Why panel interviews are hard to schedule
For an interview with one person you compare two calendars. For a panel of three you compare four, and every further person makes free times rarer. Most teams solve this by hand: somebody asks around, collects answers, proposes three dates and starts again when the candidate cannot make any of them.
The usual way out is a fixed panel, always the same three people. Then those three become the bottleneck, and the interview waits for their calendars although other colleagues could have asked the same questions.
Rules instead of names
In Book-a-Team you tag your employees with what they can do, for example java, team-lead or sales. A booking team is the page a candidate books on. It gets a pool of members and one or more rules:
- 2 x java: two members with the tag java
- 1 x team-lead: one member with the tag team-lead
This interview needs three people. Which three is decided for every time on its own.
How the people are picked
- The app goes through the working days in steps of 30 minutes, Monday to Friday between 08:00 and 18:00.
- For each time it looks at who in the pool is free: no entry in the connected calendar and no other interview booked through Book-a-Team, in any team of your company. Somebody who has reached their limit of interviews for that week is not free either.
- It fills the rule with the fewest free people first, so that a scarce skill is not left empty-handed.
- One person fills one rule. A team lead who also knows Java counts once.
- If every rule is filled, the time is offered. If one is not, the time does not appear.
When the candidate books, the check runs again and the booking is saved in one step. Two candidates who click the same time at the same moment cannot both get it.
An example
The rules are 2 x java and 1 x team-lead. The pool has four members:
| Member | Skills | Tuesday 10:00 | Wednesday 10:00 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ana | java | free | busy |
| Ben | java | free | free |
| Chris | java, team-lead | busy | free |
| Dana | team-lead | free | busy |
On Tuesday Ana and Ben fill the Java rule and Dana is the team lead, so 10:00 is offered. On Wednesday only Ben and Chris are free. Chris can be the team lead or the second Java developer, but not both, so 10:00 is not offered.
What you can set, and what you cannot
For each booking team you set the name, the length of the interview (15 minutes to 8 hours), the members and the rules. One team is one kind of interview and has one link.
For each employee you can set how many interviews they take per week at most, from 1 to 100. Without a number there is no limit. A week runs from Monday to Sunday, and the interviews of all teams count together. Only interviews booked through Book-a-Team count, not other entries in the calendar, and a cancelled interview does not count.
The working hours are fixed: Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 18:00, in one time zone. There are no breaks between interviews and no public holidays. When several people fit a rule, they are taken in the order of their names; it is not a rotation. The FAQ lists what else the app does not do.