Scheduling Interviews in a Hybrid Environment

Hi ​@kp,  Eightfold Scheduling doesn’t currently have a native way to classify or surface “in-office vs remote days” for a hiring manager as a separate setting inside Eightfold. What Eightfold pulls from the calendar for availability lookups is essentially Free/Busy status (not richer event metadata).

What Eightfold can see from calendars (and what it can’t)

• For availability checks, Eightfold uses the calendar provider’s availability API (for example, Microsoft’s getSchedule) to determine whether time is Free or Busy, and does not access additional details of non‑Eightfold events.
• Because of that, if a hiring manager’s “in office vs remote” is represented in their calendar as:Eightfold generally won’t be able to reliably interpret that and present it as an “office/remote” indicator in Eightfold today. 
  • a label/category,
  • a “working location” setting,
  • or text in event details,

Common workarounds teams use (within the current product behavior)

1) Use Rooms to implicitly represent “in-office”

If the interview is intended to be onsite, schedulers can include a Room (conference room) when scheduling. 
This doesn’t “detect” the HM’s office day automatically, but it creates a consistent operational rule: onsite interviews always have a room; remote interviews don’t.

(Requires Rooms to be enabled/configured in Scheduling.)
 

2) Have HMs block their calendar in a consistent way (so it affects availability)

If hiring managers block time as unavailable (for example by using Out of Office), Eightfold will treat that time as unavailable in availability lookups.
This can reduce coordinator pinging if the main issue is “don’t schedule me on remote days / travel days,” but it still won’t label days as office vs remote in Eightfold. 
 

3) Use “Location” on the interview invite as the source of truth

Eightfold scheduling supports adding room / location details as part of scheduling.
Many teams standardize this so coordinators don’t need to ask: the invite itself clearly states “Onsite – [office address/room]” or “Remote – Teams/Zoom link.”