The Hiring Tab Problem
Ask anyone on a recruiting team how many browser tabs they have open on an average workday. The answer is usually somewhere between "too many" and a nervous laugh.
Here's a typical interview day for a mid-size company's HR coordinator: monday.com for the hiring pipeline board. Calendly for interview scheduling. Google Sheets for the candidate scoring rubric. Gmail for candidate communications. The company careers page. The ATS (if they have one). LinkedIn. That's seven tabs minimum, and most of them need to be cross-referenced with each other constantly.
"Is this candidate's interview confirmed?" — check Calendly. "What stage are they in?" — check monday.com. "What did the panel score them?" — check the Google Sheet. "Did we send the follow-up?" — check Gmail. Every answer lives in a different tool, and the person responsible for keeping the hiring process moving has to act as the human integration layer between all of them.
For the HR team in this case, running a steady stream of open roles with multiple candidates in various pipeline stages simultaneously, this tool fragmentation wasn't just annoying — it was causing real problems. Interviews were being scheduled for candidates who had already been rejected on the monday.com board. Scorecards were being filled out in the Google Sheet but never referenced when making decisions on the pipeline. Candidates were waiting days for follow-ups because the handoff between "interview completed" and "next step assigned" fell into the gap between tools.
The Insight: HR Needs Scheduling More Than Syncing
When this team first considered integrating their calendar tools with monday.com, their instinct was to connect Google Calendar. It's the obvious choice — everyone uses it, and syncing internal meetings with monday.com boards seems like the natural move.
But they quickly realized that internal calendar sync wasn't actually their bottleneck. Their team already had their own calendars under control. What they couldn't control was the external scheduling chaos — the back-and-forth with candidates about availability, the timezone calculations, the rescheduling, the no-shows.
This is where Calendly solves a fundamentally different problem than Google Calendar. Google Calendar manages your time. Calendly manages other people's access to your time. For HR teams doing high-volume interviewing, the second problem is the bigger one.
So instead of syncing calendars, they embedded Calendly directly into their hiring workflow.
The Setup: Two Integrations, One Pipeline
The team restructured their monday.com hiring board around two embedded tools.
Calendly for Candidate-Facing Scheduling
Using Calendly Embed for monday.com, the team brought their Calendly scheduling interface directly onto their hiring board. Here's how it worked in practice:
For initial screenings, the HR coordinator no longer needed to leave monday.com to generate a Calendly link, go back to monday.com to update the candidate's status, then go to Gmail to send the link. The Calendly embed on the board meant scheduling happened in the same view as the pipeline. Move a candidate to "Screen" on the board → share the Calendly link → the interview appears on the embedded schedule view, visible to everyone on the board.
For panel interviews, the team used Calendly's round-robin and collective scheduling features, all visible from the monday.com board. The hiring manager could see who was available and when without opening a separate Calendly admin panel.
For rescheduling, having the Calendly embed visible on the board meant the whole team could see interview status at a glance. When a candidate rescheduled, the update was immediately visible in the same workspace where the hiring pipeline was tracked — no separate notification to check, no status to manually update.
Google Sheets for Structured Candidate Evaluation
The second integration was Google Sheets for monday.com, used specifically for candidate scorecards and evaluation tracking.
The team had tried building their evaluation rubric directly in monday.com using columns and subitems. It worked, technically — but it was clunky. Scorecard rubrics are inherently tabular. They have weighted criteria, scoring scales, panel member columns, calculated totals, and conditional formatting that highlights red flags. This is what spreadsheets were built for.
By embedding their evaluation Google Sheet directly on the hiring board, they got the best of both worlds:
Interviewers filled out scorecards in a familiar spreadsheet format immediately after interviews — right on the monday.com board, without navigating to a separate Google Sheet.
The hiring manager could compare candidates side-by-side in the spreadsheet view while looking at the pipeline stages on the same board. "This candidate scored 4.2 on the rubric and is in the final stage" was now a single glance, not a cross-reference between two tools.
Aggregate scores calculated automatically using spreadsheet formulas — weighted averages, percentile rankings, flag triggers — all updating in real-time as new scores were entered. The team didn't need to build this logic in monday.com's formula columns (which have limitations for complex calculations). They used Google Sheets' full formula power, embedded where decisions were being made.
The Workflow in Practice
Here's what a typical day looked like after implementation:
Morning pipeline review. The HR lead opens the monday.com hiring board. At a glance: twelve active candidates across three open roles. The embedded Calendly view shows four interviews scheduled for today. The embedded scorecard sheet shows that two candidates from yesterday's interviews have been fully evaluated. One is flagged green (strong hire), one is yellow (needs discussion). This entire assessment took two minutes and zero tab switches.
Midday interview block. Three back-to-back interviews. After each one, the interviewer opens the hiring board, scrolls to the embedded scorecard, and fills in their evaluation. Scores auto-calculate. By the time the last interview ends, all three candidates have complete evaluations visible on the board.
Afternoon decision meeting. The hiring manager opens the board on the conference room screen. Pipeline status, interview scores, and scheduling availability are all in one view. The team makes a hire decision, moves the candidate to "Offer" on the board, and the HR coordinator begins the next steps — all without anyone saying "let me pull up the spreadsheet" or "wait, when was their interview?"
Why Calendly Over Google Calendar for HR
This is a nuance worth understanding. Google Calendar is the most popular integration across all monday.com teams — it's the universal scheduling tool. But for HR specifically, Calendly serves a distinct purpose that Google Calendar doesn't address.
Google Calendar integration syncs your existing meetings to monday.com. It's great for teams that need to see internal commitments alongside project timelines — sales teams tracking client meetings, project managers monitoring team availability, executives coordinating across departments.
Calendly integration manages external scheduling — it's the tool that sits between your team and the outside world. For HR, that outside world is candidates. Calendly handles the complexity of candidate self-scheduling: available time slots, timezone conversion, buffer time between interviews, automatic reminders, and rescheduling flows. These are things Google Calendar alone can't do.
HR teams that embed Calendly in monday.com get a candidate-facing scheduling engine directly inside their internal hiring pipeline. It's the difference between seeing your calendar on the board and managing your interview scheduling process from the board.
Who This Is For
This approach is built for HR teams and hiring managers who:
- Run hiring through monday.com — using boards to track candidates through pipeline stages from application to offer
- Do high-volume interviewing — if you're scheduling more than a few interviews per week, the Calendly-on-board approach eliminates significant coordination overhead
- Use structured evaluation rubrics — if your team scores candidates on criteria (culture fit, technical skills, experience), the embedded Google Sheets approach gives you spreadsheet-grade evaluation without leaving your hiring board
- Want to reduce time-to-hire — every eliminated tool switch and manual handoff shortens the gap between "interview completed" and "decision made"
Get Started
You can implement either integration independently, but they work best together — Calendly for the scheduling side, Google Sheets for the evaluation side, both embedded on your monday.com hiring board.