This is a guest post from Marija Kojic, Productivity Expert at Clockify, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series. Marija shares her thoughts on the benefit of time blocking for recruiters.
If you are a recruiter, your workday likely consists of reach out emails, LinkedIn correspondences, meetings with managers, team leaders, and colleagues, interviews with potential new hires, as well as applicant documents, progress updates, reports, and various accompanying deadlines, among other job obligations.
When summed up in one list, that’s a tight to-do schedule with a lot of different tasks you need to juggle and often a short amount of time. Which, admittedly, is a part of this job’s allure, especially when you manage to successfully tackle 20 mini-tasks in a day and get a surge of confidence and sense of accomplishment as a result.
But, there is a dark side to this picture.
Namely, such a hectic schedule can quickly become problematic once enough tasks pile up, and you start missing deadlines, not following through with arrangements, and generally losing the race with your ever-growing workload. After all, a tight schedule requires a tight time management approach, which may seem difficult to establish and maintain.
But, it doesn’t have to be — you can keep all your tasks in check and become a better, more organised, and more productive recruiter by relying on time blocking.
What is time blocking?
Time blocking is a popular time management technique that requires you to reserve specific times (i.e. define time blocks) in your calendar for the tasks you want to work on.
It involves four simple steps:
- List your tasks in the order you’ll tackle them. Preferably, this should be their order of importance and urgency, i.e. priority.
- Define the exact times you’ll spend on these tasks. Depending on the task difficulty, priority level, and several other factors, you can allocate anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours to it.
- Slot these tasks in your calendar. Once you’ve decided how long you’ll spend on a task, it’s time to decide exactly when you’ll tackle it (e.g. 9:00 am – 10:00 am).
- Work on tasks in the scheduled order and during the scheduled times. Start from the first time-blocked task in your calendar, and work your way down from there. Move to the next task when the time block has finished, until the end of the list.
When time blocking your day, it’s crucial that you ensure your schedule is realistic:
- If you allocate too much time to a task, you’ll likely waste some of it procrastinating because you know you have time to spare
- If you allocate too little time to a task, you’ll likely build up your stress levels by racing to finish everything on time
- If you block time for too many tasks in a single day, you may fail to finish them all, which will likely demotivate you
The key here is time tracking your work. By tracking the time you spend on tasks, you’ll understand precisely how much time you usually spend on each of them, and you’ll then be able to define accurate, realistic time blocks.
Time blocking tips for recruiters
In the introduction, we mentioned several different types of tasks usually associated with a recruiter position — from crafting reach out messages, corresponding with applicants and candidates, to attending various meetings, helming interviews, assembling reports, and making progress updates.
Let’s now see how you can best manage these tasks by using time blocking.
How to use time blocking for reach out tasks
Say you have the practice of recruiting new talent via email, LinkedIn, or based on recommendations provided by your current professional network.
First, you should reserve separate time blocks each day to find and research possible candidates. This can be a 20-minute to a 30-minute time block (e.g. 9:00 am – 9:30 am) during which you’ll search through LinkedIn or talk with colleagues who have someone to recommend. Remember, each candidate you want to reach out to should get a sense that you have researched their past accomplishments well and thus understand the value they can bring to your company. So, you can use this time block to think about how best you can personalise your introductory messages.
After this research-centred time block, you’ll need to compose suitable reach out emails or LinkedIn messages for each possible candidate. Considering that these are short tasks, you can group all the emails and LinkedIn messages you plan to send today as large, 1-hour time blocks.
For variety’s sake, you can have two separate reach out time blocks in your daily calendar:
- In the morning (e.g. 9:30 am – to 10:30 am)
- In the afternoon (e.g. 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm)
Within these larger time blocks, you can assign smaller, 5 to 10-minute time blocks, for each reach out email or message. Here’s how one such string of time blocks might look in your calendar:
- LinkedIn message 1: 9:30 am – to 9:40 am
- LinkedIn message 2: 9:40 am – 9:50 am
- LinkedIn message 3: 9:50 am – 10:00 am
- Email 1: 10:00 am – 10:10 am
- Email 2: 10:10 am – 10:20 am
- Email 3: 10:20 am – 10:30 am
How to use time blocking for correspondence with candidates and applicants
Apart from possible candidates that you are reaching out to for the first time, you’ll also likely have prospective candidates with whom you’ve already made some progress in terms of communication. For example, they may have already replied to your reach out emails, agreed to come for an interview, or sent out some completed test tasks. Considering that these candidates are certainly interested in what your company has to offer, you should treat communication with them as a priority, compared to communication with possible candidates you have yet to contact.
And, your time blocks should reflect that.
You can reserve a time block for communication with these prospective candidates as soon as you arrive to work (e.g. 8:30 am – 9:00 am). You can then use this time block to arrange interview times, scrutinise or forward their CVs, test tasks, and other materials, as well as answer any further questions they might have for you.
You may also use this time to review applicants who’ve answered your company’s job ads, notify candidates whether they have passed to the next round of interviews, or even whether they were selected for the position.
Considering that this is a morning time block and that most of the new hires you bring in will likely arrive for their first day sometime in the morning, you can also use this time to support their onboarding process.
How to use time blocking to handle meetings and interviews
When you’re a recruiter, there are various meetings you need to go through regularly:
- Interview rounds with candidates
- Meetings with colleagues in charge of the technical part of the interview
- Meetings with colleagues from the HR department in charge of assessing the candidate’s personality and likelihood to fit in with the rest of the team
- Meetings with managers, team leaders, and the CEO during the later stages of an interviewing process, when it’s time to decide whether a candidate will get a job offer
In the end, it may seem like you’re spending entire days in meetings — even when you have other priority tasks waiting for you. And, once again, proper time blocking (and a little planning) can go a long way in helping you juggle these obligations.
When it comes to defining time blocks for meetings with colleagues, HR, team leaders, managers, or the CEO, it’s crucial to keep these discussions structured. So, before going into the meeting, define the points you’ll want to emphasise, ask, discuss, or expect as a question — you can even speed up the process by creating templates to assess each candidate. Bear in mind that meetings rarely need to last more than 15 minutes, so aim to have your meeting time blocks reflect that.
Now, defining time blocks for interview rounds with job candidates may seem trickier. After all, interviews have the potential to swerve off into unexpected, yet interesting territories, depending on the questions and answers. In line with that, it’s best that you reserve between 45 minutes and 1 hour for interviews, to make sure both your interviewing team and the interviewees have the time to address everything you want.
How to use time blocking for making reports and updates
Making reports and updates about your recruiting efforts is important to keep you and your team in check about how close you are to finding a suitable professional for a position (and what you can do in the future to increase these odds).
Such reports and updates usually imply some repetitive work — you’ll likely need to enter data about the number of:
- Applicants who applied to a position
- Qualified individuals, you have reached out to
- Qualified individuals who have replied to you
- Candidates who have moved on to a particular stage of the interviewing process
- Anything else you want to track
It’s always best to schedule such repetitive tasks during the times you naturally feel your energy levels drop. For example, they can serve as the perfect activity to ease out from your work at the end of a workday (around 3:30 pm – 4:00 pm).
Bonus: How to use time blocking to rest and energise
Making sure you are energised and well-rested throughout the day may not seem like activities that merit their own time blocks, but they are actually crucial in ensuring you perform well with your work. After all, you can’t possibly charm your LinkedIn connections if you’re hungry, thirsty, or simply exhausted from the lack of sleep and proper breaks during work time.
In line with that, let’s see what healthy time blocks you can implement at home and at the workplace.
First, you’ll need to establish a solid morning routine. This should include leaving enough time to sleep, exercise, and have a healthy breakfast every day.
Now, you don’t need to establish strict time blocks for every aspect of your morning routine. It’s enough if you plan your day in such a way that you have time to comfortably carry out everything (e.g. morning routine: 7:00 am – 8:00 am). As for sleep, a “time block” of 8 hours is sufficient to get you rested (e.g. to get up at 7:00 am, make it a practice to go to bed no later than 11:00 pm).
It’s also important that you account for a time block that represents your commute. This can be a flexible time frame that shows how much time you need to arrive to work on traffic-light or traffic-heavy days (e.g. 30 to 50 minutes). If you don’t drive to work yourself, you can even use this time block to nap or answer some emails.
Once in the office, it’s crucial for your focus and productivity levels that you also take breaks from work, and leave enough time for lunch. You can define a 30-minute time block for your lunch break and several 10 to 15-minute time blocks for short breaks throughout the day.
What your final time blocking schedule for the day may look like
In the end, here’s an example of how your time blocking schedule may look, based on these tips:
As you can see, time blocking can ensure you become a better rested, more organised, and thus more productive and efficient recruiter who keeps the workload under control. All you need to do is plan your day in accordance with the realistic time you have at your disposal and then stick to this plan.
Author, Marija Kojic – Productivity Expert at Clockify
Marija Kojic is an editor at Assignyourwriter.co and a productivity expert specialised in time management techniques. She works at Clockify, where she enjoys helping people discover meaningful and effective ways to work smarter.
