Case Study: Experimenting with online scheduling brings big benefits

Randstad’s Tempo-Team is pretty much constantly sourcing candidates for their clients. They work primarily with large organizations that need both logistics and production employees - A LOT of them!?

Tempo-Team has created a sophisticated recruitment funnel that lets candidates apply online and tracks them through the different stages. The sheer numbers of candidates coming through, and the need to engage with them quickly before they drop out of the process, presents challenges.

“When people apply for positions on our website, they’re added to what we call the long list,” says Product Owner Joost Gipman. “Next, our recruiters contact those candidates to interview them. The problem we saw was a big gap between the number of people who applied and the number we were able to contact.”

? "We did some experiments and there were some minor successes. Then YouCanBook.me came along.”?

Joost’s team was known for bringing innovation into their work and their openness to new ideas. They had already experimented with contacting people by phone, emails, and WhatsApp messages - and a combination of all three - to test the impact.?

“But in the end, we saw that sometimes almost ? of potential candidates in a week weren’t reachable.”

It was the biggest drop-off in their recruitment funnel and came at a point where they had almost no information about the candidate. They didn’t know why people weren’t going on to book a meeting with their team.

“We really wanted to improve on that number,” says Joost. “We did some experiments and there were some successes, but only minor successes. And then we realized that our online scheduling tool YouCanBook.me might be able to help.”

“When our people see that YouCanBook.me gives us a reaching ratio of almost 100%? they get excited.”

Sending a link to schedule a meeting online increased engagement by 115%

In most years there can be 100,000 candidates on the long list. So moving from 70% contact to 85% or even 90% would make a massive impact.?

“We knew we wouldn’t get to 100% contact”, says Joost, “but we needed to improve it because the more people at the top of the funnel, the more placements we can make for our candidates and our clients.”

Joost’s team started with a limited implementation to allow for some experimentation. They used A/B testing across 10-20 accounts, using YouCanBook.me in two ways depending on the region.

In the North, everyone who applied on the website got a WhatsApp message with the YouCanBook.me booking page link. This invited every candidate to sign up for an appointment whenever suited them.?

In the South, they sent the YouCanBook.me booking link only after a first contact attempt. If the recruitment team couldn’t get in touch by phone, they followed up with a WhatsApp message with the YouCanBook.me link.

“We saw that it didn't really help us in the South”, Joost says. “It did help us but not as huge as the numbers in the North.”??

In the test where every candidate was sent a WhatsApp message with the link to schedule time online, they saw a 115% uplift in appointments. “That was the point when we saw that this can work for us!”

And the results filtered through the recruitment funnel from there. The increase in the number of people contacted after they applied eventually led to a 98% increase in the number of candidates hired at the end of the process.??

Despite that success, sending WhatsApp messages is quite manual so Joost’s team continued to look for ways that could automate the entire process.?

“Making the time between when a candidate applies on our website and when they book a call as short as possible is better for our team and it's better for our candidates.

But really we wanted to make sure the right steps were happening for everyone. Once you see such an uplift in the trial, you want to make sure that the same process is happening 100% of the time.”

And so the experimentation continued.

“To really reduce the manual aspect, we added YouCanBook.me to our Thank You page. After applying, you’re redirected to a page that says ‘Thanks for applying. We’ll contact you within 48 hours’. By embedding the booking page there, we didn’t have to send a WhatsApp message at all.”?

“Not every candidate goes to that Thank You page so it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s still a solution that really works for us. We saw a 50% uplift in bookings.”??

Tempo-Team members were painfully aware of the long list drop-off and were delighted to use YouCanBook.me when they saw the impact it had. For other teams, particularly those that didn’t have such specific data about their workflows, the rollout was less about testing and more about helping them see the benefits of online scheduling.

YouCanBook.me’s customization means it can be adapted multiple ways for large teams

“All the other accounts, which is almost 400 at this moment, are sending their YouCanBook.me links manually to suit their own model”, says Joost.?

One group uses YouCanBook.me to set up candidate interviews. They don’t want every applicant to get a WhatsApp message with the link so they send the booking page link only to qualified candidates who are then able to schedule a meeting online.

Another team works with successful candidates who are now employed by Tempo-Team’s clients. They offer support and regular check-ins to make sure things are going well.?

“These Account groups use it in newsletters that they send monthly to their employees. Or they put it on posters and screens with a QR code. So every employee always knows how to get in touch.”

Employees who have been working for 26 weeks get a check-in call to make sure things are working out, and that can be automated by sending the links using their CRM. “We use integrations like that everywhere we can”, says Joost.

Control and customization are the key factors??

“At first people thought they were ‘giving their calendar away’. But in the end, you're saving time and you're not giving your calendar away, because you have complete control. And that's the great thing about YouCanBook.me. You can set up your availability any way you need to. So there's tons of control.

“They also really like the flexibility”, adds Joost. “Not only for availability but also for the booking form. Being able to gather information before the meeting. Now they know who they’re going to meet and what they’ll need.”

Customizing notifications is essential since the company uses YouCanBook.me across different brands, functions and languages.?

“We set up the pages with a basic template for the emails but they can make huge improvements if they tweak it around their unit or their team and personalize the messages.”

Joost has implemented hidden questions on the booking form, which allows them to pass client information into a booking that can later be joined up with each team’s wider reporting on the back end.

Joost uses Webhooks to automatically send granular information about online bookings into his existing Google Data Studio dashboard, which makes it easy to combine with other business insights to monitor performance.?

“We have more than 300 booking pages, across Randstad three brands. Within those brands we have different labels for the separate business units that use YouCanBook.me for different purposes. The webhooks allowed us to create the customized filter options and labels that we needed.”

This streamlined reporting means he always has up to the minute data to demonstrate the value of YouCanBook.me - and his latest experiments - to his stakeholders.