Events That Block Scheduling
Guide treats these as busy:
Events set to Show as: Busy, regardless of RSVP status
Pending or no-response events, if they still show as busy on the interviewer’s calendar
Tentative events
Out-of-office events
All-day events
Out-of-office events are treated as hard blocks and cannot be overridden by scheduling settings.
All-day events block the interviewer’s full day in their local timezone. If your organization has company-wide blocked dates, such as holidays, those can also be configured at the organization level in Guide so recruiting coordinators do not need to manage them individually.
Events That Do Not Block Scheduling
Guide treats these as free:
Events set to Show as: Free
Declined events
Working location events, such as “Working from home” in Google Calendar
Working location events are informational only and do not block scheduling.
Flexible Meetings
Flexible Meetings let Guide schedule over specific recurring internal meetings, while still showing the recruiting coordinator that there is a soft conflict.
Your Guide admin can configure these under Organization Settings > Scheduling Defaults > Flexible Meetings by adding meeting titles that are acceptable to schedule over.
When Guide finds a matching meeting, the time can still be used for scheduling. The meeting appears as a soft conflict, shown in yellow, so the recruiting coordinator can see what Guide is scheduling over.
This is the recommended approach for meetings like team standups, optional syncs, or recurring internal meetings where interview coverage takes priority.
PagerDuty and On-Call Schedules
Guide does not read PagerDuty on-call schedules directly. To have Guide respect on-call blocks, each interviewer needs to make those blocks available through Google Calendar.
Each interviewer should:
Import their PagerDuty on-call calendar into Google Calendar
Set that calendar’s sharing to Make available for [company] in Google Calendar settings
Connect it in Guide as a secondary availability calendar from their Scheduling Preferences page
Once connected, Guide checks both the interviewer’s primary calendar and secondary availability calendar. On-call blocks then count as busy like any other calendar event.
The Setting to Remember
The most important setting is Show as: Busy vs. Show as: Free in Google Calendar.
Guide uses that availability setting as the primary signal, not the interviewer’s RSVP status. If an interviewer has a meeting they want Guide to schedule over, the simplest fix is to change the event to Show as: Free. Declining the event also clears the block.