Welcome to Term 3! We’ve had a relatively quiet couple of weeks at the EnrolHQ office because of the NSW school holidays. Sometimes, quiet time is good though as it’s given our team the space to knuckle down and release a huge new feature - a fully featured Future Student Interview System that all EnrolHQ schools now have access to.

What do I mean when I say fully featured? I’m going to jump into these points in detail through the rest of the blog post but this interview feature allows:

1. One person or multiple interviewers to conduct the interviews.
2. One or many locations (these are set by the Interviewer), for example Kindy Interviews might be held in the Junior School Office and Year 7 in the Main Office.
3. A ‘Smart’ scheduling system that allows Interviewers to set their availability across multiple days and set their available ‘from’ and available ‘to’ time on those days.
4. Interviewers prioritise what students receive what timeslots shown to them and who will conduct their interview.
5. Parents can Book, Cancel and Re-Book their appointments via their Parent Dashboard that they used for enrolling their child.
6. The Interviewer can type notes directly into EnrolHQ or print out and write onto a customised applicant PDF that is created for them. This PDF can then be scanned and re-attached to the student record.
7. An ical feed is available to the Interviewer so all of their bookings automatically update in their calendar.

How to Get Started With Interviews

To see the Interview System in action, first you'll need to go to Users and assign the appropriate EnrolHQ users at your school to become 'Interviewers'. You simply tick the 'Interviewer' role and save. You can have as many staff in the EnrolHQ system be 'interviewers' as you require.

Next if you go to Settings --> School Details you'll see your schools' interview settings on the far right pane. This is where you can set the interview duration, usually 30 minutes. You can also set the priority buckets here; these are important as some schools want to schedule their high priority students to interview earlier. However the school also wants to send the invite to book an interview at the same time to all parents because you don't want the Enrolment Registrar getting inundated with the 'Why haven't I received an interview invitation yet' call from anxious parents. By having priority buckets, you solve this problem.

Next, you'll need to set up the physical locations that the interviews will happen. For example, there might be interviews in the Principal's office but also in the Deputy Principal's office. Is it in the Junior School, or the Senior School? Go to 'Locations' to enter those details along with some directions on how to get there. You have the ability to upload a map of the school for each location.

Enter Availabilities and Assign Students

Your interview system is almost ready to go - now you have to tell it when you're open for interviews and assign students to priority buckets so they can book into the slots you make available.

You can add an 'Availability' in the Interview --> Availability section. You need to set a date, a start time and an end time. You also need to pick a 'Location' and a 'Priority' - by choosing a 'Priority' that means only students who fall into that priority bucket are allowed to book that time you've made available.

Finally, you need to go to the Principal's Review screen to assign students to yourself as the interviewer. What you are doing here is searching for students on various filters and bulk adding them to a priority bucket. In this case, I'm putting these students into the 'Siblings' bucket because I want to interview only Siblings of current students first.

The Parent Dashboard View with Smart Scheduler

After all the set-up has been completed and the students have been assigned to the correct priority buckets, parents will be able to log into their parent dashboards and see a big call-to-action to 'Book An Interview'. You can also send them an email through EnrolHQ to tell them to login to book - that's easy to do as well.

When they click on this button, they will be shown the slots available and can choose one that is convenient to them. This is where the 'Smart Scheduler' comes in. At EnrolHQ, we recognise that a Principal's time is precious so the scheduler will only open up 4 slots on any available day. The reason for this is that EnrolHQ interview scheduler will try to 'bunch up' the interviews so they are all adjacent to each other. This is so we don't arrive at a situation where the Principal has an interview at 9am, the next at lunch time and one at the end of the day. Clever hey? :)

Recording Your Interview Notes

The big day has arrived. Parents and future students are having their interview at your school. Both sides want to make a good impression on each other. EnrolHQ gives you the choice to choose whether you want to type your interview notes directly into the interview tab on the student profile. You may prefer to hand write the notes and upload the scanned version to the student record as well. Many interviewers prefer to write the notes by hand as it's fairly clinical to be talking to a future student and typing at the same time. EnrolHQ makes it easy to hand write notes and scan by automatically generating a 2 page PDF summary of the child with a section to write notes on. After the interview, an assistant can simply scan the document and upload to the students record.

Take Your School To The Next Level!

Wow, you're still reading after all this? I did say 'fully-featured' at the top didn't I? The Interview System is a snapshot of what EnrolHQ is all about, having an all-in-one system for the schools to do everything from enquiry to making an offer (and ultimately collecting the acceptance), while the parents keep coming back to the same parent dashboard to book tours, to fill out enrolment forms, to make payments, book interviews and accept an offer of place. Get on the EnrolHQ train by booking a webinar today to see this all in live action.

Published: 22 Jul 2019