In the context of building a prototype for any scheduling system, buying an existing solution saves a substantial amount of time and effort as it's a complex system to build. A prototype should take you a couple of days at most. Your scheduling-related prototype could be some proprietary code on top of a ready-made solution. ## MVP (minimum viable product) A minimum viable product is the most basic version of whatever product you are building. Many people confuse the prototype stage with the MVP. While they can be the same thing, usually an MVP is a working product that could be sold but only has basic features. A prototype may be a broken, half-code half-image software whose whole purpose is to prove a point. An MVP should be a product that works well enough to be sold to customers but doesn't have any advanced capabilities. If you are building your MVP you have one goal: build it and sell it as quickly as possible. It's all about the time from idea to market. The fastest way to achieve this is by buying parts of the system like scheduling automation and building the rest. ‍ > Generally, you’ll want to build the modules that capture the value proposition of your product yourself, but buying parts of your system is an effective way to accelerate your time-to-market. ## Product value proposition The first and most important question you must answer for yourself is, “why are people buying my software”? In our company, [3veta,](https://3veta.com/) we used the [Cronofy scheduling automation API](https://www.cronofy.com/) to build our MVP. We realized that our value proposition centers around team collaboration and team communication. We bring together white-label video conferencing, booking pages, appointment reminders, payments, and various other types of team collaboration. In other words, we are selling an “all in one place” solution. It’s essential to realize that each of the problems we solve has been solved before; Zoom works for video conferencing, Stripe for receiving payments, etc. Therefore, our value proposition lies in our ability to make the remote-work process as simple as possible for teams by providing all of these capabilities at once. ## Build vs buy: factors to consider **Time** Building in-house delays product launch; buying allows focus on core competencies **Cost** In-house development risks overruns; buying offers predictable, long-term cost benefits **Security** Build for control; buy from certified providers with strong security measures **Maintenance** Building requires ongoing in-house support; buying includes provider-managed maintenance **Control** Building offers full control; buying reduces responsibility but limits customization options ## Time When weighing up the pros and cons, one of the main issues for us was how time-consuming building ourselves would be. For each day we would spend on building the scheduling system, we lose an opportunity to further our team collaboration edge. For instance, it could take us six months to develop a proprietary scheduling automation system. That means in six months’ time we would be in the exact same spot product-wise as we are right now. As we were assessing whether or not to build or buy scheduling automation, I went to our CTO and asked him about his perspective. “Automated scheduling is one of the most difficult features to build, especially when considering time zones”, he told me. “My opinion is to buy a ready-made solution and focus our efforts on the other elements of our offering.” Buying a scheduling API has given us more time to focus on making the product as high-quality as possible in a shorter time, allowing us to generate profit quicker. ‍ ## Cost Costs can quickly pile up when building a new product. You have to factor in the spending on the initial build, support, testing, upgrades, and the state of the market, while also preparing contingency plans if things don’t turn out as expected. According to the [Pulse of the Profession](https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/pulse-of-the-profession-2017.pdf) study from the Project Management Institute, one in six IT projects have a [cost overrun of 200% due to delays](https://saaslist.com/blog/project-management-statistics/). As I mentioned previously, building scheduling automation is time-consuming and can add up to substantial delays to your product timeline. Still, the consideration that most often deters businesses from buying software is the price. True, it can require a considerable upfront cost, but the long-term investment is undeniable. Since it’s ready to use, there are no unpredictable issues on the development side. It saves you from all the financial headaches associated with building in-house software. ‍ > Building scheduling automation is time-consuming and can create substantial product timeline delays. These delays have huge cost implications; according to the [Pulse of the Profession](https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/pulse-of-the-profession-2017.pdf) study from the Project Management Institute, one in six IT projects have a [cost overrun of 200% due to delays](https://saaslist.com/blog/project-management-statistics/). ## Security Security is crucial, especially as many tech businesses deal with incredibly sensitive data. It’s important to consider access to information and the limits necessary. You may opt to build your own firewall of safety and reduce the risk of data leaks. You can put restrictions on the tools you buy, or build your own firewall to reduce the risk of data leaks. If you are going to buy scheduling software, choose a provider with the highest level of privacy controls and security certifications. A confidentiality agreement with service providers also protects you, eradicating any risks. Security was a big contributing factor in why we chose Cronofy as our scheduling partner, as they meet the highest quality standards and run a [robust security program](https://www.cronofy.com/privacy). From the outset, the team emphasized that security was of utmost importance to them, and they prioritized that above all else. ‍ ## Maintenance When you build yourself, your team is responsible for launching, maintaining, updating, and fixing any bugs that may crop up. This is a lot of additional work for tech teams that are likely already at their full bandwidth, and could result in you needing to make additional hires to deal with the increased workload. Buying software means the provider handles all the maintenance behind the scenes and includes the cost in your subscription. Their team can help launch the platform, manage maintenance, and push out product upgrades. With Cronofy, we knew their team had a wealth of experience in providing automated scheduling as an add-on solution for products like ours, so we could trust they knew the best practices for launching and maintaining the solution. ## Control As a buyer, you never have total control over a SaaS platform’s product roadmap. If you choose to build in-house, you have 100% of the control over how software functions. However, with that control comes a great deal of responsibility. You make all the decisions, and that can create burnout among busy teams. Buying lessens the heavy burden, and if you select the best provider for you, they should be open to suggestions. With our journey, Cronofy was always quick to respond to our feedback and make the relevant changes. Ask these questions at the demo stage of the buying journey to ensure the provider is flexible and there should be no issue with buying a solution. ## To build or to buy? After weighing up the pros and cons, it’s time for the decision: will you build or buy? From what we now know, building scheduling automation in-house is a time-consuming, complex task that can result in increasing overrun costs and burnout for your team. Building, launching, maintaining, fixing and updating any software is a huge undertaking. When you work with the right scheduling automation provider, the burden is lifted, leaving your team time to focus on your product's core value proposition features. To sum up: don’t build it, just buy yourself some time. *Iliya Valchanov is Co-Founder and CTO of **[3veta.com;](http://3veta.com/)** an end-to-end solution which integrates video conferencing and scheduling automation for better team collaboration. He is also Co-Founder of 365 Data Science, and is a Data Science Instructor on Udemy with more than 800,000 students.* --- # Real-time interview scheduling with Pinpoint Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. ‍ Pinpoint is an all-in-one talent acquisition platform that helps recruiters attract, hire, and retain top talent. Their platform is used by thousands of talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide, with headquarters in the UK. Pinpoint was founded in 2017 by Co-Founders Bill Rogers, Tom Luce, and Tom Hacquoil, with a mission to create an Applicant Tracking System that has everything a recruiter needs in one place. In such a saturated industry, Pinpoint sets themselves apart by providing super fast customer service, with their average response time being just 57 seconds, and emphasizing long term customer success, aiming to stay with them over the course of their recruitment journey. ‍ They also place importance on the user experience and design of their product. When building Pinpoint, they wanted to make sure it was equally intuitive and adaptable to the needs of talent acquisition teams, hiring managers, and candidates. ‍ Pinpoint has a wide customer size range across 50 countries worldwide. They cater to many different types of companies. From small teams of 20 people to large companies of 60,000 and didn’t want to deprive any of them from using the product to their full advantage. Because of this, they provide a headcount-driven pricing structure so none of their features are gated to any of their customers. ‍ This makes it vital that their platform consistently meets the requirements of every different size of business they serve. As they put such a focus on customer success, Pinpoint consistently makes improvements to their product to ensure their customers stay loyal. It’s not just about the recruiter for Pinpoint, but also the candidate experience. A slick and enjoyable recruitment process is crucial to keep candidates engaged. ## The Challenge As Pinpoint focuses so heavily on support and success, they speak to existing and prospective customers all the time and rely on their feedback to identify needs for new features. Early on, they heard from recruiters using Pinpoint that it was frustrating to step away from the platform to schedule interviews via back-and-forth emails or calls, which also had a negative impact on the candidate experience. ‍ So the Pinpoint team built an automated interview scheduling solution where interviewers could manually enter their available interview time slots and then allow candidates to self-schedule within those slots. However, the functionality still didn’t fully solve the problem, because it couldn’t yet integrate with users’ calendars. The interview team still needed to step away from the platform to review their calendar and set aside blocks of time for interviews manually. ‍ And larger businesses in particular still didn’t have the complex interview scheduling capabilities they needed. These bigger companies needed scheduling for multiple assessment days, as well as panel or sequenced interviews. Adding even more complexity, every Pinpoint customer was using different calendar providers, which required a different connector to be built for each one, which required a lot of time and resources. ‍ Pinpoint was at a crossroads. They could either take resources away from their core product to work on building direct integrations with multiple calendar tools, or they could find a partner to help them integrate so their team could stay focused on the core product. They chose the latter option and started to look for an API provider with a ready-made scheduling solution to integrate with. ## Solution Pinpoint knew they needed an expert provider with a ready-to-use scheduling platform, who they could trust to provide a solution as high-quality and intuitive as the rest of their platform. They evaluated several different scheduling providers before they came across Cronofy. The Cronofy scheduling API stood out as it met the Pinpoint team’s high standards for design, which meant it could seamlessly integrate with their product. ‍ It was also important for Pinpoint to find a solution that was able to meet all the requirements their customers had in terms of complex interview use cases. Cronofy made it possible to automate panel, group, or sequenced interviews with our scheduling API; all the Pinpoint users would need to do was set up the scheduling groups and rules from their account. ‍ Now when an interview is scheduled, the interviewers are selected from a preset pool according to their availability. Availability and events are updated in real-time, and an email invite with a video conferencing link is sent to all participants automatically – no need for manually inputting information into calendars. Scheduling on behalf of hiring managers was also crucial for those recruiters at large companies who were volume hiring, ensuring they stayed in control of the process and kept scheduling efficient. ‍ Pinpoint also prioritized in-depth, high-quality documentation to ensure the API implementation went as smoothly as possible. The development team found Cronofy’s documentation to be the best in comparison to competitors, and made the integration process easy. > The quality and breadth of the API documentation definitely stood out to us, which obviously as an API product is very important. It really resonates with our Engineers when they see stuff that's well designed and well documented. — Tom Hacquoil, Co-Founder and CEO, Pinpoint Security and compliance was also a high priority for Pinpoint, as they deal with vast amounts of candidate data, security and compliance was high up the list of priorities. and getting access to different stakeholders’ calendars. The variation of customers meant some had particularly stringent compliance programs, and so it was important to work with a provider that adhered to GDPR, which a lot of American solutions don’t. As Cronofy adheres to the highest level of compliance through consistent auditing and certification updates, this was a big selling point. Security and compliance was also a high priority for Pinpoint, as they deal with vast amounts of candidate data, security and compliance was high up the list of priorities. and getting access to different stakeholders’ calendars. The variation of customers meant some had particularly stringent compliance programs, and so it was important to work with a provider that adhered to GDPR, which a lot of American solutions don’t. As Cronofy adheres to the highest level of compliance through consistent auditing and certification updates, this was a big selling point. ## The Results As Cronofy regularly updates and improves the scheduling API, this isn’t a concern for Pinpoint. They can trust that their scheduling features are always secure and maintained to a high standard, which saves considerable time for their development team, freeing them to build more features for their users. ‍ > I think the biggest benefit of Cronofy is that it enables us to rapidly respond to the ever-changing landscape of interview scheduling without having to have a team of 26 people internally focused on solving these problems. It frees our developers up to do higher-value work. — Tom Hacquoil, Co-Founder and CEO, Pinpoint Cronofy's features have also been used by the Pinpoint sales team as a unique selling point, helping grow their customer base while keeping their existing customers happy. They have been able to better meet the needs of larger organizations as they can now deal with more complex interview scheduling use cases like scheduling for panel, sequenced, or group interviews. This teamed with the high levels of security make it the ideal solution for businesses that deal with a lot of client and candidate data. ‍ The level of support provided by Cronofy has impressed the Pinpoint team and created a strong partnership. They’ve used Cronofy’s scheduling platform for the last three years and have often been introduced to scheduling features they wouldn’t have necessarily thought of themselves. ## What next? Pinpoint wants to keep improving their scheduling capabilities with Cronofy, focusing particularly on group interview scheduling, as well as automatically managing hiring managers’ availability. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # HR and recruitment industry trends and predictions for 2024 A webinar in partnership with Recruiting Brainfood: A look ahead at HR and recruitment industry trends and predictions for 2024 with a panel of industry experts! What are the HR and Recruitment trends you need to be aware of for 2024? How can you be a more successful recruiter in the industry as it evolves? Join Hung Lee and a panel of experts as they share their predictions and reflect on the past year. This webinar is in partnership with Recruiting Brainfood. A look ahead at HR and recruitment industry trends and predictions for 2024 --- # Candidate experience research Get insights from Cronofy's research to improve candidate experience ## Improve candidate experience with insights from our proprietary research ## Subscribe to our newsletter > We've had candidates provide unprompted feedback on how easy and smooth the scheduling of interviews was. We’ve never had that before. — Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation, Wise Resources for talent acquisition leaders ### Gain key hiring process insight from our latest Candidate Expectations Report Report 2024-06-19 --- ### Agreena recruiters are saving 5 hours a week each Customer Story 2023-06-15 --- # Cronofy Product Updates - December 2024 See how Cronofy helps recruiters schedule more efficiently with more controls for last minute changes Join Cronofy’s Senior Product Manager in this 30-minute live session to catch new updates showcasing how Cronofy gives recruiters and coordinators more control over scheduling, and how you can improve candidate experience with personalized calendar invites. See how Cronofy gives recruiters more control and flexibility with enhancements to the Scheduler --- # A financial advisor’s take on our First Impressions Report Jonathan is a Client Services Associate at independent financial advisory firm Asset Planning Corp. We interviewed him about the findings of our new report. Jonathan is a Client Services Associate at independent financial advisory firm Asset Planning Corp. We interviewed him about the findings of our new report. *[Jonathan McAlister](https://assetplanningcorp.com/dt_team/jonathan-mcalister/)** is a Client Services Associate at Asset Planning Corporation, an independent financial advisory firm founded in 1975. They use Cronofy to deliver automated self-service online scheduling for their clients (which would give them full points in the final section of our report.)* *We interviewed him about the findings of our **[First Impressions report](https://www.cronofy.com/firstimpressionsreport)**, which you can find in full here.* ### **What are the most important elements of creating a great first impression with potential clients?** The biggest part of a first impression with a potential client is trust. If the client isn’t going to trust you with their money then that’s just going to be a bad relationship down the road. And they’ll fear that you are taking advantage of them or don’t have their best interests at heart. The way to build trust is transparency. The financial world is very complicated, which is what allows us to exist as a business – but our hope is to educate the client on what they’re investing in, the service they are getting into and the fees associated with that. Our costs are actually right on our website, so people know exactly what they’ll be paying. The US also has a designation called the certified financial planning license, which is hard to get, so that’s another differentiator we want up there. No-one likes to be sold to, but they love to buy. That’s really where the best client experience begins. How do you make it easy for new clients to contact you and easily get to that first call? We have a form on our website that requests first name, last name, email, and what are you interested in? I think they can put their phone number, but it’s not mandatory. Right when they fill that out, we email them back directly with a link so they can schedule their own meeting. The part that I really like about going that way is you know what they’re interested in from the contact form, so you can get directly to what helps them the most as quickly as possible. ‍ ### **What did you think of the research and our findings?** I was surprised at the lack of sophistication in responses and scheduling because you would think that would be one of the most important parts. When you enquire about working together and don’t get a response back, it quickly feels like maybe I’m not valuable to them or worth their time. What’s interesting is that I can also see some of those scores reflected in how we work — because you always think “well, if I just give them a call and talk to them, that will be the quickest way to get it sorted.” But in reality, they would rather have finite options presented to them so they can decide what works best. I think being chased with phone tag or email tag that takes days is a good way to turn them off and make the experience draining. Covid has increased the amount that people use the internet and online scheduling and I think people will now be much more accustomed to it than they were before the virus. A lot of businesses in this industry are used to saying “I’ve done it forever this way”, and I think there’s an opportunity to differentiate yourself with the client experience by breaking from that. Cronofy really does help with that – all they have to do is click a time that works for them, because I’ve already put in their email address and other information. I think that really adds to a memorable and smooth experience. ‍ ### **What are your recommendations to others on how to improve that initial experience?** Speaking from my generation, there will be an expectation for a more streamlined experience. That initial experience has to be made more comparable to signing up for Facebook or Netflix. There’s a misconception that it’s better just to go for someone that’s about to retire that will be more profitable for your company because they have more money. But I think the more this client experience is streamlined, the more younger people will be interested in doing it sooner. So I think there is tremendous opportunity in that route. We have a fiduciary obligation to know the client in the best way before we manage their investments – and that means a lot of paperwork for us to learn about them. It will be transformative if this entire process is done digitally and not by paper anymore. *[Download our free report](https://www.cronofy.com/firstimpressionsreport)** for more information on the first impressions leading UK financial advisors make on their prospects.* --- # Hiring Success 2024 EMEA: The Latest in TA Leadership Cronofy's Head of Marketing reflects on emerging talent acquisition topics through an HR technology lens at SmartRecruiters Hiring Success EMEA 2024. As an integrations partner and headline sponsor, Cronofy reflects on emerging talent acquisition topics through an HR technology lens at SmartRecruiters Hiring Success EMEA 2024. Last week, our friends at SmartRecruiters put on their much anticipated Hiring Success EMEA event at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam. With a focus on networking and thought leadership, the event exists to inform TA leaders and decision makers on how to navigate the future of HR, and identify the signal from the noise. As a [SmartRecruiters integrations partne](https://marketplace.smartrecruiters.com/partners/cronofy)r and headline sponsor for the event, Cronofy is excited to support the community and contribute to the strategic conversations surrounding HR tech. The common thread in almost all presentations was the prevalence and adoption of AI in HR, with SmartRecruiters making big moves here, but more on that later. Let’s unpack a few of the presentations and themes from the day that shed light on the conversations TA leaders are and will be having in the coming months and quarters.  ## Leveraging AI in Talent Acquisition Candidates' approach to work is changing, and how they want to interact with organisations is evolving. Dr. Swathi Palasamudram, Enterprise Business Architect at Bosch, leading digital transformation in HR, explained how her team is rapidly introducing AI tools and processes to meet candidates' evolving expectations. For HR teams developing their AI strategies, consider either Building, Buying, Bridging or Borrowing tooling to fill a strategic gap, taking the time to consider what is the highest priority and what resources are available today. Broadly, candidates [want automation in the hiring process](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#8560eaaa9e8a), but HR teams' readiness to leverage AI has nuances globally. Asia leads the way, with HR teams leveraging AI to support the sheer volume and pace of hiring and help hiring managers match with the right candidates. North American HR teams are leveraging AI to address hiring biases and elevate the hiring experience for candidates. Europe and Oceania are more cautious with the adoption, focusing on ethical applications of AI in the hiring process, to augment HR teams to support the changing nature of interviewing and work (Remote). Dr. Swathi Palasamudram went on to frame usage of AI as “addressing anomalies”, applying AI tooling where a machines output is unmatched compared to a humans, while still focusing on quality and fit for your organisation. When the delta between manual tasks and automation and AI is so significant, it's hard to argue with. A good example of this is [Wise reducing their time to schedule by almost 10,000%](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling) through interview scheduling automation. AI and Automation is not just about efficiency but can be used to personalize the engagement with candidates and through removing the need to do low value, manual tasks, teams have more freedom to deliver high touch experiences for candidates. ## A United Future of Work  In this presentation, Jon Stanners, Global Talent, People & Culture Transformation Leader, delivered a refreshingly positive view if AI and the birth of the “United Age” where humans and machines work together. Jon challenges TA leaders to think of AI as an accelerator to propel HR teams and candidates forward, and not a spanner in the works. Our reliance on technology is only increasing, along with the gap between what humans are good at (creativity, passion, and an entrepreneurial mindset) and a machine's capabilities (speed, automation and efficiency). Jon provided helpful frameworks to categories human labour and digital labour as we enter this unified age where humans are in command and machines unlock new capabilities.  AI is just like any technology, and won't necessarily replace workers, but the process of finding and doing work will change. Work will evolve from being a place you go, to an environment where you do high value tasks. AI and ML technologies will make individuals' skills and competencies searchable and evidenced, allowing organizations to pursue the best talent for unique areas of responsibility — an opportunity for HR teams as they strive for better matching between the demand and supply of skills in the market. Jon summarised the presentation by explaining that if you or your team is doing something considered a task, it's ripe for automation. ## Navigating the evolution of HR  Blending two presentations here as they felt complimentary. Nazim Ünlü Global People and Organization Director at Novartis, asked the hard questions around what HR teams like and dislike about the profession as a way of framing where to apply new technologies to make the profession as fulfilling as possible. There’s no crystal ball to navigate transformation in HR but Nazim presented clear pathways teams can use to identify where the gaps and opportunities are for hiring teams. Where are the bottlenecks, what does your team complain about the most, what tasks have your team normalized but could be drastically improved?  Guru Sethupathy, CEO of Fairnow, then spoke about the legal landscape of AI in talent acquisition. Guru explained that right now AI is being used the least by organisations, and is also being scrutinised the least. Having governance capabilities to manage AI in your organisation, reduces the risks of AI misuse within teams and helps to factor in ethical considerations at every stage. On the flip side, Guru explained there are risks in not using AI and automation in the hiring process, as candidates increasingly see this as a positive signal of the future as organisations strive to reduce hiring bias, improving personalization, increasing time in stage speed and imporve the overall hiring experience. Considering AI and Automation tools for your HR tech stack? Above are some great questions to ask vendors to ensure your team is doing the required due diligence before partnering with HR vendors. ## The Realities of AI in the TA ecosystem Dr. Sven Elbert, Head Analyst Services, Fosway Group, delivered a hard hitting overview of the HR and TA ecosystem, solidifying how early AI adoption is for HR, but that it’s very much in full swing. He explained that AI adoption is happening on a spectrum, starting with augmentation (co-pilots and agents) and moving towards automation. It’s not however all lollipops and rainbows, with Dr Elbert sharing cautionary tales from organisations applying AI broadly to their TA strategy, i.e. removing humans from the entire hiring process. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Some interesting stats Dr Elbert shared: - 71% of TA leaders are looking to AI to increase efficiencies - 60% of organizations are focusing on being a diverse, equitable and inclusive employer to attract and engage talent - 51% of TA teams are adoption structured interview processes to better select and hire talent. - 48% of TA teams are concerned about AI and GDPR and Data and Security In the above slide, we can see what tooling is being built by vendors and adopted by HR teams. Addressing basic use cases like text generation and interview transcriptions, to more productivity focused tooling around onboarding agents for new hires and interpreting large data sets to generate reports — these AI powered helpers are being developed to assist teams get through tasks faster and with better accuracy while still keeping humans very much in the loop. Building for the future, Cronofy sits in the “beyond” bucket, delivering interview scheduling automation to assist hiring teams with their workflows and helping to deliver better candidate experiences. We’ve been building deterministic, predictable scheduling technology for almost a decade and we’re excited to see more HR teams adopt tooling that keeps the human in HR. Learning and adopting AI is a continuous journey, and requires clarity from leadership and teams on where to apply it and what the impact will be from doing so. ## Hiring For Success Hats off to the SmartRecruiters team, they put together an incredibly valuable conference for the HR community in EMEA, an intimate and information dense day that left us all with a better understanding of what’s ahead and how to get there. I’m eager to hear the full SmartRecruiters product announcements [come October 16](https://www.smartrecruiters.com/about-us/news/) after giving us a sneak peek into how they are aligning and building for the future of HR. The future is bright for TA teams, and more than ever we have a healthy ecosystem of vendors and partners with tooling to streamline repetitive tasks and scale operations that free up time for strategic decisions. [Learn more about using Cronofy in SmartRecruiters](/scheduling-in-smartrecruiters) ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. Blog Post 2024-08-20T11:00:00.000Z --- ### Candidate Expectations 2024: Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. Blog Post 2024-06-19T12:00:32.123Z --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. Hint: automated scheduling might help you along. Blog Post 2024-06-27T09:30:00.000Z --- # Supporting a SaaS Product The first interaction many customers have with a business is with their support team. According to Forbes, businesses lose $75B a year due to poor customer service. It's therefore important to make sure that the first impression you make on your customers is a positive one. In this post you’ll find some of the things you can do to deliver a positive, lasting impression on your customers via your support team. The first interaction many customers have with a business is with their support team. According to Forbes, businesses lose $75B a year due to poor customer service. It's therefore important to make sure that the first impression you make on your customers is a positive one. In this post you’ll find some of the things you can do to deliver a positive, lasting impression on your customers via your support team. The first interaction many customers have with a business is with their support team. According to Forbes, businesses lose $75B a year due to poor customer service. It's therefore important to make sure that the first impression you make on your customers is a positive one. In this post you’ll find some of the things you can do to deliver a positive, lasting impression on your customers via your support team. ## Accessibility Keep it simple. It shouldn’t be difficult for your customers to contact your support team. Find the most appropriate channel(s) for your demographic (B2B - typically email, B2C - typically live-chat and/or social media) and make accessing those services as frictionless as possible. Not doing this will lead to customers simply not contacting your Support team when they have a problem and ultimately, moving away to another platform. ## Tooling Make it easy for your support team to do their job. Cronofy have tried a few different support tools in the past (Intercom and Hubspot for example), but after some trials and tribulations, we ended up choosing Zendesk to manage support tickets. Zendesk is the industry leader for a reason. It makes managing customer interactions really easy, allows us to save time by utilizing Macros to craft common responses and features triggers for automation of common tasks. Zendesk, due to its popularity, has a plethora of additional apps and integrations, for example Hubspot integration, providing our Sales team with a fully centralized view of a customer’s history with Cronofy within native CRM tooling. ## Identify efficiencies Given the choice of doing something themselves, or contacting your support team, your customers are likely to want to self serve. Why? Less waiting. Your customer gets what they want without having to wait and they don’t have to interact with an email or chat platform. Start by looking at the data you already have. Consider the following questions: - What questions are your customers asking time and time again? - Could you provide your customers the capability to fulfil their own requests? Providing self serve capabilities and/or documentation are key to maintaining an effective support team while your product and customer base grow. A good example of how Cronofy recently did this is when we identified a number of cases in relation to our [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/) product. Specifically, the first time connection with Enterprise Connect. As a result, we re-wrote our documentation to go into more detail around getting started. In response, we’ve had some great feedback from our customers! ## Measure the right data > "If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. If you don’t measure it, you probably don’t care. If you can’t influence it, then don’t measure it." **Randy A. Steinberg** Understand which metrics are important to the running of your support team. At Cronofy, we want to know that we’re resourced correctly within the support team, we’re responding to tickets in a timely fashion, and that our customers are happy with the services that we provide. Here are the metrics that we report against to achieve those goals: ### Tickets opened vs closed These metrics tell us whether we’re well staffed enough to deal with the amount of tickets coming in, or alert us to when we might need to write more documentation or build new self-serve capabilities. ### First time to respond This metric tells us on average, how long the support team takes to respond to tickets. We use this metric to ensure our customers are getting the help they need within an acceptable time frame. If this isn’t the case, we can then look into why and what we can do to improve our performance. ### NPS Net promoter score provides Cronofy with an understanding of customer loyalty, and the likelihood that our customers would recommend our services to their customers or colleagues. ## Utilize daily customer interactions Your Support team are not only the voice of your business to the customer, but the voice of your customer internally, too. Utilize the daily customer interactions and insight of your team by seeking their feedback. Ask them for their thoughts on product changes or new products. Your support team will often offer an informed view from a customer-first perspective. ## In Summary There are some key things you can do to help elevate your Support team above that of your competitors. Look to remove any friction surrounding getting in touch with them. Enable your Support team by helping them make their jobs easier. Provide them with the right support and insights so they can focus their attention on areas of improvement. Utilize their knowledge and use it to inform business decisions. --- # How Asset Planning Corporation transformed financial services scheduling for clients with Cronofy Asset Planning Corporation is a boutique financial planning firm and one of the most experienced, independent financial planning firms in the US. With four decades of accumulated wealth experience with consumer clients including professionals and retirees. Asset Planning Corporation is a boutique financial planning firm and one of the most experienced, independent financial planning firms in the US. Founded in 1975, Asset Planning Corporation are experts at managing their clients’money and investments. As with all service-based business, great relationships are at the core of their work. When it comes to money there’s also an additional need for trust. Many clients work with Asset Planning Corporation for decades, throughout their career and retirement and to make arrangements for when they pass away. It’s a lifelong partnership and delivering a first-class service is a high priority for the firm. The nature of their work demands attention to detail when it comes to issues surrounding compliance, security and privacy.Asset Planning Corporation are also pioneering in their commitment to using digital technology to enable more inclusive financial planning and to enhance their service. Recently they’ve had success launching a subscription based financial planning service, seeing it as a new avenue for which to reach young investors looking for financial planning. ## **The challenge** Asset Planning Corporation set out on a search for a new scheduling partner to help organize their meetings when they realised that Calendly – their provider at the time – couldn’t meet all of their requirements. It was especially true of Calendly’s permanent booking links that didn’t match with their consultative rather than sales focused philosophy. Another drawback of permanent booking links is that they allow prospects and clients access to the advisors’ calendars at any time and reducing the level on control advisors have over their schedule. > In financial services, an ample amount of time is spent scheduling appointments with current or prospective clients. We wanted to stand out from our competitors and offer scheduling that enables the client to have some control and choose a time that works best for them. — Jonathan McAlister, Client Service Associate, Asset Planning Corporation Delivering a bespoke scheduling experience to prospects and customers help them understand that the relationship is valued and personalized. It makes sense that this is a high priority. The emphasis on building trust and maintaining a close and long-term relationship demanded a first-class experience when organizing regular meetings between clients and asset managers. The solution needed to be as simple as possible with no extra work for the client. Permanent booking links, which open up the calendar of the event host also offered their team less control and they had concerns about security which was a top priority. Cronofy was recommended to Asset Planning Corporation by their IT consultant as a possible alternative. ## **The solution** What attracted Asset Planning Corporation to [Cronofy’s Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/scheduling-financial-advisors) was the ability to generate a new scheduling link for each meeting. These links are personalized with the contact details, name of the event and video conferencing info. The clients only has to choose a time to book a meeting in two clicks. This perfectly answered their requirement to provide a personalized scheduling experience. Cronofy allows for more customization when booking a single meeting than a permanent booking link. The Scheduler also offers an extra degree of control and clients can only use it once, to book a single meeting which better meets Asset Planning Corporation’s needs. > We chose to use Cronofy because of the unique calendar link invites you can send to a client. You can send specific times to a client from which they can choose from for a meeting with you. Other calendar services don’t give the level of specialization Cronofy gives. — Jonathan McAlister, Client Service Associate, Asset Planning Corporation Another great part of the solution was the fact that prospects and clients don’t have to fill out their details. The scheduling link is generated by the financial advisor in a few clicks and pre-filled with the details of the invitee. This shows clients that their advisors care about their time while also feeling more professional. > The fact that you can offer clients very specific times to schedule with us is great. All they have to do is click the time and everything else has been done for them. We don't mind the fact that we enter in their email and their name. It doesn’t take long and the experience is so much better for clients, and of course when we’ve entered their details once, it saves them as a contact in the Scheduler. — Jonathan McAlister, Client Service Associate, Asset Planning Corporation The Cronofy scheduling experience also makes booking meetings more efficient, freeing up time to focus on building the relationship and eliminating email back-and-forth. Asset Planning Corporation are not just using the Scheduler for their portfolio review meetings with clients. Prospects who make enquiries on their website are sent scheduler request links to book initial consultations with advisors. This is another occasion to make a great first impression while eliminating the need to chase prospects with phone calls which might not be picked up. Enhancing the online booking process by offering times based on the real-time availability of advisors is a seamless experience and allows the firm to meet with potential clients much faster. Adopting digital tools for scheduling creates a simple and hassle-free booking process. It also suits the firm’s goals of diversifying their client base to include younger age groups. Offering a choice of face to face or online conferencing tools gives flexibility and is more appropriate for some investors, particularly considering the shift towards online since 2020. ### **Enterprise onboarding** A key requirement for Asset Planning Corporation was for their entire team to be securely centrally onboarded in order to immediately get the full benefit of the Cronofy Scheduler. Other providers were unable to connect to their on-premises Exchange server whereas it is one of Cronofy’s strengths. Data privacy and security was a big consideration in this project due to the sensitivity of the information contained on calendars and the fact that the industry is heavily regulated. Connecting to secure calendaring servers, as is often the case in regulated industries, rather than just to calendar services hosted in the cloud is something that Cronofy’s products are designed to do. Using our Enterprise Connect service, the entire team at Asset Planing Corporation could be onboarded and setup at once so they could use the tool straightaway. We worked with their IT team and the onboarding was completed within a day. > Cronofy’s products are seamless. The tool and their service has exceeded our expectations and requirements. Cronofy was helpful in getting our calendar synced with Cronofy’s software. They helped us step by step to get our company all setup. The care Cronofy showed us really felt impactful. — Jonathan McAlister, Client Service Associate, Asset Planning Corporation Do you face a similar scheduling challenge? Get in touch to see how using the Scheduler can transform your client experience. ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # Slots - Help Articles Learn how availability slots work and how you can extend them when using Cronofy for scheduling ## Slots Cronofy’s event notifications are a crucial part of the experience. This guide explains email notifications reminders and what happens when people cancel. **Q: What decides what slots are offered in a booking link?** A: Your calendar availability is the most important factor in a slot offering. Other than that you need to check your preferences (buffers, minimum notice, etc). If you included people from your Cronofy OU then their availability will also be taken to account. **Q: How can I extend or offer more slots?** A: You can make sure that you maintain good calendar hygiene. Remove any unwanted busy events. Check your preferences to see if you are offering enough times and if buffers and minimum notice make sense. Lastly you can choose, to [override](https://www.loom.com/share/fbfc2ec9c15f479b94ae7c6a3bbb7103) or [ignore availability](https://www.loom.com/share/fbb070ffb5f246df821c86a797487561). **Q: "No more slots available" is displayed, what now?** A: If you are the host, check that you have offered the correct times and that your calendar is indeed free then. Make sure you have selected your timezone correctly as well. If you are an invitee and get this message it means that the host doesn’t have any more times to offer you. You need to reach out directly to them, so that they amend the offered time range. --- # Five Recruiting Practices You Should Ditch in 2024 Is your hiring process stuck in the past? It’s time to rethink your recruitment strategies to attract top talent and stay competitive. Here are five outdated practices we’re leaving behind in 2024, and what you could do instead to improve your hiring outcomes. Is your hiring process stuck in the past? It’s time to rethink your recruitment strategies to attract top talent and stay competitive. Here are five outdated practices we’re leaving behind in 2024, and what you could do instead to improve your hiring outcomes. As the job market evolves, so do the needs and expectations of candidates. It’s time to rethink your approach to attract the best candidates and meet your hiring goals. Keep reading to find out how you can leave these common practices behind and discover how to streamline your process to attract and retain top talent. ## **1. Quit overlooking key recruitment metrics** Without tracking data analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs), it’s challenging to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement in the recruitment process. This can lead to inefficient hiring and missed opportunities to optimize. Data-driven decision-making is essential for modern recruitment strategies. Our top tip? Investing in a robust applicant tracking system (ATS) that provides detailed analytics on your recruitment process can help. Track metrics such as time-to-fill, candidate drop-out rates, or interviews per hire. For example, if you notice high drop-out rates after the first interview, this might be a sign of underlying issues within your organisation. Regularly reviewing these KPIs will help you make informed decisions and continuously improve your hiring process. ## **2. Ditch long recruitment processes** Prolonged recruitment processes are a significant pain point for candidates, leading to increased drop-out rates and frustration, with [38%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#f356bb9d5569) reporting elevated anxiety levels as a result. Candidates are reporting longer processes and waits for interviews [than ever before](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#6eac3e0c1f09b1c6e789d3c9e01dea37). With top candidates receiving multiple offers simultaneously, a lengthy process can cause them to lose interest and accept positions somewhere else. A streamlined recruitment process will have a better chance at keeping candidates engaged. This can be achieved by reducing the number of interview rounds, implementing standardized assessments, but most importantly, by automating technology in processes such as background checks or interview scheduling. A quicker process not only improves candidate experience, but also allows your organization to secure top talent before competitors do. ## **3. Stop interview scheduling delays** Delays in scheduling interviews are majorly off-putting to candidates. Our annual research indicates that [43%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#bd0e6da011b3) of candidates have dropped out of the recruitment process because of the time it took to schedule a first interview. The back and forth communication to find a mutually convenient time can lead to significant delays, causing candidates to feel undervalued and neglected—or even fall through the cracks. This is even more important when considering candidates find [poor communication](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#be088ba06865) is the most frustrating part of the hiring process. Implementing an automated scheduling system that allows candidates to choose their own interview slots can significantly speed up the process. This not only saves time for the recruitment team, but also empowers candidates and reduces their anxiety. ## **4. No more leaving candidates in the dark** Ghosting candidates, or failing to communicate with them throughout the entire process can severely damage your employer brand. Our research highlights that lack of responsiveness is a significant frustration for many candidates, but especially for [34%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#44da1727cbfa) of neurodiverse candidates. When candidates are left in the dark about their application status, they are more likely to drop out and share their negative experiences online, [deterring other potential candidates](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#6aa99e61720d). Establish a communication protocol where candidates receive updates at every stage of the process. Even if a candidate is not moving forward, a rejection email that provides feedback and acknowledges their efforts can maintain a positive relationship. Implementing email templates for each stage can streamline this process and ensure no candidate is left without communication. Personalized communication shows that you value your candidates’ time and effort, enhancing your employer brand, making them more willing to refer others.  ## **5. Say goodbye to manual scheduling** If you haven’t guessed by now, one of the biggest things that could be setting you back is not adding an automated scheduling tool to your workflow. Manual scheduling is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors such as scheduling conflicts, miscommunication, and an inability to account for last-minute changes. Additionally, a significant number of candidates clearly prefer an automated system for scheduling interviews over lengthy exchanges of communication. Candidates want their time to be valued – [70%](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#959b1c9f9206) choose roles based on the smoothness of the recruitment process. Scheduling automation reduces the back-and-forth communication, ensuring interviews are booked promptly, as well as minimizing scheduling conflicts. Additionally, recruiters can opt to send reminders and updates to both candidates and interviewers, significantly lowering the chances of no-shows. Integrating the right tool with your current ATS can provide valuable insights into key performance indicators (KPIs). For instance, Cronofy’s integration with Greenhouse and Lever allows recruiters to track metrics like [time-to-schedule, time-to-hire, and overall time saved](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/rethinking-recruitment-kpis-what-metrics-truly-matter). By leveraging automation for scheduling and communication, recruiters can focus more on meaningful interactions with candidates, making more informed decisions without the need for a lengthy interview process. ## **Here's what you can do next** By keeping hiring cycles efficient, maintaining consistent communication, leveraging data analytics, and letting go of manual scheduling, you can significantly enhance your company's recruitment performance. One of the most important takeaways of this article is that automating interview part of the hiring process would have a direct impact on many of these bottlenecks. [Book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-generic) with us to find out how our scheduling tool can make your hiring process more efficient and improve your candidate experience. ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- ### Psychology in Recruitment: Data-Driven Insights for a Better Candidate Experience Recruitment What goes on in the minds of job candidates as they navigate the recruitment process? How do their expectations shape their experience, and what factors contribute to their stress or satisfaction? We shed light on these questions. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- # Recruitment KPIs: How should recruitment teams measure efficiency Let's talk about the KPIs your Talent Acquisition team should track to measure their efficiency! Listen to the discussion on how best to measure recruiting efficiency, from time-to-hire to ROI. Recruitment team measures and KPIs --- # Product Security ## Product Security The Cronofy product team considers security a first-class concern when building and developing any aspect of the Cronofy service. Encryption in Transit Cronofy supports TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 (where available) to encrypt network traffic between the customer application and Cronofy’s services. TLS is enforced for all communication with Cronofy APIs. TLS to calendar services is used where available. Encryption at Rest All calendar and personal data is encrypted at rest. The technologies we use for this currently include [Amazon Aurora](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/) and [Amazon S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/). For particularly sensitive data where the original values are not needed, such as our own passwords, we hash the data using the BCrypt algorithm. Where the original values are needed, such as authentication details for accessing calendars, the values are encrypted using the AES-256-GCM algorithm using a unique, randomly generated salt for each set of sensitive data. Penetration Testing Cronofy commissions quarterly internal security scans and biannual external penetration tests. The outcome of these tests are recorded and actioned within an appropriate timescale. For example, high priority issues are reviewed internally and remediated as soon as is realistically possible, as per our Patch Management policy. Calendar Data Permissions Cronofy uses a given calendar service provider’s permissions schemes to access the end-user calendar. This normally provides Cronofy’s sync engine with full access to all calendar data accessible by the end-user. In some cases, the permission schemes used also provide access to email and contact data. This is NOT accessed by the Cronofy sync engine. Cronofy’s permission scheme for application providers allows them to only request the level access required to deliver the functionality they need. --- # The Scheduling Agent for Slack is live: ask about your calendar, book, and reschedule in one place The Cronofy Scheduling Agent for Slack is live. Schedule meetings, ask what's on your calendar, reschedule, and add or remove attendees, all from inside Slack. Real-time availability across Google, Microsoft 365, Exchange, and Apple calendars. The Cronofy Scheduling Agent for Slack is live. Schedule new meetings, ask what's on your calendar, move existing meetings, and pull people on or off the invite. All from inside Slack, all grounded in real-time availability. If your team lives in Slack, the friction of scheduling and managing meetings still drags you out of it. Open the calendar to check what's on. Hunt for availability. Copy-paste suggestions. Switch back to move a meeting that no longer works. Switch again to add the person you forgot. The Cronofy Scheduling Agent for Slack removes that round trip. You can @mention it to set up a meeting. You can also ask it what's on your calendar tomorrow, move an existing meeting, or add someone who got missed off the invite. All inside Slack. It's live now in the Slack App Directory. [Add to Slack](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/slack) Scheduling a meeting For a new meeting, three steps, all inside Slack. **Ask. **In any channel or DM, @mention the Scheduling Agent along with the people you want to meet. Write it the way you'd ask a colleague: "find us 30 minutes next week for the pricing review." **Review. **The agent checks connected calendars for every participant in real time, accounts for time zones and working hours, and replies in the thread with options. **Confirm. **Pick a time. Calendar invitations are sent automatically with the conferencing link and the right time zone for each invitee. No new UI to learn. No separate app to open. The conversation where the meeting got proposed is the same conversation where it gets booked. ![Cronofy Scheduling Agent for Slack: ask, pick, done]() What it can actually do Scheduling a new meeting is the headline use case, but the agent does more than that. It can act on your calendar in four ways. **Schedule. **Find a time that works for everyone and send the invites. Single, multi-person, or panel meetings, across time zones. **Look up. **Ask what's on your calendar. "What do I have on Thursday?" "When am I next meeting Sarah?" "What's my next meeting?" The agent reads your calendar and answers in the thread, with the relative status of each event so you can see at a glance what's already started, what's coming up, and how soon. **Reschedule. **Tell the agent to move a meeting. It proposes new times that work across all the existing attendees' calendars, sends updated invitations, and clears the old slot. **Add or remove attendees. **Pull someone onto an existing meeting, or take them off. The invite updates automatically. No copying details into a new event, no asking the original organizer to do it. That last one matters more than it sounds. Forgetting an attendee is one of the most common reasons a meeting needs a second pass. Fixing it without leaving Slack saves the small but constant tax of switching to your calendar app to edit an event. Why this isn't another AI scheduler Most AI scheduling tools fall into one of two camps. Either they're a standalone product that asks you to context-switch into a different surface, or they're an LLM wrapper that produces confident-sounding suggestions without actually knowing whether the times work. The Slack Scheduling Agent sits on top of Cronofy's temporal grid. That means the times it proposes, the calendar lookups it answers, and the rescheduling it carries out are all grounded in real availability data, pulled live from connected Google, Microsoft 365, Exchange, and Apple calendars. Time zones, working hours, and conflicts are handled at the infrastructure layer, not guessed at by a model. The AI part interprets what you're asking for. The grid makes sure the answer is correct. Where it earns its keep Two-person internal meetings are the easy case. The agent is built for the harder ones. **Panel and multi-person meetings. **@mention four people across three time zones and get a shortlist back in seconds. No mental arithmetic. **External participants. **Anyone not in your Slack workspace can self-schedule via a personalized link based on real-time availability. This is the work that quietly eats hours across a team every week. The kind nobody puts on a roadmap because it's "just admin," but which adds up to real lost time. ![Multi-person, multi-timezone scheduling in Slack]() Setup Install from the Slack App Directory. An administrator connects the relevant calendar service. Once that's done, anyone on the team can start scheduling, asking about their calendar, or moving meetings around. There is no training step. For enterprise deployments, scheduling templates and organizational configurations are available. ![Up and running in minutes: installing the Cronofy Scheduling Agent for Slack]() A note on the AI The agent uses AI to interpret natural-language requests. Suggestions should be reviewed before you confirm, and that goes for rescheduling and attendee changes as well as new bookings. Calendar data is processed in Cronofy's own data centers, not passed through third-party AI services. Cronofy is ISO 27001, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701 certified and SOC 2 attested, with full support for GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. That matters because the calendar is one of the most sensitive datasets in any organization. Where it gets processed, and who can see it, is not a detail to wave through. Try it If you spend any meaningful portion of your week coordinating meetings inside Slack, this is built for you. The first booking, the first "what's on my calendar today," or the first reschedule will tell you whether it sticks. [Add to Slack](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/slack) --- # How to Give Your Employees More Control Over Their Schedules Employees are increasingly demanding cultural fit over remuneration when it comes to the roles they choose. Businesses therefore need to find ways to demonstrate the kinds of businesses they are – whom they employee, what they value, and what their plans are for the future. One of the ways they can do this is by giving employees more control over their schedules. Doing so shows employees that they’re trusted to manage their time and commitments. It also means that businesses can hire from a wider pool of talent because the flexibility and independence that comes from this control will inevitably attract more candidates. The more candidates a company attracts to a role, the more likely they are to hire the right person for the role and retain them, too. All these things are great, of course, but how do you give your employees more control over their schedules? Let’s take a look. Employees are increasingly demanding cultural fit over remuneration when it comes to the roles they choose. Businesses therefore need to find ways to demonstrate the kinds of businesses they are – whom they employee, what they value, and what their plans are for the future. One of the ways they can do this is by giving employees more control over their schedules. Doing so shows employees that they’re trusted to manage their time and commitments. It also means that businesses can hire from a wider pool of talent because the flexibility and independence that comes from this control will inevitably attract more candidates. The more candidates a company attracts to a role, the more likely they are to hire the right person for the role and retain them, too. All these things are great, of course, but how do you give your employees more control over their schedules? Let’s take a look. Employees are increasingly demanding cultural fit over remuneration when it comes to the roles they choose. Businesses therefore need to find ways to demonstrate the kinds of businesses they are – whom they employee, what they value, and what their plans are for the future. One of the ways they can do this is by giving employees more control over their schedules. Doing so shows employees that they’re trusted to manage their time and commitments. It also means that businesses can hire from a wider pool of talent because the flexibility and independence that comes from this control will inevitably attract more candidates. The more candidates a company attracts to a role, the more likely they are to hire the right person for the role and retain them, too. All these things are great, of course, but how do you give your employees more control over their schedules? Let’s take a look. ## Flexible working hours Flexible working hours are increasingly becoming something that employees expect from their employers. These make it easier for those with families to balance their personal and professional lives. They have time to drop their children off at school before heading into work, or can leave early to pick them up at the end of the day. Employees with long or unpredictable commutes also don’t have to worry about being penalized if they don’t arrive dead on time, and anyone with a medical appointment can make up the time at a later date. Offering flexible working hours means that you don’t restrict yourself to only hiring people who can work set hours. This makes it easier to hire more senior roles because you can hire those with children and without child care, those with long-term health problems, or those that live farther away. Lifestyle, location, and health problems don’t dictate how good a person is at their job, and it shouldn’t dictate if you hire them, either. ## Simple meeting scheduling $13,000 per employee per year is lost every year in the US to [repetitive tasks](https://www.cronofy.com/how-automated-scheduling-and-calendar-sync-can-transform-hr/). That equates to billions of dollars and countless hours lost to small, simple tasks. Meeting scheduling is one of these tasks. When it comes to organizing a meeting, it’s easy to discount it as a quick and simple task. But coordinating everyone’s schedules, finding an available room, and ensuring any equipment needed is available can add up to take hours of an employee’s time that could be better spent elsewhere. Software that uses [Enterprise Connect](https://www.cronofy.com/enterprise-connect/) simplifies the meeting scheduling process by allowing employees to book everything they need at the same time. In just a few clicks they can reserve a room, a TV, and the people they need for the meeting. The meeting is then pushed to the calendars of all of these people and resources to avoid any double-bookings. There’s no need to cross-check or coordinate anyone’s schedules – Enterprise Connect does it all for you. Employees can even schedule meetings in software that they use every day, such as Slack. They don’t even need leave the software that they’re talking to their colleague in – they can book the meeting there and then, based on their real-time availability. Their colleague – or even someone outside of their company, in a different workspace – can then accept the invite from within Slack, or, if they don’t use it, from the booking link that’s emailed to them. Find out more about how the [Slack Calendar Connector](https://cronofy.slack.com/apps/A08TXU0BT-cronofy-calendar-connector) works in our video: ## Easy paid time off management Making it easier for employees to schedule paid time off demonstrates that you value their wellbeing. When paid time off management software uses calendar sync, employees can request paid time off straight from their calendars. They can also see their coworkers’ availability alongside their own schedules, meaning that they can work out the best times to book off. It can also be set up so that managers can approve leave from their calendars. This makes it easier for them to cross-check staff availability before approving time off. They don’t need to flit between several different programs to see which team members are around and when, nor do they need to open a new program to respond to the request. ## Project management programs that sync with their calendars Tools such as Trello make it easier for employees to track their upcoming projects and break them down into smaller chunks. They can also assign due dates to their tasks. However, those due dates don’t sync across to their calendars, which is where they really need to see their upcoming deadlines so that they don’t overbook themselves when there’s a deadline looming. The [Cronofy Trello Power-Up](https://trello.com/power-ups/5a1d81359fcdfd9011c0a698/cronofy) changes all that. Employees can connect their Trello boards to their calendar then have their due dates sync across in real-time. They can then see, at-a-glance, all of their upcoming deadlines. Due dates can even be changed just by dragging and dropping the calendar event to a different day on the calendar. ## Keep everything in one place The less applications employees have to flit between to organize meetings, book paid time off, or manage projects, the less frustrations they have. It becomes easier and faster for them to organize their time. This means that they have more time to focus on meeting deadlines instead of doing tasks that enable them to do the work in the first place, such as meeting scheduling.You then get to reap the benefits – deadlines can be met faster, more work can be achieved, and more money can be generated in the long run, too.Employees, meanwhile, are less bogged down by the over complication of simple tasks. They feel trusted and valued because they have more time to work toward their objectives. This autonomy also gives them a greater sense of control, which helps to stave off [workplace stress and anxiety](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/prevent-workplace-stress/).More and more software providers are adding calendar sync to their offerings. When you think about the amount of time it can save, it’s no surprise. To find out more about adding calendar sync to your software, check out our [features page](https://www.cronofy.com/features/). --- # 7 Ways Technology Can Save Healthcare Practitioners Time It’s no secret that healthcare practitioners are short on time. With staff shortages throughout the healthcare industry, it’s no wonder.This staff shortage means that those who do work in healthcare need to speed up as many of their processes as possible. Here’s some of the ways technology can save healthcare practitioners time. It’s no secret that healthcare practitioners are short on time. With staff shortages throughout the healthcare industry, it’s no wonder.This staff shortage means that those who do work in healthcare need to speed up as many of their processes as possible. Here’s some of the ways technology can save healthcare practitioners time. It’s no secret that healthcare practitioners are short on time. With [staff shortages throughout the healthcare industry](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/13/nhs-faces-acute-and-growing-staffing-shortage-warns-agency), it’s no wonder. This staff shortage means that those who do work in healthcare need to speed up as many of their processes as possible. While it’s important to keep accurate patient records, for example, it’s much faster to store these in the cloud than to keep them updated by hand or on a hard drive. The more time healthcare practitioners have, the more time they can spend helping patients to get better. Here’s some of the ways technology can save healthcare practitioners time. ## Automate patient appointment booking Patient appointment booking is a huge drain on resources. Healthcare providers that don’t allow patients to book online create more work for administrative staff, who then have less time to spend dealing with patients in-person and creating a welcoming atmosphere to help put patients at ease. ## Schedule meetings automatically When meeting scheduling is automated, staff don’t need to worry about coordinating their schedules. Instead, the meeting organizer can tell the software whom they need in the meeting, and the software can use this information to work out the best time for everyone to meet. It does this using [calendar sync](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api), which factors in attendees’ real-time availability and prevents any double-bookings. ## Automate repeat prescriptions Repeat prescriptions are a time-consuming process for staff and patients. By allowing patients to order them online, then automatically sending them to the patients’ preferred pharmacy once it’s been approved, it saves patients from needing to visit the doctor’s office in person. Ordering prescriptions in-person can be awkward and mean patients have to rearrange their schedules to get there. When they can order online and their prescription is sent to their pharmacy automatically, they can order and collect their medication at their own convenience. This creates a better experience for patients and reduces the processing time of repeat prescriptions. ## Sync patient notes via the cloud When a patient moves, it can be weeks or even months before their medical records are relocated to their new doctor. Saving patients’ notes to the cloud means that everything can be sent straight away, preventing the need for an administrator to move everything across manually. Patients can then get the care that they need faster, without the delay that often comes with changing doctors. Automating the process also means that patients’ notes are less likely to get lost, which is a common problem when patients relocate. ## Virtual appointments When a patient is severely ill or contagious, it’s not recommended that they visit a doctor in person in case they pass their germs on to someone else. However, that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t benefit from some medical advice. Offering patients virtual appointments is a cheaper alternative to home visits. It means doctors can fit patients in around their other appointments and don’t need to worry about travel time, which can cause missed appointments and doctors needing to work later to fill in the gap. ## Bot triage Chatbots are everywhere, and they’re getting smarter than ever. Chatbots could be used by forward-thinking practices to offer patients a triage service. This then saves receptionists from needing to act as a gatekeeper, giving them more time to spend helping patients who are there in person. Patients may also feel more comfortable discussing their symptoms with a bot rather than a person, making it easier for the bot to decide whether the patient needs to rest, to see a nurse, or to visit a doctor. Given how many people each year see a nurse or doctor for ailments that go away on their own, offering a bot triage service is a simple, scalable way to allow patients to get answers about their symptoms without taking up healthcare practitioners’ time. Should the chatbot decide that the patient needs to see someone, an appointment can be scheduled using the chatbot. ## Translation services When you need medical attention in a foreign country, the language barrier can be a huge issue. New technology cuts out the need for a translator, meaning that hospitals don’t need to hunt around for someone who can translate – they can use their smartphone or tablet instead. This makes the patient more at ease, cuts out the middle person (who then has more time to do whatever they were doing to begin with), and allows hospitals to treat them faster. ## Conclusion Technology helps doctor’s offices and hospitals to speed up basic, time-consuming processes. This then gives healthcare practitioners more time to spend with patients, putting them at ease and helping them to get the care that they need. See how you could use Cronofy in your healthcare application [here](https://www.cronofy.com/api-for-healthcare). ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### The 6-Step Guide to Identifying Recruitment Gaps Guides Ever feel like your hiring process is more of a guessing game than a strategy? You’re not alone. We’ve gathered insights from top recruitment leaders to help you uncover hidden gaps and turn your recruitment process into a well-oiled machine. --- # What Are the Benefits of Mentorship for Mentors? Everyone always talks about the benefits of mentorship for mentees. And there are a lot of benefits – the most obvious one being that they get to learn from someone who’s doing what they one day want to do. But what’s in it for mentors? Why should they spend their time helping someone else to expand their skills? Turns out, there are just as many benefits of mentorship for mentors as there are for mentees… Everyone always talks about the benefits of mentorship for mentees. And there are a lot of benefits – the most obvious one being that they get to learn from someone who’s doing what they one day want to do. But what’s in it for mentors? Why should they spend their time helping someone else to expand their skills? Turns out, there are just as many benefits of mentorship for mentors as there are for mentees… Everyone always talks about the benefits of mentorship for mentees. And there are a lot of benefits – the most obvious one being that they get to learn from someone who’s doing what they one day want to do. But what’s in it for mentors? Why should they spend their time helping someone else to expand their skills? Turns out, there are just as many benefits of mentorship for mentors as there are for mentees… ## Reinforce their knowledge The best way to learn is to teach. Teaching someone what you already know (or vaguely know) helps you to reinforce your knowledge of a particular topic. It also helps you to spot any gaps. You can then use this to go back and fill in those gaps so that you don’t get caught in the future. ## Expand their skillset Just because mentors are there to teach, that doesn’t mean they can’t learn, too. Spending time with colleagues that specialise in different areas – or work in the same area but are trained differently – can help mentors to expand their skillsets. They can then use these takeaways to become even better in their main role. ## Learn leadership skills Leadership skills are imperative for employees looking to progress. However, leadership is about more than just managing a team. It’s about setting an example; about encouraging and inspiring people to be the best that they can be. Mentorship teaches people these skills on a small-scale. Instead of setting an example or inspiring a whole team, they start with just one person. They learn what motivates that person and what prevents them from moving forward. Using this knowledge, they can help their mentee to work through their pain points and be more effective in their role. Once the mentor has these skills, they can adapt them for other team members, and, as time goes on, for groups as well. For anyone looking to go into management they can use these leadership skills to guide their team to being the most effective they can be in their roles. For those who don’t want to go into management but still want to progress, they can specialize in a particular product or area. Over time, they’ll become the go-to person for that product or area. Colleagues will respect their knowledge and seek out their advice. This type of leadership allows them to set an example without dealing with the day-to-day management of a team. ## Meet colleagues from different departments In large organizations it’s impossible to know everyone. Mentorship schemes are a good way for people from different departments to meet. This helps to avoid cliques forming and creates a more inclusive atmosphere. There are often teams that don’t interact within companies. That doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from each other’s knowledge, though. A developer could learn from a designer about user experience, or a copywriter could learn from a HR person about psychology. There’s always something that people can learn from someone, so don’t assume that the best mentor/mentee relationships start in the same departments. Encouraging employees from different departments to interact puts them outside of their comfort zones, which encourages creative thinking. Creative thinking benefits all areas of the business, and it gives employees more opportunities to show their skills. ## Improve listening and interpersonal skills Listening and interpersonal skills are crucial to the success of any leader. Mentoring helps mentors to improve these skills, which will benefit them in the future. It’s important for mentors to remember that it isn’t about them. The conversation should always go back to the mentee, and what they need. However, we like talking about ourselves. That’s human nature. Mentorship is therefore an effective way for mentors to learn how to redirect the conversation back to someone else. This is a skill that will help them in all future conversations – people who talk about themselves less are [perceived as more likeable](https://medium.com/the-mission/14-habits-of-exceptionally-likable-people-5e8103392a67). This means that, long-term, they can create more meaningful relationships that can benefit them personally and professionally. ## Build confidence Reinforcing their knowledge, learning new skills, and working on their leadership skills all help to build someone’s confidence. The more confident someone is, the less they second-guess their decisions and the more confident they’ll be in their role. ## Career progression With all the new skills that mentors get, is it any surprise that it offers the chance of career progression? Volunteering as a mentor shows that they’re willing to help other people. Whether they’re looking for a promotion or moving companies, having taken the time to nurture someone helps mentors’ resume to stand out. Since many companies hire as much for cultural fit as they do for skills (if not more), having mentorship on a resume shows companies they care about more than just their career progression. ## Conclusion Many people focus on the benefits of mentorship for mentees. And don’t get me wrong – there are loads of them. But mentors should be able to get just as much out of mentoring. Mentorship is a relationship. And – like any relationship – it should be mutually beneficial. Mentors should be able to learn just as much from their mentees. It can also be a great opportunity to meet more people in their industry and further expand their network. --- # Is It Time to Change Your Recruitment Game Plan? Timing is key in recruitment. Knowing when and how to update your hiring strategy can make all the difference in attracting top talent and staying competitive. Read on to find out how to make the most of times of change in your company, including leadership shifts, team restructuring, and more. Timing is key in recruitment. Knowing when and how to update your hiring strategy can make all the difference in attracting top talent and staying competitive. Read on to find out how to make the most of times of change in your company, including leadership shifts, team restructuring, and more. ## **When is the right time to implement change?** Consider making changes during quieter hiring periods when your team has the time and energy to focus on new initiatives. This downtime is perfect for rolling out new processes or tools without the pressure of peak hiring demands. Many companies consider adding more coordinators to their team to manage administrative work during peak hiring periods. However, they often find that [automation](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-to-streamline-your-hiring-automated-interview-scheduling) speeds up their processes more effectively, offering a better return on investment and efficiency improvements, especially when hiring volume is unpredictable over the longer term. Before diving in, ask yourself: Is your organization ready for change? Is there a need for change management to accommodate automation? Often, outdated processes, disengaged hiring managers, and poor calendar management hinder hiring efficiently. This assessment ensures that internal changes, beyond just adding tools, are being made to enhance the overall hiring process. ## **What are best practices for changing your recruitment process?** 1. **Assess current processes and engage stakeholders early**: Begin by evaluating your existing recruitment processes to identify areas for improvement. Engage all relevant team members and stakeholders from the outset. Their input and buy-in are crucial for a smooth transition. Understanding the current landscape and garnering support ensures everyone is aligned on the need for change and the desired outcomes. 1. **Strategic planning and prioritize impactful changes:** Develop a strategic plan that outlines the changes needed and the best time to implement them. Focus on changes that deliver the most impact quickly. This prioritization helps in maintaining momentum and showing the benefits of the changes to the team. 1. **Training, support, and focus on candidate experience**: Equip your team with the necessary training and support to adapt to new tools and processes. Ensure that team members are capable of leading such projects before engaging leadership. Throughout the transition, maintain a strong focus on enhancing the candidate experience, which is a key driver of recruitment success. You can read more about [improving candidate experience with data here](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/psychology-in-recruitment-data-driven-insights-for-a-better-candidate-experience). ## When implementing changes, steer clear of these common traps: - **Over reliance on automation**: While automation can get you a step ahead, it’s crucial not to rely solely on technology for all aspects of recruitment. For example, using automation for high-value tasks like CV screening or candidate communication can lead to missing out on important nuances that a human touch would capture, such as cultural fit or alignment with company values. Automation should be used to handle repetitive, low-value tasks, allowing your team to focus on areas where human judgment is essential, such as assessing interpersonal skills and potential team dynamics. - **Neglecting Communication**: Keep all stakeholders informed throughout the process. Lack of communication can lead to confusion and resistance. Keep your team informed about what changes are being made and why, and make sure candidates are aware of what to expect. ## **Prioritizing impactful changes: Spotlight on interview scheduling** As you assess which areas to improve first, consider focusing on interview scheduling automation. This aspect of recruitment often presents a significant bottleneck, with back-and-forth communications and scheduling conflicts leading to delays and [candidate dissatisfaction](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024#f356bb9d5569). Implementing automation in this area can provide immediate and noticeable benefits, streamlining the process and improving the candidate experience. It not only enhances efficiency but also frees up time for recruiters to engage more meaningfully with candidates. Companies like Wise, [Agreena](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/agreena-recruiters-panel-interview-scheduling), and Allegro have successfully integrated automated scheduling tools, leading to faster hiring times and improved candidate experiences. ## **Your next steps** While implementing change in recruitment processes can be challenging, focusing on high-impact areas such as interview scheduling can yield significant returns. Regularly auditing your processes, engaging stakeholders, and prioritizing impactful changes are key strategies for successful change management. By taking a structured and thoughtful approach, you can improve your recruitment strategy and attract top talent more effectively. Want advice on next steps? Check out the video below, and [talk to us today](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo). ### Is it time to change your recruitment game plan? Duration: 1:50 ### Managing Transparency and Privacy in Recruitment: Beyond Data Protection Recruitment Building a trustworthy employer brand requires being open with candidates, yet maintaining that trust while safeguarding sensitive information is crucial. Are you confident that your current process truly protects privacy without sacrificing transparency? Read on to find out what you might be missing. --- ### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Recruitment Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? --- ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- # Scheduling API for Telemedicine and Healthcare Platforms | Cronofy The appointment scheduling API for smart healthcare companies - Cronofy API is the simple, secure way to embed scheduling into your platform or application. Try today. ## Embed GDPR, ISO, HIPAA-compliant scheduling into your healthcare application Integrate an exceptional patient booking experience with the world’s most reliable scheduling infrastructure. Privacy-first, API-first appointment scheduling for developers and product teams. [Speak to a specialist](https://youtu.be/2iL6SQh6y0o) [View documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/) Reliability ## Integrate the most reliable real-time calendar sync API Simplify event creation and updates by syncing seamlessly with all major calendar providers. Our robust calendar sync engine is built to handle complexity and scale, ensuring real-time updates from patient and practitioner calendars without any hassle. With a 99.99% uptime guarantee, Cronofy's dependable service allows you to focus on developing unique features of your healthcare product. [View documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com) Security & Compliance ## Secured patient data with HIPAA compliance All sensitive and private data is secured through robust, battle tested APIs that carry HIPAA and GDPR compliance. Secure scheduling infrastructure as you scale. [Learn more about security privacy](/privacy) > A lot of our users were looking for iCal, AppleCal, iCloud, and Outlook support. Getting that right out of the box with Cronofy without needing to develop it ourselves was incredibly handy. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer, Heal.me EHR system integration ## Schedule events with EHR Systems Our Scheduling APIs seamlessly integrate with Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. Enhance patient care and confidentiality, streamline time-consuming admin tasks and achieve a greater experience to healthcare management. [Speak to a specialist](/book-a-demo-api) ### Docplanner Group uses full calendar sync to power its SaaS healthcare solution Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. Case Study --- ### Revolutionizing digital healthcare support with Tidepool Tidepool are committed to helping all people with insulin-requiring diabetes safely achieve great outcomes through more accessible, actionable, and meaningful diabetes data. Case Study --- ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study > With Cronofy we were able to offer seamless scheduling experiences to our doctors and patients alike. Our online appointment booking feature helps patients get the care they need quicker while doctors are seeing an increase in their activity. They also spend less time on administrative tasks and have more time to dedicate to their patients. — Albert Armengol, Co-founder, Docplanner ## Join leading healthcare companies trusting Cronofy [Speak to a specialist](/book-a-demo-api) --- # Revolutionizing digital healthcare support with Tidepool Tidepool is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Founded by people with diabetes, caregivers, and leading healthcare providers, they are committed to helping all people with insulin-requiring diabetes safely achieve great outcomes through more accessible, actionable, and meaningful diabetes data. Tidepool are committed to helping all people with insulin-requiring diabetes safely achieve great outcomes through more accessible, actionable, and meaningful diabetes data. > We looked at Calendly but couldn’t use them because they aren’t HIPAA compliant. During the vetting process we found out about the Scheduler and the fact that all Cronofy’s products are HIPAA compliant. Then it was just about functionality. The tool is simple and to the point but it had pretty much all the functionality that we wanted. The launch of the private calendar events setting was the last piece of the puzzle, assuring confidentiality for our team. — Nick Riggall, User and Regulatory Operations Lead, Tidepool [Tidepool](https://www.tidepool.org/) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to make diabetes data more accessible, meaningful, and actionable; and is one with a very personal origin. Howard Look, Tidepool’s President and CEO just wanted to make sense of his daughter’s diabetes device data. When she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 10, she was prescribed a number of devices that would help manage her diabetes but there was a big problem: the data was siloed within proprietary software. When it comes to managing diabetes, and type 1 diabetes in particular, you need data to make informed decisions about how to dose insulin, critical for those living with type 1 diabetes and potentially fatal if mismanaged. At the time, there was no technology solution available to combine the data from the most popular insulin pumps, which continuously deliver insulin, and leading continuous glucose monitors which generate a new glucose reading every five minutes. Enter Tidepool and their free, open source software that integrates device data from over 50 insulin pumps, continuous glucose monitors, and blood glucose meters in a single, intuitive interface. Since its founding in 2012, Tidepool has developed a reputation as a collaborator within the diabetes industry, and a leader in conversations throughout the medtech regulatory landscape. ## The Challenge Moving forward into a new challenge, Tidepool wants to deliver an FDA-regulated iPhone app that will automate insulin delivery, working interoperably with different insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors called Tidepool Loop. While Tidepool Loop is still under FDA review, they are continuing to develop and iterate upon the infrastructure required to support their users. Chief among these support components is how to deliver high-quality support to their users. More precisely: how to schedule support calls with users that can include highly sensitive, personal health information (PHI), in a HIPAA-compliant platform. It also needed to complement the flexibility and versatility of a team that is remotely distributed. Tidepool uses Zendesk as their primary support platform to engage with users experiencing any issues. Again, given the nature of their operation, HIPAA compliance is key, and as the Tidepool team sought to expand their support operations to prepare for the need the schedule live calls with future Tidepool Loop users, their investigation for a HIPAA compliant scheduling tool led them to Cronofy. After evaluating Cronofy’s capabilities, Nick Riggall, Tidepool’s User and Regulatory Operations Lead, knew he had a viable option for Tidepool to leverage. ## The Solution After clearing Tidepool’s detailed security evaluation and signing a Business Associate Agreement to ensure Cronofy’s HIPAA compliance, the Tidepool Support team started using the Cronofy Scheduler to deal with the tickets they got that were just too complex to be sorted over email. This is a use case that they expect to grow exponentially when Tidepool Loop has launched In terms of user support, Tidepool is thinking like a modern, agile software company, rather than an old-fashioned healthcare company with a huge call center and stock hold music. They needed a tool that was efficient and capable of creating the best user experience possible, ultimately making their team’s processes seamless. The fact that Cronofy’s Scheduler integrates with Zendesk was a welcome discovery. > Zendesk is my primary space. I live in that tool. I'm in it the entire workday. Just to have the button right there in the bottom of the comment box in Zendesk is great Rather than needing to change tabs, I click the Cronofy icon and it brings a little Scheduler window right up there. It saves me 15 to 20 seconds every time by doing it that way - which does add up when you're busy. And once I hit create link, it even drops it into the body for me, which is awesome. — Dave Cintron, Support, Tidepool Initially intended to be a tool leveraged by Tidepool’s Support Team, other teams have taken to Cronofy to improve the efficiency of their processes. Their Clinic Success team uses the Scheduler’s Public Link to create an Office Hours-like experience for inquiring clinicians looking to learn more about Tidepool’s software. Their User Research team is using our new Scheduling Groups and Scheduling Rules features to schedule usability testing sessions with their community for upcoming products in development. > The versatility of Cronofy’s Scheduler is pretty remarkable. Multiple teams with very different needs can take advantage of Cronofy’s seamless interface and integration with our existing tools. I couldn’t imagine doing my job without it. — Christopher Snider, Community and Clinic Success Manager, Tidepool [Find out more](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler/) about how Cronofy can save your business hundreds of hours, using our secure and HIPAA compliant scheduling and integrations for scheduling meetings with your users and prospects. Check out more about what Tidepool had to say about their experience partnering with Cronofy on our[ G2 Crowd review page.](https://www.g2.com/products/cronofy/reviews/cronofy-review-5003891) ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### Cronofy Partners with Whereby for Integrated Video Calls and Streamlined Scheduling Cronofy has partnered with Whereby to further accelerate scheduling and video conferencing capabilities for product builders. Our shared vision of creating secure, scalable and flexible solutions for developers and product teams, is now set in motion. Blog Post 2024-09-24T10:31:00.000Z --- ### Docplanner Group uses full calendar sync to power its SaaS healthcare solution Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. Case Study --- # Invitees - Help Articles Learn how to curate and improve your invitee's experience when scheduling with Cronofy. ## Invitees Your invitees’ experience is important. We help you create a smooth event for everyone involved. **Q: What will the invitee see when I send a scheduling link?** A: Your invitee will open a scheduling link or public link and get to the **slot selection page**. From there, they see the available times you have and select a time slot to book the event. **Q: How do I send a separate invite to the invitee?** A: You can send a separate invite to your invitee by clicking the **three**-**dotted** symbol next to their name. Then, enable the **slider** and click “**Done**.” Afterward, you’ll be able to **switch** between the event details to access different information about it. Now you can: - Share separate calendar event content with a candidate and interviewer(s). E.g. you can share preparation information to your candidate, and share the candidate information with your interviewer(s). - Guarantee privacy as both parties will not see each others information such as name and contact details. - Hide internal calendar updates from candidates. Maintain control over event changes. Interviewers won't have the option to decline which will keep you in control in case they need to reschedule a time or a different interviewer. Separate invites are now also supported if you create a request from a template. ## What your invitees see : ![alt]() **Q: Will invitees receive reminders?** A: No, invitees do not receive reminders for meetings ahead of time. However they will receive notifications about changes of the event. **Q: What happens if invitees can do any of the times offered?** A: By clicking the ***I can’t do any of those times*** on the scheduling request the user may decline the request. The request then goes into the orange status, awaiting your action. From here you can choose if you want to offer more times or cancel the requests entirely. --- # Cronofy Scheduling API Cronofy's scheduling infrastructure is chosen by hundreds of the biggest SaaS companies on the planet for its reliability, performance and flexibility. ## Accelerate the delivery of embedded meeting and scheduling features Build on top of our meeting and scheduling infrastructure to eliminate integration complexity, save months of development time, and ship native experiences your users will actually adopt. [Get started](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) [Talk to a human](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/) > It was either going to take us stopping everything that we were doing to build a significantly more robust calendar integration, or to find someone that can do this for us. When we came across Cronofy, we realised we’ve been looking for something like this. — Chad Agate, Chief Technology Officer, Heal.me ## Pick your functionality Our modular API gives you full control over how you integrate scheduling and meeting functionality. From reliable calendar connectivity and booking, to provisioning conferencing and capturing meeting insights, each layer works together to deliver customisable experiences that fit your workflow, reduce friction, and drive greater adoption. ## Easily connect calendars to your application Building and maintaining calendar integrations across providers is complex and time consuming. Our Calendar API is powered by our Calendar Sync Engine, which handles the complexity and inconsistencies of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and other providers. It keeps sync reliable and data unified across every account with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, so your team stay focused on building features, not fixing integrations. [Explore the Calendar API](/developer/calendar-api) ## Support self-serve booking and rescheduling Managing scheduling logic for different booking types, time zones, rescheduling rules and conferencing provisioning quickly becomes unmanageable to maintain in-house. Our Availability API powers everything from one-to-one meetings to multi-participant, round-robin, and multi timezone scheduling through a single endpoint, so you can deliver reliable self-serve scheduling without adding to your support load. [Explore the Availability API](/developer/availability-api) ## Embed experiences that feel native When booking flows feel disjointed or take users out of your product, drop-off rises and your platform stickiness suffers. Our customisable UI components embed directly into your existing flows, adapting to your product’s design and logic so scheduling feels native and intuitive. Your team doesn’t waste time building custom UIs, and your users complete more bookings [Explore UI components](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) ## Make meetings more actionable Meetings don’t end when the calendar says they do, but the context and data they generate are often lost in disconnected systems. With Meeting Agents, your application can automatically deliver recordings and transcripts, supporting the full meeting lifecycle through a single integration. You turn every meeting into actionable data that cuts down on user admin and drives smarter decisions. [Explore Meeting Agents](/developer/meeting-agents) ## Unlock regulated markets while building trust that drives adoption Calendar data often contains sensitive personal and business information, and users expect it to be handled securely. Cronofy makes that easy. We’re GDPR and HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 attested, and ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 certified. With six regional data centers, you also get full control over where data is hosted, helping you deploy confidently, meet regional requirements, and prove to customers that their data is safe. [View Privacy and Security](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) Start integrating Cronofy is designed to get you building fast, with clear documentation and a full API reference, quick-start tutorials, and a sandbox environment where you can build a proof of concept on your own terms. When you’re ready, a technical specialist can walk you through your use case and help you plan your implementation so you can move fast and get it right from day one. Get started [Speak with us](/book-a-demo-api) ## Ship faster with the Embedded Scheduler Not every use case needs a full custom integration. Sometimes you just need a managed experience that works out of the box to offer users a booking link without engineering effort. Cronofy’s Embedded Scheduler lets you drop booking links into your product or workflows with minimal setup. It’s built on the same infrastructure as our API, so you get the same reliability, compliance, and seamless booking experience whether you’re using it alongside your custom integration or as a standalone solution. [Explore Embedded Scheduler](/developer/scheduler-api) --- # Switching interview scheduling tools? Here’s what you need to know Discover critical factors to consider when switching interview scheduling vendors. Learn how to evaluate features and get the most out of a new vendor. Your recruitment process is only as strong as the tools behind it. Explore what makes a vendor stand out and how to navigate the switch without hurting your reputation at work. As your recruitment needs evolve, the tools that support your process must keep pace. One of your most critical platforms - your interview scheduling software - may no longer meet your requirements. This can impact your ability to attract and hire top talent. But how do you know when’s the right time to make a switch? ## These are signs you might need a change: - **Increasing inefficiencies: **Your team spends more time coordinating interviews than engaging with candidates. - **Negative Candidate Experience: **Feedback indicates that candidates are frustrated with the scheduling process. - **Unhappy recruiters and hiring managers: **Your team expresses dissatisfaction with the current tool’s functionality and its impact on their productivity - **Inadequate tool support: **Your current software doesn’t fully align with your workflows. - **Push for automation and scalability: **There’s internal pressure to adopt more automated solutions to support future growth. If you recognize any of these signs, [consider a switch](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/time-to-change-recruitment-game-plan). I advise conducting this evaluation during a quieter hiring period, allowing your team to focus on implementation with the necessary time and resources. ## **Auditing Your Existing Scheduling Process** Once you’ve identified the need for change, it’s essential to audit your current scheduling process thoroughly. This will help you identify where the current system is failing and what your needs are moving forward. Start by mapping out the candidate journey and analyzing how your team handles scheduling. ## Key areas to focus on: - **Track key metrics: **Measure how long your team spends on different tasks. Monitor metrics such as [time-to-schedule](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/how-time-to-schedule-impacts-time-to-hire) and time-to-hire. Delays here can indicate inefficiencies that may cost you top talent. - **Candidate Experience feedback**: Collect feedback from candidates to understand their experience with your scheduling process. Cronofy’s [Candidate Expectations Report ](https://www.cronofy.com/reports/candidate-expectations-report-2024)provides extensive data on their experiences and opinions on interview scheduling, highlighting key areas where many organizations may fall short. Use this as a benchmark to assess your process. - **Satisfaction of recruiters and hiring managers**: Gauge the satisfaction levels of your internal stakeholders to identify areas for streamlining. ## **Choosing the Right Vendor** Selecting the right tool is no easy feat. I’ve outlined some key factors to consider, questions to ask during your evaluation, and insights from one of our customers, [Wise](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling). - **Integration capabilities: **Does the solution easily integrate with our existing tech stack, including conferencing, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), calendar provider, and reporting tools? What’s the potential impact on our current workflows? - **Vendor support: **What kind of support does the vendor provide, both initially and ongoing? Can they share examples of how they’ve helped other companies navigate similar challenges? Cronofy's dedicated support was a stand-out qualifier to Wise during their vendor selection process. > From day one, what stood out after we selected Cronofy was the strong support. It has been one of the best we've experienced in terms of understanding our complex scheduling needs. The support is exceptional. Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation at Wise - **Scalability: **How well can this technology scale as our organization grows? Is it flexible enough to meet future requirements? - **Feature Requirements: **Does this platform offer all the essential features we need? Are there any key functionalities we would be compromising on? - **Implementation complexity: **What is the expected timeline for full implementation, and what resources will be needed? How does the vendor support the implementation process? How much training will our team need to start using this system effectively? - **Testing and trial period:** Does the vendor offer a trial period? How can we test the tool’s functionality and integration with our existing processes before fully committing? > Do not underestimate that deeper level of testing and planning on how it's going to integrate with your other tools. Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation at Wise - **Reporting Capabilities: **What reporting capabilities does the vendor offer? How can it help us gain new insights into our scheduling process? - **Privacy and security: **Does the company meet our privacy and security requirements? How do they ensure compliance with relevant regulations? Choosing the right vendor means looking beyond the bells and whistles. It’s about finding the partner that will support your team’s growth and success. ## **Future-Proofing your Scheduling Process with the Right Tool** Future-proofing your scheduling process means investing in solutions that are not only effective today but will continue to support your organization’s growth and changing needs. A crucial first step is ensuring strong [calendar hygiene](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/calendar-hygiene-a-guide-to-cleaning-up-messy-calendars) — disorganized calendars can lead to scheduling conflicts, missed opportunities, and delays. Addressing this issue upfront can significantly improve your overall process efficiency. > This is standard for any type of scheduling tool, but to set yourself up for success, it’s vital to consider the change management of diary cleanliness, and to dedicate enough time to really managing that process before going live. Mark Harman, Global Head of Recruitment Operations and Transformation at Wise From there, it’s about choosing systems that integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, provide robust support, and offer the flexibility to scale as your team expands. That's why Cronofy is built with this future in mind. Designed to help organizations empower recruiters to take full ownership of the interview scheduling process without negatively impacting the candidate experience, it also allows coordinators to focus on higher-value tasks like sourcing, recruiter enablement, and employer branding. Ready to take your first step to better scheduling? [Speak to us today](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### How To Streamline your Hiring with Automated Interview Scheduling Recruitment Curious about how to enhance candidate experience, reduce time-to-hire, and improve overall recruitment efficiency? We bring insights on top areas to optimize, backed up by data on what candidates want from hiring in 2024. --- ### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand Recruitment Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this? --- ### Candidates Fed up with Lack of Responsiveness in Recruiting Recruitment Research Our annual report is back and bigger than ever, this time surveying 12,000 candidates across 7 countries. What were their priorities and hopes for recruiting in 2024? We've got the results. --- # Infrastructure and Network Security ## Infrastructure and Network Security Cronofy leverages Amazon’s AWS suite of services to deliver robust, reliable and scalable infrastructure to ensure the highest service levels to our customers. Data Centers Cronofy currently hosts production environment instances in the following regions: - USA (AWS US-East Region) - Germany (AWS Frankfurt Region) - Singapore (AWS Singapore Region) - Australia (AWS Sydney Region) - Canada (AWS Canada Central Region) - UK (AWS London Region) You can read more about this in our documentation: [https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/data-centers/](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/data-centers/) Each production instance operates discretely, and no customer or account data is transferred between instances to ensure Cronofy customer use complies with local data privacy regulations. Physical Security Cronofy leverages AWS data centers for all production systems, including the storage of customer data. AWS has robust physical safety measures in place, such as fire detection and suppression, multi-resilient power sources, and strict access control policies. For more information on AWS Data Center Physical Security, see the AWS Security Whitepaper: [https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/security-identity-compliance/](https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/security-identity-compliance/) Monitoring and Alerting The Cronofy platform, services and third parties involved in the delivery of Cronofy services are monitored 24/7/365 by our Engineering team. Cronofy has a robust and well-documented incident response plan in place. This is supported by our Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans, to ensure consistent delivery of service. Current and historic status reports are available at: [https://status.cronofy.com](https://status.cronofy.com) Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDOS) Prevention Appropriate technologies are in place at both network infrastructure and application level, to detect, mitigate and prevent DDoS attacks. --- # Back to what works: Why Smindle returned to Cronofy’s API after trying Nylas Smindle provides a browser-based sales platform and call center system for B2B sales teams and outsourcing companies, integrating with CRMs like HubSpot and supporting international operations. See why they switched to Cronofy after trying Nylas, and how they took their sales call bookings from 15 minutes to 5 seconds. Smindle provides a browser-based sales platform and call center system for B2B sales teams and outsourcing companies, integrating with CRMs like HubSpot and supporting international operations. > Scheduling sales meetings with external calendars takes 15 minutes. With our system and the Cronofy integration, the calendars are linked. It takes five seconds, so you save 15 minutes per meeting booked. If you have a hundred agents, you can quickly calculate the amount of time saved. It’s a big advantage. — Jouko Koskinen, CEO, Smindle Success for Smindle **Scheduling automation took booking complex sales meetings from 15 minutes to 5 seconds** **Returned to Cronofy for outstanding support after confusing and broken Nylas onboarding** **Smindle’s B2B customers now saving hours per team member to spend more time on selling** Smindle provides a browser-based sales platform and call center system for B2B sales teams and outsourcing companies, integrating with CRMs like HubSpot and supporting international operations. We speak to Jouko Koskinen, CEO of Smindle, to understand how streamlining scheduling for their customers turned into a significant competitive advantage for their platform. ## The problem: # Sales teams spending hours on scheduling meetings, not on reaching the right stakeholders Smindle provides a browser-based sales platform and call center system for B2B sales teams and outsourcing companies, integrating with CRMs like HubSpot and supporting international operations. We speak to Jouko Koskinen, CEO of Smindle, to understand how streamlining scheduling for their customers turned into a significant competitive advantage for their platform. Nowadays, outbound sales are changing. “Ten years ago, outbound call centre systems were made for high frequency sales with robots,” explains Jouko. “There was a gap in the market for B2B outsourcing. When you try to reach a CEO, you have to know what you’re selling and you need a lot of different data on hand.” That’s where Smindle came in to disrupt the market. ### How did Smindle use Cronofy to streamline sales call booking? Duration: 00:46 Smindle differentiates itself by allowing users to create contacting automation loops for full-funnel touchpoints, weaving in SMS, email, and sales calls that surface information from various sources. “We focus on how to make the calls high quality, without sacrificing quantity. We provide a service that allows our users to be efficient and very controlled in their outreach, so SDR’s always know who to contact, when to contact and have all the supporting data from all sources needed.” When it came to progressing deals with time-poor senior leaders, streamlining scheduling for follow-up calls was a vital offering to Smindle’s users. “Normally, you’d have everyone’s calendars open on different tabs. It took 15 minutes to write everything down, create all the calendar invites, and send all the emails to everyone. We wanted to streamline that, and that’s how we eventually found Cronofy.” ## The solution: # A scheduling API that’s easy to integrate, every time When it came to the choice of developing scheduling functionality in-house for Smindle, this decision was cut-and-dry. “It’s a very important supporting feature, but we were not building that. We were definitely buying it. We had so much on our hands with the VoIP and everything else, so scheduling infrastructure was a nice find, and with Cronofy, it was easy.” The team wanted to focus on building out the differentiating features of their platform, not scheduling. Having been a Cronofy customer from their early days, Smindle re-evaluated pricing from different vendors when it was time to move their customers over to a new version of their platform in a bid to cut costs. However, it was a decision that slowed them down. > Our developers found Nylas, and the API documentation looked good. The pricing was very cheap, so we went with it, because we thought — whatever, it doesn’t matter. But then we noticed that it does matter. Smindle ran into a number of issues when it came to trying to make Nylas work for their platform. > The verification process was a nightmare. There were a number of weird things, and we had to give Nylas ownership of our Google project so they could verify it. It was a major liability, even if it’s just one project. They tried to complete the verification process without handing over ownership of their project to no avail. “We got their documentation and we just couldn’t do it,” explains Jouko. “It was impossible. It said — click this button. There was no button. So we thought, screw this.” Luckily, there was a solution that solved all of their needs with ease. “We checked Cronofy out again, and it was all plug and play.” Smindle returned to Cronofy, and was up and running in no time. ### Why did Smindle move from Nylas to Cronofy? Duration: 01:10 ## The result: # The result: Complex sales meetings scheduled from 15 minutes to 5 seconds Now, Smindle’s busy engineering team is reaping the benefits of working with a scheduling provider that prioritises 99.99% uptime and responsive support. “We have our own hands full with our own product, so we want the supporting solutions to be easy. Because we move fast, we need fast answers. Everything needs to be easy, good service, and a decent price, and Cronofy delivered.” Smindle’s users are seeing hours saved per team member, per week, quickly adding up to significant productivity gains. Scheduling complex meetings has gone from 15 minutes to mere seconds, and turned into a significant advantage against Smindle’s competitors: > When it comes to lead generation for our B2B outsourcing customers, scheduling sales meetings with external calendars takes 15 minutes. With our system and the Cronofy integration, the calendars are linked. It takes five seconds, so you save 15 minutes per meeting booked. If you have a hundred agents, you can quickly calculate the amount of time saved. It’s a big advantage. When it comes to delivering even more value to their users through upcoming features, Smindle is now looking to cut through the AI hype to deliver specific and valuable insights at scale using transcription. “We have this cool system where our customers can collect all of the data on one company. One interesting thing is getting transcripts combined with call and company history. We tried seeing what happens if you put a thousand discussions for OpenAI to analyze, and the results are amazing.” We’re certain we can expect Smindle to deliver more competitive advantages for forward-thinking sales teams in the near future. ### How did Smindle take sales call booking from 15 minutes to 5 seconds with Cronofy? Duration: 00:41 Talk to an expert about your scheduling needs ## Speak to our specialists ### Redefining calendars: AI-powered recruitment automation Mercu now booking interviews via WhatsApp Learn how Mercu, the AI-powered recruitment automation for volume hiring, revolutionized their product offering by integrating Cronofy’s scheduling API. Case Study --- ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- # Interview Scheduling Made Easy for Hiring Teams and Recruitment Platforms Cronofy helps hiring teams and recruitment platforms simplify interview scheduling with powerful APIs and automation tools. Eliminate manual coordination, reduce delays, and deliver a seamless experience for recruiters and candidates alike. ## Simplify Interview Scheduling for Everyone Slow hiring doesn't just frustrate candidates - they delay great hires. Whether you're hiring in-house or building recruitment software, Cronofy eliminates scheduling friction so interviews get booked faster and candidates stay engaged. [I'm Hiring](https://www.cronofy.com/recruitment#4341eed0275a) [I'm Building a Platform](https://www.cronofy.com/recruitment#c8887cbfda2b69c1438907f1f0b8565f) ## Create experiences candidates and recruiters love When coordination breaks, hiring slows down. Delays, reschedules, and email chains frustrate recruiters and strain your team. Cronofy removes the friction for any interview workflow, no matter how complex - so you can schedule faster and keep everyone on track. **Speed up time-to-hire** **Let candidates self-schedule** **Stop checking time zones** **Automate complex setups** ## Cronofy for recruiters Cronofy’s pre-built Scheduler helps your team automate interview scheduling, reduce delays, and give candidates a better experience. - Cut out back-and-forth coordination and reduce time lost between hiring stages. - Reduce recruiter workload so your team can focus on candidates, not calendars. - Prevent double bookings and timezone errors. - Let candidates self schedule with no logins or extra tools required. [Explore the Scheduler](/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) [Try the Scheduler](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/scheduler) ## Cronofy for recruitment platforms Ship scheduling features faster - without compromising on user experience. - Take the manual work out of interview scheduling so your users can focus on hiring, not calendars. - Deliver a seamless, customizable in-app scheduling experience with an integration that fits your platform and brand. - Free up your engineering team and focus on building features that help your platform grow. [Explore our API](/developer) [Start integrating for free](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer) ## Frequently Asked Questions **Q: Does Cronofy integrate with our existing ATS or calendar provider?** A: Yes, Cronofy works with all major calendar providers (Google, Outlook, Exchange, iCloud) and integrates with popular ATS platforms as shown [here](https://www.cronofy.com/ats-scheduling-integration-partners) **Q: Do candidates need to create an account or log in to book interviews?** A: No, candidates receive a link and book interviews based on your team’s availability. **Q: How does Cronofy handle rescheduling and cancellations?** A: Our scheduling flows include built in rescheduling and cancelation options, with real time updates to everyones calendars to avoid confusion. **Q: How does Cronofy keep calendar data secure?** A: Cronofy is ISO 27001, ISO 27018 and ISO 27701 certified and undergoes SOC 2 Type 2 audits annually. We're proud to be certified by third-party auditors – showing that we have an effective security and privacy programme to protect your data. **Q: Will Cronofy work for teams in multiple time zones?** A: Yes, Cronofy automatically detects and adjusts for time zones. **Q: I'm building a recruitment platform - how long does it take to integrate Cronofy’s APIs?** A: Most teams are up and running in days, not weeks. Our dev-friendly APIs and documentation make it easy to embed scheduling quickly. **Q: Does Cronofy support complex interview workflows, like panels, round-robin or multi-round stages, through the API?** A: Yes. Cronofy’s APIs support panel interviews, multi-stage workflows, round-robin logic, and custom scheduling rules so you can replicate your users' real-world hiring flows. **Q: If integrating the APIs, can we fully white-label the scheduling interface?** A: Yes. We provide the infrastructure, and you control the UI and UX to suite your platform and branding. ### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience. Case Study --- ### Redefining calendars: AI-powered recruitment automation Mercu now booking interviews via WhatsApp Learn how Mercu, the AI-powered recruitment automation for volume hiring, revolutionized their product offering by integrating Cronofy’s scheduling API. Case Study --- ### How a scheduling integration with Cronofy freed thousands of hours for BambooHR users BambooHR’s dual focus on candidate experience and removing administrative fatigue led them to integrate Cronofy’s embedded scheduler to help save recruiters thousands of hours from manual scheduling. Case Study --- # Why Cronofy is levelling up company-wide with experimentation right now Cronofy is stepping into an era of higher experimentation velocity to enable us to test boldly, learn more from our customers, and to iterate without fear of failure holding us back from risky ideas. Here's how we're making it happen. Cronofy is stepping into an era of higher experimentation velocity to enable us to test boldly, learn more from our customers, and to iterate without fear of failure holding us back from risky ideas. Here's how we're making it happen. It was my co-founder Garry’s idea. He and I were discussing how we could get the whole company aligned on and involved in our growth mission for the remainder of the year, and beyond. “Would Matt Lerner run a whole company workshop at May-HIP?”. There are two things that possibly need explaining from that sentence. If you’re not familiar with [Matt Lerner,](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewlerner/) he’s the startup growth guru behind the Growth Levers book and the [SYSTM](https://www.systm.co/) course. ‘May-HIP’ is Cronofy shorthand for the May instalment of our biannual whole company offsite. ## Why it's the right time for experimentation The foundational premise of the SYSTM experimentation method is that 90% of a startup’s growth comes from 10% of the things it does. To drive growth, you need to find the 10% and double down. This is why right now, Cronofy is honing in on experimentation to supercharge our growth, coupled with the [£15 million investment from BGF](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/cronofy-bgf-15-million-investment) to support our long-term embedded scheduling vision. A lot of that has been situational and has been a personal focus of mine. I’ve been hiring and guiding objectives over the past year or so to get us ready to grow faster. Fast-forward to early May, and the whole company is sitting in a room, in the grounds of a chateau nestled in the sunny French countryside for Matt’s workshop. The Cronofy team with Matt Lerner ## The most impactful ideas aren't always self-explanatory Ahead of the session, Matt had everyone complete a survey to help him, and us, understand the state of growth thinking in the org. As a team, we scored highly on Focus and Openness but definitely had work to do on Discovery and Insight. So that became the focus of the workshop. How can we improve our ability to run experiments, learn from them, and from customer insights? We got our heads down to work in cross-functional groups and quickly learnt the value of different perspectives. Especially enlightening was watching our ambition expand as we explored experiment ideas that seemed good, ones that could 10x the business (without limits on budget or laws), and then those that just seemed bad. Whilst some of the bad ones were bonkers, many dialled back just 10% suddenly didn’t look so crazy. The richest areas for experimentation lie between the 10x ideas and ones that seemed scary or bad on the surface. We designed Minimum Viable Tests to peel back the layers of complicated ideas, distilling them down to the core of what sparked our curiosity in the first place. Inside the experimentation workshop ## Ramping up to Cronofy's phase of growth It was an intense day, but the energy of the team was palpable and invigorating. It really gave me the confidence that we had the minds in the room and thus people on the bus we needed to accelerate growth at Cronofy. The challenge for the leadership team is to capture and nurture that energy into our day to work. We’ve already got a #customer-intel channel in Slack that is disseminating what we’re learning and enabling many more people to effect positive change for Cronofy and our customers. Much more to come as we fully embrace the method. I’m excited as Cronofy is stepping into an era of higher experimentation velocity to enable us to test boldly, learn more from our customers, and to iterate without fear of failure holding us back from risky ideas. After all, that’s where true growth lives. ### Recruiting Brainfood - Candidate psychology in the hiring process Psychology perspective on the candidate experience for recruiters. Webinar 2024-03-27T10:00:00.000Z --- ### UI/UX Talk: Optimizing Patient Experience and Engagement for Telemedicine The Role of User-Friendly Interfaces in Telehealth Platforms Webinar 2025-02-26T16:00:00.000Z --- ### Panel Discussion: The Evolution of AI in FinTech Talent Acquisition in 2025 Discover new ways to work with AI and automation Webinar 2025-02-20T16:00:00.000Z --- # Interview with Recruiting Brainfood: After fundraising, what's next for Cronofy? Here's why this investment affirms our embedded scheduling vision, and why everyone who schedules meetings in their daily work lives should read this. Cronofy CEO Adam Bird talks to Hung Lee of Recruiting Brainfood about the latest £15m investment from BGF, and what this means for where Cronofy's product is going next. I’m delighted to announce to you today that Cronofy has received a £15 million investment from [BGF](https://www.notion.so/Customer-Funding-Email-1ee55c6cc81e80a5b848e64fc28d3ca3?pvs=21), the largest and most experienced growth capital investor in the UK and Ireland. This is of course immensely exciting for the team and real affirmation of our embedded scheduling vision. But what does this mean for the company, and why should everyone who uses calendars in their daily work lives care? ## How outdated calendars started it all First, let’s take a step back to why Garry and I started Cronofy. We recognised a missing piece of the internet. Calendar systems were designed in the last century – it was an era never made for multi-person decision making, or the multi-tenant SaaS companies of today. Every recruiter scheduling job interviews, every medical secretary setting up appointments, every product manager adding scheduling to their app, confronts this pain every day. We shouldn’t be fighting legacy technology to get to our real work. Things had to change. Adam and Garry at a hackathon in 2017 ## Powering scheduling for 180,000 companies More than a decade and a billion calendar events later, Cronofy now enables real-time, secure scheduling through its integrated platform, which is used by over 180,000 organisations worldwide across a variety of sectors including recruitment, healthcare, and professional services. Here’s how: If you are a customer of our [API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer), you’ll have embedded Cronofy into your application and leveraged the power and capability of this reimagining of what is possible. Our [Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api) layer simplifies the complexity of integrating with multiple calendar services. Our [Availability API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/availability-api) puts high-performance querying and availability management into your developers’ hands. Our [UI elements](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/ui-elements/) solve complex interface challenges for you. More recently, our [Scheduler API](/developer/scheduler-api) is giving you a fully managed scheduling flow with a few lines of markup. ## World's leading tech companies reducing time-to-schedule by 8000% If you’re a [Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) customer, you are a direct beneficiary of this technical infrastructure. Our pre-built [integrations](https://www.cronofy.com/ats-scheduling-integration-partners) into recruiting and CRM systems allow you to take advantage of all of the power of the Cronofy scheduling infrastructure, embedded into your workflow. Cronofy is a tool that you pick up where you need it, whenever you need it. Internal recruitment teams schedule job interviews faster to lock in the best candidates with Cronofy’s pre-built integrations into recruiting systems like SuccessFactors, Greenhouse and SmartRecruiters. Fintech powerhouse [Wise reduced their time to schedule job interviews](/case-studies/cronofy-wise-interview-scheduling) from 6 days to 90 minutes in this way. ## This is the vision that BGF has invested in So, what comes next? Cronofy will use the funding to go deeper into more scheduling use cases across more companies. We’re zeroing in on more capabilities, integrations, and even better performance. Together, we’re building a future where scheduling is easy, and everyone gets meaningful time back to focus on work that truly matters. [Read our investors' announcement](https://www.bgf.co.uk/insights/cronofy-investment/) ## A look at Cronofy through the years An early Cronofy All Hands in person back in 2019 The team at an All Hands in Bruges in 2024 The Cronofy team today in 2025 Adam and Garry at Cronofy's All Hands in 2025 ### Recruiting Brainfood - Candidate psychology in the hiring process Psychology perspective on the candidate experience for recruiters. Webinar 2024-03-27T10:00:00.000Z --- ### UI/UX Talk: Optimizing Patient Experience and Engagement for Telemedicine The Role of User-Friendly Interfaces in Telehealth Platforms Webinar 2025-02-26T16:00:00.000Z --- ### Panel Discussion: The Evolution of AI in FinTech Talent Acquisition in 2025 Discover new ways to work with AI and automation Webinar 2025-02-20T16:00:00.000Z --- # Cronofy becomes a certified SmartRecruiters integration partner! SmartRecruiters users can now use Cronofy’s automated interview scheduling, integrated straight into their existing platform! SmartRecruiters users can now use Cronofy’s automated interview scheduling, integrated straight into their existing platform! Cronofy has partnered strategically with leading ATS provider, [SmartRecruiters](https://www.smartrecruiters.com/)! Users can now take advantage of Cronofy’s flexible automated scheduling for all types of interviews. With our integration, even complex use cases such as panel or sequenced interviews can be scheduled in seconds. This looks set to transform how SmartRecruiters users schedule interviews, saving them valuable time and accelerate the recruitment process. Cronofy is now listed on the [SmartRecruiters marketplace](https://marketplace.smartrecruiters.com/product/cronofy/) for customers to start using right away. Recruiters can choose to fully automate scheduling as candidates move through the hiring stages, or use the browser extension to create personalized scheduling links. The extension works with Chrome and Firefox, and allows you to schedule without having to leave the SmartRecruiters platform. ### The hiring headache The Scheduler is a SaaS tool that can be integrated with ATS software so recruiters and hiring managers can schedule interviews in a few clicks rather than through frustrating back-and-forth emailing and calls. They can share their real-time availability with candidates and accelerate the hiring process. ‍ Interview scheduling is a time-consuming process for recruiters – time they could be spending on higher value tasks like sourcing and building relationships with candidates. Cronofy’s Scheduler can deal with complex interview scheduling use cases, as well as allowing recruiters to schedule on behalf of a hiring manager; which makes it perfect for high-volume hiring. ‍ Our CEO Adam had the following to say: ‍ > “We’re thrilled to be partnered with SmartRecruiters, being such an esteemed and trusted brand within the recruitment industry. We’ve worked with thousands of recruiters over the years, so we know how frustrating and time-consuming the interview scheduling process is. We’re excited to help make SmartRecruiters users lives easier and provide them with all the benefits of our flexible automated scheduling.” ‍ SmartRecruiter's Director of Alliances, Stanislaw Wasowicz,echoed Adam's sentiments on the partnership: ‍ > “I’m delighted to welcome Cronofy to the Smartian ecosystem. Cronofy’s solutions are the pinnacle of what’s possible for solving scheduling at scale. Our new integration will be a game-changer for our customers on their road to hiring success. Increased hiring team productivity, better candidate experience, far less hassle for everyone. The future of this partnership looks very bright.” ‍ The SmartRecruiters partnership is the latest to add to a growing list of software providers who trust Cronofy. We’re immensely proud of the fact we’ve been trusted by multiple highly esteemed software companies and look to keep helping recruiters hit their talent acquisition targets by integrating our scheduling technology with the HR platforms they use. Want to integrate Cronofy with your SmartRecruiters platform? [Book a demo](https://www.cronofy.com/book-demo) and see how it can work for you. --- # Interview Scheduling: Candidate expectations, frustrations, and preferences Exclusive insight and data on what candidates expect and want from the hiring process Welcome to Cronofy’s third annual Candidate Expectations report! Each year we survey 6,500 candidates across the globe to understand their preferences and frustrations with the hiring journey. Our aim is to help recruiters improve their processes so they’re more efficient and provide a great candidate experience. It’s been fascinating to see the changing behaviors of candidates over the past few years. It reflects the velocity of how the world is changing, with technology punctuating every part of our lives. It’s decreasing our attention spans, keeping us constantly entertained, and delivering results and answers faster than ever. With a projected [20 to 50 million additional jobs](https://population.un.org/wpp/) created globally by 2030, even with the layoffs we’ve seen throughout the tech industry this year, it’s crucial to know what the candidate wants and expects from the hiring process to fill your roles. **Candidates deserve to have their time respected and feel valued – removing the burden of repetitive administrative tasks from recruiters frees them to focus where they can have the biggest impact.** ### Introduction to the Candidate Expectations report 2023 with our CEO Adam Bird TOP 3 KEY FINDINGS **40% **would expect it to take **no longer than 6 days** after applying for a job to arrange an interview – up from **30.5% in 2021** and **33% in 2022** **Responsiveness **during the hiring process is **most important for UK (52%) and US (56%) candidates **– up from UK (43%) and US (47%) in 2021; and UK (40%) and US (55%) in 2022 **41% say lack of communication **is the most frustrating part of the recruitment process – up from **24.75% in 2021 and 36% in 2022** ## See the panel discussion about the findings ### Recruiting Brainfood Webinar - September 2023 Duration: 59.42 ### Adam Gordon shares thoughts on the Candidate Expectations report 2023 Duration: 04:09 SHORTENING ATTENTION SPANS ## 8.25 seconds It’s official – our attention spans have decreased to less than a goldfish. The average attention span [is 8.25 seconds](https://www.ambitionsaba.com/resources/average-human-attention-span-statistics), which is 4.25 seconds less than in 2000. This is largely due to the social media and technology that surrounds us in our everyday lives. We constantly have something else to occupy our minds, and regularly feel distracted from our tasks. This has had a clear impact on our patience within the recruitment process. Candidates expect responsiveness and to be taken through the hiring process quickly. Recruiters have to meet these demands if they want to catch the top talent for their open roles. This is only set to get worse – Generation Z doesn’t just have a shorter attention span; they also juggle more screens. On average, millennials bounce between [3 screens at a time](https://www.forbes.com/sites/deeppatel/2017/05/01/10-tips-for-marketing-to-gen-z-consumers/#7ccdb38c3c50) while Gen Z juggle 5! It’s more difficult than ever to keep people’s attention, so Recruiters need to be fast to ensure candidates don't lose interest. 49% left the recruitment process when it took too long to schedule an interview, compared to 38% last year **72% say the smoothness of an interview process** would affect their final decision on whether or not to take the job, particularly those who work in finance (78%) **40% **would expect it to take** 2-6 days after applying** to arrange an interview **14% of people working in IT** would disengage from an interview scheduling process if it took **longer than 2 days** EVERYTHING NOW CULTURE ## Demanding Americans Respondents in the USA were particularly impatient, within the 18-34 age bracket even more so. The US is known for it’s “everything now” culture of instant gratification, with the population regularly receiving a bombardment of ads and marketing messages. This has had a profound impact on their levels of patience. A study from Fifth Third found [96% of Americans](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ninety-six-percent-of-americans-are-so-impatient-they-knowingly-consume-hot-food-or-beverages-that-burn-their-mouths-finds-fifth-third-bank-survey-300026261.html) are so impatient that they would knowingly consume extremely hot food or drink that burns their mouth! This reflects in their behavior during the hiring process – levels of patience tend to run low and they value speed and responsiveness over all else. **67% of candidates in the US** would wait no longer than** 6 days** for an interview, compared with **53% **in Germany, **52%** in the UK and **52%** in France **81% of senior candidates** would wait no longer than a week to schedule an interview **86% in the 18-34 age bracket** in the US would wait no longer than a week to schedule an interview, 81% overall POST-PANDEMIC ## Connection with others Even with the amount of technology that can automate tasks for us, we still crave that human connection in our lives. This was exacerbated by the pandemic, and made us realize the importance of connection with others. We’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic – [30% of adults](https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2018-05/us-loneliness-index-report-pr-2018-05-01.pdf) reported feeling lonely in a recent survey. Technology is great but it can’t replace the value of building relationships with people. It needs to be balanced in terms of automating what should be automated while maintaining human connection. This is especially true in recruitment, after all recruitment is a relationship and people-focused role. The only things that should be automated are those administrative tasks like interview scheduling that get in the way of giving more time to relationship building and sourcing. **54% in France **say human touch is the most important factor during the recruitment process, compared with **53% in Germany, 29% in the UK, and just 18% in the US** **81% agree that a human touch point** is still important during the hiring process. This rises to **90%** when looking at the **55+ age bracket** **70% **said their interviews had been conducted **face-to-face** ### Brianna Rooney shares thoughts on the Candidate Expectations report 2023 Duration: 04:35 COMPANY CULTURE VULTURES ## Part of something more It’s not enough for employers to just offer money anymore – candidates want much more than that. They want to be bought into the company culture, and feel they are part of something they can be proud of. They want to be valued and for their time to be respected. This is especially prominent within the younger generation, they expect a strong company brand that reflects their ethos. A recent study found that [around 32% of job seekers](https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/1-compelling-reason-why-youd-take-a-job-that-paid-32-percent-less-science-finds.html) might consider a job with lower pay if the employer had positive company culture elements. The interview scheduling process is part of this. If it’s slow and haphazard, that signals a disorganized business that doesn’t care about its employees' time or experience. The importance of this can’t be underestimated. According to research by Brandon Hall Group, a good hiring process increases the [retention rate in a workplace by up to 82%](https://b2b-assets.glassdoor.com/the-true-cost-of-a-bad-hire.pdf) and saves you the extra costs of scouting for new hires. **73%** of candidates in the **18-34 age bracket** say the experience of scheduling an interview affects their perception of an employer, compared with **65% in the 35-54** age bracket and **60% in the 55+** age bracket **57% of respondents in the 18-34 age bracket** said they would be less likely to recommend or engage with an employer in future if their interview scheduling process was slow **Nearly a third** said a slow interview process would make them believe that the **employer doesn’t care about their candidates** and that they had an insufficient HR function/team EMPLOYER BRAND ## Something to be proud of The most common result of a bad interview scheduling process was telling friends and family about the experience. Don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth, even in this digital age, people are looking for trusted sources more than ever. They want advice from real people. Naturally the people you trust most are friends and family. Having a poor hiring experience has a lasting effect on your brand and therefore the likelihood people will apply for your jobs. It’s all a reflection on your business as a whole, so it’s important to get it right and make the best first impression or the impact can be detrimental. **67% **of candidates in the **media and marketing** field wouldn't recommend or engage with a company in future if there were scheduling delays, compared with **49% in the facilities/cleaning industry** > As recruiters, we measure ourselves on volume of applications. From a candidate experience perspective, that’s not great as you become one of many. Candidates want to feel they are being seen and heard as individuals. — Allyn Bailey, Executive Director Hiring Success Services, SmartRecruiters GENERATIVE AI GENERATION ## Key for success In a world of generative AI, personalization is key for success for any business. It’s being seen more and more in marketing, and for good reason; [70% of consumers ](https://movableink-marketing.s3.amazonaws.com/2022/reports/audience-of-one-2022-getting-personalization-right.pdf)say they’re more likely to be a loyal customer or increase their purchase rates when brands build personal relationships with them. It’s also crucial for relationship building, which is the name of the game in recruitment. It makes candidates feel seen and heard. **66%** agree there should be **more focus on the candidate** rather than the company **41% said poor communication** was said the most frustrating thing during the recruitment process > Naturally, stress and anxiety comes with delays. So I was not surprised to see that 46% of the respondents said that delayed interview scheduling affected their anxiety levels. It’s up to us as recruiters to make candidates feel at ease and confident during the interview process. — Brianna Rooney, CEO of Thriversity STRESS-INDUCING TIMES ## State of anxiety We’re living in an understandably stress-inducing time, with cost of living crisis, recession, and inflation being an inescapable reality. It appears to be leaving us in a state of anxiety that’s having an impact on all parts of our lives including the hiring process. More than one in four (26%) reported they anticipated experiencing more stress at the start of 2023, up from one in five (20%) last year. This is particularly prevalent among women, young millenials and Gen Z. Burnout from workplace stress is at an [all-time high since Spring 2021](https://futureforum.com/research/future-forum-pulse-winter-2022-2023-snapshot/). These younger generations feel they have less control or stability in their careers, so want to feel reassured throughout the recruitment process. The rising stress can also be put down to the massive layoffs we’ve seen within the past year – nearly 170,000 tech employees globally were let go in 2023. However the candidate shortage in tech persists, showing that despite the layoffs and hiring freezes, the global economy remains on the hunt for top tech candidates. **46%** said delayed interview scheduling **affected anxiety levels** compared with **38% last year** BURNING OUT ## The gender gap Women have reported higher levels of burnout than men for years, a gap that has more than doubled since 2019, [Gallup](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/358349/gender-gap-worker-burnout-widened-amid-pandemic.aspx) reports. The explanation for this widening gap can be boiled down to gender inequities: [Research](https://gdc.unicef.org/resource/why-women-are-more-burned-out-men#:~:text=The%20academics%20concluded%20that%20women,to%20increased%20stress%20and%20frustration.) has found that women are less likely to be promoted than men yet more likely to head single-parent families and take on unpaid labor – all things that can exacerbate burnout. The [worsening child-care crisis](https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/3852987-whats-behind-the-uss-worsening-child-care-crisis/) is another factor causing more stress and frustration for women. **40% of female** respondents said interview delays had a negative impact on their stress levels, compared with **31% of males**. 36% overall > If you look at the data overall, this is a conversation about speed. Candidates today are used to being able to reach out, articulate their need and have an immediate and quick response. That is parlaying itself into their expectations around the candidate experience. — Allyn Bailey, Executive Director Hiring Success Services, SmartRecruiters AUTOMATION IS EVERYWHERE ## Heightened expectations During the pandemic use of automation and digital platforms rose astronomically, obviously due to the increased reliance on this technology to keep businesses afloat through lockdown. This has had an irreversible impact on society as a whole. Automation is everywhere, and continues to grow – the smart home automation market is expected to grow by [more than 27% annually](https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2023-02-14/smart-home-automation-market-to-hit-444-98-billion-by-2030-grand-view-research-inc) through at least 2030. As it’s so prevalent, naturally people have begun to expect more of it from businesses. **62% would prefer an automated system** that manages the interview process efficiently rather than lengthy back-and-forth communication. Yet **email (45%) and telephone (44%)** are still the most common ways to schedule an interview. **70% of respondents in the UK** agree that the switch to a more virtual world during the pandemic has led them to **expect more from business’s technology** throughout the hiring process ## Booming hiring market The number of respondents that most wanted to see automation in the interview scheduling part of the hiring process increased from 30% to 35% in management roles. Clearly managers are realizing the detrimental impact slow manual interview scheduling has on their team’s productivity, and are looking for ways to build more high-performance teams. Region-wise, the USA wants interview scheduling automation the most, especially Junior staff (45%). This may reflect that they want to spend more time building other skills that can see them progress rather than spend too much time on administrative tasks, as they’ll likely want to capitalize on the[ current booming hiring market](https://www.npr.org/2023/06/03/1179652353/jobs-labor-market-unemployment-economy-workers). IMPACT AND RECOMMENDATIONS ## Key takeaways - **Recruiters need to be fast **– speed is everything in a time of growing impatience and decreasing attention spans, in large due to the technological age and social media - Candidates want to be **bought into your brand and company culture**, especially the younger generation – the interview scheduling process is a reflection of your whole company - **Stress and anxiety is rising**, especially among the younger generations and women – a slow or haphazard hiring process can amplify these negative emotions and lose you talent - The recruitment industry is **highly competitive** and the way to get ahead is to move quickly. **Automation enables recruiters to save precious time** and speed up the hiring process - Although there is a lot of helpful technology for recruiters to use, they should **never sacrifice human connection**. Use technology to free up more time for you to source the best candidates and to build relationships - It’s about making the process as **smooth and fast as possible** while showing consideration for the candidate - Automation continues to grow in prevalence, and subsequently **candidates expect more **from an employer's technology stack – you need to adapt to catch the best talent - **Personalization is key** – people want to feel individual in a time of generative AI ## Final insights The growth of generative AI has had a profound impact on candidates' behaviors this year. Personalization is something we’re seeing across the board in terms of marketing and communications and this has translated into recruitment. People want to feel like they are seen as an individual. Part of this is having their time respected, so fast interview scheduling with clear communication throughout the hiring process is crucial. Candidates expect more from employers' technology, but still want the human connection to be intact. Recruiters need to ensure they’re not sacrificing one for the other, and instead use technology to enhance their process and provide them with more time to build human relationships. We’ve identified a range of factors that cause frustration for the candidate, and it’s clear that interview scheduling needs to be prioritized. Candidates want and expect a fast, personalized scheduling experience, and failing to do so will cause recruiters to miss out on the top talent. --- # New to Cronofy’s White Label API? So am I - Let’s Break It Down Together New to Cronofy’s White Label API? Join Developer Marketer Jack as he breaks down the key components, including the Sync Engine, Calendar API, Availability API, and UI elements, to help you easily integrate a powerful scheduling system into your application. You’re a developer who needs to build out a scheduling workflow within your application. You’ve found Cronofy’s White Label API, but aren’t quite sure how the pieces fit together. I’m new here too, so let’s figure it out together. Hello World. I’m Jack, the new Developer Marketer at Cronofy, and my goal is to make it easier for developers to discover and get started with our scheduling tools. If you're new to Cronofy, this blog will be a great starting point to explore the foundations of our White Label API. ## White-Label API: The building blocks of scheduling Cronofy was described to me as the building blocks of scheduling - you pick the blocks you need, stack them together and create a fully functional, real-time scheduling system without worrying about the complexities of calendar integrations. You can think of Cronofy’s White Label API as a toolbox of API endpoints that give you the flexibility to build a tailored scheduling experience for your customers and users. Each of these components builds upon the last, allowing you to choose the functionality and level of control needed to power scheduling directly within your applications. So what does that stack look like? The Foundation Cronofy's Sync Engine At the heart of Cronofy’s service is the Sync Engine, which establishes and maintains real-time connections between users’ calendars and Cronofy. It’s the invisible power source that keeps everything in sync behind the scenes, across all calendar providers. The Sync Engine continuously monitors calendar changes and ensures updates are reflected in connected applications and vice versa. The Next Layer APIs that build on the Sync Engine With the Sync Engine handling real-time updates across calendar providers, Cronofy’s APIs allow developers to build out advanced scheduling capabilities. The APIs are the ‘building blocks’ that I mentioned earlier, with each one adding more functionality to your scheduling workflow. Calendar API Your gateway to calendar data Up first is Cronofy’s Calendar API. Its role is to expose calendar data from the Sync Engine, giving developers full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) access to events across all synced calendars. Instead of authorizing multiple calendar services separately, users authorize Cronofy as an intermediary. Cronofy then handles the OAuth process, saving developers a huge amount of time by eliminating the need to build and maintain separate integrations for each calendar provider. Availability API Find the best time, instantly The Calendar API gives us access to users’ schedules and allows management of calendar events. This is a great start for a simple use case of keeping calendars in sync, but what if we need to find the best meeting time across multiple people’s calendars in real-time? That’s where the Availability API comes in. You can think of it as an intelligent time selector that checks multiple calendars to find a slot when everyone is free - you can query our Availability API to search the availability of up to ten calendars, finding the best slot in an instant. **What additional functionalities does the Availability API bring?** The Availability API doesn’t just check calendars for available slots, it also helps you build smarter scheduling workflows that take the needs and constraints of every user into account - things like working hours, meeting buffers, and special ad-hoc availability. While end users set their own preferences, developers can ensure these rules are applied in real-time through the API. This means you no longer have to handle availability logic manually - the API does it for you, ensuring a frictionless scheduling experience from within the applications you’re building. UI Elements Pre-built scheduling interfaces to accelerate development Now that we have the Calendar API syncing schedules and the Availability API finding the best time, the next step is to display this information in a way that end users can interact with. That’s where Cronofy’s UI Elements come in. Instead of building scheduling interfaces from scratch, Cronofy provides you with pre-built UI components that can be integrated into your application. These elements sit on top of the Calendar and Availability APIs, handling all of the complexities of scheduling logic while giving users an intuitive way to book meetings. Bringing it all together And there you have it - that is a beginner’s introduction to Cronofy’s White Label API architecture. By stacking the Calendar API for seamless calendar syncs, the Availability API for intelligent time selection, and the UI elements for a polished user experience, you have the tools you need to build a fully integrated scheduling system without the headache of building scheduling logic from scratch or managing integrations with multiple calendar providers. While the White Label API is the perfect toolbox for devs looking to have full control over the UX of the workflow, we understand that there might be some cases where you just want to get scheduling up and running as quickly as possible within your application. If that’s you, then you might want to consider Cronofy’s Scheduler API. Scheduler API Embed real-time scheduling with a few lines of code The Scheduler API encompasses all of the functionality of the White Label API, but allows you to embed real-time scheduling capabilities directly into your application with just a few lines of code. Instead of building a scheduling interface from scratch, you can generate and embed real-time booking links within your applications with just a few calls to the Scheduler API. The benefit here is that you can leverage Cronofy’s powerful scheduling infrastructure without having to build and maintain a custom UI, significantly reducing development time while still giving your users the benefit of a seamless booking experience within your application. What next? I hope this blog helped you understand the building blocks of Cronofy’s White Label API. This was just an introduction, so if you’d like a deeper dive, I’d highly recommend reviewing our Cronofy [Developer Docs](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=white-label-API) and setting up a Cronofy Developer [account](https://app.cronofy.com/sign_up/developer?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=white-label-API) to start kicking the tyres of our APIs. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing more content breaking down each API, making it easier than ever to get started with Cronofy. In the meantime, if you have any feedback about our API resources or are looking for something specific, don’t hesitate to [get in touch](mailto:jack@cronofy.com) with me - I’d love to hear from you! ### Developers, meet the Embedded Scheduler Seamless scheduling, directly in your application or website. See how we're making it easier than ever for developers to go live with a solution to their scheduling needs with updates to our support pages about Cronofy's Embedded Scheduler. Blog Post 2025-03-14T16:21:42.712Z --- ### Balancing Automation & Human Touch | HRTech Europe Discover AI's impact on recruitment and get practical advice on how HR leaders can leverage automation effectively while keeping the human element front and center. Blog Post 2025-03-10T10:54:00.000Z --- ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- # Employee Scheduling Technology Solutions Save employees and managers time with integrated scheduling. ## Employee Scheduling Technology Solutions Save employees and managers time with integrated scheduling. > Personio is building an innovative HR management and recruiting solution for HR departments, managers and employees. Real-time calendar sync is crucial to ensuring it fits seamlessly into both their working and personal lives. — Hanno Renner, Co-Founder and CEO, Personio ## Better scheduling for every step of the employee journey - Save time and reduce the scheduling burden for employees and managers - Meetings can be booked without leaving your HR software - Add meetings to all attendees’ calendars automatically - Give everyone more time to spend on higher-value tasks ## Onboarding - Connect your software to the calendars of people, rooms, and resources - Add recurring meetings to employees’ calendars before they start - Choose between individual and business-level authorisation - Let employees see when mentors are available to meet ## Training - Organize training sessions around employees’ availability - Set capacities for training sessions - Re-open training sessions if someone cancels - Be notified when external trainers accept or cancel calendar invitations - Always present up-to-date availability ## Meeting scheduling - Set up [virtual calendars for rooms or resources](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/calendars-events/application-calendars/) that don’t require a calendar but need scheduling capabilities - Schedule meetings when meeting rooms are available, avoiding any double-bookings - Find the availability of required resources - Schedule meetings around every attendees’ availability in a click ## Team management - Managers can approve paid time off books from their calendars, saving them time flitting between applications - Add recurring meetings to employees’ schedules - See employees’ availabilities at a glance - Allow employees to update their colleagues’ calendars - Calendars are always up to date ## Performance reviews - No double-bookings, even during the busiest time of the year - Organize yearly appraisals based on managers’ and employees’ schedules - Only schedule appraisals when there’s a meeting room available - Easily track commitments --- # Calendar Sync for Online Marketplaces ## Calendar Sync for Online Marketplaces > One of UpCounsel’s main value propositions is connecting customers with highly qualified attorneys quickly and effortlessly. With Cronofy, our users can schedule calls with lawyers within minutes. Our lawyers also love it because they spend less time coordinating calls and instead can focus on helping their clients. — Jaya Pareek, Product Manager, UpCounsel ## Create a more modern, user-friendly booking experience Adding two-way calendar sync to your online marketplace makes it simpler and faster for customers to book appointments with service providers. Say your customer needs a plumber. They can find one based on the type of plumbing skills they need and where they’re based, then book it in seconds. Plumbers, meanwhile, have more control over their schedules. They can decide when they want to be available to their customers. This could include blocking out time to pick the kids up from school, or working later to help with emergencies. ## Connect users based on their real-time availability With two-way calendar sync, there’s no risk of services being double-booked. [Buffers](https://www.cronofy.com/blog/buffers-availability-api/) can even be added between appointments, giving plumbers plenty of time to travel between appointments. It also means that if someone cancels, the slot will reopen for anyone that needs a last-minute appointment. Plumbers lose less business should someone cancel their appointment. It’s easier for customers to find someone at the last-minute for emergencies. ## Add features faster Two-way calendar sync doesn’t just make life easier for your users. It also makes it easier for you to add new features to your online marketplace. Instead of worrying about ongoing maintenance or dealing with various versions of different calendar services, you get to focus on building features that will help attract new customers and retain old ones. We deal with all of the ongoing maintenance and security, giving you more time to focus on delivering a great customer experience. ## Let vendors choose their availability Vendors can select the times they want to be available for work using our Availability Rules. This gives them the flexibility to choose when they want to be available for appointments. They can block out their lunch break, times when they’re working on other jobs, or when they need time for a personal appointment. They have full control over their schedules. Your software will never book anything if there’s already something in their calendar. ## Real-time bookings Present customers with a list of times to choose from with our [Slot Picker](https://www.cronofy.com/ui-elements/). Only times vendors have selected as available and that haven’t been booked will be offered. Customers can scroll through the list of slots and choose one that works for them. --- # People Security ## People Security Cronofy ensures the highest level of compliance throughout all levels of staff through various policies and procedures. Background Checking Before anybody joins the company, Cronofy conducts background checks. The depth of these background checks can vary dependent on the position that the individual is taking. Background checks include verifying education, previous employment and references, as well as a background check with a credit reference agency. Employee Code of Conduct The Cronofy Employee Code of Conduct outlines what is expected of everybody at Cronofy. All employees agree upon a set of principles that are adhered to and are asked to respectfully challenge each other when this may not be the case. Employees agree to the Code of Conduct as part of their on-boarding, and are asked to re-read it every year, or whenever there’s a change to it. Security Awareness Training All employees must complete security training as part of their orientation when joining Cronofy. Awareness training is rolled out continuously, either when updates are made to policies, or on an annual basis. Security awareness training includes training on, but is not limited to, good security practices, such as password security and multifactor authentication, handling incidents and preserving evidence, and information security responsibilities. All Software Engineers must also undergo additional training on threats, vulnerabilities and secure coding practices. Policies and Processess Cronofy maintains a robust suite of policies and processes which underpin the everyday operation of the business. Cronofy’s Information Security Management System (ISMS) controls the day-to-day management of Information Security, including the writing and distribution of policies. Policies are available to review by any member of staff, at any time, within the ISMS. All policies are reviewed at least on an annual basis. **Access Control Policy** Access to operational applications, platforms and data is strictly limited according to an employee’s role. Cronofy operates a general rule of least privilege, meaning that, employees only receive the access they need to perform their role, and nothing more. **Access Reviews** Cronofy conducts quarterly access reviews, ensuring that employees’ access to critical systems has not changed, and is still appropriate for their role. Where this isn’t the case, the event is recorded, investigated, and the access adjusted. **Employee Account Authorisation** All employees are trained to use [1Password](https://1password.com/) to generate a random, unique password for each service, using a password as long as the service will support. Cronofy employees will always use two-factor authentication when available. Where supported, Cronofy uses a service’s own security policies to ensure secure authentication methods are used (eg. forcing the use of MFA). **Customer Account Authorisation** Passwords for Cronofy customer accounts must be at least 9 characters and not on a denylist of 10,000 common passwords. Cronofy also offers support for multi-factor authentication and SSO, should Cronofy customers want to use it. **Incident Management Policy** Cronofy’s Incident Management Policy defines how Cronofy responds to events that threaten the security or privacy of confidential information, ensuring that incidents are properly identified, contained, investigated, and remedied. The policy is supported by an Incident Response Playbook, which assigns roles, responsibilities and general guidelines on how to handle an incident. This ensures consistent handling, no matter who is managing the incident at the time. Information Security Responsibilities The Information Security Responsibilities help all Cronofy employees understand their role within Cronofy, in relation to Information Security. Business Continuity Cronofy has a Business Continuity Plan which ensures that the organization can quickly recover from unexpected events while continuing to support customers and other stakeholders. The Business Continuity Plan is tested by Cronofy on at least an annual basis, in line with the requirements outlined in ISO27001. After each test of the Business Continuity Plan, improvements are documented, actioned and resolved, to better improve the Business Continuity Plan. Disaster Recovery Cronofy’s Disaster Recovery plan exists to prevent and minimize a period of loss of service for Cronofy customers. Cronofy’s recovery objectives vary dependent on the circumstances. For example, if AWS were to completely fail, our RTO would be six hours, and our RPO would be 24 hours. This, however, is very much a worst-case scenario. Asset Management Cronofy closely manages IT systems and the data that they contain from purchase to disposal. All pertinent information concerning assets is recorded within an Asset Register. All laptops have end-user compliance tooling installed, to ensure that assets are not misused. Equipment Disposal To appropriately protect our constituent’s data, all equipment being disposed of must be disposed of per the Equipment Disposal Policy. This ensures that data is appropriately destroyed, and equipment is disposed of, both securely and in an environmentally responsible manner. Vendor Management The Vendor Management policy helps to ensure that Cronofy, and Cronofy’s customers, are protected and that the vendors used are assessed appropriately. All new vendors must complete a Vendor Risk Assessment before Cronofy will start using them. All vendors are reviewed, and risk assessed annually, to ensure that they still meet the strict data protection requirements outlined by Cronofy. Internal Audits The organization conducts Internal Audits on its employees, policies and controls to ensure the best level of service to its customers. If or when gaps are identified, training takes place to ensure those gaps are filled. **Security Team** Cronofy employs security and privacy professionals as part of our Engineering and Operations teams. This team is tasked with maintaining the company’s security posture, while developing security processes and staying aware of new vulnerabilities. Our Privacy and Compliance program is led by our CTO, who is involved in ensuring Cronofy meets the expectations set out by our external accreditations, by government agencies, and by our customers. Cronofy leverages Amazon’s AWS suite of services to deliver a robust, reliable and scalable infrastructure to ensure continuity of service. --- # Top Performance Tips Watch the videos from Talent Acquisition experts who share their reflections on 2023 and Top Performance Tips for recruiters in 2024! ## Top Performance Tips 2024 - **Karin Philippczyk recruitment tips for 2024** (4:39) - **Keirsten Greggs recruitment tips for 2024** (3:16) ## Top Performance Tips 2023 - **Keirsten Greggs recruitment tips for 2023** (4:38) - **Allyn Bailey recruitment tips for 2023** (4:01) - **Lindsay Hildebrandt recruitment tips for 2023** (5:46) - **Brianna Rooney recruitment tips for 2023** (4:16) - **David Smith recruitment tips for 2023** (1:14) - **Matt Alder recruitment tips for 2023** (2:46) - **Adam Gordon recruitment tips for 2023** (6:19) - **Hung Lee recruitment tips for 2023** (2:55) - **Judy Ellis recruitment tips for 2023** (2:58) ## Scheduling for recruitment teams Interview scheduling automation that streamlines the hiring process for recruiters worldwide. We work with over 70 Applicant Tracking Systems and thousands of recruiters worldwide. Find out how teams have improved their time-to-hire by automating an admin heavy task like scheduling. - 1:1 - Multi-person and panel - Easy time zone settings - Rescheduling [Learn more](/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) ### Interview Scheduling: Candidate expectations, frustrations, and preferences --- ### Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What metrics truly matter --- # MDA Leadership is scheduling coaching sessions 92% faster MDA Leadership Consulting is a worldwide leadership assessment, development, and coaching firm based in the US. They've helped hundreds of business leaders build the skills they need to be successful in their roles and drive their company's success. MDA Leadership Consulting is a worldwide leadership assessment, development, and coaching firm based in the US. They've helped hundreds of business leaders build the skills they need to be successful in their roles and drive their company's success. [MDA Leadership Consulting ](https://mdaleadership.com)was founded in 1981 with a mission to help organizations identify the right talent to drive results, accelerate the development at all levels of the leadership pipeline, and sharpen alignment between talent and strategy. Their coaches and consultants work with companies of all sizes on a local, national and global level to identify and improve leadership performance.‍ Over the years, they’ve built a reputation as the assessment and coaching consultancy to go to for top-tier leadership assessment and development. Although they are based in the US, they provide their services virtually worldwide. They expanded more into virtual assessment and coaching particularly during the pandemic, when the majority of businesses had to shift to virtual to survive. ‍MDA set themselves apart by providing a “white glove” approach, delivering premium client service. They want to provide the best possible experience for their clients. Because of this, they look to ensure every stage of the customer journey is high quality and frictionless. ## The Challenge Given MDA is an assessment and coaching business, a large part of their function is booking meetings, whether this be interviews or business simulations, coaching sessions, consulting with clients, or internal meetings among employees. As the business has grown, so too has the volume of meetings to schedule. The business began offering more of their services virtually during the pandemic, which made them more accessible to leaders around the world. This naturally increased the number of meetings that needed to be booked. > The inevitability of working with executives is that they need to reschedule. And when that happens, that process starts all over again. Automated scheduling was an obvious solution to improve their experience from the start of working with us. — Matthew Such, Vice President of Operational Excellence, MDA Leadership Business increased to such a scale that the company employed a team of ten admin staff who primarily took care of organizing and scheduling meetings for consulting and coaching staff. This model was highly manual, taking employees away from doing higher-value tasks, and not as time or cost efficient as it could be. As MDA focuses so heavily on client experience, providing a “white glove” premium service, the existing stressful and time-intensive back-and-forth exchange didn’t fit their ethos. ‍The nature of working with busy leaders and executives meant they regularly had to reschedule meetings, which was proving to require a significant amount of time and effort to address the constant schedule changes. In order to maintain the same level of client service while dealing with an increased workload, they needed a better system for booking meetings. ## Solution Matthew Such was brought to MDA to improve the operational side of the business, and quickly pinpointed scheduling as a priority. > One of the reasons why scheduling automation was the first major project was because it reduces the burden on staff, and allows them to do other high-value tasks that they often don't get time to do. — Matthew Such, Vice President of Operational Excellence, MDA Leadership Matt needed to transform manual scheduling to a digital solution. However, a lot of the staff within the business were used to a certain way of working. MDA Leadership is generally traditional in its approach and has not been tech-focused. It was important that they found a simple-to-use solution that could be used by any of their clients or staff. As [the Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler) enables users to book meetings within just a couple of clicks, it proved to be the perfect fit for their needs. ‍MDA deals with complex booking use cases, such as assessment processes that span multiple days, changing consultants for each session, or multiple clients needing to be in one session. They needed a solution that could cater to all of these scenarios. It didn’t take them long to decide Cronofy was the best fit for their needs. > I did some market research on scheduling solutions before finding Cronofy – I looked into around ten different providers. Cronofy was the only one that fit the bill for all of our use cases for scheduling and talent assessments without having to do a ton of development work. That made the decision pretty easy. — Matthew Such, Vice President of Operational Excellence, MDA Leadership Being able to schedule on behalf of a coach or consultant was one of Matt’s main priorities when looking for an automated scheduling solution. MDA’s admin staff often have to book meetings on behalf of the consulting and coaching team, so this capability was vital to maintaining business efficiency. The Scheduler allows anyone in the same organization to schedule on behalf of another team member. Not only this, but the recipients can reschedule in just a couple of clicks if they need to, and everyone will be notified of the new meeting time. ## The Results Since MDA Leadership has started using the Cronofy Scheduler, the admin team who were previously dedicated to booking meetings have saved hours from their week, giving them more time to focus on other high-value tasks. What was previously hundreds of hours of effort a month has been cut down substantially – staff used to spend around 3 hours booking a single assessment or coaching process, whereas now it takes 15 minutes. This has made the company more efficient, helping them to deal with the increased workload that has come with their company growth. ‍Automated scheduling has improved the user experience, making it as simple as possible for these busy clients to book into assessment and coaching sessions at times that are most convenient for them. Being able to reschedule without hassle has taken away the back-and-forth headache that rescheduling would have created previously. MDA’s clients have commented on how simple it is to use the Scheduler and how much time it saves. ‍They have been able to increase the amount of business meetings and calls that can be scheduled. The new way of working has improved the consultants' day and decreased the burden of scheduling meetings. > The Scheduler is helping us generate more revenue by speeding up the scheduling process by 92%, which enables us to book in more assessments and coaching sessions. Solutions like the Scheduler let us do more work without adding more people, as well as reducing the effort needed. — Matthew Such, Vice President of Operational Excellence, MDA Leadership MDA has been impressed at the level of service from the Cronofy support team, being highly responsive and available to help with the implementation process whenever necessary. They’ve been able to facilitate a smooth roll-out of the platform to around half of their staff so far. ## What next? ‍There’s still a lot that MDA wants to achieve with scheduling automation. They are in the middle of rolling Cronofy’s solution out to all their lines of business and clients and will continue to do so until the whole business is using automated scheduling. ‍ ### Case Studies --- ### Video Hub: top tips --- # How Calendar Sync Can Help with Campus Recruitment Networks like Handshake have helped to revolutionize the campus recruitment scene. They make it easier for students and businesses to connect, which helps students to get more real-world experience and businesses to find more top talent straight out of university or college. These connections are invaluable for everyone involved. Students can go on to form long-term relationships with businesses, which helps with their future career prospects. Businesses reduce their time and cost to hire while also improving their brand image among younger audiences. An employer’s brand image plays a huge role in campus recruitment. Networks like Handshake have helped to revolutionize the campus recruitment scene. They make it easier for students and businesses to connect, which helps students to get more real-world experience and businesses to find more top talent straight out of university or college. These connections are invaluable for everyone involved. Students can go on to form long-term relationships with businesses, which helps with their future career prospects. Businesses reduce their time and cost to hire while also improving their brand image among younger audiences. An employer’s brand image plays a huge role in campus recruitment. Networks like Handshake have helped to revolutionize the campus recruitment scene. They make it easier for students and businesses to connect, which helps students to get more real-world experience and businesses to find more top talent straight out of university or college. These connections are invaluable for everyone involved. Students can go on to form long-term relationships with businesses, which helps with their future career prospects. Businesses reduce their time and cost to hire while also improving their brand image among younger audiences. An employer’s brand image plays a huge role in campus recruitment. According to [Harvard Business Review](https://hbr.org/2014/03/how-companies-can-attract-the-best-college-talent), the most important factor when it comes to millennials looking for jobs is people and cultural fit. This even comes above compensation and career potential. Getting the right image across to potential employees – even those who may go on to become employees long after they’ve graduated – is therefore crucial. According to the same study, the majority of millennials hear about companies from friends. So the more people a company can connect with, the more organic reach they’ll receive through word-of-mouth, too. Word of mouth is one of the best forms of marketing, and it’s something that businesses really can’t put a price on. The better their brand image is, the more highly people will speak of them. One of the ways campus recruitment can be made easier for companies is by using [calendar sync](https://www.cronofy.com/features/). Calendar sync makes it an easier, faster process for them to connect with students and career advisors. The easier it is for them to do this, the more likely they will be to do so, creating more opportunities for everyone involved. ## Connect students with career centers When career advisors’ calendars are connected to a booking system, students can book meetings with advisors online. This way, they’ll always be able to get an appointment with the right person to get the advice they need. Advisors, meanwhile, don’t need to worry about being double-booked as Cronofy ensures that once a meeting is booked with them, it’s pushed straight to their calendar to avoid any conflicts. They can also specify when they’re available to meet with students to avoid any appointments being booked outside of their working hours. Connecting students with career centers early on in their college or university life helps them to decide on the right career path for them faster. This means they can be connected with the right people and businesses faster, getting their foot in the door before they’ve even graduated. ‍[Handshake](https://www.cronofy.com/case-studies/handshake-student-engagement/) does this with their network of universities, students, and businesses. It works with universities such as Stanford, Princeton, UC-Berkeley and more, connecting students with counselors and businesses to make it easier for them to get a head start with their careers. ## Connect students and businesses before it’s time to hire When a student’s first contact with a business is during the hiring process, they’re less likely to know about the business and what the role involves. When they’ve already built up a relationship with the organization, they’re better informed about what the role entails and what the organization's expectations are. Businesses also have more of an idea of the kinds of talent an academic institution or a particular course can offer them. Events such as guest lectures are a good way for businesses to begin to form relationships with future candidates. However, they can be difficult to organize – particularly around university schedules and the working day – meaning many businesses lose out on this opportunity. Using calendar sync, events such as guest lectures can be organized around the speaker’s schedule, making it a more attractive prospect to businesses looking to improve their brand image. The event can also be added to their schedule using a [Smart Invite](https://www.cronofy.com/smart-ics-invites/), which can be used to confirm their attendance and provide them with any additional information such as where the event is or how long it will take them to get there. Another way that businesses can build relationships with students is with mentorship schemes. These help students to develop the skills they need in the working world – which many businesses feel [students are lacking](https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/jan/25/too-many-graduates-are-mismatched-to-their-jobs-whats-going-wrong) – while also helping team members within a business to build their leadership skills. Internships and sandwich years are other ways for students to develop their skills in the real world. They’re also a good way for businesses to find the right candidates before offering them a permanent, full-time position. Students can schedule work around their study time, and sync their commitments to their calendar to avoid any other commitments conflicting with their studies or work. ## Schedule interviews faster Calendar sync – especially when it updates in real-time – makes it easier and faster for your customers to schedule interviews. Hiring managers, recruitment coordinators, and students can say goodbye to lengthy phone calls or emails. Instead, hiring managers can connect their schedules to a tool like Real-Time Scheduling. Coordinators can then send an email booking link to students they’d like to interview. Students can book the interview at their own convenience, picking times that best suit them while also working around the hiring managers’ real-time availability. It even works for complicated multi-part interviews which can be unnecessarily time-consuming to organize. Allowing students to book their own interviews creates a candidate-first experience from the start. This helps to attract more candidates and therefore give businesses a wider talent pool to choose from. Because of this, they have a better chance of finding the right person for the role first time, meaning they spend less time and money on campus recruitment. A more streamlined hiring process like this demonstrates a modern, employee-first working culture from the start. This not only helps with online reviews but makes people more interested in working with them because they know they’ll be treated well. The more complex or monotonous tasks companies automate, the easier it is for employees to focus on getting the work done that they were really hired to do. When [520 hours per year per employee is lost](https://www.cronofy.com/how-automated-scheduling-and-calendar-sync-can-transform-hr/) to those kinds of tasks every year, the more that can be automated, the more productive employees can be. When new employees have more time to get to grips with the job at hand – and their colleagues have more time to train them – they can progress faster, as can the business that hired them. The same booking process could also be used to make it easier for students to schedule meetings with career advisors. Advisors generate the booking link then can send it to multiple students they’d like to meet with. Students can then cross-check their calendars before booking the appointment. ## Conclusion Calendar sync helps companies to create a more candidate-first hiring process. For students just entering the working world, this is one of the ways in which businesses can stand out from their competitors. Companies can attract the best students right out of university, training them in their own way and helping them to get their foot in the door faster. Students will appreciate this opportunity and go on to develop their skills in a way that best suits the business’s – and their customers’ – needs. For more ideas on how calendar sync could help your educational software, check out our [educational use cases for calendar sync](https://www.cronofy.com/use-cases/education/). --- # Why you should start with interview coordination as a gateway to automating your hiring Talent teams are coming under increasing pressure to be more productive with the tools at their disposal. AI and automation promise to be the cure-alls, but how do you actually go about implementing them with low risk and high productivity gains? Let’s dive into why automating interview scheduling inside your ATS might just be the perfect place to start. Talent teams are coming under increasing pressure to be more productive with the tools at their disposal. AI and automation promise to be the cure-alls, but how do you actually go about implementing them with low risk and high productivity gains? Let’s dive into why automating interview scheduling inside your ATS might just be the perfect place to start. ## Why your inefficient scheduling is costing you candidates Recent research conducted by Cronofy with 7,000 candidates worldwide reveals a sobering reality: 41% of candidates have left a recruitment process entirely because it took too long to schedule. The traditional email chains and calendar juggling just aren’t working. Nearly half of your candidates are walking away before you've even had a chance to showcase your company culture or assess their fit. When scheduling becomes a back-and-forth email marathon spanning days or weeks, you're inadvertently signaling that your organization is disorganized, slow to move, or doesn't value the candidate's time. 33% say slow scheduling makes them feel their prospective employer doesn’t respect their time. It’s not just wasted time for candidates, too. The research reveals that hiring teams waste an average of 13 hours on scheduling in candidates in peak hiring weeks by having to click back-and-forth between HRIS systems like [Workday](https://www.cronofy.com/interview-scheduling-in-workday), their emails, and their calendars. ## Yet expectations for recruiter productivity have never been higher An even more pressing issue is that teams are having to do more with less. Talent teams are stuck stitching together disconnected systems that don’t speak to each other. Endless tab-hopping between calendars, spreadsheets, email threads, and your ATS turns into time wasting. Before you know it, you’re overwhelmed trying to book candidates into interviews. Many are looking to supplement their work with AI and automation, yet everyone knows how painful it can be to implement new tools into existing hiring processes. You’re usually looking at 6+ months of implementation, a steep learning curve, and yet another tool that doesn’t speak to Teams, Google Calendar, or the candidate information inside your ATS. Are you using Calendly for your interview co-ordination needs? Here’s why you might be missing out on productivity gains: [Learn more](/calendly-alternative-interview-scheduling-in-workday) ## Why scheduling is the perfect automation starting point When people think of interview scheduling, they reduce it to dropping times into a calendar. But anyone who has to co-ordinate interviews regularly knows it’s never that straightforward. It’s repetitive and prone to errors as you scale. What looks like a minor admin task quickly balloons into one of the biggest time drains in recruiting. Before you see an interviewer’s availability, there’s a chain of back and forth messages, status updates in the ATS and constant outreach to the candidates and interviewer, to make sure they show up. Here’s why fixing interview scheduling delivers immediate wins: ### **1. It's purely administrative.** Unlike other aspects of hiring that require emotional intelligence and human judgment, all scheduling requires is calendar information on when interviewers are free or busy. There's no risk of losing the human touch, because there was never required to be one here in the first place. In fact,** 74%** of candidates say human touch is vital to them in the recruiting process, but they also recognise that speed and efficiency come first. Top candidates are walking away, and they’re telling each other about poor hiring experiences. Our data shows that as inefficiencies compound, candidates are far more likely to warn their networks or use platforms like Glassdoor to talk about their experience — not a great look for prospective candidates looking into your company. ### **2. The ROI is immediate and significant.** Those implementing automated scheduling have seen dramatic improvements. Companies like Wise have already reduced their time-to-schedule from six days to just 90 minutes using Cronofy in their ATS. That's not just small gains. That's transformation. Here’s Wise talking about how automating one small co-ordination part of their interview process resulted in hundreds of hours back for their recruiting team: ### How did Wise's recruitment team save hundreds of hours on scheduling? Duration: 1:04 ### **3. It frees up time for what matters.** Every hour saved on calendar coordination is an hour that can be invested in personalized candidate feedback, meaningful conversations with hiring managers, or strategic talent planning. ## Balancing automation and human touch The goal isn't to remove humans from hiring. It's to ensure they're spending their time where human skills matter most. By starting with interview scheduling automation, you're picking the easiest low-hanging fruit to streamline your hiring process, and keeping your candidates engaged by giving them the extra human touch when they need it. ## One small part automated, hundreds of hours saved When you automate interview scheduling effectively, your recruiters become less stressed and more strategic. Hiring managers appreciate the professionalism and efficiency. All of your candidate information continues to live in one system. Most importantly, the hours you get back per week create breathing room to focus on the parts of recruitment the human connections that that truly differentiate your organization. Now, you can plug scheduling add-ons like Cronofy directly into your ATS, letting you automate interview scheduling whilst keeping you in your main hiring tool. **[Learn more about streamlined scheduling inside your ATS here](https://www.cronofy.com/ats-scheduling-integration-partners)****.** ### Help Interviewers Share Availability Faster We’ve made enhancements that give interviewers more control over their time commitments and reduce manual effort for recruiters. You can now also use Separate Invites in templates, and we’ve added the ability to regenerate public links with a single click. Blog Post 2025-05-30T10:29:00.000Z --- ### How time-to-schedule is impacting your time-to-hire You've heard of time-to-hire as one of the most widely used metrics in the recruitment industry. But do you measure your time-to-schedule? It could be having a detrimental effect on your hiring. Blog Post 2023-11-30T11:26:00.000Z --- ### Workflow Automation with AI: New Tech, Same Problems There's an exciting opportunity to automate business workflows with AI agents, but is it that straightforward? Cronofy's CEO Adam Bird breaks down the right (and wrong) scenarios to implement these tools. Blog Post 2025-02-27T12:42:18.774Z --- # How doctoranytime Transformed Telehealth Booking with Real-Time Calendar Sync Learn how European healthcare marketplace doctoranytime used Cronofy's API to book telehealth consultations. Doctoranytime is a European-based healthcare marketplace, allowing patients to find and book appointments with the best doctor for them using Cronofy's White Label API. We speak to their Head of Growth to see how this has transformed their platform. > We didn’t want doctors’ calendars to be our primary focus. Thanks to this integration, our engineering team is saving time and focusing on what really matters for us – the patient and user experience challenge. We’ve reduced user friction and increased the quality of our product. — Baptiste Lilles, Growth, Doctor Anytime Success for doctoranytime **Telehealth appointment scheduling at scale** 670,000 appointments and 17,300 video consultations booked in just 2024 alone **99.99% API uptime for the most reliable appointment booking** Patients now seamlessly booking appointments with real-time doctor availability every time **Hours of time back for engineering team** No more calendar maintenance and bug squashing means team focuses on valuable product development Doctoranytime is a European-based healthcare marketplace, allowing patients to find and book appointments with the best doctor for them. Already a market leader in Greece and Belgium, they also serve users in Latin American countries like Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. We speak to Baptiste Lilles, the brains behind doctoranytime’s Marketing, Growth, and Product. ## The problem: # Calendar bugs and double bookings getting in the way of a smooth patient experience Doctoranytime's platform offers doctors a SaaS where they can manage their appointments and connect with new patients. With this came the challenge to offer their users instant availability, all while doctors were scattered across their own different calendar providers. Initially, doctoranytime integrated with calendar providers themselves, but maintenance quickly became a drain on resources better spent elsewhere on their platform. “It was time consuming for our engineering team to maintain reliable service and squash bugs,” explains Baptiste. > We had many complaints from doctors saying calendars were not syncing properly, so multiple patients booked the same slot. This was the worst-case scenario for us. At this point, we were creating a lot of conflict for the doctor and for the patient who was unable to see real-time availability. Struggling with complaints from disappointed doctors and patients over appointments not synchronizing properly and causing double bookings, the team decided something needed to change. ## The solution: # The most reliable calendar API on the market that patients, practitioners, and developers can rely on The philosophy behind doctoranytime prioritizes simplicity and transparency, and this dictated how they wanted to achieve their scheduling goals. “It was important for the calendar connection to be seamless to enable easy onboarding for our doctors,” explains Baptiste. Real-time availability and calendar support were essential pieces to doctoranytime’s mission to connect patients with doctors for smoother telehealth experiences. “We’ve been working on our doctor-facing UI/UX for many years, and we have a big team of consultants that help doctors digitize their workflows. Many doctors looking to start out in telehealth still use paper calendars, and the switch to digital is saving them time and providing everyone with a better experience.” While being essential to the functioning of doctoranytime’s platform, calendars are inherently disconnected, and their availability needs to be centralized. > We offer doctors our own calendar on doctoranytime, but we also wanted to offer them the capability to integrate with third party calendars for everyone to ensure everyone using the platform can see real-time availability. The team was acutely aware that calendars are ever-evolving things that change minute-by-minute. “We knew it was our goal to offer real-time availability for our users, and to allow them to book, cancel, reschedule, and modify appointments within our own platform.” If they were to take users away from their own platform to book appointments, they risked user drop-off. This is why **[Cronofy’s White Label API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/white-label-api)** was the right solution for doctoranytime. Seamlessly integrated within their platform, it gave the engineering team the flexibility to create a scheduling interface that looked and felt native to their application, all while leaving Cronofy’s Sync Engine to do the hard work of establishing and maintaining connections between doctors’ calendars, and monitoring for any changes to availability. ## How it works: **[Cronofy’s Calendar API](https://www.cronofy.com/developer/calendar-api)**** **lets doctoranytime’s team manage events across all user calendars, with one integration that handles creating, updating, and syncing events automatically. Doctors authorize Cronofy once as an intermediary, which then manages OAuth for all supported calendar services. This is a massive time-saver for developers, who no longer need to build and maintain separate integrations for each provider. “Switching to Cronofy enabled us to reduce friction for patients looking to book appointments with accurate doctor availability. It was a non-negotiable for us to avoid double bookings and disappointed patients.” > Our engineering team integrates third-party vendors into our application, and it’s obvious that they always prefer vendors like Cronofy with clear **[API documentation](https://docs.cronofy.com/)** and information on reliability. Setting Cronofy API’s reliability apart from other vendors on the market is a **[99.99% uptime service commitment](https://docs.cronofy.com/developers/faqs/rate-limits/)**, as part of the Cronofy API Service Level Agreement. “The integration with Cronofy is very seamless. Our doctors can now connect their calendars in just a few clicks, and display their real-time availability, making this part of onboarding them onto our platform easy.” ## The result: # Taking bold steps on the path to becoming a healthcare super-app by freeing up developer resources “Pricing, documentation for developer teams, and reliability were very important for us when choosing our vendor,” explains Baptiste. “We are offering this availability feature free of charge for our doctors to improve the booking experience, so Cronofy having competitive pricing was a key consideration. We wanted a vendor that could scale with.” **[Pricing for Cronofy’s API](https://www.cronofy.com/api-pricing)**** **comes in tiers suitable for various organization sizes, and a fair pricing model alongside discounts for startups makes the API a long-term solution to scheduling headaches. > We didn’t want doctors’ calendars to be our primary focus. Thanks to this integration, our engineering team is saving time and focusing on what really matters for us – the patient and user experience challenge. We’ve reduced user friction and increased the quality of our product. Now, doctoranytime is focusing in on differentiating their offering to continue their trajectory of becoming a market leading telehealth provider. “Over the last few years, we’ve grown our so-called healthcare marketplace towards a more B2C-oriented solution, including an advanced review system to see and compare all reliable information about doctors,” reflects Baptiste. “We’ve been expanding, as well as creating a 24/7 medical chat, where as a patient, I can go and chat with both an internal and external network of doctors.” With a goal to simplify healthcare management, they now aspire to become a super-app for patients. “The next step for us is to allow patients to see their medical history, files, and chats with doctors, as well as allowing them to access instant care from primary care practitioners to resolve everyday issues. We’re looking to build a seamless experience where users can switch from a chat interface to a video consultation if needed. They should also have the ability to renew their prescriptions, and to share them with their pharmacy.” Now, with freed-up time for their engineering team thanks to Cronofy’s API, doctoranytime’s journey to becoming a one-stop destination for everyday healthcare is well underway. Solve your scheduling needs ## Speak to our specialists ### An API that scales with you: How Heal.me solved telehealth calendar sync headaches Learn how Heal.me delivered reliable calendar synchronization to patients and practitioners on a wider scale. We speak to CTO Chad Agate to understand how Cronofy provided a reliable, long-term solution for their needs. Case Study --- ### Docplanner Group uses full calendar sync to power its SaaS healthcare solution Global healthcare platform Docplanner Group offers SaaS solutions to health professionals around the world to improve the patient experience and medical practice management. Case Study --- ### Revolutionizing digital healthcare support with Tidepool Tidepool are committed to helping all people with insulin-requiring diabetes safely achieve great outcomes through more accessible, actionable, and meaningful diabetes data. Case Study --- # BambooHR Schedule any interview with Cronofy right inside your BambooHR ATS. Phone screens, multi-person and round-robin interviewers. No need to request candidate availability. Schedule interviews with all of the power of Cronofy from the BambooHR Hiring module. The BambooHR integration with Cronofy brings real-time, multi-person scheduling embedded into Bamboo. Once enabled, Schedule Interview buttons will appear in BambooHR and you're ready to go. ## Schedule any type of interview from BambooHR Now you can schedule 1:1s and panel interviews, for yourself or on behalf of your hiring managers directly from BambooHR using Cronofy. No more emailing back and forth or playing calendar Tetris. [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) [Show me how to set it up](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/bamboohr/) ## See how Cronofy works with BambooHR! ### Screening calls and 1-1 interviews with BambooHR Duration: 05.55 You can now very easily schedule any type of interview right from bamboo HR. So when you want to invite a candidate to interview, you go to hiring and find the correct candidates. In this case, we'll take Janet's, who's filling an application, and we want to move her to a screening call after having a successful resume review. So you will start scheduling a new email, and you can set up some templates that makes it even easier, where you can see that there's a placeholder also for the interview scheduling link. So we'll create the interview scheduling link very easily by clicking on schedule interview. And if you've done a similar request recently, you can also select this and it will fill the information that's similar to your reasons request. And for this case, I'll show you how to create one from scratch. So either if you're scheduling this interview for yourself, or perhaps for a different recruiter or a hiring manager, the form is the same, but you can select for which one you're creating it. So in this case, what you will see is that the candidate information is already automatically pulled in here. So they should already need to have a look at. The next section that you'll see is the invitation that the candidate will receive. So this will pull from your preferences. And as you can see here, there's the title that you can adjust if you like to the duration, you can still adjust. But this pulls basically automatically. If there's any attachments, like maybe preparation PDF, you can also attach it by clicking here. So the last decision that you need to make for this scheduling link is to see what type of availability you want to provide. So there are three types. The easiest, is working hours. And as you can see here on the top bottom, this provides 30 slots in the next seven days. As you'll see, if you make the next three days it will obviously become less. And with 14 days it becomes more. Usually we recommend to do three days or seven days for a screening call or for a one on one with the hiring manager. And if you want to do panel interviews, we usually recommend the 14 days. But in this case, let's just go with seven. So this is one option. As you can see here, it will show all the slots that are available in your actual calendar, or from the person you're scheduling for between the working hours as you can see. So meaning on Tuesday and Wednesday. I've got no availability at the moment. But Thursday, I've got full availability, and someone Monday to the second option is to schedule with custom hours. So the customers and the specific slots we usually recommend if either yourself or the person that you're scheduling for has specific blocks allocated for interviews, then this is a way that you can leverage those blocks. Basically, what you would do is you can select if you want to only look at when you are the person you scheduled for is free in your actual calendar, or you can override availability. And this overriding is especially helpful if you have a blocking or calendar for interviews. Usually that would show as not available slots. But if you choose whether I'm busy or not, it will overwrite those slots. So let's say you've got some blocks here a calendar for Monday afternoon. And for Thursday morning, you can select them by dragging and dropping and we will only look at your availability we're only looking at offered slots in these green areas to to candidates. Specific slots works actually in the same way, the only differences that gives you even more specific control over what you want to offer to the candidates. So as you can see here, you can select specific dates, and then various specific times that you want to offer. And you can add as many as you would like or as you need. This can also be helpful if you're scheduling on behalf of a hiring manager, for example, who's already let you know what times they are available, then you can add them here. And again choose to look at only if they're free in our calendar, or override any other activity in their calendars and then create the slots. As you can see here. Obviously, the more specific you go, the fewer slots there will be for the candidates. So in this case, let's just go with working hours and create the link. So what you'll see here the candidate will receive this email with this link. And once they've selected the slots a confirmation will be sent automatically to As the interviewer and to the candidates, and you will also receive notification as the person scheduling the interview. And as you can see, you will hear find a notification in your email, and also an invitation for your calendar. And if you want to see your total overview of the statuses of different invites you've sent to candidates, you can go to your personal scheduler dashboards, when you log in with your single sign on. You can then here see for when one interview is scheduled, but also for example, if they're still pending one that might need some follow up. So this is how you can schedule an interview from bamboo HR. And here you can find your interviews that you've scheduled in there. Enjoy a 90 day trial Try Cronofy for 90 days and then pay as low as $15 per month at the end of your trial. You also pay nothing when there's no active usage on your account, perfect for low-hiring seasons. [See pricing](/pricing) **Save a day on admin tasks every week** **Schedule interviews 12x faster** **Multi-person interviews scheduled like magic** **Supports Outlook/Teams & Gmail/Google Meet** **Schedule without ever leaving your ATS** ## Schedule without leaving BambooHR Quickly generate scheduling links personalized for each candidate and send emails from any of your interview invitation templates in BambooHR. ## Keep track of your candidates with automatic updates Say goodbye to your scheduling blindspots. See when candidates schedule interviews with your team, directly from your BambooHR account. ## Add scheduling superpowers to your BambooHR account Cronofy is the most advanced and reliable interview scheduling tool on the market. That's why we are the only partner for interview scheduling with BambooHR. Now you can easily distribute interviews across a pool of interviewers. You can book over blocked times on hiring managers' calendars and can combine multiple calendars in one view, no polling required. Time to stop doing admin and start focusing on your candidates. Want to find out more? [Speak to an expert](https://www.cronofy.com/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) [See how to setup Cronofy in BambooHR](https://docs.cronofy.com/integrations/bamboohr/) --- # BrightHire Add BrightHire to your scheduled interviews. --- # Cammio Use Cammio as a live video interviewing provider for your scheduled interviews. --- # Custify Create personalized, dynamic scheduling requests for the currently assigned Customer Success Manager. --- # d.vinci Recruiting and onboarding software with real-time interview scheduling powered by Cronofy. --- # Fountain Frontline workforce management software with real-time interview scheduling powered by Cronofy. --- # Google Meet Link Google Meet conferencing accounts for people within your organization. --- # Greenhouse Cronofy interview scheduler for Greenhouse ATS. Send self scheduling links and manage interview pools with Cronofy's automation and templating tools. Trigger personalized, self-serve interview scheduling workflows when candiate is moved through pipeline stages in Greenhouse. ## Schedule multiple screening calls in one click You no longer need to request candidate availability or schedule one interview at a time; send personalized invites to several candidates with one-click automation in Greenhouse, allowing candidates to self-schedule or reschedule interviews with no extra effort on your part. [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) **Save a day on admin tasks every week** **Schedule interviews 12x faster** **Multi-person interviews scheduled like magic** ## Add advanced scheduling features to Greenhouse While Greenhouse is a powerful recruiting platform and offers 1-to-1 interview scheduling, there are some use cases that the platform doesn't cover. Automate multi-person, sequenced interview scheduling without the complexity of multiple calendars with Cronofy. > Before implementing the Cronofy Scheduler, 20% of our staff were primarily dedicated to scheduling sessions and meetings, which was hundreds of hours of effort a month. Now we’ve reduced scheduling time from an average of 3 hours to 15 minutes, which has freed up our staff to do other high-value tasks. — Matthew Such, Vice President of Operational Excellence, MDA Leadership ## Do more with Cronofy in Greenhouse Greenhouse vs Cronofy for ATS - 1-to-1 - Panel - Combined panels and dynamic pools - Allow private events - Send separate invites - Add candidate profile and interview kit to interviewers' invite ## Keep track of your candidates with automatic updates Automatically update Greenhouse with any changes to a candidate's status with Cronofy's custom workflows. Keep track of everything in one place for a streamlined hiring process. ### See how you can enable one-click scheduling with candidates for any interview in Greenhouse ## Make panel interview scheduling more efficient in Greenhouse with Cronofy Stop the back and forth of asking for times. Just offer your candidates real-time availability and schedule in hours not days. ### Candidate Expectations Report 2024 --- ### Recruiting Brainfood - How should recruitment teams measure their efficiency? --- ### Improving remote hiring processes in 2024 --- # Hubspot Track meeting booking activity in Hubspot and create dynamic booking pages for deal owners. --- # iCIMS Extend iCIMS interview scheduling capabilities for your complex scheduling needs. --- # Jiminny Copy Meeting Agent recordings to Jiminny for analysis. --- # Lever Your recruitment team can schedule interviews 12x faster with Cronofy's integration for Lever. No more back-and-forth and an improved candidate experience. Use Cronofy to schedule any type of interview from Lever. Your recruitment team can schedule interviews 12x faster with Cronofy's integration for Lever. No more back-and-forth and an improved candidate experience. ## Schedule any type of interview from Lever Schedule complex, multi-person interviews without juggling calendars. Your recruitment team can schedule interviews 12x faster with Cronofy's integration for Lever. [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) **Save 1 day on admin tasks every week** **Schedule interviews 12x faster** **Schedule complex meetings in minutes** ## Say goodbye to back-and-forth While Lever is a powerful recruiting platform and offers 1-to-1 interview scheduling, there are some use cases that the platform doesn't cover. Automate multi-person, sequenced interview scheduling without the complexity of multiple calendars with Cronofy. No more back-and-forth. > Our recruiters can now own the end-to-end hiring journey. They can make sure that **candidates are having a great experience**, but are able to do it in a much more seamless way. The fact that Cronofy integrates with Lever means they’re **spending a lot less time on the admin, everything just works**. — Joseph de Garr Wilkinson, Head of Talent, Agreena ## Supercharge interview scheduling in Lever with Cronofy Lever vs Cronofy for ATS - 1-to-1 - Panel - Allow private events ## Keep track of your candidates with automatic updates Automatically update Lever with any changes to a candidate's status with Cronofy's custom workflows. Keep track of everything in one place for a streamlined hiring process. ### See Cronofy in action! ## Make interview scheduling more efficient in Lever with Cronofy Want to **save 5 hours a week per recruiter**? Get in touch to find out how bring to Cronofy’s interview scheduling features to Lever! [Get started](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ### Candidate Expectations Report 2023 --- ### Recruiting Brainfood: How should recruitment teams measure their efficiency? --- # Microsoft 365 Agent Use Cronofy's Scheduling Agent within Microsoft 365. --- # Microsoft Teams Conferencing Link Microsoft Teams conferencing accounts for people within your organization. --- # Okta Enable Okta SSO for your organization's users. --- # PageUp End-to-end talent acquisition software with interview scheduling powered by Cronofy. --- # Paychex Flex Schedule any type of interviw with all the power of Cronofy without leaving Paychex Flex. --- # Paycor Embedded interview scheduling for Paycor. Schedule any type of interviw with all the power of Cronofy without leaving Paycor. --- # Personio The all-in-one HR software solution with calendar sync and interview scheduling powered by Cronofy. --- # Pinpoint Accelerate your Pinpoint interview scheduling with Cronofy. See how the integration can help your hiring workflow. Applicant tracking software with real-time interview scheduling powered by Cronofy. The fast, flexible applicant tracking software Attract, hire, and retain top talent with Pinpoint the applicant tracking system designed for in-house recruitment teams, with unlimited support included. Attract ## Find competitive talent for your organization Your team expects great candidates. Pinpoint helps you find them. With easy-to-build branded careers sites, filterable talent pools, and hundreds of integrations with your favorite job boards and recruitment tools, you’ll spend less time worrying about how to attract the right applicants. [Learn more](https://www.pinpointhq.com/features/attract/) Hire ## Build your strongest team Reduce admin by 80% and hire the best talent for your team. From candidate communications to interview scheduling, Pinpoint does the tedious tasks so you can focus on candidate experience. With custom scorecards and reports, you’ll be able to make more informed hiring decisions. [Learn more](https://www.pinpointhq.com/features/hire/) Onboard ## Set new hires up for success Engage your new hires from the moment they say ‘yes’. Use our onboarding portal to offer new hires a personalized experience and make onboarding faster, easier, and more effective for everyone. [Learn more](https://www.pinpointhq.com/features/retain/) With Pinpoint and Cronofy you can - Streamline your interview scheduling process by allowing candidates to select their interview times based on your calendar availability - Get more control over the hiring process - Achieve your hiring goals faster by removing the back-and-forth of interview scheduling - Improve your candidates experience - Save time for your hiring managers and recruitment teams ### Pinpoint product overview Duration: 6:25 ## Support at every step Pinpoint customers get unlimited access to our team through implementation and beyond via phone, email, or live chat. Every user of Pinpoint can access live chat within our product, with an average response time from our team of less than 2 minutes. No submitting a support ticket into a black hole or waiting four days for a response. [Learn more](https://www.pinpointhq.com/why-pinpoint/customer-success/) ## Speak with the Pinpoint team [Book a demo](https://www.pinpointhq.com/contact/pinpoint-demo-partner/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=marketplace&utm_campaign=cronofy) --- # Salesforce Track meeting booking activity in Salesforce. --- # Slack Add the Cronofy Agent to Slack to manage your calendar and schedule with colleagues. Multi-person, multi-timezone scheduling without the back and forth and no need to leave Slack to do it. ## A window on your calendar Ask the agent what's on your calendar and it tells you. "What's on tomorrow?", "When am I next meeting Sarah?", "Am I free Thursday afternoon?" Answers come back in the thread, in your time zone, without opening another tab. Booking is one of the things you can do here. Reading is the other. Once you stop thinking of Slack as just a chat tool and start thinking of it as a window on your calendar, the friction of switching apps for quick checks disappears. ## Ask, Pick, Done! Step 1 — Ask Cronofy. In any channel or DM, @mention the Scheduling Agent along with the people you want to meet. Tell it what the meeting is about and any constraints. Write it the way you would ask a colleague. Step 2 — Review suggested times. Cronofy checks connected calendars for every participant in real time, accounting for time zones and working hours. It replies in the thread with times that work for everyone. Step 3 — Confirm and go. Pick a time. Calendar invitations are sent automatically with the right details, conferencing link, and time zone. ## Multi-person, multi-timezone, one message Panel interviews, cross-functional reviews, client calls. @mention everyone who needs to be there and Cronofy finds times that work across all of their calendars. Time zones are handled automatically. No mental arithmetic, no "is that your time or mine?" When plans change, ask the agent to move any meeting on your calendar to a time that works. It proposes new options based on real-time availability, sends updated invitations, and can add or remove attendees as needed. It works on meetings the agent booked and on existing meetings in your calendar. ## Send a scheduling link in seconds Some meetings are easier when the other person picks the time. Ask the agent to create a scheduling link for a recipient and it generates a personalized URL based on your real-time availability. Send it however suits, by email, in another Slack channel, or pasted into a CRM. They pick a slot, the meeting lands on your calendar. Useful for candidates, prospects, clients, anyone outside your workspace where back-and-forth in a thread would not work. ## Up and running in minutes Install from the Slack App Directory. An administrator connects calendars through Cronofy (Google, Microsoft 365, Exchange, Apple). Once connected, any team member can start scheduling immediately. No training needed. For enterprise deployments, scheduling templates let admins pre-configure meeting types and rules (durations, buffers, working hours, host selection) so the agent applies them automatically when teams ask to schedule. [Add to Slack](#form-829ed116-324e-48cd-9731-a588ba8553c8) --- # SmartRecruiters Embed Cronofy scheduling into your SmartRecruiters recruiting workflow today! Embed Cronofy scheduling into your SmartRecruiters recruiting workflows and support your most complex interview scheduling requirements. ## Advanced SmartRecruiters scheduling, at scale Leverage Cronofy's time-saving interview scheduling features directly from your SmartRecruiters ATS. Schedule panel, group, and sequenced interviews 12x faster. Make hiring easier with your SmartRecruiters ATS and Cronofy interview scheduling. [Speak to a specialist](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) **Save a day a week on admin** **Scheduler interviews 12x faster** **Multi-person interviews scheduled like magic** ## Automate complex group interview scheduling While SmartRecruiters is a powerful recruiting platform and offers 1-to-1 interview scheduling, there are some use cases that the platform doesn't cover. With Cronofy's integration, you can automate multi-person, sequenced interview scheduling without the complexity of multiple calendars. > Cronofy’s solutions set the standard for scalable scheduling. Our new integration is poised to transform the hiring process for our customers, boosting hiring team productivity, enhancing the candidate experience, and significantly reducing the hassle for everyone involved. — Cal Murphy, Alliances Manager, SmartRecruiters Extend your SmartRecruiters scheduling with Cronofy SmartRecruiters vs Cronofy for ATS - 1-to-1 - Panel - Override interviewer "busy" times - Allow private events - Add candidate profile and interview kit to interviewers' invite ### See the Cronofy SmartRecruiters integration in action! ## Learn more ### Candidate Expectations Report 2023 Gain key hiring insights from our latest Candidate Expectations Report published July 2023. --- ### Recruiter Top Performance Tips 2023 Watch our Top Performance Tips from recruiter experts, including SmartRecruiters' Allyn Bailey. Accelerate your scheduling [Speak to a scheduling specialist](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) --- # SuccessFactors Trigger personalized, self-serve interview scheduling workflows when candidate is moved through pipeline stages in SuccessFactors. ## Automatically trigger self-scheduling links to candidates With Cronofy's fully customizable triggers you can automatically send self-scheduling links to candidates when they move into particular stages in your recruitment pipeline. Perfect for the high-volume stages like screening calls. Just move the candidate in SuccessFactors and Cronofy will automatically send them a link. The candidate can then choose from one or a pool of interviewers with constraints available to ensure that the load is being spread fairly. [Book a demo](/book-a-demo-scheduler-recruiter) ## Personalized scheduling, no matter how complex Cronofy allows you to schedule interviews from within SuccessFactors so you don't have to jump to another tool to get your work done. No matter how complex the rules for a particular interview. Schedule for yourself, for others, for groups, even over blocked times. You can add a self-schedule link to an email to your candidate with just a couple of clicks. --- # Teamtailor Recruitment software with real-time interview scheduling powered by Cronofy. --- # Webex Enable Webex conferencing accounts for people within your organization. --- # Whereby Scheduling and video calls go hand in hand. This is why Cronofy and Whereby are partnering to deliver seamless scheduling and integrated video calls in one package. Enable Whereby conferencing sync for your API applications. Whereby is a video calling API and SDK to integrate real-time communications into your platform. Their solution is reliable, user-friendly and easy to integrate with extensive customization options. Connect Whereby with Cronofy for seamless meeting management. Build ## Developer friendly API & SDK Getting started with Whereby is easy, and integrating it inside your platform is straightforward. Developers have the choice between loading their pre-built experience via a Web Component, or a completely custom integration using the SDK. [Explore developer docs](https://docs.whereby.com/?utm_source=cronofy&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=cronofy-announcement) Trust ## A secure and private solution Built in Europe, Whereby puts privacy and security first. All content is encrypted, they’re GDPR compliant, ISO27001 certified and can be implemented with HIPAA compliance. [Learn more](https://whereby.com/information/embedded?utm_source=cronofy&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=cronofy-announcement) Grow ## A tested, scalable infrastructure Their global infrastructure is used daily by millions of users, with reliable call quality even in low band width areas. They’re dedicated to supporting you as you grow with flexible usage based pricing. [See pricing](https://whereby.com/information/embedded/pricing?utm_source=cronofy&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=cronofy-announcement) ## Book your technical consultation today ## With Whereby and Cronofy you can: - Streamline the meeting creation process with automatic room creation - Have more control over where users meet - Create a seamless user experience within your platform - Save development time by choosing developer-friendly yet powerful solutions with direct integrations Features ## Built-in features, ready to go Whereby has tons of powerful features already built into their solution, with full control to switch them on or off. From breakout Groups, to session transcriptions, screen share, live chat, cloud recording and so much more. [See more features](https://whereby.com/information/embedded?utm_source=cronofy&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=cronofy-announcement) ## Get started with Cronofy and Whereby [Request a demo](https://whereby.com/information/embedded?utm_source=cronofy&utm_medium=partnership&utm_campaign=cronofy-announcement) --- # Zendesk Generate and track scheduling requests in Zendesk support as well as triggering automated workflows. --- # Zoom Automatically add Zoom conferencing links into booked meetings across your organization. Link Zoom conferencing accounts for people within your organization.