Greenhouse Recruiting provides various ways to coordinate, sync, and manage your organization's interviewing schedule across multiple interviewer calendars. In this article, we will uncover the logic and principles supporting Greenhouse Recruiting's scheduling functionality, and provide additional resources for certain email integrations.
Greenhouse scheduling model
Scheduling interviews in Greenhouse Recruiting involves creating consensus (syncing) about an interview's time and place across three parties:
- An interviewer's calendar
- A candidate's calendar
- Greenhouse Recruiting
Any changes to an interview's schedule must be synced across all three parties. There are a few models for how this can be achieved and this section will explain how scheduling consensus is achieved in Greenhouse Recruiting.
Instead of hosting a primary calendar that pushes updates to candidate and interviewer calendars via email, Greenhouse Recruiting is best thought of as a compiler that aggregates changes made to an interviewer's calendar (into a source of truth) and pushes those updates via email to the relevant candidate's calendar.
In this model, all scheduling changes originate from an interviewer's calendar rather than from within Greenhouse Recruiting. This model was designed to allow for a more dynamic way of handling scheduling changes and to allow editing directly from individual calendars.
Greenhouse scheduling principles
Note: For organizations who are using Greenhouse Recruiting's integration with Google Calendar or Outlook 365 much of what is explained throughout this article happens seamlessly within the Greenhouse Recruiting application. For Outlook and other email / calendar clients, .ics files will need to be manually uploaded.
Greenhouse Recruiting's scheduling model directly impacts how scheduling tasks are handled in the system. Since Greenhouse Recruiting essentially operates as a compiler of your interviewer's personal calendars, we require three essential elements to coordinate interviews:
- Calendar file (
.ics) from an interviewer - Authenticated user
- Interview kit URL
Note: While the exact behavior for every email integration is slightly different, Greenhouse Recruiting requires the above elements to correctly coordinate interview scheduling.
Calendar file (.ics) from an interviewer
Scheduling changes are sent to Greenhouse Recruiting via calendar files (.ics). These files are emailed to Greenhouse when interviewing changes are made and are compiled to construct a mirror of your organization's current interviewing schedule.
Once an email integration is enabled, a Greenhouse-owned email address will be invited to all scheduled interviews. As an invited guest to the interview, the interviewer's email client will forward the appropriate .ics file to Greenhouse so we can compile it.
Authenticated user
Greenhouse Recruiting should only be compiling .ics files from users whose organizations are subscribed to our services. Our system authenticates users via their email and will attempt to compile .ics files from users whose email addresses are recognized by our system.
Interview kit URL
The last element Greenhouse Recruiting requires to successfully schedule candidates are coordinates to the exact candidate and interview that is affected by the scheduling change. Greenhouse Recruiting does this automatically from our system's scheduling workflow by parsing the unique Interview kit URL.
Email integrations
Greenhouse Recruiting's scheduling model and principles inform the way we have integrated with popular email / calendar clients. While each integration's workflow can vary slightly, Greenhouse Recruiting's underlying operations are essentially the same. Once we receive the essential .ics file from the interviewer's email client, we will authenticate the user, locate the candidate and interview, compile this information, and give you options to push this data to the candidate.
For more information about the workflows for individual email integrations, check out the following articles:
Candidate calendar events
By default, candidates will receive an .ics file during scheduling. You can turn on candidate calendar invites to include candidates in calendar events and let recruiters see when a candidate RSVPs to the interview. To enable this feature, go to Configure, select Permissions, then scroll to Scheduling. Finally, turn on "Send candidate calendar events via connected calendar integration."