Hellohire
New feature • Released • Admin • Scheduling
Background
About Hellohire
Hellohire is a virtual interview platform that helps recruiters and employers conduct initial interviews with job applicants. The platform is used for ongoing hiring and hiring at scale, where many openings exist for the same role.
Scheduling
Employers set their interview schedule by creating “interview sessions”— time blocks where applicants schedule their interview. Interview sessions are typically 1-hour and each interview is between 5 and 15 minutes long, allowing an interviewer to meet between 4 and 12 candidates per hour.
Job applicants are sent a link to a scheduling page where they select an interview session.
The applicant is qualified or disqualified by registration questions, and then provided with a specific time to arrive for their interview within the interview session they selected.
Challenge/Opportunity
Each interview session is scheduled individually.
Employers often follow a regular schedule, interviewing at the same times and days every week. For some roles this schedule is maintained indefinitely, and for others the schedule is consistent week over week for months at a time.
Employers typically schedule between 5 (1 per day) and 15 (3 per day) sessions each week. Each session is scheduled individually by the interviewers or by an admin member of the employer’s team.
Admin app - Schedule
Admin app – Schedule – Add session modal
Why solve this now?
Make habitual use of Hellohire easy
Hellohire wants customers habitually using the platform as their default method for screening job applicants. Over the last 6 months, Hellohire re-focused its customer acquisition on employers with ongoing hiring needs, such as business process outsourcing/contact centers and recruitment agencies.
Before this shift, other employer profiles were included in the Sales Qualified pipeline: seasonal scale ups (golf clubs, outdoor entertainment, etc.), retail, restaurant/food service, and other businesses hiring individual roles.
The re-focused ideal customer profile (ICP) uses Hellohire as their default applicant screening method, rather than only leaning on Hellohire for short term surge and one-off hiring.
Allowing the creation of recurring interview sessions flips the requirement for user action from needing to take action to continue using Hellohire (creating interview sessions), to needing to take action to stop using Hellohire (canceling the recurrence of an interview session).
Customer feature requests
Scheduling each interview session individually is being reported by a growing group of customers as operationally burdensome, and leads to inconsistency in availability when they forget to schedule sessions.
Support team burden
To reduce the friction of ongoing usage, the Hellohire support team has taken over interview session scheduling for select accounts, taking time away from their other work. This also takes control away from the customers as any change requires contacting the Hellohire team.
Goals
Increase ongoing usage
Shorten time to habitual use for new accounts
Reduce burden on the Hellohire support team
Increase usage – number of interview sessions and interviews
Reduce time on session scheduling
Reduce errors (Don Norman “slips”) in interview session creation (scheduling for AM vs PM, wrong timezone, wrong interviewer, forgetting to schedule sessions, inviting candidates to schedule interviews with no upcoming sessions available)
Requirements
Recur weekly on specified days
Indefinite schedule or with an end date
Continue to allow individual session scheduling
Individual sessions to remain the default for the initial version. Might default to recurring after launch with feedback from a broader set of users.
Assign interviewers
Update series
Interviewers
Start/end time
End date
Add/remove
Change end date
Update individual sessions
Interviewers
Start/end time
Delete
Solution
Exploration of existing approaches
There are several existing cases and approaches for creating recurring appointments, meetings, and calendar availability.
Recurring meeting scheduling and appointment booking tools were reviewed with a focus on:
Creating a series
Editing a series
Editing one session within a series
Google Calendar – Web
Google Calendar - Web - scheduling flow
Google Calendar - Recur weekly on custom days
Google Calendar – iOS
Google Calendar - iOS - scheduling flow
Calendly
Calendly - scheduling flow
Hubspot
Hubspot - scheduling flow
Mapping Hellohire's scheduling flow
Interview session flow before the introduction of recurring sessions
Introduction of recurring sessions
Design
Exploration of how to display that an interview session is part of a recurring series in the list of interview sessions,
Playing with a round arrow to indicate a session is part of a recurring series
Trying to the right of the date and another arrow design
Playing with associating the indicator with the edit function
Realizing that for consistency it would also need to go on the delete function if it's going to be tied to an action. Looking messy. Not liking the look!
Final version of the Interview sessions list. Series and individual sessions are indicated in the new “Repeats” column.
Column showing recurring with the weekdays on which the series repeats.
Add session modal with repeat radio picker single session and series
Playing with the layout and controls for the modal to indicate that a session should repeat as a series.
Repeat weekly selected
New day picker component
Toggles have been used previously in the platform but there was no standard component. I took this as an opportunity to create a toggle for the design system.
New toggle component
New toggle component
Add session with toggles
There were a number of new scenarios where users could update or delete individual sessions or series of sessions that would impact assigned interviewers and job applicants. I wrote a series of confirmations when the edit or delete actions would have destructive consequences, and where possible give the option to limit the impact to sessions without applicants already registered.
Destructive Action Confirmation Template
Destructive Action Confirmation Template
The challenge of email invites and calendar events
Example email generated for an interviewer assigned to an interview session
Email notifications and calendar events pose a challenge for recurring sessions.
When an interview session is created, the interviewers assigned to participate in the session receive an email with a calendar invite notifying them of the session. The email also includes a calendar attachment so the session appears in their calendar, blocking the time.
Interviewers scheduled for recurring sessions receive an email for each session generated within the series. At the time a recurring session is created, if an end date is not applied, 45-days of sessions are generated. If scheduling 2 sessions/day M-F, this results in ~60 emails.
Single email for the series
We explored sending a single email for the series, but the calendar event for a series is not modifiable using the email attachment method. And so if a single session within the series is modified in the Hellohire platform, the interviewers’ calendar would not reflect that change. Prioritizing information accuracy and trust, this solution was rejected.
Calendar integration
A possible solution that was explored would be to build a calendar integration for interviewers to connect their calendars to Hellohire. This would allow full control over calendar event updates without requiring emails with calendar attachments. While this would be an improvement for interviewers who set up a calendar integration, a solution for interviewers who do not enable a calendar integration would still be required, and so this solution was determined as out of scope for the initial version.
Decision & solution
One of the principles we try to follow is to avoid degrading the user experience on one part of the platform in service of delivering a better experience somewhere else. While the generation of 30-90 emails (1 session/day to 3 sessions/day) is not ideal, it’s also not a step backward from the experience interviewers have when sessions are created manually one at a time.
Due to the volume of emails sent to interviewers the team recognizes this as an area to watch closely for feedback and frustration as it’s likely to require a better solution in the future.
The challenge of email invites and calendar events
In testing the recurring session feature, we found that the existing email subject format was leading to email clients treating each email as an individual email. The email subject contained the job name as well as the interview session date and time. Removing the date and time from the email subject template resulted in email clients treating the emails as a single email thread, and so while 30-90 emails were still sent, they were no longer overwhelming the interviewer’s inbox.
Email inbox without threading behavior
Email inbox with threading behavior
Oh no, a missed requirement!
We forgot to limit how many sessions appear on the scheduling page employers share with their candidates.
Scheduling setup without control over limiting the number of days visible to applicants and resulting scheduling page
The scheduling page default was to display all upcoming interview sessions. The Hellohire Support and Customer Success teams have access to set a limit on the number of days into the future a scheduling page displays, and had been enabling this for customers on a case by case basis, but the global default was to display all scheduled sessions. Recurring sessions create 45-days of sessions at the time the series is set up, and so all 45 days of sessions were being displayed on the scheduling page.
Our QA process caught this issue, and we introduced the ability to control the number of days into the future the scheduling page displays, and introduced a 7-day default as 7-days was the standard value used when the Support and Success team had enabling the limit for customers on a case by case basis.
New field limiting number of days ahead applicants can schedule and resulting scheduling page
Select screens and interactions from final version
Admin app with add session or series modal and select components
New edit and delete dropdowns for series actions. And a new filter on sessions to limit the list to upcoming or past.
Release, Adoption, and Next Steps
Release and Adoption
Within 2 weeks of the soft launch the recurring feature is being used by 18% of accounts
Not all accounts hire the same role continuously.
Hard launch – an email announcement will be sent to all accounts informing them of the new capability. Additional adoption is expected at this time.
14% of Hellohire accounts do not have an ongoing hiring need and would not benefit from the feature – this set of accounts is no longer considered ICP.
Next steps
Post launch adoption monitoring
Post-launch user research
Multi-time recurring sessions
Calendar integration