How to Automate Your Interview Scheduling

As a recruiter, it can be overwhelming to juggle so many tasks all at once, and the process of manually scheduling interviews with hundreds or thousands of candidates is especially a drain on time, effort, and resources. The back-and-forth between recruiter and candidate to schedule an interview is time that can be better spent on other touchpoints in the recruiting process.

With the right technology, recruiters can balance their workload while maintaining engaging and meaningful relationships with their candidates at every step of the recruiting process.

What is Automated Scheduling?

Interview scheduling software uses artificial intelligence to set up a system that allows for candidates to easily schedule an interview based on the recruiters' availability. The system will collect the recruiter's available date and time slots, and compile them into a list for candidates to pick from. 

Complex scheduling workflows are also available, which include sequential, panel, and round-robin interviews, and can include additional team members like hiring managers. That's all possible too, but more on that later in this blog post.

Automating your interview scheduling mitigates long wait times and ensures that candidates can move onto the next step of the hiring process as soon as possible.

Why should employers automate interview scheduling?

1) It saves a lot of time

Scheduling is extremely repetitive and takes up a lot of time, especially if you're looking to fill many roles at once. Automating this task frees up your recruiters' schedule and allocates their time to more important touchpoints in the recruiting process, such as interviewing. 

2) It improves the candidate experience

Traditional recruiting can often feel drawn out for candidates, with long wait times in between emails - and hours to days before scheduling is confirmed. Automated scheduling is a way for candidates to take the lead on their application as they can schedule an interview with a recruiter at their convenience. This enhances the candidate experience and makes job seekers feel valued and respected. 

3) It's scalable

Whether you're a small or large business, automated scheduling can help you meet your hiring goals. Your automated scheduling chatbot can host many scheduling conversations at once, so it can handle any number of candidates.

As you continue to grow and develop your talent acquisition strategy, you have a flexible tool that can be adjusted to meet your current business needs. 

What types of interview workflows can be automated?

1. One-on-One

For scheduling a single interview with a single interviewer. We provide the candidate with a choice of time slots that the interviewer is available.

2. Sequential

For scheduling consecutive interviews with single interviewers. We provide the candidate with a choice of time slots that the first interviewer and the second interviewer are available, one after the other.

 3. Panel

For scheduling a single interview that has one or more interviewers. We provide the candidate with a choice of time slots that the interviewers are available at the same time.

4. Round Robin

For scheduling a single interview with the interviewer who has the most availability. We provide the candidate with a choice of time slots that the interviewer is available.

Automated scheduling is a great way to reduce time-to-hire and save on time and costs. With less wait time between emails, recruiters can provide a positive candidate experience and hire the best talent, faster.

Automated Interview Scheduling enables candidates to schedule time directly on recruiters' calendars instantly.

There's always room for improvement when it comes to recruiting.

Traditional recruiting consists of manual screening, scheduling, and interviewing. This doesn't sound too tough on recruiters when there are only a dozen candidates waiting to be met - but what happens when your business scales? Hundreds to thousands of candidates can apply to your job listings in a short time frame, putting a huge workload on your recruiters' shoulders. 

This pain point presents itself as a window of opportunity to improve the efficiency of your recruiting strategy. 

Over the recent years, automation gained traction in the recruiting space. Now, it's used at many different stages of the recruiting process to help ease the burden of repetitive tasks such as interview scheduling. 

Hope it was useful. This article was inspired by the everyday work at XOR and the Marketing Department that creates content for all the Recruiter’s out there.