Kate:

So, booking candidate travel in TravelBank can be very beneficial. Of course, you can just say, “Hey, go to kayak.com,” or your favorite booking website and book directly there. But by having them book within TravelBank, it’s a really good introduction into your company saying, “We have some systems in place that are going to make everything better for you, make everything a lot more seamless, and TravelBank will be the first introduction to them.” So, with that, when you book candidate travel in TravelBank, you’re first going be able to optimize costs. So, as an admin, you can even set a budget for your candidates if you want, that way they’re not overspending, they know exactly what the expectations are for their booking, so it will eliminate questions coming back to you, since they’ll be able to see their policy directly within TravelBank.

You’ll also minimize risk. So, by booking through TravelBank, it is going to serve as a duty of care. So, admins will have visibility into where candidates are traveling from any active candidates traveling. So, if there’s inclement weather, anything else going on, you can see what candidates are either on their way to you or on their way home, and see if they’re being impacted. And then of course you can lean onto our support team for any issues that might arise. You’ll be able to track savings, too.

So, you can view total candidate travel spend on a company level, on a department level, and you can also use your travel tags to be able to look at the spend based on a team level too if you want to utilize that. This will help you better understand candidate travel spending. So, as you start to think about the future quarters or the future year, if you know that you’re going to be having very similar hiring wrecks that open that you’re going to be having people travel for, you can look at historical data, be able to see exactly what was spent on it, and be able to budget a little bit better.

There’s a few features in TravelBank that you really want to make sure that you’ll be utilizing when it comes to candidate travel. We’ll cover all of these more in depth in our, but there’s a couple different ways that candidate travel can be booked. You can of course have them book it themselves. You can book it by utilizing delegate role. You can book on behalf of somebody through your own profile. We want to make sure you’re using the traveler profile. That way the candidate can log right into their TravelBank account, fill in all their birthdate information, TSA pre-check loyalty numbers, all of that so you don’t have to ask them for it. They can just automatically put it in themselves. In-app flight modifications will be extremely helpful if the candidate needs to change their interview for whatever reason, change their travel a little bit, then they can just make changes directly in the app.

They’ll still be able to earn loyalty points, too. So, this will be extremely helpful just so they’ll be able to see that they are getting of course a benefit to go and meet you for candidate travel but also getting the benefit of earning loyalty points. In addition to this too, if your company is signed up for corporate airline loyalty programs, so quick little plug for that, you as a company will also be getting points for the candidate traveling to you. If you’re not signed up for these, just reach out to your customer success manager or to our success at TravelBank.com inbox and we can help you get set up. And I mentioned it before, but of course our 24/7 support. So, you don’t have to worry about your travelers or your candidates needing to reach out to any airline and calling them if they run into an issue. They can call into or chat into our support team who knows your company.

So, talking about candidate travel definitely makes a little bit more sense when we look directly into the app with it. So, let’s jump right into TravelBank here. So, I am logged in as an admin. As I mentioned, there’s a couple different ways that people can book candidate travel. What we’re going to want to do, no matter if people are going to be booking for themselves or if you’re going to have them book as a delegate, it’s very helpful for them to create an account. So, you will invite them the same way that you invite your employees to book travel, go into our company settings and employees, employee directory, and we can add the employee. So, of course you put first name, last name, their email address. Employee ID is optional as are the rest of these settings.

I do recommend having a department in here for candidates. You can call it candidates or candidate travel, just so you know exactly what was spent based on departments, you can really group all in the same way. Travel policy is also completely optional. One thing to consider though, if you do not have a candidate travel policy, they are going to fall within your company’s default travel policy. So, if you choose to have your candidates have maybe no policy at all, I would recommend making a candidate policy and just letting them book whatever they want. Or similar to that, if you want to put some parameters around it, too. Of course, just creating their own candidate policy, having them book exactly what you want by setting up that policy.

The manager option is going to be very helpful as if you have your policy set up that somebody gets an alert when somebody books, when they book out a policy, those alerts go to the manager. If there is no manager in here, it’s going to go to the admin. But this manager section can be especially helpful when it comes to candidate travel because maybe the hiring manager is the one that needs to know about this. Maybe it’s somebody on your talent acquisition team that needs to know about it. So, I would recommend using this. Like I said, we see it in a couple of different ways. Hiring manager is definitely one of the more common ways that we see this being used for candidate travel. But of course if there’s somebody in HR or talent acquisition that would need to see it instead, set them as the manager. Once you add the employee, if you want to use the delegate feature for that.

So, what is the delegate feature? If you’re not familiar with it, we do have the support article. The delegate feature lets you perform tasks on behalf of somebody else. So, if we add in a new delegate, so the candidate would be your host. If Kate candidate is in here as a host, I can make anybody a delegate for Kate candidate. What that means is the delegates would… So, say we make Cassie the delegate. Cassie would be able to log in for a Kate candidate and be able to complete tasks on their behalf such as booking a trip or making changes to a trip. The benefit of doing it this way is the trip is linked to the candidate’s profile. That way if you want to empower that candidate to be able to go in themselves to see what trip you made, if you want them to be able to make any changes, if you want them to be able to chat with support, this is going to be the best way to do it so they can do it themselves.

If you don’t want to go the delegate feature and you made them an account, you can also just have them book the trip by themselves, too. But first, let’s talk about the delegate feature. So, if you are a delegate for somebody, you can go into my account, switch account. And I’m now logged in as Kate candidate. So, I can see Kate’s profile. I can see that there is not a traveler information here yet, so we would just want to enter in all the TSA required information here. I would be able to see any flight credits. And then as I’m delegated in Kate’s account up here, I would be able to book a trip here. So, say we’re going from Atlanta to DC, select our dates, search for the flight.

And as a reminder, this is what the candidate would see too if you chose to go with the option for them to just book it themselves. So, say you create them a profile like we just walked through, they’re going to get an email inviting them into your TravelBank account. They would be able to go in and do exactly what we’re doing right now, so they can completely book themselves if you want to be fully hands off on it. They would see the travel policy. Right now I’m viewing the travel policy for the Kate candidate account. And then I’d be able to book or select a trip. So, if there is a specific airline coming from Atlanta, we maybe want to look at Delta so we can select the trip, we can view seats. Let’s select this flight. And then our return flight, we’ll select another nonstop here.

And this is where if you have a policy built in place for them, they’re going to see the policy. If we request approval for this, like I said, it is going to request approval from the manager. That’s why it can be very helpful to have the hiring manager in there, talent acquisition or HR, whoever should get that. If they do not have a manager in here, like I said, it will just go to the admins to do. Whether you are booking for them by using the delegate feature or they’re booking for themselves, it’s a very good practice to get into, to have them put in an additional email address. Why this is helpful is as an admin you can of course go into reporting. You can see the trips. But maybe you need somebody that does not have admin privileges to be able to see their email or be able to see their booking.

So, once again, maybe it is an office manager that needs to get them a badge for when they are arriving or anything of the sort. If you put in your instructions for candidate travel to put in that office manager’s email address, that way that office manager once they book or you book for them, is going to get an email saying that it’s booked with their information of when they’re arriving, when they’re leaving. That way they could get their badge for them if they need it to enter the building. They could arrange car service for them if they need to. Anything of the sort. So, it can be helpful to introduce that booking, get that booking either confirmation and receipt or only confirmation to go to somebody else.

Another really helpful thing by booking candidate travel through TravelBank is you can put in a company card for them to be able to book on. That way, you don’t have to worry about reimbursing them, having them pay by themselves and then reimbursing it to you. Sometimes that can be a hard conversation to do. So, this way you can just have a company card available for them. And then you can also do additional booking details if you want. So, if you want to be able to capture, maybe you want to know the exact job that the candidate is going for, you can ask them to put in the name of the title of the job and that way you can see those additional booking details if that would be helpful.

If there are no policies in place, we would just be able to book this flight straight away. But since there are policies in place, this would have to go for a flight approval first from the manager set in place. So, that is how you would book as a delegate. Switch back. Since we were just talking about that credit card too, let’s go ahead and talk about how we can add that. So, you can add in a company card, we can set it as a corporate card. And you can either set it for the entire organization to use or just specific departments. That’s why this can be very helpful to have a candidate specific department. So, we could add in this credit card and make it only available to candidates. That way when they go to book or you go to book on their behalf as a delegate, you would be able to see those last four digits, select that candidate card and have them book.

So, that is one thing that we want to make sure that we’re setting up too if needed. If you are going to choose to book on behalf of somebody, let’s look at how we do that. So, I’m in my own account right now. I’m not in the candidate’s account, I’m in my account. So, I’ll go into travel to New York, select our dates. And we can go ahead. Maybe you ask them their preferred airline or their preferred flight, whatever that might be. We will go ahead and select our flights, and then we would want to add a new traveler. So, we would put in all the candidate’s information we could add in their loyalty programs if they sent it to us. No traveler number. If they have one and they sent it to us, all of this TSA required information.

Once that information is in there, the trip will be booked for them. So, you just want to make sure in this traveler information that you’re selecting that candidate, you are not booking for yourself. Same practice if you want to have it say maybe go to an office manager, put that email address in here. And then the payment method, too. If there was a specific company card that you wanted candidates to travel on, you would have to make sure that you personally have access to it as well. Or you can just add a payment method here as well. We also give you the option to set as a corporate card at this time too, so you don’t have to go back into my account and do it there. You can do it right at this time of booking.

If you do book for them this way, another recommendation would be to send the booking confirmation. And as you can see, you can put in multiple email addresses. So, you can put in that office manager’s email address or you can put in multiple. And that way you can send this directly to the candidate. They’ll see the email with all of their information. And then be able to go ahead and see that you had it booked and everything that they need.

So, there’s a couple benefits to doing it each way. So, whether we’re booking on behalf of somebody else, the one benefit is you will just have everything directly in your profile. You have some control over what information is stored in here. You are not making the candidate their account in TravelBank if you don’t want to. So, that’s one way to do it. One of the, not downsides, but maybe challenges of doing it this way is if you want the candidate to be able to change anything, chat into our support team, anything of the sort, everything will need to go through you since it was booked on your account. By booking through the delegate feature or having the candidate book by themselves, they’re going to have their own profile. They’ll be able to see their own travel, either book their own trip or you book it for them. Everything is stored directly on their profile.

So, however you want to do it, there is no right or wrong way. That’s why we give you multiple options. We do see this done in both ways. I will say the delegate feature is definitely the most common one. That way it’s best of both worlds. You are booking for them, but they’re able to see everything in their account. So, whatever makes more sense for your company, those are going to be your options. As an admin too, you’ll be able to use your reporting whether you have Premium Insights or Core Insights to be able to see what people have booked. I know we only looked at flights, but you can book of course their hotels and cars if needed in here.

Just a couple things to note. The flights we can put directly on the company card. For the hotels, we can put it on the company card if they are paying at the time of booking. If they are paying at the time of check-in, they will be required to put down their own card. That would then of course require going for reimbursement. So, if you do want to just have the people pay at the time of booking, say we want to have them stay at the Arlo, we can start by rate types. So, we can either do pay at hotel or pay now.

If you have a corporate rate with a local hotel, maybe the hotel rate next to your office, you have a corporate rate for, you can put that in the instructions for candidate travel that they have to stay with the corporate rate at the hotel. If you don’t have a corporate rate but you have candidates traveling in pretty frequently, I recommend getting one. You can reach out to us if you need any help with it.

But as you can see, this one’s a pay at the hotel. So, if they selected this room, they would be required to put a card down at check-in for the hotel. If we just want to look at the pay now, they will be paying for this room at right at this time once they go ahead and book. So, you can put it on the corporate card that you have stored and then they will have to put a card down and check in for incidentals just in case they charge meals or anything to the hotel. But we could pay for the room right now. So, just something to keep in mind when it comes to hotel bookings for candidates.

And then if they do need to book a car, they will have to have a card when they go to pick up the car and pay for it then, unless your company has, say, direct bill, set up with Enterprise. If you have that set up with Enterprise, put that in your candidate travel booking instruction saying must book with Enterprise. And then, since you would have that set up directly in TravelBank under rental cars, you would be able to put in the billing code linked to your direct bill and then that way, they’ll be able to pick up the car and have it direct billed. They don’t have to pay for it.

So, that is candidate travel through TravelBank. If you do have any questions when people are traveling, so we are a 24/7 agent support. That is available via chat email at reservations@travelbank.com or the phone number on the screen. Product support, if there are any challenges with the product itself, you can reach out via chat. Our support.travelbank.com website has all of our frequently asked questions. You can email at support@travelbank.com. And we have product updates at the travelbank.com/whats-new. So, if you are wondering what we’re doing on a monthly basis with all of our product updates, you can view all of those there. But thank you very much for joining me for the Customer Success Office Hours as we talk about candidate travel. Please reach out if you have any questions at all. Thank you.