TalentReef accelerates time-to-hire by three days with the Nylas Calendar API

Industry-leading hiring platform selects Nylas to revamp interview scheduling features

Introduction 

TalentReef (acquired by Mitratech) is an applicant tracking system (ATS) platform for the hourly workforce. The platform combines recruiting automation, digital onboarding, and employee retention capabilities to help its customers source high-quality candidates, fast, all while ensuring consistency and eliminating errors in the hiring and onboarding process. The company aims to create a single, streamlined experience for all internal and external stakeholders, optimizing every component of the employee lifecycle to empower great enterprises to retain talent longer.

In its mission to bring greatness to staff, infrastructure, and ultimately business growth, TalentReef strives to remove friction for candidates and hiring managers in its platform. When hiring hourly candidates, speed wins. And among the most tedious, time-consuming hiring processes is booking and scheduling interviews. 

Challenge: High rates of no-shows and inefficient booking workflows 

From the start, TalentReef’s legacy interview management feature had a problem. Alexander Plumb, Sr. Product Manager at TalentReef, says “There was a large gap between the functionality clients needed and the capabilities of our legacy interview scheduling tool. We saw a 98% dropoff rate from the time a user clicked ‘schedule interview’ to submitting the invite.”

What caused this massive dropoff? Poor user experience and slow time-to-hire. TalentReef services businesses that need location-based, high-volume hiring, including grocery stores, hotels, and quick-service restaurants. In these industries, time-to-hire is critical, as candidates who don’t receive fast follow-up on their application will accept a job elsewhere, leaving hiring managers with a smaller pool of talent. As Plumb puts it, “Your applicant today is someone else’s hire tomorrow.” 

TalentReef’s existing interview scheduling tool made it difficult for managers to sync their calendars and create slots of availability, requiring them to manually type in duplicative information to complete and send an interview invitation. This experience was not only a waste of time but it made it harder to follow up quickly, meaning candidates didn’t receive their interview invitations fast enough. And without any notifications or reminders, candidates were more likely to ghost or no-show their interviews. 

Internally, the TalentReef product team struggled to keep up with troubleshooting and customer requests. Plumb shares, “The original legacy interview scheduling tool we built took a year at minimum to launch. And after we launched it, we had a backlog of enhancements that kept building up on customer requests that we couldn’t satisfy.”

TalentReef needed a solution that not only saved engineering resources but also ensured its users could engage candidates quickly with a streamlined interview scheduling experience.

Solution: Universal calendar integrations that power fast, intuitive interview scheduling

Prior to discovering Nylas, TalentReef considered building in house. But ultimately, they decided against it. Plumb explains, “Building from scratch would’ve taken time and money–all while competing against other initiatives on our roadmap. We needed to focus on our number one priority: improving user experience.”

The product team at TalentReef needed a solution that was easy to build on, offered robust integrations with leading calendar service providers, and armed their end users with fast, flexible scheduling capabilities. After some research, they came across the Nylas Calendar API and Scheduler. 

It took TalentReef over a year to build the original scheduling feature within its interview tool, but with Nylas, it took just six months, allowing the product team to go to market with their Enhanced Interview Scheduling feature twice as fast. What’s more, TalentReef completed the project with fewer than half of the resources. Plumb explains, “The Nylas build only took two full-time engineers, freeing up the rest of the team to work on other priorities on the roadmap. This freedom gives our team the velocity to launch other exciting features that we would have never had the bandwidth to complete without Nylas.”

TalentReef’s new Enhanced Interview Scheduling lets users easily connect their own calendars in just a few clicks. After authentication, users can configure their scheduling pages from predetermined templates or create new pages. Users can edit these pages to set custom open hours, meeting duration, manual/instant booking, email reminders, and more. After a user saves their scheduling page, they can send interview invitations to candidates to eliminate time-consuming, back-and-forth emails. The video below demonstrates how hiring managers use TalentReef to schedule interviews today:

Results: TalentReef improves customer satisfaction with Nylas APIs 

Since implementing Nylas’s calendar management capabilities, TalentReef has decreased its time-to-hire by three days, meaning that hiring managers can find and sign hires three days faster. “There’s no longer any disconnect with users copying and pasting information for scheduling or sending out manual emails. This has made a huge difference in response times,” says Plumb.

Plus, the added capabilities to their interview scheduling tool have made a clear impact on overall customer satisfaction. The majority of TalentReef’s user base now rate their experience as a 4.5 out of 5. Meanwhile, applicants can easily book time with visibility of their hiring manager’s schedule, reducing friction and making scheduling much less complicated. 

One of the ways TalentReef makes it easier for hiring managers to identify top talent is by assigning candidates a score based on overall fit. Out of the clients that have the interview scheduling feature enabled, half leverage automation built on the interview scheduler to send an invite based on the score an applicant receives. This workflow gives hiring managers yet another leg up to expedite time-to-hire and focus on engaging candidates. A customer of TalentReef, Crestline Hotels, increased applicant flow by 369% in its first month using the platform.

One of Alex’s favorite things about Nylas is the expertise and support system he has access to. “I really appreciate this type of relationship and level of attentiveness and thoroughness while going above and beyond to come up with a solution”, Plumb shared while discussing his experience with the Nylas team. 

Moving forward, TalentReef plans to deepen its partnership with Nylas and invest further in its interview scheduling capabilities. “We’re excited to explore how Nylas’ group and collective scheduling will allow candidates to schedule meetings across multiple hiring managers’ calendars simultaneously,” Plumb adds.