« All Simplicant Blogs

3 Ways To Improve Interview Scheduling

If the phrase “interview scheduling” sends a chill down your spine, know you are not alone. Recruiting the best candidates is not easy, and is one reason why more companies are taking to social recruitment to find the top talent they need.

But once you have connected with talent using social media and their applications arrive in your applicant tracking system, the next step in the hiring workflow can sometimes be even more complicated. Scheduling interviews with smart people is a pain, especially if you found a passive candidate with a traditional 9-to-5 job. Finding a gap in your passive candidate’s schedule can be hard enough without considering your own packed calendar. 

However, you might not be the recruiting lead on every position. Sometimes your candidate will need to meet with several other people in your organization before signing on the dotted line and decorating their new office space.

Every additional person who needs to be involved in the recruitment interviewing process means another calendar to consider. This can easily make the recruitment process a logistical scheduling nightmare.

What can you do to streamline your interview scheduling process and quickly get the best candidates into your open positions?

Here are a few tips to take your interview scheduling from scary to scary efficient in your recruitment process:

Take a hard look at your recruitment process

Your recruitment process is everything you use to get great candidates from mere career site visitors to valuable employees. This process includes your social recruitment and candidate sourcing strategies, the capabilities of your applicant tracking system, the workflow across your hiring funnel and even your interview scheduling. Ignoring the inefficiencies of your recruitment management process could prevent you from moving fast when trying to get the best talent in for face-to-face meetings.

Candidate experience is an important part of your company brand identity and can make a huge difference in the quality of candidate your organization receives. To attract the best candidates, you will want your candidate experience to be top notch. If you have to reschedule an interview five times to accommodate every department’s schedule, this is unlikely to leave your talent with a glowing impression of your company.

A recent study revealed that nearly 60% of job seekers have had a poor candidate experience. Of those job seekers, 72% report having shared that experience online on an employer review site. If you do not take a hard, critical look at your current recruitment process, you could be bleeding talent without even realizing it.

Sync your calendars

With Simplicant’s next-gen recruitment management system, interview scheduling is easy and painless allowing you to sync your calendars directly from within your applicant tracking system. This way, you can easily see the availability of your entire recruiting team. There will be no endless back and forth if you can see all calendars synced on one screen. This will make it a breeze for internal recruiting coordinators to get everyone on the same page.

Collaboration in the recruitment process is important, and you want important decisions to be decided by everyone involved. By using Simplicant’s recruitment software and applicant tracking system with built-in calendar syncing, it becomes much easier to find a time that will work for everyone’s schedule. The calendar invite can then be sent to the candidate, without an endless back-and-forth likely to damage the candidate’s experience with your organization.

Don’t miss out on a great passive candidate

When pursuing top talent for your critical open positions, you know that they are probably being aggressively headhunted by other, competing organizations. Making interview scheduling easier from your applicant tracking system means you can focus your recruitment efforts of wooing this talent into your office, not on coordinating multiple schedules.

Scheduling interviews can be a mess, but if you focus on how to to make this aspect of your recruitment process more efficient, you’ll improve your candidate experience and attract the top talent you need.

What are some ways you can improve your interview scheduling? Share in the comments! 

Photo by Kyrie kim on Unsplash