iCal Templates - What are they?
When an Interview is scheduled with a Candidate there are two main ways to let a system user know - you can either Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) them in on the confirmation email to the candidate, or you can send them a dedicated notification. This is where the iCal Template comes in.
By having a dedicated iCal template for individual, or all, Action Types, you can create a specific notification to your users that includes only the information they need.
Rather than being aligned to a stage in a Recruitment Workflow, the iCal Template is aligned with the Action Type, meaning that any time an Action is created, a dedicated email notification can be sent. Not only is this useful for interviews, but they can also come in handy if you'll be using Actions within your system to create reminders, such as putting a specific date and time in your diary to contact a Candidate or a Contact.
What do I need to think about when planning?
Whether or not this is a feature you'll need to use will be dictated largely by your internal processes.
For example, if your Hiring Managers will be directly booking all interviews with their Candidates, you may not need to use the iCal feature as they'll be able to put the interview directly in to their Calendar. On the other hand, if the Candidates will be booking their own interviews via the Candidate Portal (using the Interview Slots feature), or if your Core System Users will be booking the interviews, then you may well want to use an iCal template to let the Hiring Managers know.
Once you've decided whether or not this is something you'd like to use, the next question is whether you need a single template for all Action Types, or if you'd like a different template (capturing different information) for each Action Type.
Now you'll need to consider the design for your template(s) and decide what information should be merged in to each template.
Finally, you'll need to decide who should receive each iCal notification. Should it be the Hiring Managers on the Vacancy, the Core Users on the Vacancy, the Main Contact on the Vacancy or a combination of these?
I'm still not sure what I need to do - are there any examples I can see?
Yes indeedy-do!
To see how the templates are constructed, log in to your core system and navigate to Admin > Contact Templates > iCal Templates.
From here, click on the name of one of the templates.
To see how they are attached to an Action, navigate to Admin > Drop Down Lists and then select Action Types from the Show Values For list.
Tip iCal Templates are covered as part of the wider Email Templates topic, about half-way through the second of our Customer Configuration webinars.