Confusing Schedule Rules, Clunky UI
June 25, 2019
Confusing Schedule Rules, Clunky UI
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TimeTrade
My team used TimeTrade to set up appointment schedules for a team of a half-dozen seasonal phone interviewers working in our recruiting department. With a large-scale hiring process like ours (thousands of summer staff hired each year, with thousands of more applicants not hired but still screened), managing appointment schedules manually would have required nearly an FTE. Instead, we used TimeTrade to allow candidates to make their own appointments within schedules customized to fit each employee's unique schedule and availability.
- Customized schedules for each employee.
- High degree of customization possible.
- Set-up doesn't require coding skill (even HTML).
- Clunky UI feels out of date, was sometimes challenging for applicants to navigate.
- Customer support slow to respond, not always helpful.
- Difficult for "self service,"most often my staff would have to go through me to make schedule changes.
- Messy design of settings UI’s can lead to overlapping/conflicting scheduling rules, which are not flagged with error messages, lead to multiple snafu’s with times accidentally made available or unavailable. This led to several missed interviews.
- Using one schedule to book appointments for applicants to multiple programs introduces a lot of design challenges, and creates more work for TimeTrade admin when schedules change.
- Interface makes it difficult to offer appointment times in both 30- and 45-minute blocks, necessitates using multiple blocks of 15-minutes instead.
- We found it necessary for me to execute manual quality control measures on a weekly basis to ensure my team’s schedules were correct, which I buttressed with emails to the team encouraging them to check their schedules as well to make sure everything was accounted for.
- We missed several appointments due to conflicts in schedule rules between personal calendars and the team calendar—the conflicts between rules in two types of calendars leads to never-ending headaches for the administrator.
- Slow response time from customer service team left us hanging multiple times, one time requiring me to escalate to my manager who had to take time out of her day to call our rep and play ‘bad cop’
TimeTrade is the only software of its kind that I've used, but if I was placed in a similar role again (managing a team of interviewers) depending on license costs and budget I would consider hiring a part-time scheduling coordinator instead. While I wasn't an employee at the time Galileo selected TimeTrade as its solution, we did consider other options during my time there and concluded that the others did not offer sufficient level of customization to fit our needs.