12 Key Metrics to Track Interview Coordination Efficiency

The United States fills 66 million jobs a year (there’ve already been nearly 12 million hires in January and February of this year), and well over a billion interviews take place annually to fill those roles. And given that it takes between 30 minutes and 2 hours to schedule a single interview, that’s a world of time companies dedicate to what recruiting coordinators—Talent Acquisition’s tireless interview-schedulers—call “calendar Tetris.” You can see why some companies keep onboarding more recruiting coordinators (RCs) to manage the sheer volume of scheduling. 

Of course, whatever your tech stack, recruiting metrics should be top-of-mind for every Head of Talent, Talent Leader, Recruiting Coordination Manager, and Recruiting Operations Manager. Metrics are the only way an organization can confidently answer the vital question: “How do we hire high-quality talent that’s the best fit for our company—faster?” But given the amount of time and energy that gets invested in scheduling interviews, keeping the lines of communication wide open between candidates and the organization, and ensuring every hiring process runs smoothly for all stakeholders, RC metrics in particular should be tracked both carefully and thoughtfully. 

We spoke with a handful of talent professionals (Jeremy Lyons, RecOps expert and Co-founder @ RecOps Collective; Amy Wood, Head of Recruiting Operations @ Anthropic; and Geva Whyte, Recruiting Coordinator formerly @ Lyft, Stripe, OpenAI, Google Fiber) to learn more about the metrics they’ve used to track both RC performance and interview coordination efficiency. Whether you’re a Head of Talent, a RecOps professional, or a Recruiting Coordination Manager, you’ll want to start here when it comes to measuring and optimizing interview scheduling and interview coordination for candidates. After all, these metrics have significant trickle-down effects, as they both directly and indirectly impact offer-accept rates and time-to-hire.

“RCs might schedule anywhere from 20 to 40 interviews a week. That’s a combination of phone screens and onsite interviews, the latter of which are a bit more time-consuming to schedule because there are multiple people involved at that stage. Having two or three calendars open at once to determine whose availability matches the candidate's open window is probably the most tedious part of the process.”

• Geva Whyte, Recruiting Coordinator formerly @ Lyft, Stripe, OpenAI, Google Fiber

1. Time to resolve an interview request (aka Request turnaround time)

This number gives you a high-level sense of how quickly your coordinators are working to schedule interviews with candidates across the organization. We’ve seen teams track both median and average time-to-resolve, though the benefit of tracking median time is that it removes any outlying numbers in the data set that might skew the average time, ultimately giving you a more accurate representation of how long it typically takes your RCs to schedule an interview. (Note: This metric drops exponentially with automated Interview scheduling tools.)

But don’t stop at overall time—especially if you’re a larger organization. The time-to-resolve metric can be filtered down by: 

• Average/median time to resolve by region/geo/location
• Average/median time to resolve by coordinator
• Average/median time to resolve by hiring manager/interviewer
• Average/median time to resolve by department

… and more. The more filters you use to slice the data, the more likely you are to uncover best practices in one area of the organization that can be leveraged in other areas. Is one coordinator’s time-to-resolve an hour faster than your other RCs’ time? What can they share about their workflow that would benefit their peers? 

“In the past, I’ve tracked both median and average days to resolve—from the time the request is put in to the time the interview is confirmed with the candidate. It’s important that our interviewers confirm they can make the time, and that all RSVPs are ‘yes’ on the calendar, before we call a request ‘resolved.’ This reduces whiplash for both the Ops team and candidate.”

• Amy Wood, Head of Recruiting Operations @ Anthropic 

2. Time between recruiter request and first contact 

This metric is a specific slice of time in the larger time-to-resolve metric. It measures the amount of time that passes between when a recruiter puts in a request—whether through a ticketing system, the organization’s ATS, or elsewhere—to reach out to a candidate and the time that the coordinator hits “send” on a request for the candidate’s availability. Ideally this metric is measured in minutes rather than hours (and certainly not in days!). 

Ultimately this metric is about RC performance when it comes to turnaround time, and—when optimized—it ensures that qualified applicants get swift responses from the organization while they’re likely also applying elsewhere. If this metric starts creeping up from minutes into hours, it’s important to know why. If it’s a single coordinator taking too long to turn a request around, you may need to discuss prioritization with them. But if whole swaths of the coordination team are slow to make first contact, it’s worth examining your tools, your training, or your coordinators’ bandwidth: How much time are they being asked to spend on things other than interview scheduling? 

“Ideal time to resolve an interview scheduling request varies from company to company. At Google Fiber, we aim to address new requests within 24 to 48 hours. Our metric is RC response time rather than time-to-calendar, because if a candidate doesn’t get back to me, I can only send so many follow-ups. So we're not held to the time it takes to get an interview on the calendar—only time-to-reachout. Managers can see how long on average it takes to move a new request to a request-in-progress, so if that time starts creeping up for a particular RC, they can reach out and ask: ‘What’s happening here? Do you have all the information you need to reach out to the candidate?’”

• Geva Whyte, Recruiting Coordinator formerly @ Lyft, Stripe, OpenAI, Google Fiber

3. Time between recruiter request and interview scheduled

“Time to resolve” can mean any number of things for the Recruiting org—is a request “resolved” once the RC reaches out to the candidate, once the hiring manager has confirmed their availability and the interview is on the calendar, or once all parties have RSVP’d?—and so will vary across companies. But the time between recruiter request and interview scheduled leaves no room for interpretation. 

This number will necessarily be larger than the prior metric (time to RC’s first contact), because it accounts for both the amount of time it takes the candidate to respond and the amount of time it takes the interviewer to confirm their availability—and it’s a window that gets drawn out if scheduling requires a lot of back-and-forths. (A scheduling tool will alleviate this.) While an RC can’t exactly be held to the amount of time it takes a candidate to reply, it’s worth tracking this metric to uncover best practices for prompting talent to respond with their availability more quickly. Is there information that can be included in the reachout—a compelling detail or two about the hiring manager they’ll be speaking with, for example—that would make them more eager to respond right away? 

Because this metric also accounts for the email ping-pong it might take to finally schedule an interview, it can offer insights into how to optimize messaging—around how many windows to offer candidates, for example. If 75% of candidates are responding to say they can’t make any of the available time slots offered—essentially extending the time-to-interview-scheduled metric—your RCs will want to start including more options in their reachouts. Another solution here is candidate.fyi’s suggested availability which pulls from interviewers calendars. In this scenario, when a candidate goes to leave their availability they’ll also see a suggested availability block. The goal is to limit the back and fourth. 

“I see a lot of organizations track both recruiter-request-to-first-contact and recruiter-request-to-interview-scheduled metrics. I think the industry is still trying to figure out which is the more optimal number to track. RCs shouldn’t be penalized for a slow response from a candidate, though I think monitoring the number of days to interview-scheduled gives managers and talent leaders a sense of how enthusiastic their candidates are to interview, and how diligently the RC follows up on non-responses.”

• Jeremy Lyons, RecOps expert and Co-founder @ RecOps Collective

4. Percentage of interviews scheduled during candidates’ first available window

Speaking of email ping-pong, we’ve all experienced how back-and-forth messaging works when interview scheduling is done manually: Candidates provide RCs with a handful of windows that they’re free to interview, and the RC then plays “calendar Tetris” with hiring manager and interviewer availability. What can be particularly anxiety-inducing—not to mention time-consuming—for RCs is when they have to reach out to managers and executives (or their EAs) within the organization to ask if they’d be willing to move their schedules around to accommodate an important interview. 

Ideally your organization has recruiting as one of its core values, and hiring managers at all levels understand how important it is to prioritize conversations with candidates. RCs should be trained and encouraged to get candidates in the door as soon as possible—even if it means uncomfortable conversations with hiring managers or working with candidates to help find creative solutions to work an interview into their schedules more quickly. 

“The path of least resistance is often to schedule a candidate at a time that will require the least amount of arm-twisting for the interviewer. But if you are tracking the percentage of interviews that are scheduled during the candidate’s first available window, and emphasizing its importance company-wide, it can prompt RCs to get past the awkwardness of reaching out to high-level people in the company to request that they move their schedules around. In some ways this helps prepare the RCs for future roles where they are going to have to have some executive presence with requests.”

• Jeremy Lyons, RecOps expert and Co-founder @ RecOps Collective

5. Number of interview requests pending (or Total open requests per coordinator)

This essential metric gives Heads of Talent and Recruiting Ops an overall sense of what the Recruiting Coordination team is up against. Ideally you want your RCs’ candidate.fyi scheduling queue, “request inbox”, or “ticket inbox” continually approaching zero: The more requests the team has pending, the less efficient your RCs’ turnaround time is. This is one number both coordinators and coordinator managers should consistently have their eyes on. Do you need to automate your coordination efforts to get this metric down? Do you need to better train the team? (Less ideally, do you need to bring more RCs into the organization?)

Another metric worth tracking—depending on how your RC efforts are structured—is open requests by coordinator. (Recruiting can also track pending requests by region, department, and more within a scheduling queue) If coordinators are assigned requests or tickets rather than self-select them as they come in, it’s important to know whether—and why—any individual RC is struggling with their request load. This is where candidate.fyi’s capacity reporting comes into play

“From a RecOps perspective, there are a few reasons to track total open tickets per coordinator. Monitoring open scheduling requests helps us understand RC capacity and redistribute workloads to ensure equity. It allows us to track our internal number against benchmarks or targets to identify where we might improve. And it gives us visibility into the pipeline—how many interviews are forthcoming?—so we can better forecast hiring.”

• Amy Wood, Head of Recruiting Operations @ Anthropic

6. Number of completed interview requests (or Number of interviews scheduled per coordinator)

This metric gives RecOps a sense of the turnaround time of every RC in your organization. It’s a way of discovering which are your most efficient coordinators when it comes to interview scheduling, and which RCs are either moving too slowly overall or not prioritizing scheduling because they’re juggling too many other things. Track this per day, per week, per month—or all three—to note trends. Make these individual metrics visible across coordinators so they can benchmark themselves against their peers.

You might also have an overall “Number of completed interview requests” that you track in your dashboard (or wherever else you track your metrics), and that’s visible to the team. Watching this number increase can help RCs feel the value they bring the organization in what can sometimes feel like a thankless role. It’s a metric that can be a powerful motivator for the whole team—for example, trying to exceed last week’s number in the spirit of collaboration.

7. Total number of reschedules (or Reschedule rate)

Rescheduled interviews are inevitable—whether it’s because something came up for the candidate or for the interviewer. They often take more time than the initial scheduling took because of the number of stakeholders who have to pivot together to find a new time. Knowing how many reschedules a given coordinator is handling at a time helps RC managers better distribute workloads equitably across the team. 

Reschedules should be broken down into two different categories: those requested by candidates and those requested by interviewers. If most of your reschedules are candidate-driven, this is a signal to look at things like recruiter engagement or analyze the clarity of your interview schedules and messaging. If most of your reschedules are interviewer-driven, you may need to assess whether to tap more interviewers, or whether you need to have a conversation with particular hiring managers or hiring team members about prioritizing interviews over certain internal meetings or project deadlines. 

While we’re at it, you should also track the number of interviews canceled altogether (hopefully you’ll see very few of these—and they’ll be more candidate-driven than interviewer-driven). Both reschedule and cancellation metrics (along with funnel conversion metrics) will help you make strong hypotheses around down-funnel metrics like time-to-hire. You can automate your reschedule and cancellation reporting with tools like candidate.fyi which will let you see whether it was candidate-driven or staff-driven.

“Reschedules are almost always tracked and accounted for in a mature recruiting organization, because they take up RCs’ time. This is especially important for load balancing purposes: It’s important to know the ratio of time spent scheduling new interviews to time spent rescheduling ones that were already on the calendar. If I’m working on a role for which there tends to be a lot of rescheduling, that means I can’t attend to the scheduling requests for new candidates entering the funnel. But if we’re tracking how many reschedules an RC is working on, we can assign incoming requests to someone else to help pick up the slack.”

• Geva Whyte, Recruiting Coordinator formerly @ Lyft, Stripe, OpenAI, Google Fiber

“The most important thing for recruiting organizations tracking reschedule rates is to distinguish between reschedules that happen due to interviewers’ conflicts and reschedules that happen due to candidates’ conflicts. Typically, you can do more about the former from the standpoint of optimization—whether that’s retraining your hiring teams on the overall importance of recruiting to the organization or creating team-wide “no-meeting” blocks so that interviewers simply don’t have the option for conflicts to arise.” 

• Jeremy Lyons, RecOps expert and Co-founder @ RecOps Collective

8. Interviews per month goal

An “interviews per month” or “tickets per month” goal will be based on the number of people the organization plans to hire, as well as on the number of interviews you’ve historically needed to make those hires. In other words, if your organization has a hiring target of 2x in the next year, how many interviews need to be scheduled every day in order to meet that target? Knowing this will help you determine your monthly interview goal. 

For example, if your engineering team is hiring 20 engineers and you’ve historically interviewed about 6 engineers for every hire, that’s around 120 interviews you’ll likely need to conduct to see those hires. (Note: include historical data on reschedules and cancellations here!) This metric is essentially a way of monitoring whether you’re on track to hit your hiring goals in a timely manner. Simply put, if you’re not interviewing enough people, you’ll fall short of your quarterly headcount goals. 

“Tickets-per-month goal is an initial KPI: Here’s how many interviews we need to schedule to make our hires this quarter. We goal coordinators separately on that, but it’s also great to have a team overview. If one coordinator doesn’t have much on their plate, they can help another coordinator out knowing the team hasn’t quite hit its goal yet.”

• Amy Wood, Head of Recruiting Operations @ Anthropic

9. Coordinator workload

Tracking RC workloads around interview coordination and scheduling ensures that candidates don’t fall through the cracks and/or experience frustrating lags in response time. It also prevents coordinator burnout on the one hand, and a feeling of ineffectualness on the other. Ultimately, talent leaders want their teams to experience a sense of equity and mutual support. Tracking coordinator workloads quickly alerts leaders and Ops when this isn’t happening, allowing them to quickly pivot and redistribute work for the sake of their RCs.  

“We take more of a round-robin approach instead of having a single coordinator focus on a department, or region, or be paired with certain recruiters. As scheduling tickets come in, anyone can help with them. That’s why a workload view is so valuable for us: On any given week we can say, ‘Coordinator X is overloaded right now, but Coordinator Y isn’t; so maybe they can take on some of that scheduling workload.’”

• Amy Wood, Head of Recruiting Operations @ Anthropic

10. Candidate NPS scores (or Candidate experience survey results)

At the core of an RC’s role is candidate experience (CX), and talent uses their experience as a candidate with your organization to gauge how you’d value and treat them as an employee. Is your process thoughtful, polished, and—perhaps above all—respectful of their time? You can discover this through a candidate net promoter score (cNPS) or through pulse checks offered throughout the process. (With mid-process pulse checks, hiring teams can collect candidate sentiment in real-time, identify key components of the experience that need improvement, and optimize on the fly.)

Pay particular attention to experiences around interview coordination. How easy was the scheduling experience for the candidate? How able was the RC to get them in during their earliest available window? How quickly did they respond to the candidate? How strong was communication overall? 

“Some organizations track candidate satisfaction metrics that pertain specifically to the RC. These are obtained through a candidate experience survey, in addition to the net promoter score. So alongside a broad question like: ‘On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your candidate experience?’ we might ask something like: ‘How would you rate your interview scheduling experience?’ or ‘How was your experience of working with your recruiting coordinator?’ Stripe asked a question like this on its candidate surveys, and it was important from a process-improvement standpoint. Numbers are great, but qualitative comments straight from the mouths of candidates are invaluable.”

• Geva Whyte, Recruiting Coordinator formerly @ Lyft, Stripe, OpenAI, Google Fiber

11. Interviewer and hiring manager survey scores

The experience RCs provide isn’t only about candidates; it also touches hiring managers and other members of the interviewing team. Survey these roles after every hire and ask a question about their experience with interview coordination: How easeful was the scheduling process from their perspective? How strong was the communication around everything from why certain windows were chosen to how reschedules were dealt with?

“It’s a great rule of thumb to check in with hiring managers and interviewers after every hire is made to learn how their experience was with interview coordination. Post-hire surveys aren’t just for candidates! How was the scheduling experience for all stakeholders involved?”

• Jeremy Lyons, RecOps expert and Co-founder @ RecOps Collective

12. Time to hire

As opposed to time-to-fill, which measures the number of days between the time a job req is approved and the time a candidate accepts an offer, time to hire measures the number of days between the time a candidate applies and the time they accept an offer. In other words, time-to-hire is the number of days it takes a candidate to move through your hiring funnel, from application to offer-accept. 

Granted, a lot of factors influence time-to-hire, and not all of them have to do with RC performance or speed of interview coordination. But while time-to-hire more broadly provides a clear indication of how your recruitment team is performing overall, the metric certainly includes how quickly candidates are moving from one interview stage to the next. So while there isn’t a direct correlation to RCs in this metric, it’s one your coordinators should keep an eye on. Is there something they can do in their roles to bring down the organization’s current time-to-hire metric?

“Metrics like time-to-hire are always good to know, because we're a team and we want both our recruiters and our candidates to be successful. But recruiting coordinators generally aren’t held to those high-level metrics, because there could be any number of reasons why time-to-hire is what it is—whether the hiring manager scoped out the role correctly, whether the sourcer was initially aligned with the hiring manager’s needs, and so on. RCs play an important part in time-to-hire, but there are a lot of things that aren’t in our control as far as that metric goes.”

• Geva Whyte, Recruiting Coordinator formerly @ Lyft, Stripe, OpenAI, Google Fiber

At candidate.fyi, we’re solving for the candidate experience—especially when it comes to interview coordination efficiency and ease of scheduling for all stakeholders. Almost every one of the 12 metrics above is automatically optimized with interview scheduling software. That’s because interview scheduling platforms include everything from hassle-free self-booking and availability submission for candidates, to smart slot suggestions based on all participants’ availability, to automated calendar holds, to load balancing for equitable RC workloads, and more. 

Tracking these RC metrics is an essential step toward improving your overall interview coordination efficiency. But automating your scheduling process? Is a giant leap in the direction of getting maximum efficiency out of your RCs’ most time-consuming activity. 

“Scheduling is inherently complicated. This is especially the case for a global company like Automattic, since we’re working in over 90 countries with a lot of time zones. But candidate.fyi makes the world of later-stage scheduling virtually effortless. Because the portal is integrated with our ATS, it pulls in all the data so our specialists don’t have to manually enter it. What’s the source? Who’s the recruiter on the role, and what time is the interview scheduled for? All those details are automatically taken care of. LinkedIn hasn’t done this; our ATS can’t do it. But candidate.fyi integrates scheduling with the entire candidate experience—seamlessly.”

• Nitin Moorjani, Director of Talent Operations @ Automattic 

“Scheduling doesn’t slip through the cracks anymore thanks to candidate.fyi’s well-designed request dashboard, which shows each interview’s progress bar and accepted invite status. The availability and self-scheduling workflows are smooth and easy to use—especially for candidates, who often share how easy and enjoyable the overall experience is. I also love that separate calendar invites are auto-created for the candidate and the interviewer. Editing the invite template only once for each job saves us a ton of time, while allowing us to offer a very white-glove, tailored experience.”

• James Parker, Head of Talent @ Tropic