People & HR

How to run an interview loop as Event Agency Founders

People & HRFor Event Agency Founders4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

When you need to hire a second coordinator or a new sales person mid-season, you're cobbling together a process across Gmail threads, a shared Google Doc with interview questions, and a calendar you're managing manually. Candidates email you, you copy availability into a reply, someone books the wrong time, and the debrief lives in a voice note on your phone. You're not running an HR department — you're a founder who needs to fill a role in the next three weeks without losing a Thursday to scheduling ping-pong. The interview loop gets sloppy because there's no system, and a good candidate takes another offer while you're waiting on a callback.

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People & HRFor Event Agency Founders4 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A scheduling flow that gives candidates a public booking link for each interview stage — phone screen, working session, final conversation — synced live to your Google Calendar with buffer time between slots so you're not back-to-back on event days

An email agent that drafts your candidate communications in your voice — confirmation notes, follow-up nudges after no-shows, rejection notes, and offer-stage emails — so every message goes out the same day instead of sitting in drafts

A meeting notes system that captures every interview in a searchable archive with extracted action items, so your debrief conversation is grounded in what was actually said instead of who remembers what

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Scheduling Email Agent Meeting Notes Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Google Calendar via scheduled sync to power real-time booking availability in the Scheduling app. Gmail is connected via scheduled sync so the Email Agent reads candidate threads and drafts replies without you switching tabs. Meeting transcripts from your video calls (Google Meet or Zoom, connected from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live) feed into Meeting Notes. Task Manager runs standalone with no external data source required.

Prompts to copy

Build me a scheduling page for hiring a senior event coordinator. I need three meeting types: a 20-minute phone screen, a 60-minute working session where I share a brief event scenario, and a 30-minute final call. Add 15-minute buffers before and after each slot. Only show availability Tuesday through Thursday between 10am and 4pm — those are my lightest event-day windows.

Set up an email agent for my hiring inbox. When a new candidate application lands in Gmail, draft a reply in my voice acknowledging receipt and sharing the phone screen booking link. If someone books a phone screen and then goes quiet for 48 hours before the call, draft a reminder. After each completed interview stage, draft a brief 'we're moving you forward' or 'we're going another direction' note — I'll review and send.

Create a meeting notes workspace for interview debrief. After each call, auto-generate a summary with: the candidate's name and role applied for, key strengths mentioned, any red flags or concerns, and a hire / no-hire recommendation field I fill in. Archive every interview in a searchable log so I can compare candidates across a hiring round.

Add a task list for this hiring round. I want P1 tasks for: send offer letter, check references, and confirm start date. P2 tasks for: schedule next-round interviews and update candidates on timeline. Alert me if any P1 task is overdue by more than 24 hours.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Calendar — Starch syncs your calendar on a schedule and the Scheduling app reads your live availability to build a booking page that never shows a slot you're already using.

2 Tell Starch to build your interview scheduling page: specify the three meeting types (phone screen, working session, final call), your available days and hours, and how much buffer you need around event-heavy days.

3 Connect Gmail — Starch syncs your inbox so the Email Agent can read incoming candidate threads, identify where each person is in the process, and queue up the right draft response.

4 Tell Starch what your confirmation and follow-up emails should sound like — paste in an example of how you write, or describe your tone — and the Email Agent drafts every outbound message in that voice.

5 Set up the phone screen stage: candidates get the booking link in their confirmation email, they pick a slot, and a calendar event is created for both of you automatically. No back-and-forth.

6 Before the working session, Starch drafts a prep email with your standard scenario brief attached — you review it once and it goes out to every candidate automatically at the right stage.

7 Turn on Meeting Notes for your video interview calls — Starch captures the transcript, generates a summary with key decisions and any concerns raised, and assigns the debrief action item (hire / pass) to you before the call even ends.

8 After each debrief, the Email Agent drafts the candidate-facing status update — advance or decline — so it's ready to send the same afternoon instead of sitting in your mental to-do pile for three days.

9 Task Manager tracks the hard blockers: reference checks requested, offer letter drafted, start date confirmed. Set P1 for anything that will delay the hire if it slips; P2 for coordination tasks. Starch alerts you if a P1 goes stale.

10 At the end of a hiring round, search your Meeting Notes archive to compare candidates side by side — what each person said about their largest event managed, how they handled a vendor crisis — rather than reconstructing it from memory.

11 Once the hire is made, close the scheduling page for that role, archive the candidate notes, and use the same Starch setup for the next open position by forking the configuration and updating the role-specific details.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

April 2026 coordinator hire — 4-week process, 11 candidates

Sample numbers from a real run

Phone screens completed	11
Working sessions completed	4
Final calls completed	2
Candidate emails sent (all stages)	38
Hours saved vs manual scheduling + email	6

You posted a coordinator role in late March and 11 candidates applied within a week. Every applicant got a Gmail confirmation draft from the Email Agent within the same business day — you reviewed the first two, saw it had your voice right, and started approving with one click. All 11 booked their own phone screens via the Starch scheduling page; zero back-and-forth emails about availability. You ran 11 calls in a week. Meeting Notes captured each one, flagged that two candidates mentioned they'd handled events over 500 guests (a filter you care about), and had a summary waiting before your next call started. You moved 4 to working sessions — Starch drafted the scenario brief email automatically. After working sessions, Meeting Notes surfaced that one candidate asked clarifying questions about vendor relationships while another skipped straight to logistics: that distinction was sitting in your searchable archive, not your memory. You made the hire in 26 days. The Task Manager caught that you'd forgotten to request one reference check — P1 overdue alert on a Tuesday morning — and it went out that afternoon.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time from application to phone screen booked (target: under 48 hours)

Candidate drop-off rate between stages (how many accept the working session invite vs. ghost after phone screen)

Days to fill — total calendar days from job post to signed offer

Email response lag — how many hours between a candidate email arriving and your reply going out

Interview-to-hire ratio per hiring round (are you screening efficiently or interviewing too wide)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Calendly standalone

Handles booking well but doesn't connect to your Gmail drafts, interview notes, or task tracking — you're still stitching four tools together manually.

HoneyBook (which you already use for clients)

Built for client-facing workflows and proposals, not internal hiring loops — you'd be bending a client management tool to do HR work it wasn't designed for.

Google Docs + Gmail + Calendar (current default)

Free and familiar but produces a hiring process that lives in your head — no archive, no automated follow-ups, no debrief history you can search later.

Greenhouse or Lever (ATS)

Purpose-built applicant tracking but priced and scoped for teams hiring at volume — overkill if you're filling 2-3 roles a year and don't want another subscription to manage.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scheduling, email agent, meeting notes all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

I already use Google Calendar and Gmail — do I have to move everything into a new tool?

No. Starch connects directly to both. Your Google Calendar stays where it is — Starch syncs it on a schedule and reads your availability to build the booking page. Gmail stays where it is — the Email Agent reads your inbox and drafts replies there. You're adding a layer on top of what you already use, not replacing it.

Can the scheduling page handle multiple open roles at the same time — say, a coordinator and a production assistant?

Yes. Tell Starch you need two separate hiring flows with different meeting types, availability windows, and confirmation emails. Each role gets its own booking page and email sequence. You can describe both in one prompt and Starch sets them up independently.

What if a candidate books a slot that conflicts with an event I just added to my calendar?

Because Starch syncs your Google Calendar on a schedule, the booking page reflects your real availability as it updates. If you add an event day to your calendar, those slots stop showing. The sync isn't instantaneous — there's a short lag on the schedule — so if you have a very last-minute calendar change, block the time manually in Google Calendar as a buffer.

Will the Email Agent actually sound like me, or will candidates get a generic AI-sounding reply?

The agent drafts based on how you describe your voice or examples you give it. You review before anything sends. If the first draft is off, tell Starch what to adjust — 'shorter,' 'more direct,' 'skip the pleasantries' — and it updates. You're approving every candidate-facing message, so nothing goes out that you haven't cleared.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? I'm handling candidate personal data here.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your agency works with enterprise clients who require vendor compliance documentation before you can use new tools, that's worth flagging. For most independent event agencies running their own hiring, this is not a day-to-day blocker, but it's an honest limit to name.

My video interviews are on Zoom. Will Meeting Notes work with Zoom calls?

You can connect Zoom from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live. Tell Starch to pull your completed Zoom recordings or transcripts into the Meeting Notes workflow and generate summaries from those. If Zoom transcript export isn't available in your plan, Starch can automate the download through your browser — no additional API setup needed.