How Clara saves me time
More time sourcing, less time scheduling, no time worrying
I don’t have nearly as many meetings as some of our customers, but I still find Clara saves me time. Here are a few ways I take advantage of the service.
Setting up phone screens
Recruiting/sourcing websites often connect you with a candidate after you’ve “matched.” Some mornings I’ll find 3–5 matches sitting in my inbox that need to be scheduled.
Normally it would be a lot of work to set these up: for each one I’d go to my calendar, find a good time, email the participant and ask if they are free at that time. Then I have to wait for their responses and check if those times are still valid, suggest new times, and so on. The cognitive load is tremendous, and the context switch between tasks reduces my productivity. This problem grows more complex as more meetings are being scheduled simultaneously into a busy calendar.
Now when candidate matches arrive, I just cc Clara on the email and note that this is a phone screen. Clara knows my time and duration preferences for phone screens and that I prefer to use Google Hangouts to share code for technical screens.
The only time I check my calendar is to find out what’s next on my agenda.
On-the-go calendar updates
Sometimes I’m out and about when I remember that I want to block time for an event on my calendar. I like to mark these things down when I remember them lest I’ll surely forget to do it later.
I’m more likely to remember the name of an event than its date. This means I usually look up an event’s webpage before putting in on my calendar. Googling an event webpage and then switching to a calendar app on your phone requires quite a bit of finger-tap-work; it’s clunky and hard to do quickly.
This is where Clara helps me out. I can ask Clara, from my email, to put an event on my calendar from a relevant link or event name without leaving my email app.
In the example above, Clara put the event on my calendar (first finding the date at the URL provided) and even reminded me to purchase a ticket! Clara also supports reminders, so I followed up with a request to remind me to get that ticket one week in advance of the event.
The event was added from my phone and without opening my calendar, and I’ll get a reminder about it a week in advance.
*Note that Clara isn’t designed to reliably support “research,” in other words this example well in my case because the my event came from a very specific website dedicated to one event.
