Participating in OCI at a school whose CSO isn't providing a video conferencing platform? If you're asked to provide your own links, you can create them speedily in Flo Recruit, and have a place to manage your schedule as a cherry on top.
There are two ways you can set up a virtual OCI event in your Flo Recruit employer account: in a Virtual Chats event type, or an Interviews event type (the same way you build callbacks). While Interviews are based on a candidate's schedule, Virtual Chats are based on the interviewer's schedule, which tends to be a better format for OCI!
Setting up an OCI by using Virtual Chats, Outreach event
Pros
Easier way to set up a schedule as it is driven by the attorney
Do not have to send emails manually; can use scheduled auto-send
Cons
Students has the ability to cancel their participation (button in their confirmation email), which could lead to another student on the list being able to reschedule their time
Building the Schedule
"Create Event" on your events dashboard
Choose "Outreach Event" then "Virtual Chats"
Fill out the event name with something like {Firm Name}, {School Name} OCI 2021
Each column on the schedule is an OCI "room." Add the interviewers for each room accordingly, ex. Two columns with two interviewers each, if both of your interview rooms are 2:1s.
If your "room" changes interviewers midway through the day, treat it as a new room in its own column.
Pro tip: Build one column with the whole schedule first, then Duplicate Schedule by hovering over the three dots at the top of the column. Saves time if each room follows the same schedule!
Adding Candidates
There are three scenarios and options for adding your candidates to the OCI schedule:
The candidates already exist in your Flo Recruit database from another event. In this case, just click "Add Candidate" on each time slot, and search their name in the drop down list.
βThe candidates do not already exist in your Flo Recruit database, but there are few enough of them that you don't mind adding them manually as you go.
- Click "Add Candidate"
- Select the "+" next to the search bar
- Add the candidate by typing in their first name, last name, and email address
- Click Save - and now they exist in your database!
βThe candidates do not already exist in your Flo Recruit database, and there is a high enough volume of them that you do not want to type them in manually as you go.
- Save your work on this Virtual Chat at the bottom of the page; we're leaving for a moment
- Create a Webinar event (Create Event, Outreach Event, Webinar)
- Title the Webinar event something like "Upload Candidates"
- Enter a date far in the future, like 9:00a.m - 10:00a.m. CST, January 1, 2050
- Enter a filler phrase for the video conferencing link, like "No link"
- TURN ALL EMAILS TO "DO NOT SEND"
- Save the Webinar at the bottom of the page
- Click "Manually Add Candidates"
- Use our spreadsheet template to upload a .CSV file spreadsheet of your candidates, so you do not have to create them manually. Now they exist in your candidate database! It's our little ~fake Webinar~ hack.
- Return to your Virtual Chat OCI event
- Click "Add Candidate" on each of your time slots, and the candidate will now be in your drop down, so you do not have to type in their info
Distributing Video Links
BY EMAIL:
When you finish building out the schedule in your columns, you'll continue down the event creation and see email options. Email settings for a re-created OCI totally depend on what the school is communicating vs. what you are responsible for communicating. Do you want to send candidates a confirmation and a schedule with their link and interviewer info? Or do you want turn off candidate emails and simply send the links to the CSO? Up to you! And them!
We do recommend leaving Final Schedule Email to Members and Outlook Calendar Invite to Members set to "Send" to help out with getting info and links to your interviewers. These are the same emails they receive during callbacks.
Note that the Time Block Email to Members is just a single aggregated email version of the Outlook invites. Both of them send automatically as soon as you create the event. For more details on emails, see our emails help article and go to the Virtual Chats section.
MANUALLY:
To grab each candidate's and interviewer's link manually, rather than sending it in a schedule email, simply:
Save your Virtual Chat
Go to the Members/Candidates list and find any participant
Hover over the three dots next to their name
Click "Copy Link"
β
Setting up an OCI by using Virtual Callbacks, Interview event
Pros
No way a candidate can reschedule or cancel themselves by mistake
Interface says 'interviews' everywhere
Cons
Requires you to make one callback time block within the event per interview, which is high volume
Requires you to send the schedule email to the attorney manually, because otherwise we will send one email per time block to the attorney
Create a new Interviews event, the same way that you build callbacks events. We know you're already an expert on callbacks, but a few notes when using the Interviews event type for OCI:
Event Settings
Make sure to turn on the Confirmed Schedule to Candidates
Set the Final Schedule email to Candidates to automatically go out
Set the Final Schedule email to Members to Manually Send Later. We need to do this because emails are sent to members per time block, and in this case, we're going to need to add the same Member to a lot of time blocks, and that would result in the member getting a lot of emails.
You can also leave the Outlook Calendar Invite on, but just be aware that we will send one calendar invite to the member per interview, so they'll see a bunch of back-to-back invites on their calendar.
Schedule Builder
Now that you've set up the event:
Create one time block for each student that is their interview time
Add the candidate manually to that time block.
When you're ready, assign the interviewer.
After you've assigned the candidate to their times and hit save at the bottom of the Schedule Creator page, they will get the Confirmed Schedule email to Candidates with their video chat link. They'll also receive the Final Schedule email before their interviews if you have it set up that way.
Because we set the Final Schedule email to Members to Manually Send Later, we'll want to make sure to send it manually by:
- Save your schedule with the big Save button at the bottom of the page
- Go to the Members/Candidates list
- Hover over the three dots next to the interviewer's name
- Click "Send Schedule"
There you have it!
For more questions about recreating OCI events in your firm's Flo Recruit account, please use the blue chat icon in the lower right.
Happy interviewing.