Candidate Interviews: Scheduling Tips

Robust hiring tools and platforms can get you in front of quality candidates and competitive hires, but it’s up to recruiters and HR teams to secure top talent by creating a seamless hiring process. Often, that starts with efficiently scheduling the first interview.

The hiring market is as competitive as ever, and something as simple as missing an interview or making the interview process more difficult than it needs to be could be the difference between losing a candidate and acquiring a quality hire. 

Poor communication, ignoring candidates, and not making hires feel valued and respected are all ways to miss out on top talent, and it’s important to have a strategy for seamlessly scheduling interviews. 

In this article, we’ll cover some tips and best practices for scheduling interviews and landing quality candidates while they’re within your reach. 

Tips for how to schedule interviews with candidates

While interviewing and scheduling interviews might seem like a self-explanatory process, a lot can go wrong. If you pick the wrong time, communicate poorly, or lack efficiency in your process, you can push away top talent.

Below are some tips to follow when scheduling a candidate interview. 

• Schedule interviews as fast as possible
• Candidates are likely applying to several other companies, and scheduling the interview as fast as possible will keep a candidate’s interest, show that you’re serious about hiring them, and mitigate the chances that they get picked up by a competitor. 

• Have an interview script
• Having an interview script or a few different scripts (depending on the role, level of the position, or industry to name a few examples) will ensure that a certain level of quality is maintained. It’s important for interviews to deviate from the defined interview questions to establish rapport, but having a few standardized questions can be a useful starting place. 

• Avoid early morning or end-of-the-day interviews
• Morning interviews are ideal as most candidates and team leaders will be alert, caffeinated, and ready to interview. If it’s too early in the day, though, you may run up against too many conflicts preventing your candidate from being able to interview.like other meetings getting in the way, obligations at home or at work, or individuals might still be in their day-planning mindset. Conversely, it’s not hard to imagine how tired interviewers and interviewees might feel at the end of a long work day. 

• Schedule follow-up interviews immediately
• While you don’t necessarily have to create a follow-up interview at the end of the actual meeting, it’s important to not waste time with your candidate if you know they’re moving on to the next level of interviews. If you know that a candidate is ready for the next set of interviews, get in touch with them within 24 hours. 

• Avoid weekends and holidays
• Between leisure time, life responsibilities, and people simply not feeling up to the task, holidays and weekends are some of the worst times to schedule interviews. You might even consider avoiding Mondays and Fridays, as these are the days that people are catching up on work, meeting deadlines, or preparing for the weekend. 

• Feedback and surveys are your friend
• Interview feedback is great for standardization and quality maintenance. Efficiency, quality of questions, and the interview experience are all things hiring teams should be looking to maintain, and sending an interview feedback survey immediately after an interview ends is a good way to ensure candidates get back to you. 

• Utilize technology for scheduling interviews
• Utilizing technology and scheduling tools will allow you streamline and simplify the scheduling process. Google Calendar, Calendly, Zoom, and Zoho Bookings are just a few of the more popular scheduling apps out there.

How Crosschq can help you schedule quality interviews with quality candidates

Now that you know the best ways to schedule interviews and things to avoid, you still might be wondering where you can get access to quality hires. This is where a robust reference checking and hiring platform like Crosschq comes in.

Crosschq’s state-of-the-art technology provides you with reimagined reference checking, sourcing and robust talent analytics to help companies make quality hires and build diverse, winning teams. 

Contact us for a custom demo today to see how Crosschq can help you make quality hires..