Problem

Time is one of our most valuable resources. Once a day, hour, or minute has passed it can’t come back, at least until we will have the time machine :) When I’m looking for new opportunities, like now, one of the most time-consuming tasks for me is the process of scheduling interviews. It usually involves a lot of back and forward emails, SMS, or private messages on LinkedIn. Plus, if you’re talking with some recruiters/hiring managers at the same time you could make easily the error to schedule two interviews at the same time or with a very short period of time between them, not the best impression that you want to give of your organization skills. If you think your time is valuable, the time of the people interacting with you is valuable too. Could we make this process less time-consuming, less prone to errors, and misunderstood?

Solution

Fortunately for us exists already a good number of services that solve this problem very efficiently. I personally use Calendly, but there are many others that offer more or less the same capabilities. With an app like Calendly, that takes care of scheduling your meetings, you can regain control of your time and dedicate it to learn new technologies/languages, polish your skills in algorithm and data structures, networking, etc. The functioning is very simple, you define the blocks of time you will dedicate to interviews. You have total flexibility over these blocks, as you can see in the following image:

Then you share your calendar with the people interested in it and everyone saves time. After a person book a meeting, Calendly will send the invitation email to all the assistants to the meeting with all the details of it. Besides that, Calendly creates an event in your calendar as well. It’s a win/win! It requires a bit of initial effort, but the payoff is worthy.

Extra mile

I personally use Trello to manage my tasks. Every time that Calendly created an event in my Google Calendar, I created manually a Trello Card, hmmm, not the most fun thing to do. Then I decided to create a script to do these tasks for me automatically, but before starting I decided to change my approach, and instead of reinventing the wheel, see if some service could do that for me. Once again this is a problem that others have had in the past, and they have solved it already. Exist services like ITFFF (I really like that name) and Zapier. I didn’t have experience with any of them, then I flipped a coin, and the winner was ITFFF. It was really easy and magic to see how with any line of code I could connect Google Calendar and Trello, and now every time a person book a meeting with me I see almost immediately the new card on my Trello’s board!

References

• Calendly
• ITFFF
• Zapier

This article first appeared on WebCu's blog at https://webcu.dev/automate-your-interview-planning-process/.