Top Features to Look for in Interview Scheduling tools

Amidst heavy competition to hire the best talent, haphazard interview scheduling might cost you missing out on quality talents. Moreover, scheduling interviews manually takes a lot of time and is prone to manual errors. Here the biggest challenge is related to interviewer’s availability, back and forth emails, and rescheduling which accounts for 78%, 64%, and 50% of a recruiter’s time respectively. Thanks to recruitment automation that is helping organizations to overcome such challenges and simplify the recruitment process and streamline candidate interactions. 

According to a survey by Yello, 60% of recruiters say that they regularly lose applicants before an interview can be scheduled and that manual interview scheduling is a biggest challenge. To eliminate this, employers and recruiters have started utilizing technology for interview management.  

Now, let's find out how interview scheduling tools make recruitment easy for recruiter as well as organization, regardless of size and scope. 

What is an interview scheduling tool? 

An interview is similar to an event manager, organizer, or a planner. It is a digital tool that recruiters and employers can utilize to plan and schedule interviews with the candidates by coordinating with all the required participants and data for an interview.  

Advantages Of Interview Scheduling Tools 

• Reduces the overall hiring time. 
• Enables recruitment process automation. 
• Offers flexibility for both candidates and recruiters by enabling them to choose from the available slots. 
• Scope for clear employer-candidate communication. 
• Prevents human errors by taking care of data entry and record maintenance apart from automated interview scheduling. 
• Prevent candidates and interviewers from missing out on interviews by enabling notifications. 
• Enables good candidate experience. 
• Frees up the recruiters’ time thereby allowing them to focus on more important activities. 
• Streamlines the hiring process. 
• It is a scalable long-term hiring solution thereby helping minimize hiring cost. 

Top features to look for in an Interview scheduling tool 

1. Calendar integration 

Calendar integration is a powerful interview management system. Always look for an interview scheduling that is or that can be seamlessly integrated with a calendar. For information, .ics universal calendar format that can integrate with any calendar application. Calendar helps get access to others schedule for easy interview scheduling. This cuts down the human resource intensive redundant job of manually scheduling the interviews. Here it is preferable to keep the interview scheduling option open for both manual as well as automated for enhanced customizability. 

2. Automated reminders 

It is important to notify both the candidates as well as the interviewers before the interview. This can effectively minimize the chances of candidates and recruiters missing the interview or getting confused with other schedules. It is recommended to choose an interview scheduler tool that helps you send customized notifications, where you can personalize them, control the frequency, and add other necessary information along with the notifications. In short, sending automated reminders helps streamline the hiring process.  

3. Record maintenance and storage capacity 

This is an advanced interview scheduling feature that helps maintain the interview track record for future reference. This helps reduce the time spent on data entry and enable recruiters to focus on the core hiring activities such as candidate engagement and screening. Also, make sure to choose software that can organize and allow fetching the required data based on a direct search. It is recommended to invest in a scheduler that can be seamlessly integrated into the existing Applicant Tracking System in order to enable centralized control over the entire hiring process. 

4. Interview format accommodation 

Depending upon the organizational needs and job requirements there could be several interview formats that have to be handled from a centralized interview scheduler tool. Moreover, job interviews need not always resemble a meeting, instead there could be group discussions, automated robotic interviews with preset questions, recorded or non-recorded interviews, audio call facility, online test and presentations, in addition to the standard one on one interview. Here each type of interview could be conducted using a different tool and here the interview scheduler should be able to function across several tools and formats as well as convert the time zones. 

5. Mobile interview scheduling 

Though there are several efficient interview scheduling applications available in the market it is preferable to have a mobile compliant interview tool. There need and importance of mobile compliance in job interviews is increasingly becoming popular. One of the reasons for this is that job applicants find mobile hiring comfortable and time-saving especially when they are passive candidates who are already busy with their existing work.  

Top 5 Interview Scheduling Tools with Features 

1. Prelude  

Prelude is designed to assist recruiters with complex interview scheduling needs. Apart from providing a supportive interface, the platform design aims at enhancing the candidate's experience. It offers plenty of room for customization such as adding multiple interviewers to a panel, distributing interview loads, reassigning interviewers without cancelling, adding interviewer attributes and so on. 

2. Calendly 

Calendly is a widely used interview scheduling tool which is best for professional scheduling experience. It offers straightforward and intelligent interface for professional scheduling experience, automates the before and after interview communication of interviews. It is highly customizable with regards to the duration of each meeting, break time between two meetings, and the number of meetings in a day. 

3. Clara 

Clara is known as a smart interview scheduler that acts as a team mate who schedules meetings for you. Here it is not necessary to get used to its user interface and avoids back and forth mailing. What you need to do is cc Clara in your email with the required meeting details and the meeting is scheduled. This makes it quick and easy to set up interviews. It operates cloud-based thereby requiring no application installation step.  

4. HireVue 

HireVue is an on-demand interview scheduler for the features it provides and is well known for its responsive client support system. This tool is ideal especially for a large number of applicants as it enables setting up automated bot interviews. Here the recruiter should provide the bot with a set of questions and the answers for the same for an automated interview along with a result score. Such robot mediated interviews are suitable for prescreening interviews and it is recommended to periodically monitor the recorded versions of such interviews for quality results.

5. 10to8

10to8 is well-known for its versatility of scheduling any types of meetings and appointments. First of all, it is a cloud-based application and does not demand installation and the second most important feature is it being mobile friendly thereby enabling easy mobile recruitment. It also offers a two-way chat communication facility with all the invitees and participants of a meeting.  

Challenges and the solution 

Though several platforms claim to offer the best tools for an automated interview experience, most of them come with their own set of disadvantages. Depending upon the hiring needs of an organization, the features required in your interview scheduling tool vary. Also, for several organizations hiring is a seasonal need therefore recruiting teams also need to count the return on investment for interview scheduling tools. As a solution, there are recruitment service providers who take care of interview scheduling along with other hiring steps thereby making the hiring process cost-effective. 

Conclusion 

The interview process is the key deciding stage in a typical hiring process. And as a HR professional it is a responsibility to harness the best tools and technology that can potentially enhance and set a benchmark for your organization’s interview process. 

Interview scheduling tools, apart from streamlining the recruitment process, are expected to minimize the recruiters’ time and effort from 24 hours to 5 days.  Further, this tech-based automated solution enables increased speed, flexibility, and transparency, thereby resulting in superior recruitment outcomes. 

Given all the advantages, 51% of recruiters already use interview scheduling software as part of their hiring process and 26% of recruiters plan to utilize the same. This tells us that interview scheduling tools with more useful features will play a significant role in the future as well. 

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