Planning

The best way to think about the Event Timeline is:

WHO gets to see WHAT and WHEN?

The WHO:

Employers
Students
Alternates (if applicable)

The WHAT:

Job postings
Student applications
Employer decisions
Student decisions
Alternate student decisions
Final schedule

The WHEN:

There are a lot of questions to consider here. You may read the questions below or, for your convenience, feel free to download THIS spreadsheet to help with planning.

What is the date(s) of the event?
When does employer registration begin?
How long do you want to give employers to create their postings?
When does student registration begin?
How long do you want to give students to apply?
When do you want employers to be able to view applications? Right away or after an internal review?
How long do you want to give employers to review applications and make their decisions?
Will these decisions be visible to students right away or no?
How long do you want to give students to accept or decline their interview invitations?
Do you want to allow student alternates?
If so, how long would alternates have to claim their spot?
Lastly, how far in advance do you want the final schedule to be available to employers and students?

Here is an example of the above planning spreadsheet filled out:

With all this in mind, it is helpful to add up your answers. This will provide you with how long the timeline will be overall and when the first step needs to begin. Using our example, we would need about 8 and a half weeks. Since our interviews start on July 17th, the process would need to begin in mid-May.

Inputting Dates

Now that we have a better idea of WHO gets to see WHAT and WHEN, we can input the dates and times.

The first step will be when the employers will be able to register and post jobs. Again, the following screenshots will utilize the example answers from the sample spreadsheet:

Next, we will input when students will be able to start applying.

Note that you have the option to include a review period. This allows students to begin looking at employer job postings in order to start getting their materials ready. They will not be able to apply, however, until the application start date. There will be verbiage to clearly communicate this.

You may also place limitations on how many applications a student can submit or interviews that they can be assigned to:

You will want to decide if you would like to review student applications before they are visible to employers. Once you have made this decision, you can input when the employers will be able to view applications and start making decisions on who they would like to meet with.

Note that the Final Schedule Availability Date refers to when the employers will actually have the schedule. Therefore, let's come back to this field at the end.

Moving along, we will now input when the students will be able to view employer decisions and either accept or decline the invitation to interview.

If you want to allow for alternates, toggle the enable button and the menu will expand:

Note that you can also limit the number of alternates per schedule:

According to our example, we want to make the final schedule available 3 days before the actual start of the interviews. Now, we can add this to both the Employer Decision Timeline and the Student Decision Timeline:

If desired, you could set these to be different dates and times. For example, you might want to make the final schedule available to employers first or vice versa.

With that, your timeline is complete! In the next article, we will cover Employer Settings.