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In a hyper-growth phase, Airtable needed to automate scheduling while still providing a white-glove candidate experience. With Calendly’s Prelude, Airtable built workflows that drastically sped up interview scheduling and made it easier to organize complex panel interviews.
Challenges
Wasting time and resources on manual interview scheduling
The world’s largest enterprises use Airtable to build and deploy customized apps for their most critical and unique workflows — from managing product roadmaps to launching marketing campaigns to tracking job applicants. Airtable’s low-code platform makes it easy for anyone to connect data, people and workflows across their organizations.
Just as Airtable helps teams create custom apps, the organization prides itself on creating a customized candidate experience. Not an easy feat for a high-growth organization.
In 2019, Tyler Patterson, Recruiting Manager, Coordination and Operations, joined Airtable right before they reached 100 employees. Today, they have grown to about 1,000 employees.
When hiring quickly, it’s easy for candidates to fall through the cracks and for interviewers to become burned out. That’s why Tyler’s team coordinates interviews for all hiring teams. This ranges from organizing a simple video call to planning a multi-part process that includes tests and panel interviews.
“Scheduling is at the heart of how my team supports the candidate experience at Airtable, but we used to spend almost all day scheduling (and rescheduling) interviews,” Tyler says.
Rescheduling interviews was particularly draining as entire processes had to be started from scratch. Tyler and his team knew with the right tool they could increase scheduling speed and automate core processes like rescheduling and organizing interview panels.
“We were manually using Google Calendar, Greenhouse, and Airtable to schedule interviews. We really needed something that would automate our white-glove experience and save us time.”
Tyler Patterson
Recruiting Manager, Coordination and Operations at Airtable
Not just any automation tool would fit the bill. Airtable needed a flexible solution that accommodated for different interviewing scenarios.
For example, hiring for Airtable’s Engineering team requires scheduling technical assessments and tasks like assigning questions to specific interviewers. Tyler’s team usually handled this load manually.
“We handle a lot of complex scheduling and needed something that worked with us,” Tyler says. “We needed a tool that allowed us to make scheduling adaptations for each candidate and job, especially when hiring for our Engineering teams.”
After evaluating several tools, Airtable chose Calendly’s Prelude because it was custom made for recruiting teams, delivered flexible scheduling, and provided a better candidate experience.
Solution
Building dream interview schedules with Prelude
Tyler and his colleagues are impressed with the automation and flexibility Calendly’s Prelude offers. “I was warned a scheduling tool wouldn’t work for a high-growth startup. But with Calendly’s Prelude, I can set up my dream schedule and finesse the system to ensure candidates are always scheduled in the way we require,” Tyler says.
The team also loves the integrations with their application tracking system (ATS), Greenhouse, and other tools like HackerRank and
“Prelude syncs directly with our ATS so recruiters and interviewers didn’t need to learn a new process. All the information they need is still in our ATS” Tyler says.
Tyler and his team are happy they could improve their process with Calendly’s Prelude so both candidates and recruiters can enjoy a better hiring experience.
Planning panel interviews with Loops
Using Prelude’s feature, Loops, to schedule complicated panel interviews is saving massive amounts of time.
Building the right interview panel is an art form. The panel typically must include interviewers with a range of attributes, skill sets, and seniority levels, for example.
“Prior to using Prelude, we were maintaining a big spreadsheet for interviewers,” says Tyler. “Now we use Prelude’s attributes feature to easily sort interviewers into teams and build panels with just a few clicks. It’s saved a lot of time.”
Speeding up rescheduling with automation
Rescheduling interviews is also much easier. The team used to manually reschedule interviews inside their ATS which took time. “Rescheduling interviews used to be the worst part of waking up in the morning, and now it’s not a headache,” says Tyler.
With Prelude, rescheduling can be accomplished in just a few clicks. The system automatically sends out updated invitations to all parties, reducing manual work and streamlining communication. “Calendly’s Prelude makes reschedules way less dreadful. It’s a lot faster and automates key parts of our process.”
Scaling interviewer onboarding with Training plans
Scheduling interviewer training with Calendly’s Prelude is creating impressive ROI.
“Prelude Training has unlocked potential for my team. We were trying to increase our number of interviewers to improve bandwidth. But the process was slow,” says Tyler.
Prelude lets coordinators automatically invite trainees to interviews and include them on existing schedules.
