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The Guide Inbox

A convenient, effective, and powerful solution for keeping track of your conversations.

Updated over a year ago

The Guide Inbox is a convenient, effective, and powerful solution for keeping track of your conversations. Whether communicating with your candidates or supporting your team, the Guide Inbox helps you remain responsive and supportive to questions, coordinate interviews, and share important updates.

The Inbox explained

Keeping track of multiple conversations can be a challenge. Has a candidate read my message? Are there messages that have responses that need a follow-up? Which candidates should I re-engage? Am I still waiting on the candidate to share their availability, or did they share it, and I missed it? The Guide Inbox is here to help.

Access the Inbox in Greenhouse

The Inbox can be accessed conveniently in Greenhouse from the Guide Extension. The Guide Inbox can be accessed conveniently from the Guide Extension. This means that the Inbox will follow you wherever you go in Greenhouse. Below is a picture illustrating the Inbox in both of these locations.

The Guide Inbox in Greenhouse

How to use the Inbox

The Inbox should look pretty familiar, thats because we modeled our design choices off of the email inboxes we use everyday. The Inbox is a list of conversations sorted by date of last activity. That’s a fancy way of saying that messages with more recent responses will always float to the top.

The Guide Inbox explained

Each row in the inbox is a conversation – the threaded back and forth replies originating from an original message. Each conversation item surfaces relevant information such as the subject, recipients, other participants, and a timestamp of the latest activity. You will also find helpful information on message activity (i.e. sent, viewed, or replied).

A Guide Inbox conversation

What conversations appear in the Inbox?

The Inbox is a combined list of conversations. These are conversations relevant to you. In the Inbox you will find conversations that match any of the following criteria:

  • Conversations started by you. These would be messages you directly sent to candidates.

  • Conversations you are following. These are would include messages you were notified of or any conversations you are following.

  • Conversations with your candidates. Even if you didn’t initiate the conversation, the Inbox keeps you informed of ongoing conversations with candidates with whom you are the Hiring Manager, Recruiter, or Coordinator in Greenhouse.

Message engagement status

Guide supercharges your messages by providing real-time engagement insights allowing you to track when your candidates view their messages.

Message engagement 
status indicator

Each conversation in the Inbox will show the status of the last message sent. For example: If you just sent a message to a candidate, the status will display “Sent” if a candidate opens the message, the status will change to “Viewed,” and if they reply, the status will change to “Replied.” These are the four message statuses Guide tracks and reports on:

The last message was successfully delivered.

The last message was opened and viewed by the candidate.

The candidate or another participant has replied with a message.

We were unable to deliver the last sent message.

Interview scheduling status

With Guide, you can send a request for availability along with your message. This functions a lot like Greenhouse's request for availability but is tightly integrated into your message and offers a better candidate experience. For information on how to request availability read: Request availability from a candidate.

In the Guide Inbox you can easily see which conversations have outstanding availability requests. As soon as a candidate provides available times, these conversations update to notify you of their response and remind you that the next step is to schedule their interview. Once you've scheduled the interview, the last thing to do is reply to the conversation with the interview schedule. Once you've done this, the conversation will update to help you and others know the Confirmation has been sent.

Interview scheduling
 status indicator

These are the four interview scheduling states that you will come across in Inbox conversations:

There is an outstanding request for availability in the conversation.

The candidate has responded to the availability request.

The candidate has updated their original response.

The scheduled interview details have been shared with the candidate.

Viewing & replying to a conversation from the Inbox

Clicking on an item in the list of conversations in your Inbox will take you to the conversation in the candidate's guide. From here, you can read and respond to the discussion. If your candidate has responded to a request for availability, the times they provided will be attached to the conversation.

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