Schedule New Meeting

You can use Schedule New Meeting in Journeys to easily automate scheduling new meetings with a new hire and a colleague such as a manager or onboarding buddy. Some examples could be scheduled syncs, training sessions, and more.

To begin, click Create a new step, select Schedule New Meeting and give your step a title.

The first things you’ll configure are the Organizer, Recipient, Calendar Event Name, and Calendar Description.

The Organizer field will correspond to who will be leading these meetings, and will become the meeting owner.

The Recipient field will correspond to who will be invited to the newly created meeting. Often this is the new hire.

The Calendar Event Name and Calendar Event Description fields will reflect what will be displayed when viewing the event in Google Calendar or Outlook. You can also use variables to personalize the title of the new meeting to the organizer and recipient!

Note: If scheduling for a new hire, their company email address must be created and set to receive email to schedule a new meeting. Be sure to keep that in mind and check with your IT team when scheduling this step before their start date.

You’ll then choose between two options:

Schedule meeting anytime based on attendee calendar availability
1. This will allow Cleary to look for mutual availability between 9am - 5pm of each attendee's time zone. You can then choose the earliest and latest times you’d like Cleary to schedule these meetings, based off the new hire date, journey start date, or onboarding buddy assignment date.

If there ends up being no availability between the two employees within these dates, the organizer of the event will receive the following notification:

“{journey_admin_full_name} wants you to meet with {recipient_full_name}. Please take the lead in scheduling a meeting with them when you are both available.”

Always schedule this calendar event at a specific day and time
1. Selecting this option will schedule the meeting at a specific time based off the new hire date, journey start date, or onboarding buddy assignment date. This does not take availability for either the organizer or recipient into account.

Note: These meetings can always be rescheduled after initially scheduled by Cleary by the organizer or recipient.

Trigger

Next, you’ll choose when to trigger scheduling the new meeting. You can choose to trigger this step either at a specific time, or after a previous step has been completed.

If choosing At a specific time, you can adjust the variables to trigger based off of the new hire start date, journey start date, or onboarding buddy assignment. This way, for example, the scheduling will not occur until after the user’s email has been created.

If choosing After step has been completed, you can set this step to trigger immediately once a selected step has been completed, or a certain amount of days after the selected step has been completed.

Note: These times are relative to the timezone displayed, not necessarily in the time zone of the employee on the journey.

You’ll then configure the duration and timeframe for the new meeting. The timeframe and Time zone fields will adjust how Cleary attempts to schedule a new meeting when looking for mutual availability.

Advanced Settings

You can further adjust this step with two more advanced settings:

Error handling

If this option is selected, a new hire will be added to this meeting even if they’re added to the journey after the step should have been triggered.

For example: You’ve chosen to schedule this step 2 days before the new hire start date, but the new hire wasn’t added to the journey until 1 day before their start date. Enabling this option will ensure they’re added to the meeting even though it falls after the 2 day trigger.

Restrict this step to a specific audience

By default, every new hire will be added to the recurring meeting. However, you can choose to restrict this step to a certain audience.

For example: If you don’t want contractors to be added to this recurring meeting, you can set up the audience like so:

Finally, once you’ve configured this step to your liking, you can choose to Save as Draft or Publish this step type.

If the step is saved as a draft, it will not be live when the Journey is published. You must click Publish to ensure the step is live once the Journey is.

How to Create Shared Journey Calendar Events

How to set up a Journey meeting step so new hires who start together get one shared calendar invite, such as a single benefits, payroll or IT orientation, instead of each getting a separate event that competes for the organizer's time.

How it works

When a meeting step is set as a group event, Cleary books one calendar event for each occurrence. An occurrence is every new hire whose meeting falls on the same day and time, with the same organizer and the same calendar.

The first new hire to be scheduled creates the event.
Every new hire after that is added to the same event as an attendee. Nobody gets a duplicate, even if steps run at the same moment or are re-sent.
If only one person starts that day, they get the meeting on their own.

Set it up

Go to Journeys → Journeys in the admin menu and open the onboarding journey.
Under Steps, open the existing meeting step, or click Create a new step and choose Meeting.
Pick the Organizer, the person running the session. Leave the recipient as the new hire.
Select Always schedule this calendar event at a specific day and time. and set the day and time, for example the new hire's start date at 10:00 AM.
Group events need a fixed time. With "schedule anytime based on availability", each person would land on a different slot, so the group option is hidden.
Tick Book one shared event for everyone scheduled at the same time.
Rewrite the Calendar event name and Calendar event description so they only use organizer and company variables (see the rule below). The default name includes {recipient_full_name}, so it must be changed.
Under Calendar, keep Organizer's calendar or choose a shared calendar. Everyone in the group must be booked on the same calendar.
Save the step.

The one rule for names and descriptions

Everyone shares one invite, so anything about a specific new hire would show that person's details to the whole group. A group event's name and description can only use:

Allowed: organizer variables such as {organizer_full_name} and {organizer_first_name}, and {company_name}.
Not allowed: anything tied to the new hire or their people, such as {recipient_full_name}, {new_hire_first_name}, {manager_full_name}, the onboarding buddy or the journey admin.

If a disallowed variable is left in, saving fails with a message that lists exactly which variables to remove.

Example: benefits orientation

Organizer: The benefits lead
When: Specific time: new hire start date, 10:00 AM
Shared event: Ticked
Event name: {company_name} Benefits Orientation with {organizer_first_name}
Calendar: Organizer's calendar

Three hires starting Monday get one 10:00 AM invite with the benefits lead and all three of them. A hire starting the following Monday gets a separate event for that day.

Good to know

Attendees see each other. Google Calendar shows everyone on an invite the other guests' email addresses, so new hires in the same session will see one another.
The organizer is emailed once, when the shared event is first created, not again for each person added. Calendar updates still go out as people join.
Late additions join automatically. A new hire added after the event exists is added to it, as long as their meeting falls on the same day, time, organizer and calendar.
Leaving a journey does not remove someone from the invite. Remove them from the calendar event by hand if needed.
If the event is deleted or cancelled in the calendar, the next new hire in that session gets a fresh event. People already added stay on the old one.
Changing someone's individual meeting (duration, video link, Zoom host) only applies if they are the first booked. Everyone else joins the shared event as it is.
Individual meetings are unchanged. Leave the box unticked and each new hire keeps getting their own event, as before.

FAQ

Q: When do meetings get scheduled?

A: Invites are triggered to be sent out once a company email has been set in Cleary for the new hire.