By Tiffany Liu
What goes on in TC day-to-day you ask? How do employers get set up in their respective interview rooms? How do the correct students get paged to their interviews? How does manning the call centres work?
This is all the work of Interview Day Services at TC.
Interview Day Services (IDS) help facilitate interview days. They orient employers to campus, set up employers in their interview rooms, receive messages from students to relay to employers, inform students of where to go, run call centres, and everything in-between to make sure your interviews run smoothly.
The interview process begins with the Employer Services team. They prepare information packages for employers, schedule the room bookings and work closely with employers to help put their interview schedule together.
On the interview day, it’s IDS. There are a total of six stations: employer reception, paging desk and four call centres. Grace Wong is the Assistant Service Manager and the IDS team reports directly to her. She works closely with the Rooms Booking Coordinator to ensure that all scheduled interviews are distributed throughout the building for in-person and call centre interviews.
A Day in IDS
Employer reception
A team of five greeters are at employer reception. They are responsible for preparing rooms for the day's interviews. A few people are always at employer reception ready to greet employers when they arrive. Greeters welcome employers to campus and provide them with their interview schedule, ranking instructions, where to eat on campus etc.
Paging
The captain of paging sets up the system every day based on a list of every student interview that day. Call centre interviews are removed from the system and in-person ones are kept on the list. There are a few roles at the paging desk: answering questions about interviews, check-in points for students and a runner. The runner's role is to deliver messages to employers such as letting them know of late arrivals, conflicts and other miscellaneous messages.
In case you were curious of how the paging system works:
- The employer pushes a silver button in the interview room when they are ready for their next interview.
- The room number shows up on the computer screen at the paging desk.
- We manually select the next student to be interviewed.
- The student's name gets put up on the TV screen that you see!
Call Centre
The call centre is combination of employer reception and paging. The captain at each call centre sets up the interview schedule, preps every booth for web interviews and ensures that employers are connected to the correct phone booths. Since they are the first level of troubleshooting, they are all semi experts on most forms of web interviews! Captains instruct students on how to do their interviews, keep track of missing students and if there are conflicts, resolve them with employers.
What does IDS do for students?
IDS is a very visible team and they are the ones you interact with when you have an interview at TC. IDS works to provide employers with the information they need to ensure employer satisfaction with their experience hiring from Waterloo. This way, employers are more likely to interact with students positively.
One of our team's core values is staying empathetic to the student experience. We want to do everything in our power to make processes better, connect students and employers seamlessly, and get students employed!
Continuous interviews this term are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with one match a week on Fridays.
