Many firms, especially technology and engineering companies, have an involved interview process. In fast growing successful companies it is common for technical candidates to be interviewed by five to eight people for 40-60 minutes for each interview. These same organizations are trying to attract top talent. Our customers tell us that in order to attract top talent you want to make the interview process intense, but as smooth as possible for the candidate, the recruiter, and the interviewers.

Imagine that you are a talented engineer applying to a fast growing technology company. You’ve flown across the country, showed up for your interview on time, only to be told that you’ll have to wait an hour. After your first one hour interview, you then have to wait an hour before the second interviewer has time to interview you. You’re told to write a technical test, but there’s no room for you to write it in so you end up sitting on a chair in a hallway trying to concentrate and ace the test.  Not the greatest first impression of the company that is trying to get your commitment, energy, and enthusiasm.

It’s not much better for the recruiters trying to arrange for five to eight interviews of a candidate in a single day.  They know who the interviewers are, but not their schedules.  Many phone calls, email messages, and other interactions later the five interviewers are lined up to interview a candidate, a room is booked for the test, and there are a minimum number of delays in the interview schedule.

The day of the interview arrives.  The candidate is late because the plane flight the recruiter booked for them is late.  One of the interviewers calls in sick.  Another interviewer is late finishing one interview and the recruiter has to rearrange everyone’s schedule. The result can be a real mess.  As one recruiter told me “I feel so sorry for candidates that have to sit and wait around for three hours because we couldn’t rearrange everyone’s schedules during the day.”

The solution is automated scheduling.  When first booking the candidate interviews, all the recruiter should need to do is enter the name of each person doing an interview, indicate any extra resources needed (e.g., a room to write a test), then ask for scheduling solutions. Solutions that integrate with Microsoft Exchange will be able to accurately check each interviewers free/busy time to come up with viable solutions. That’s a great time saving for both the recruiter and each interviewer, but where this really makes a difference is on the day the candidate shows up. Last minute schedule changes can be manually or automatically adjusted throughout the day, minimizing gaps in the candidate’s interview process.  If a gap does develop, it can be accurately communicated to the candidate. Automated interview scheduling improves the candidate experience, saves time for each of the interviewers, and dramatically improves the life of the recruiter.  Isn’t that what automated scheduling is supposed to do?

David Greer

Telecommunication companies, utilities, and many other organizations that schedule large field organizations often use the concept of bucket scheduling (also known as slot or group scheduling).  The basic idea is that you schedule service work (new services, preventative maintenance, emergency repairs, and so on) in big buckets of time. Each bucket is assigned for a geographic area (say NE, SE, NW, and SW). 

For any given day an estimate is made of how many slots will be made available in each geographic area. Suppose that work takes one hour on average, travel time is one hour, and there are ten workers in each geographic area. Assuming an eight hour work day, that means there are forty appointments available on any given day (each appointment takes two hours, one to do the work, and one for travel time, so four per day).

In the bucket scheme work is assigned to each bucket until it’s full. On the day of service a manager has to match up the individual technicians who are available with the work that’s been assigned to the bucket. In my posting on ROI on Automated Scheduling I’ve written about how expensive the “day of” scheduling is.

One challenge of bucket scheduling is that you cannot confirm a fixed time when someone will show up for a customer. Often the best that can be done is morning or afternoon. Real time scheduling solutions like ours schedules each individual technician at the time that an order is booked. This means that customers can be given a fixed date and time when someone will show up to do service work providing a better customer experience.

While the advantages of real time scheduling can be demonstrated, many service organizations find it challenging to move from bucket scheduling to real time scheduling. In order to do real time scheduling, the schedules of each individual technician must be established ahead of time.  This requires more planning and a change to the business processes of the organization. Changing business processes requires people to think in new ways. 

Our scheduling platform is designed to adapt to an organizations existing workflow, but we still have to help our prospects make the leap from letting people schedule the individual technicians to letting software do it automatically. The benefits of real time scheduling have been demonstrated in the marketplace. Rather than use buckets for scheduling, I’d prefer to use them for a fun day at the beach.

David Greer

Enterprise architects that are moving to a services model face the challenge of introducing business process improvement to their organizations. Modern software web services almost always cut across organizational boundaries. This means that multiple stakeholders and business units are involved in business process initiatives.

We live among the coastal mountains of the west coast of Canada. I was recently hiking in the mountains around a small lake. The stillness of the water and the beauty of the mountains reminded me that organizational change is more like a raging river than a calm lake.

Books have been written on organization change and business process improvement. Change involves people and changing people’s behavior can be arduous. Keys that we’ve identified for successful business process change are:

1. The business benefit to the enterprise has to be clearly articulated to everyone involved.
2. Leadership. For our scheduling application, we are always working with a senior business leader along with a senior IT person. They provide the leadership to implement our scheduling solution across the affected business units. Equally important, they can communicate the changes and the business benefit.
3. Continuously improve your business processes. This is ongoing and not a one time event.

Getting people to change the way they do things will always be a challenge. Competitors, changing market conditions, and technological advances are forcing all of us to change our business processes. We all need to find ways to rise to the leadership challenge to see the necessary business process improvements through to the end.

David Greer