Understanding Guide's Scheduling Queue System
Guide's scheduling queue system is designed to help your recruiting coordination team triage, own, and act on interview scheduling tasks - without anything slipping through the cracks. This article walks you through how the Unassigned Queue works, how to take ownership of tasks, and how your team can layer on Custom Queues to organize work by team, function, or any other grouping that makes sense for your workflow.
Part 1: The Unassigned Queue
What is the Unassigned Queue?
When a new scheduling request comes in - for example, after a candidate moves to an interview stage in your ATS - Guide creates a scheduling task and places it in the Unassigned Queue. This is a shared, centralized inbox for all scheduling tasks that have not yet been picked up by a recruiting coordinator (RC).
Think of it as a team triage pool: visible to everyone, but not yet owned by anyone.
Why it matters
The Unassigned Queue prevents double-assignment and ensures that every incoming scheduling request is visible to your coordination team in one place. No task gets silently dropped, and no two coordinators accidentally pick up the same request.
How to pick up a task from the Unassigned Queue
1. Go to your Coordinator Dashboard.
2. Click the Unassigned tab.
3. Browse the list of incoming tasks. You can filter by:
Job title
Department or function
Interview stage
Candidate name
4. Click into any task to review the details.
5. Assign the task to yourself (or another coordinator) to take ownership and begin scheduling.
Once a task is picked up, it moves out of the Unassigned Queue and into the assignee's Assigned to Me view.
Part 2: Understanding Your Queue Views
Guide surfaces scheduling tasks across several views on the Coordinator Dashboard. Here is what each one means:
Assigned to Me - Tasks you have actively taken ownership of and are currently coordinating. This is your personal working queue.
Following - Tasks tied to candidates where you are listed as the Recruiting Coordinator in your ATS (Greenhouse or Ashby). Even if you have not yet picked up the task in Guide, these appear here so you can track activity on your candidates.
Unassigned - The shared pool of all tasks not yet assigned to anyone.
All Tasks - A full cross-team view showing all scheduling tasks in your organization. Useful for managers or coordinators covering for teammates.
You can also filter any view by Status (e.g., Availability Needed, Scheduling Needed), Tags (e.g., Urgent, Executive), Stage, or Candidate Name.
Part 3: Custom Queues
What are Custom Queues?
Custom Queues let you create named, color-coded groups that scheduling tasks can be routed into - on top of the standard Unassigned Queue. This is especially useful if your coordination team is organized by department, function, or pod and you want tasks to flow to the right group by default.
Examples of how teams use Custom Queues:
Engineering Queue, Sales Queue, Executive Queue - organized by department
East Coast Pod, West Coast Pod - organized by geography
Seniority-based queues such as IC Queue and Leadership Queue
Every organization starts with a Default Queue, which is the baseline queue all new tasks are placed in unless you specify otherwise.
How to create a Custom Queue
1. Navigate to Settings in the left sidebar.
2. Click Scheduling queues under the scheduling settings section.
3. Click Create New Queue.
4. Enter a name for the queue and select a color to visually distinguish it.
5. Save the queue.
How to add members to a Custom Queue
Once a queue is created, you can add coordinators as members:
1. From the Queues settings page, click on the queue you want to manage.
2. Click Add Members.
3. Search for and select the coordinators you want to include.
4. Save your changes.
Members can also be removed individually from the queue detail page at any time.
How to assign a task to a Custom Queue
When creating or updating a scheduling task, you will see a Queue and Assignee selector. From here you can:
Choose a specific Custom Queue to route the task into
Optionally enable Round Robin to automatically distribute tasks among queue members in rotation
Guide also remembers the last queue you used for a given job and interview stage, so it will pre-select that queue as a smart default the next time you create a task for the same role - saving you time on repeat actions.
How to filter the dashboard by queue
On the main Coordinator Dashboard, use the Queue filter dropdown to narrow the task list to a specific queue. This lets each coordinator or pod focus only on the tasks that belong to their group without noise from other queues.
Queue assignments are also visible on individual task cards and in the task detail view, shown as a color-coded badge next to the queue name.
Part 4: Best Practices
Use the Unassigned Queue for shared teams, PTO coverage periods, or any situation where task ownership is fluid.
Create Custom Queues when your coordination team is split by function, geography, or specialty - this keeps the right tasks in front of the right people without manual sorting.
Use Round Robin within a queue to distribute load evenly among members automatically.
Set a default queue in Organization Settings under Scheduling Defaults so that new tasks are routed to the right place automatically without any manual selection each time.
Encourage coordinators to use the Assigned to Me and Following views for daily work, and dip into the Unassigned or queue-filtered views during team standups for triage and coverage planning.
That covers the full queue system in Guide - from the shared Unassigned Queue all the way through Custom Queues with round-robin options. If you have questions about configuring your team's queue structure, the settings pages referenced above are the best place to start.