The challenges

Manually scheduling thousands of hires per year 

As a global technology consulting organization, Thoughtworks aims to recruit the best talent in digital strategy, design, and engineering. Their hiring team is spread across five regions and organized to engage all active consultants as potential interviewers.

This makes for highly complex interview scheduling.

Global Head of Programmes Rebecca Schmidt is responsible for supporting the company’s recruiters, recruiting coordinators, and hiring managers with the infrastructure they need to fulfill their fast-paced hiring requirements.

Streamlining interview scheduling is a top priority.

Rebecca says, “Our scheduling process used to be very manual, and we had pain points around cycle time. Finding the right interviewers for a role and sending out the whole spectrum of communications to candidates and hiring teams kept our talent operators busy all day long.”

Rebecca and her colleagues wanted to unlock more opportunity for the recruiting coordinator position by eliminating unproductive scheduling tasks and freeing time to provide more valuable support to candidates and hiring teams.

They were specifically focused on delivering more seamless training and shadowing experiences for new interviewers.

But smoother processes weren't possible without specialized scheduling automations.

Rebecca says, “In order to reduce cycle time, the biggest issue we have to address is finding the right interviewers for the right candidate, determining their availability, and connecting them quickly. We have a big interviewer pool that we tap into, so there was a lot of pinging back and forth.”

The manual scheduling was frustrating for coordinators and recruiters. It also prevented recruiting leadership from gathering actionable data to make improvements.

After vetting 10 popular scheduling solutions and trying detailed demos of their top contenders, Thoughtworks chose Calendly’s Prelude.

Solution

Automated scheduling to optimize recruiting

Rebecca and her colleagues were impressed with the flexibility of the workflows and customizable features in Calendly’s Prelude. They also appreciated the development roadmap, which incorporated customer feedback into new releases.

Thoughtworks implemented the recruiting solution with high confidence. They knew it would integrate easily with their ATS and deliver outstanding value as a key resource for the team of recruiters and recruiting coordinators, and by connecting the 12,500 employees who participated in the interview process at that time.

“With all of our employees being interviewers, everyone needed to learn how to submit their availability and scheduling preferences in the tool,” Rebecca says. “Now, 100% of our teams are using Calendly’s Prelude. There’s no more pinging back and forth between recruiters, interviewers, and candidates.”

Easily coordinating multi-stage interviews

For Thoughtworks, one of the recruiting tool’s most impactful features is Loops.

Loops makes it easy for the Thoughtworks recruiting team to coordinate multi-stage interviews by analyzing availability for the whole panel and presenting the best options.

“We’re using the Loops functionality extensively. Our interviews involve two face-to-face stages and several interviews within them. With Calendly’s Prelude, we can schedule all of those interviews at once. It’s really helpful and gives us a better overview of the process,” Rebecca says.

Another major time savings comes from a custom integration to the Thoughtworks ATS, which they built using the platform’s flexible API. The integration automatically syncs interview details into the candidate profile, keeping records up to date while saving the team manual effort.

Empowering new interviewers with Training plans

Rebecca’s team uses Prelude Train to seamlessly schedule new trainees for shadow (or reverse shadow) opportunities during the scheduling process. This ramps new interviewers faster. 

“Everybody finds the Training plans really helpful. They make sure that every new joiner has a smooth experience and no one gets left behind,” Rebecca says. “It even automatically tags people when they’ve finished training and makes them available to be scheduled as interviewers.”

The smooth shadowing process also has helped balance the interview load across the organization, as new interviewers are trained quickly and efficiently.

Leveraging data with Reports Analyze

Enhanced reporting on scheduling data has helped Thoughtworks better understand their interview process and make productive changes.

They use the Interview Training Readiness Dashboard to track their interviewers’ progress toward “graduation.”

Senior managers also receive automated reports with the percentage of reschedules and declines for each interviewer.

“Last-minute cancellations are not a good candidate experience. But before, it was a very manual task to track them. Now, Calendly’s Prelude gives us an opportunity to look into them and make changes to reduce their number,” Rebecca says.

The reporting also helps the talent team quantify their work and showcase wins for their stakeholders.

Scaling confidently with a trusted partner

From the first pilot testing to now, over two years into the relationship, Rebecca says they’ve always felt heard and supported by Calendly.

“Our [Calendly] customer success manager helped us plan the whole implementation and customize the system to make it more scalable for our business,” Rebecca says. “We’ve worked on new features together, and they’ve helped us find even better ways of doing things. It’s a great partnership.”

Results

4-day reduction in time to hire

With Calendly for Recruiting, Thoughtworks streamlined the process of scheduling interviews and achieved a 4-day reduction in time to hire.

The time to book even their most complex team interviews has been reduced by 25%, driving an excellent 149% ROI.

Rebecca and her team are thrilled with the value they’ve realized.

“Considering how the time savings for our talent operators has allowed them to focus on more strategic initiatives, we calculated the return on investment at 149%. We absolutely needed a tool like Calendly’s Prelude as we scaled the company,” Rebecca says.

The total streamlining is saving the talent operations team over 12,000 hours per year, which they’ve reinvested in more valuable interactions with candidates and their hiring teams. The operations team is also creating data-driven strategies to improve training and other processes across the recruiting function.

Rebecca recommends Calendly’s Prelude to companies that want an efficient recruiting infrastructure, optimized processes for their teams, and an outstanding experience for their candidates.

“Calendly’s Prelude has had a significant impact on the way we work, the way we think about interviews, and the way we’re developing as an organization,” Rebecca says. “It’s helped us create a more enriched role for our talent operators and make our company ever more scalable.”

Ready to explore what Calendly for Recruiting can do for your bottom line? Talk to sales.