When organizing collective or round-robin style interviews, coordinating multiple hosts' schedules and availability can sometimes result in insufficient available time slots. Rally's native Study Scheduler provides a solution to this challenge by allowing you to check the joint availability of hosts and understand the reasons behind conflicts for each time slot. This feature enables you to communicate with the hosts and request them to open up certain time slots if possible. Additionally, if you choose the 'Use Each Host's Availability' option in the availability settings, an Admin has the ability to override a host's predefined availability as needed.
Rally also allows the flexibility to Manually Book Interviews to bypass host availability, interview limits, and other scheduling restrictions, and log past interviews or interviews outside of Rally to ensure a Participant's history stays up to date.
Understanding Conflicts
Conflicts refer to any timeslots on Study Schedule Calendars that are unavailable for Participants to book. Find out why certain timeslots are unavailable in the steps below.
Navigate to the relevant Study, select 'Actions', and select 'Edit Study'.
Select the 'Scheduling' step of your Study from the top.
Select 'Availability' from the sidepanel.
In the top right corner, select the 'Check Availability' button to view your hosts' shared availability, including the total available timeslots per day and each individual available timeslot.
Shared availability timeslots are displayed by white boxes.
Unavailable timeslots and conflicts are displayed by gray boxes.
Select any gray box to understand the reason behind the unavailable times. It will provide information such as whether the time is outside working hours or if there is an existing event on the host(s) calendar.
In the top right corner, select the 'Back To Scheduling' button to return to setup.
Overrides
Overrides allow Admin role types to edit a Study host's general availability to override unavailable times and provide more available timeslots for Participants to book.
Navigate to the relevant Study, select 'Actions', and select 'Edit Study'.
Select the 'Scheduling' step of your Study from the top.
Select 'Availability' from the sidepanel.
Admins can make changes to Interviewer availability.
If "Set the same hours for all interviewers" is selected or if this is a 1:1 Interview Study, Admins can edit the interviewer's displayed availability.
If "Use each interviewer's preferred hours" is selected, Admins can select 'Edit' next to an interviewer's name.
Update the interviewer's availability to allow for more interviews to be scheduled.
🚨 Warning: These updates will not be limited to a specific Study but will apply globally for the edited interviewer's availability across all Studies.
Understanding Availability Issues
Missing Interview Availability Timeslots
If you see less interview availability for Participants than expected for certain dates, review your source calendar for any events that may correspond with the missing availability.
Various factors on your connected calendar may contribute to less interview availability for Participants than expected, depending on the Meeting Conflict Handling setting you have selected in Settings > Availability in Rally. Some examples of situations on your connected calendar that may limit interview availability include full-day events, accepting your colleagues' out-of-office (OOO) events, and recurring meetings you are a part of but marked tentative or free.
Unexpected Interview Availability Timeslots
If you see more interview availability for Participants than expected for certain dates, review your Availability settings in Settings > Availability in Rally to ensure you've logged any Date Overrides for out-of-office time or other unavailable times/days, and that you've set your Meeting Conflict Handling to your preference.
Additionally, review your source calendar for any events or missing events that may explain the extra availability. Ensure the relevant meetings are set to 'Busy' or 'Automatically decline meetings' to avoid being scheduled over. See examples below.
If you have focus time scheduled on your connected Google calendar that should not be booked over, you may want to update the GCal event setting to 'Busy'.
If you have out-of-office time scheduled on your connected Google calendar that should not be booked over, you may want to update the GCal event setting to enable the 'Automatically decline meetings' setting.
