TL;DR: GoodTime has the ability to read your calendar and find availability to schedule interviews. It does this by analyzing keywords on your calendar and presenting only the “open space” calendar options (i.e. no conflicting calendar events) to the candidate.
In order to optimize your calendar and allow for maximum “open space,” it is helpful to encourage your business interviewers to apply the listed calendar 'Best Practices' and to use standardized keywords in your calendar management.
The diagram above can also be downloaded and shared with your interviewing team (see the bottom of this article for a downloadable version).
Calendar Best Practices
Managing Your Calendar
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Always keep your calendar up to date. Accept all events that you plan on attending.
b. Decline calendar invites that you are not attending (do not answer “Maybe” or leave unanswered).
c. If you are ending the day early for an event, mark the event and time needed for travel.
d. If you are traveling and/or have offsite meetings, add your flight or transportation details to your calendar to block off time you will be on the road and unable to take interviews.
e. Cancel/remove meetings or events that have been canceled from your calendar.
- Let your recruiting team know of any recurring events that can or cannot be booked over
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For all-day events during which you can conduct interviews, make sure the calendar event is set to "free" and that you are not a guest or attendee of the event
a. Do not accept your team members’ PTO all-day events (accepting these will mark you as busy).
- If you are out of office an unable to attend interviews during that time, put "PTO", "OOO", "Vacation". "Out of Office" or "sick" in your calendar event.
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When you receive an interview invitation remember to Accept the calendar invitation.
a. Be sure to promptly respond "No" to decline the invitation if you cannot make the interview
b. If you have to decline an interview within hours of the interview occurring, be sure to also reach out to the recruiting team. If possible, offer a replacement interviewer (the recruiting team will want to replace you as an interviewer rather than cancel the event to maintain a positive candidate experience)
Creating Events in Your Calendar
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If your meeting is not mandatory for all to attend (e.g. lunch and learns, standups, etc.), mark the event as “free” or mark individual attendees optional.
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For reminders or work session blocks, include “Reminder” in event title and mark event as “free”.
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For webinars that you optionally attend, include “Webinar” in event title and mark event as “free”.
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Make sure your meeting titles include the exact language of the below keywords to ensure your calendar is fully optimized. GoodTime will not work if you don’t adhere to these keywords!
GoodTime Standardized Keywords
You are able to customize keywords within GoodTime so that we better understand the calendar terminology your company might use. Below are some examples of common keywords you might like to use. It’s important that employees reference the keywords when creating events on their calendars to help GoodTime determine whether events are hard conflicts or soft conflicts.
The following article provides a deeper-dive on how GoodTime Keywords operate in practice.
Soft Conflict: They’re still able to be booked over, but a Recruiting Coordinator will reach out to you ahead of time to make sure.
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1:1
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Hold
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Block
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DNB (do not block)
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DNS (do not schedule)
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Lunch
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Office Hours
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Huddle
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Lunch and Learn
Transparent: Events with these keywords won’t block scheduling and will be used for scheduling interview availability.
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WFH
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Remote
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Canceled
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Reminder
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Webinar
Please note: Keywords will only work on public calendars (not private calendars).
For O365 users, interviewers must share "can view all details" access to the talent team for keywords to work.