Recurring Interview Slots

You can now set up & schedule recurring interview slots to help reduce the admin involved in arranging and managing interviews. This feature is available in the core system & the Hiring Manager portal, allowing users to add a 'Repeat' schedule when configuring their interview slots.

Creating Recurring Interview Slots

The process for creating slots is the same; access the calendar via the Eploy 'View' menu or the recruitment workflow, before clicking Create Slots. When you look to configure a Single slot, you will find the option to Setup a Repeat. Click this option to turn your slot into a series of slots, repeated over multiple days and weeks!

Tip you can now specify the number of seats you'd like your single/repeating slot to have by using the Candidates/Places field. Whatever the number you have enter here will be copied into your series of recurring slots.

When you click on Setup, you will be able to configure the details of your series of slots, including Start Date, Times and Repeat on:

• Start Date will be when the series begins from, so enter this as the date of the first slot.
• Start / End Time will dictate the duration of the slot.

• Repeat Every (Weeks) will determine how often the slot will reoccur, with 1 being the default for every week. Changing this to 2 will make the slot fortnightly, whilst 3 will be every 3rd week etc.
• Repeat On will allow you to set which days of the week the slot will occur, so if this will be a daily slot, you can chose all working days. In this example, the slot will reoccur on both Tuesdays and Fridays.
• The End Date will then be the end of the reoccurrence, so in the case below, the slots will repeat every week until the 30th of June. This can be left blank if you would like the schedule to repeat indefinitely. 
• Create In Advance is the trigger for the system to actually create the slots in the series and trigger any iCal placeholders for the interview slots. If setting up slots for your hiring community, consider how far ahead you want to place hold the time in HMs diary for these slots. The default is 30 days but can be set anything between 7 and 60 days.

Once configured, click Add to confirm the series. This will then be available for you to review or edit back within the Create Slots page.

Note - Recurring slots are only available when creating Single slots, so if you do have a series of slots you wish to make recurring, you can create each time slot one by one.

Now that the schedule has been set, you will be able to continue to configure your slots as normal, including allocating to different Vacancies & Interview stages and including Teams/Zoom details. For more information on how to do this, please see here.

Once your recurring schedule has been created you'll be returned to the calendar as normal. You can easily identify a recurring slot via the repeating icon visible within the calendar.

Editing Recurring Slots

Recurring slots can be edited in largely the same way as a regular, non-recurring slot.

Within the Calendar, locate the slot you wish to edit and click it to open the Slot Details panel. From here you can amend the number of seats available for that single slot as normal and show or hide the slot from candidates.

Note once the schedule has been created its impossible to amend the number of seats for each slot in the series.

To edit the series, click the Edit pencil.

From here you can amend the slot details and edit the repeating schedule.

To delete the slot, click the Delete button and select a suitable option:

Tip it's not possible to change the details of a single slot without affecting the whole series (e.g. changing the Action Type or Location). If you want to make such a change to a single slot within a series, delete that single slot and recreate it, but take care not to add a repeating schedule to the new slot.

Managing Candidate Slot Selection

In addition to the settings above, there are also some new controls available within the Recruitment Workflow stage settings to help manage candidates & the slots that are available to them. These include:

• Maximum Days in Advance - This setting will control how far in advance any slots are available, based on the Create In Advance setting within the slot series. Regardless of how far in advance your hiring communities are creating slots, you can use this setting to limit it for candidates. This means you can have calendar invites in Hiring Managers diaries for as long as required, but prevent candidates from picking too far in the future.

• Maximum Slots to Show - This setting will then further limit the slots available to candidates, restricting them to next available. This will help ensure that they aren't picking slots too far in the future, whilst there slots waiting to be filled in the meantime.

These three options (including Create in Advance) all work in conjunction together, meaning that your hiring teams can get calendar invites for the full schedule of slots, candidates can only book so far in the future and are encouraged to pick the soonest slots available.

For example, Hiring Managers may choose to create slots 30 days in advance, whilst candidates can only pick from slots across the next 14 days. They are then prompted to chose the soonest slots available, as only the next 4 slots are available to them (which are all in the next few days).

Auto Assign Vacancies

As well as the introduction of Recurring Interview Slots, we have introduced a way to automatically assign any new vacancies to your slots, ensuring any vacancies raised after the series has been created are included. You will be able to do this with the Auto Assign Vacancies option, with the relationship:

Based on the Organiser (which is set to whoever configures the slot but can be changed), you can ensure that any new jobs are assigned when the Organiser is the main contact on the vacancy OR the Organiser is assigned to any vacancy. This will help to capture any new jobs that you wish to allocate to your recurring interview slots. N.B. the organiser doesn't have to be a Hiring Manager user it could be a Core System user.