We’re well into 2024, and workforce participation is still below pre-pandemic levels. In other words, it’s still a candidate’s market: According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, even if every unemployed person were to find a job, there would still be 3 million unfilled openings in the country. In order to capture quality candidates in this time of scarcity (you know, the ones who are only on the market for 10 days before they land their next role), companies have little choice but to accelerate their hiring processes. Automated interview scheduling software is one game-changing solution for that acceleration—a solution that’s become all the more important as recruiters are tasked with “doing more with less,” and scheduling is their most time-consuming activity.
Manually scheduling candidate interviews is on the verge of being a thing of the past—in fact, it has to be, if teams want to compete. Automated interview scheduling software has already transformed the hiring landscape. Teams that haven’t brought it on yet are risking employer brand, recruiter fatigue, candidate quality, and making their hires at all.
What is automated interview scheduling software?
We’re glad you asked. Interview scheduling software is a solution for talent acquisition teams that automates scheduling for everyone involved in the hiring process—recruiters, hiring managers, interview teams, and candidates. It does so by integrating with participants’ calendars, syncing schedules, uncovering the most optimized times to interview, and sending out confirmation and reminder emails—without the sometimes weeks-long back-and-forth recruiters and candidates engage in to schedule a single meeting. In short, interview scheduling software automates one of the most time-consuming, tedious, complex, and inconsistent activities in recruiting, with immense ROI on hiring efficiency.
“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
What are the benefits of automated interview scheduling software?
Broadly speaking, automated interview scheduling software increases recruiters’ efficiency, reduces hiring teams’ fatigue, eliminates scheduling errors and biases, enhances employer brand, decreases candidate ghosting and dropoff, speeds up time to hire, and more. Here’s what those advantages look like in greater detail:
Increases recruiter efficiency and returns a huge time-savings ROI
Talent acquisition teams spent 42% of their time scheduling interviews in 2022. That’s nearly half a work week—every week—spent on administrative tasks to solve “the availability puzzle” for every candidate. The result is an inefficient hiring engine that directly impacts the company’s ability to attract and win top talent. Automated interview scheduling eliminates the multitude of back-and-forth emails: Candidates self-schedule (and reschedule!) or leave availability themselves, the software sends automatic calendar holds once they’ve selected their time slot, and then auto-updates those holds to confirmed meetings once all parties have responded. Thanks to intelligent slot matching, interviews are scheduled in a matter of seconds, rather than days (or weeks).
When recruiters are removed as the “middlemen” from the entire complex process of constantly-in-flux schedules, they get that time back to engage in the aspects of hiring they play vital roles in: establishing employer brand, optimizing processes, strategizing to improve offer-accept rates, uncovering top candidates for the organization, building deeper and more meaningful relationships with them, and providing them with exceptional experiences at every stage of the funnel. Automated interview scheduling software also supports hiring managers, who often get caught in the scheduling web, allowing them to devote more attention to evaluating candidates and decision-making. This impacts quality of hire down the road.
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Reduces hiring team fatigue
Because they don’t offer visibility into the entire hiring team’s calendars at once, manual scheduling processes often result in the same team member (often a top performer) getting tapped for interviews again and again. This decreases morale and diminishes the strength of the interview, because the interviewer is fatigued or frustrated, struggling to keep up with their own work while supporting the team’s hiring.
Good automated interview scheduling software will automatically balance interviewers’ workloads for fair and flexible rotations. Recruiting teams can set weekly or daily limits on the number of interviews hiring team members have, so their objectives and KPIs don’t take the back burner. More fairly distributed interviews prevents employee burnout and maintains team efficiency.
Eliminates scheduling errors and biases
Interview scheduling doesn’t occur in a vacuum: It takes place in the context of high expectations from both hiring managers and candidates around velocity and quality. Managers need positions filled fast with best-fit talent, and candidates demand hiring experiences that are both outstanding and swift. These apparently-incompatible expectations give rise to stress, errors, and bias (recruiters unconsciously—or consciously!—prioritizing scheduling the candidates they’ve already decided they like). There’s little that feels worse for an interviewer than realizing they no-showed a conversation with a terrific candidate—and a missed opportunity to hire them—because of miscommunication around date and time. Yet manual scheduling processes are fundamentally error-prone, and occasional mishaps like these are a given when teams opt to schedule interviews without software.
Automated interview scheduling software gives recruiting and hiring teams the best of both worlds: speed and accuracy. No more calendar errors, overlooked rescheduling emails, unsent interview reminders, certain candidates being passed over to prioritize others, or candidate confusion about the length of the interview they’re showing up for. The process becomes a well-oiled machine—and when the machine is working quietly in the background, that creates space for more human connections.
Offers optimal time slotting and stakeholder flexibility
Traditional approaches to interview scheduling often mean interviewers are scheduled for non-optimal times. If one of the sessions requires three interviewers, the final interview of the day has to be with the hiring manager, and breaks need to be scheduled between conversations for the candidate’s sake, someone is bound to have a meeting that interrupts a wide-open morning window for concerted work efforts rather than that odd 45 minutes between meetings later on in the afternoon, when interviewing would be more ideal. (And someone else—namely the coordinator—is going to experience a world of chaos trying to calibrate all those calendars.)
Automated interview scheduling software scans participant calendars and automatically identifies optimal interview times based on the availability of both interviewers and candidates. Hiring managers and team members can block time slots when they’re unavailable or would prefer not to interview, candidates submit their preferred availability, and the software’s smart slot suggestions intelligently match all participants’ favored times. If one party needs to reschedule, the software extends that flexibility by re-matching, and updates everyone in real-time.
Empowers candidates and strengthens the candidate experience
Because it invites them to self-book or leave their availability, automated interview scheduling software ensures candidates feel empowered to take the next step in their hiring process, rather than suspending plans and holding their breath for days until a recruiter gets back to them (waiting is, by far, the most frustrating part of the job search).
Automated scheduling platforms ensure the scheduling (and rescheduling) happens in real-time, with user-friendly interfaces and no hassle. Once scheduled, candidates receive automated reminders that indicate your organization is on top of its game. This builds trust, retains talent’s interest throughout the process, and keeps candidates engaged—after all, a hiring process that’s modern, organized, thoughtful, and deeply considerate of its candidates speaks volumes about the values of the company.
Boosts employer brand
This follows from the previous points. When candidates experience agency, flexibility, clear communication, speed, and visibility into your process, it translates to positive reviews, referrals from their networks, and an increased likelihood that they’ll use your product or service themselves, becoming customers whether or not they become employees. (Compare this with the 72% of job seekers who say they would share negative hiring experiences online or with their communities, and the 50% of candidates who say they wouldn’t purchase goods or services from an organization after an subpar hiring experience with them.)
As much as some organizations would like it to be otherwise, employer brand isn’t about what the company says about itself. It’s what people collectively say about the company, based on their firsthand experiences with it. Automated interview scheduling software leads to great personal experiences with an organization, which results in a strong employer brand. And a strong employer brand conjures a larger talent pool, filled with more (and more diverse) top talent. In other words, automation creates a virtuous circle.
Decreases candidate dropoff and speeds up time-to-hire
Coordinating schedules to plan a single interview—let alone hundreds of them—is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the hiring process. When a candidate takes a day to respond with the times they’re available to interview, and the recruiter takes a day to respond to that email (and so on), those stretches of time are ripe for withdrawal—or for ghosting altogether. In a competitive hiring market, in-demand candidates are interviewing with multiple companies, and your competitor with the automated interview scheduling software may be halfway through the entire hiring process with that candidate by the time you manually schedule the first interview. (Remember, on average, top talent finds their next job in 10 days.)
Fewer bottlenecks mean accelerated hiring, which means fewer candidates dropping out. (44% of candidates have ghosted an employer, more than 20% of whom went silent when the company took too long to get back to them.) In order to hire the best talent, companies must reduce hiring time. Automated interview scheduling software allows for precisely this, as it allows hiring team members to meet candidates more quickly, and ensures you don’t have to start all over again with the next candidate because your top choice dropped out after waiting too long to schedule their next interview with you.
What to look for in automated interview scheduling software
Ultimately, automated interview scheduling software is a win for all stakeholders involved. Candidates experience a fast, thoughtful, empowering process with fewer silent spaces between touchpoints. Recruiters get back the better portion of their weeks to do the work that makes them feel vital and of consequence to the company. And organizations see a more efficient, cost-effective hiring process that results in higher-quality hires.
Yet while there’s a virtually-certain ROI in implementing automated interview scheduling software, some platforms offer more than others. Here are some features and capabilities to look for when you’re evaluating providers:
- Load balancing: Does the platform allow the team to set weekly or daily interview limits per person and auto-rotate interviewers for fair and balanced workloads?
- Smart slot suggestions: Does the platform optimize interview timing by auto-suggesting the best time slots based on the availability of all stakeholders?
- Seamless ATS integration: A scheduling platform will naturally sync with participants’ calendars, but does it also automatically update the ATS in real-time each time an interview is scheduled?
- Automated calendar holds: Even before all parties have confirmed, will the platform place holds on invitees’ calendars to efficiently reserve interview times? Will it auto-update holds to scheduled events once all parties have confirmed?
- Tailored invites: Does the platform create separate invites for candidates and interviewees, with just the right details for each party?
- Mobile-friendly interface: Is the user experience just as intuitive and seamless when candidates and hiring teams are scheduling on-the-go as it is when they’re at their desktops?
- Email reminders: Does the scheduling platform automate reminders when candidates’ and hiring teams members’ interviews are approaching?
- Integration with a candidate portal: Does the platform seamlessly communicate with your team’s candidate portal for a cohesive candidate experience?
At candidate.fyi, we’re big proponents of an integrated recruiting tech stack: It keeps your processes simple, your operations team happy, your data unified, and your costs low. That’s why we built a scheduling tool that talks seamlessly to our candidate portal, the source-of-truth where candidates “live” while they’re in process with you. With the portal-plus-scheduling combination, teams can deliver employer brand content at exactly the right stages of the hiring process to keep candidates engaged, give talent self-serve information about each stage of the process, collect candidate feedback on a stage-by-stage basis for a more granular view of the candidate experience and how to optimize it… and enhance candidate experience even more by giving them agency (and speed) over their own interview time slots.
“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
We’d love to tell you more about our interview scheduling tool. Get in touch if you’re interested!
