Jan 23, 2018

This is a booking method selected when creating a new round of interviews.

This option will allow parents to make a single booking only, and they will not be prompted to select the staff member – the system currently allocates the first available staff member from a pre-defined list of staff.  More about this later.

Selecting Staff

Once you have created the interview round, click on the ‘Staff’ link in the menu.  Currently you will have check boxes indicating which year levels each staff member teaches, however you will also have a check box for each interview round where ‘Parents meet pre-selected staff’ is selected.  Go through the list of staff and place a tick in the check box for each staff member that will be conducting these interviews.  For example, if you have selected 6 staff members then up to 6 parents will be able to book into each time slot you configure.

Once you have configured the staff selection you can ask those staff members to login and update their availability.  The system will automatically adjust the number of bookings possible to the number of staff available in each time slot.

Parent Bookings

When the parent logs in to book their interview they are not prompted with a list of teachers, the application takes them straight to a single list of time slots.  On each time slot is listed the number of available spaces, so parents get an idea of availability for different times.  For example, there might be generally 6 staff available through the day, however in the later afternoon slots there might be only 1 or 2 interview times available indicating that other parents have been busy booking these times.

The parent only has to click one time slot in order to register their booking.  The parent can change their booking in the same way they can with regular parent/teacher interviews.

Allocation of Staff

Internally the system simply allocates the first available teacher to the booking, so staff may consider it unfair that the interviews are not shared around evenly.  The key thing to remember here is that the staff member allocated is not necessarily the staff member that needs to conduct the interview.  The system accepts bookings for the number of staff available, so it should be possible to share out the interviews among the allocated staff.