- They deal with people and repetitive tasks. Dealing with interviewers as well, there are a pool of interviewers and you don’t know who you’re gonna end up scheduling with, so dealing with A LOT of people.
- Situation: You are the coordinator. It’s 4.28 and you have an interview for 4.30. However, the interviewer comes up to you and says “I don’t think I can take the interview anymore, please reschedule,” → Contact the candidate and find the earliest new availability.
- Next Scenario: Some roles we would require to schedule back to back sessions. If a candidate doesn’t pass the first session, we will most likely not proceed with the second session at all for time efficiency. So let’s say you scheduled an interview and the candidate did not pass the first round, so we want to go ahead and cancel the second round and let the candidate know that we will not be continuing. How would you let the candidate know? Just for quick insight of Agoda, we don’t want to be too transparent because we have candidate experience in mind, we don’t want them to be able to pick a fight with us. → Based on real cases, we most likely will not let them know that they didn’t pass immediately, because they will raise questions. It could escalate and lead into something bigger, so we want to avoid that. We would let them know that we will not be proceeding to the second round anymore, but we will not use the word ‘you didn’t pass.’ Be more mindful about the wordings. We can be like ‘We’ve collected enough information that we will not be proceeding anymore. We will get back to you in 2 business days, then the recruitment team will handle the rejection. In a way we will let them know that we will not be proceeding with them, but it’s not a 100 percent confirmation that they didn’t pass.
- Next scenario: You’ve scheduled an interview for a candidate from the US at 8 AM Bangkok time by mistake because 8 AM is not a working hour yet. So the candidate has been waiting on the call for an hour, no one joined. Later, he writes an email to complain about this. → The best approach is to apologize to the candidate and own our mistakes, let everyone involved know, and reschedule at the earliest time.
- Last situation: You scheduled an interview for Friday and today is Monday, and the interviewer keeps declining the invite. But, we don’t want to reschedule with this candidate anymore because we already rescheduled twice. Keeping candidate experience in mind. Bear in mind that you still have time until Friday. → We, as a coordinator, know that this candidate has already faced 2 reschedules, and we’ve assigned the 3rd reschedule. As mentioned earlier, we have an interviewer pool, a lot of back ups. So, going to the pool and reaching out to someone that would be available to take it, would be the most ideal solution. We actually have a staff group chat, where we have first round interviewers in one channel and second round interviewers in another channel. So if someone keeps declining, we put the information in that channel like “hey who can take this interview as this person keeps declining, who wants to come replace them?” If they volunteer, go ahead and replace it. If not, our scheduling tool ‘good time’ is actually automated, so just input the availability to the candidate’s side, it will read all the available interviewers for us available at that time, so we can just select a new one and update the schedule. As part of our day to day, we also have to track reschedule reasons by the interviewer as well. We have to write down in the tracker rescheduled this time, how many days before the interview, the reason being. We take rescheduling very seriously. >> now prepare me for the last interview with the Team Lead of the Talent Acquisition Coordinators with the info I gathered and anything else that is essential for me to nail the last round.
