Superdays and Interview Day Events: How Recruiters Can Make the Most of Them

When companies need to interview a large number of candidates and recruit multiple people on the same day, they often hold hiring events like Interview Days and Superdays. 

However, high-volume hiring can be a real challenge, especially if you don’t prepare properly or lack the right tools. For example, if interviewers aren’t on the same page about what makes a candidate a good fit, you might end up hiring the wrong people. And without appropriate technology to streamline things, your recruitment events could drag on or become unmanageable altogether.

What if you could turn that chaos of high-volume hiring into an efficient recruitment process? You’d cut through the complexity of mass recruitment and find numerous top-notch candidates quickly.

That’s exactly what this post will help you achieve. Dive in to learn why Superdays and Interview Days are essential and how to optimize your recruitment process during those events. 

What are Superdays and Interview Days?

Superdays and Interview Days are hiring events. They involve assessing and recruiting a large group of candidates quickly, even within a day. Instead of candidates getting interviewed by just one person, they rotate between interviewers for a well-rounded assessment. 

Organizations usually hold these events when they want to hire several interns, recruit multiple seasonal workers, or quickly hire a large number of people in a short time. 

Both Superdays and Interview Days involve a candidate meeting multiple interviewers, often back-to-back and in a specified time frame.

While the two are mostly similar, there are subtle differences between them. For instance, Superdays are common in financial services recruitment, while Interview Days are typical across industries. Additionally, Superdays are fast-paced and more intense — they often involve three to five rounds of 30-60-minute interviews on the same day. Interview Days, on the other hand, are shorter and less intense. 

By the time candidates get to the Superday or Interview Day, they’ve already gone through phone screening or other methods of verifying qualification. 

Key components of Superdays and Interview Days

Interview Days and Superdays boil down to three primary things: 

1. A group of interviewers

Superdays and Interview Days have multiple interviewers, each responsible for assessing specific skills and qualities in candidates. 

For example, a company might split a 1.5-hour interview for design interns into three parts. Someone from HR may meet with each candidate for 30 minutes to determine cultural fit. The candidate can then undergo a half-hour creative thinking assessment with an interviewer from the design team. The final 30-minute interview might be with a design manager to discuss the candidate’s favorite past projects. 

Depending on your hiring requirements, you can further break the interview for each role into multiple separate meetings led by different team members. 

2. A set time frame

With Superdays and Interview Days, you don’t accommodate candidates’ schedules like in standard job interviews. Instead, you set a specific period for all the interviews and let the job seekers work around that. 

For instance, a company can inform candidates that all interviews for design intern positions will take place on Monday and Tuesday between 1:00 and 5:00 pm EST. 

3. A pool of candidates

Before hosting recruiting events, organizations typically roll out a marketing campaign to promote their high-volume hiring. By the time Superdays and Interview Days arrive, they’ll have already attracted and pre-qualified as many candidates as possible. 

Benefits of hosting Superdays and Interview Days

The talent market is super competitive. In GoodTime’s 2024 Hiring Insights report, nearly half of recruitment leaders said the war for top talent in the labor market has been fiercer than ever in the past 12 months. With Superdays and Interview Days, you can obtain the best candidates faster and stay ahead of the competition. Here’s how: 

Speed up recruitment

Superdays and Interview Days are all about getting things done quickly. Instead of dragging the hiring process out for weeks, you interview and hire multiple candidates in a day (or a few days). 

The faster your hiring process, the higher the chances of landing top talent before the competition does. 

“The fastest hiring team typically gets the best candidates. GoodTime helped us accomplish that.”  

— Erika Thorson-Garay, Head of Talent Acquisition at LiveRamp

Keep things running smoothly

Managing interview schedules for each candidate individually can be hectic. You have to deal with different times and dates while trying to accommodate everyone’s availability. 

Superdays and Interview Days simplify this process. Instead of trying to work around separate schedules, these events let you bring in numerous candidates on the same day and interview them in a specific timeframe. This way, you avoid the hassle of coordinating individual interview dates. 

Improve candidate experience

Recent research shows that talent acquisition leaders across all industries agree on one thing: great candidate experience is crucial for staying ahead in an increasingly competitive job market. 

Superdays and Interview Days can improve candidate experience. How? When candidates move quickly through the hiring process, you show respect for their time, which reflects positively on your organization. This can be a powerful way to strengthen your organization’s employer brand.  

Preparing for Superdays and Interview Days

If you don’t prepare properly, your hiring events can easily go off the rails. Schedules can overlap to cause inefficiencies, and interviewers might not know what the organization wants in candidates. Worst of all, candidates could walk away with a bad impression of your company.

So, how do you make sure you’re ready for a Superday or Interview Day? 

Setting clear objectives and planning the day

Determine the specific roles you’re hiring for and how many candidates you need to fill them. 

Also, what skills will your back-to-back interviews focus on? Maybe you want to test technical knowledge, cultural fit, or the ability of a candidate to work with a team.

Once you know your objectives, use them to plan the day. For instance, if you aim to test cultural fit, technical skills, and team fit, you can divide Superday interviews into three segments, each focusing on one of these areas. 

Remember to determine when each interview segment will begin and how long it will last to establish a flow of events. You can add breaks between the segments if you wish. 

Selecting and training interviewers

Pick interviewers based on their departments and the criteria you want to test candidates against. For example, a company hiring engineering interns may include the following people in an interview panel: 

• HR professional to test cultural fit and soft skills
• Someone from the engineering team to assess a candidate’s technical skills
• Engineering manager to discuss a candidate’s personal engineering work or any previous projects they may have worked on

After creating panels for different roles, you need to educate interviewers on expectations and best practices. The interview training doesn’t have to be a full-day workshop or a complete course. A little preparation material that gets everyone on the same page about what you’re evaluating for each job position will do the trick. 

Creating a welcoming environment for candidates

Superdays and Interview Days can be a bit intense for candidates — multiple back-to-back interviews and packed schedules. Setting the stage for a welcoming experience, even before the event, can make a huge difference. 

For instance, a day or two before the event, you can send a friendly SMS, email, or text. In your message, remind them the big day is around the corner and that you’re looking forward to having them. You can also tell them what to expect so they can come well-prepared. 

However, sending reminders manually to numerous candidates is tedious and time-consuming. High-volume hiring software like GoodTime allows you to send reminders in bulk at the click of a button, which saves time and makes your recruitment tasks more efficient. 

Best practices for successfully running recruiting events

A Superday or Interview Day is a big deal. What can you do to prepare properly and ensure everything runs smoothly when the mass hiring day comes? 

Manage time effectively

Back-to-back interviews are already intense for candidates. And if the events run longer than planned, interviewees may feel drained and frustrated.  

To prevent that, interviewers should know in advance how much time they have with each candidate and how to keep things moving without making anyone feel rushed.

Take advantage of technology

Did you know that 99% of talent acquisition teams use automation and AI recruitment tools to do more with less? That means if you don’t use technology in your mass hiring events, your competitors might leave you behind. 

Powerful, high-volume recruitment software like GoodTime helps you schedule Superdays and Interview Days quickly and easily. It allows you to bulk schedule interviews and automatically send calendar invites, agendas, or interview reminders to candidates.

You can also monitor your team’s scheduling activity in one place and automatically collect feedback from candidates at every step of the way. 

This recruiting automation minimizes the time and effort wasted on manual processes. As a result, you can focus more on what really matters — evaluating candidates quickly and hiring the best talent without a hassle. 

Provide a positive candidate experience

You can improve the experience of candidates by removing any unnecessary stages in hiring, which speeds up your recruitment process. Recruitment analytics can help you identify stages that are causing delays. 

“Platforms like GoodTime massively increase our visibility into key recruiting metrics like time-to-hire. They allow recruiting teams to not only see overall time-to-hire, but also pinpoint specific areas that might be causing delays.”

— Dallas Frazer, former Recruitment Operations Lead at Shopify

The easy way to manage Superdays and Interview Days

Hiring candidates in large numbers and within a short time can be challenging, especially if you don’t know where to begin. Technology is one of the best solutions to make high-volume hiring faster and more efficient. Leverage it to complete mass recruitment tasks at scale and provide exceptional hiring experience to your pool of candidates. 

Want to automate high-volume hiring and streamline your recruitment process? Check out GoodTime’s interview scheduling software and see how it can help you acquire the best talent faster.