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Tag: Interview Scheduling

60% Of Companies Say Their Time-to-Hire Increased. Here’s Why.

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Seeing time-to-hire decrease warms the heart of every talent acquisition professional out there. Sadly, our data shows that few TA teams experienced this joy in the past year.

Our 2022 Hiring Insights Report surveyed 560 HR and talent decision makers to understand the most pressing challenges facing their teams, and what should be done to reel in top candidates.

Out of the companies surveyed, 60% said their time-to-hire increased in 2021. If alarms aren’t going off inside your head, they should be.

Even within less competitive hiring markets, time-to-hire is a critical KPI. The competition for the best candidates will stay consistent, no matter the current hiring volume. This makes maintaining hiring efficiency crucial.

So, why have talent teams seen their time-to-hire skyrocket? Let’s dive into the data and examine how teams can attain success.

Burdened by Interview Scheduling

HR teams from our report spend more than one-third (37.3%) of their total work hours scheduling interviews. It’s no wonder that companies saw their time-to-hire rise; a time-consuming scheduling process deals a major blow to hiring efficiency. 

This statistic was consistent regardless of company size. The smallest companies (50-100 employees) spent 33.5% of their time scheduling interviews, and the largest companies (1,001-5,000 employees) spent 35.1% of their time doing so.

How To Fix This

Recruiting coordinators in companies of all shapes and sizes know the pain of manual interview scheduling. When you have your head stuck in calendars, you can expect an influx of hiring delays and bottlenecks.

Automating your interview scheduling logistics is the way forward. You’ll fill roles at the speed of light and no longer lose precious time to juggling schedules and drafting emails.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

Mismanaged Connections With Candidates

Even though 46% of respondents agreed that creating relationships with candidates has become more important than ever, just 36% looked to build better relationships in the past year.

When you neglect your relationships with candidates, the holistic quality of your hiring process goes downhill—and that includes your time-to-hire. 

If a candidate doesn’t feel a notable bond with your talent team, it’ll be much harder to get them to a “yes” in a timely manner when you extend an offer. You can say bye-bye to any chance of shortening your time-to-hire.

How To Fix This

Healthy candidate relationships consist of four key pillars. Check off these pillars, and you have yourself some quality connections.

  1. Genuine Connection: Candidates want to know if they align with a company’s mission, culture, and DEIB beliefs. To understand an employer’s stance on those elements, candidates want to build a genuine connection with them.
  2. Transparency: Candidates want a transparent hiring process. They won’t tolerate ghosting, that’s for sure. Candidates want open and frequent communication from employers.
  3. Adaptability: Your hiring process must adapt to the needs of your candidates. They want to schedule interviews at times that best fit their schedule, as opposed to sitting through an inconvenient all-day interview. 
  4. Candidate Well-being: On the topic of well-being, candidates want to gain an understanding for where companies stand on mental health support and any other related benefits.

Inefficient Recruitment Data Collection

The best talent acquisition teams are fiercely data-driven. Digging into your hiring process’s data allows you to identify potential blockages that are lengthening your time-to-hire. 

However, problems arise when you don’t have a firm pulse on your analytics. If you go too long without examining your data, you can’t stop bottlenecks before they arise.

The good news is that most of the teams from our report check their analytics frequently. Thirty-five percent utilize their hiring data on a weekly basis. But this wasn’t the case for all  respondents. Seventeen percent use their data quarterly and 7% consult their data yearly. 

How To Fix This

The 35% of companies that leverage their recruitment data every week are on the right track. There’s always something to learn from your metrics. The more often you reference them, the more optimized your hiring process will be. 

If you’re stuck on how exactly to evaluate your hiring data to boost critical KPIs like time-to-hire, we’ve put together a handy guide for you.

Want the Latest Insights? Read the 2023 Hiring Insights Report

History doesn’t have to repeat itself. Talent teams might’ve struggled with their time-to-hire in the past year, but there’s several surefire ways for them to decrease it in the months to come.

Automating interview scheduling, improving candidate relationships, and zeroing in on hiring analytics is the way forward. 

Want to catch up on the latest hiring trends? Get excited: our 2023 Hiring Insights Report is now available. 500+ HR leaders, 1,000s of real findings, 1 industry-leading report. Read the report today.

5 Mistakes Recruiting Coordinators Make (And How To Avoid Them)

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Recruiting coordinators make the talent world go ‘round. As the unsung heroes of the hiring process, recruiting coordinators act as a candidate’s first impression of a company. RC’s juggle multiple tasks at once to keep this impression pristine and move the hiring process along. Yep, it’s a pretty big role.

However, as with any job—especially ones that involve a high workload (and stress)—mistakes happen. No matter if you slip up when emailing candidates, or stumble when coordinating interviews, the most important thing you can do is evaluate what went wrong and steer clear of it in the future.

Here are five common mistakes recruiting coordinators make, and how to avoid them to create an extraordinary hiring experience.

1. Sending Candidates Lackluster Communications

When sending message after message to candidates, it can be easy to go on autopilot and phone it in. We get it—coordinating interviews isn’t the most exciting task. 

But truth be told, the communication between RC’s and candidates plays a pivotal role in the hiring process. The last thing you want to do is send a robotic email riddled with errors. Even quick text exchanges with candidates should be scrutinized for high quality.

These messages inform candidates of your company’s tone of voice and can either increase or decrease their excitement for their upcoming interview.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

Whether you’re sending a message to gather a candidate’s availability or to confirm their upcoming interview, there’s several steps you should take to refine this communication.

To add a layer of empathy to your communications, direct candidates to an email and/or phone number to reach out to if they have any questions. You never know what’s going on inside a candidate’s head.

Above all, always review your responses for the ABC’s of communication: accuracy, brevity, and clarity. That way, your messages will contain the most important information, will be an appropriate length, and will be abundantly easy to digest. Now, your response is ready to be sent out into the world.

2. Failing to Give Candidates Scheduling Flexibility

Flexibility is a growing priority for those in the world of work. In fact, 96% of US professionals say they require flexibility. 

Asking candidates to adapt to your hiring team’s schedule, or to make themselves available within a narrow time frame, conveys that flexibility is not a priority for your organization.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

Make your hiring process flexibility-focused by putting candidates in the driver’s seat. Instead of expecting candidates to move their schedules around for your company, ask for their availability. Show that you respect their time by letting them schedule their interviews for whenever works best for them.  

At the end of the day, your candidates are likely chatting with multiple other companies. They’re more likely to remember and value your interview process—and you as an RC—if you act with flexibility and understanding.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

3. Coordinating Interviews Manually

If you’re still manually scheduling and coordinating interviews, you’re doing something wrong. (Too harsh?) Daily recruiting coordinator tasks become highly tedious and inefficient when they’re done without the help of technology. And when your head is stuck in calendars and spreadsheets, you have even less time to spend on high-value tasks that will actually move the needle.

Today’s candidates have little patience for clunky hiring processes that rely on manual operations. An inefficient process does nothing but degrade the candidate experience and weigh down your hiring metrics.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

The best way to keep up with candidate expectations and remain competitive in the talent landscape is by leveraging a tech solution that offers recruitment automation. Speed is crucial to a hiring process; automation gives you an edge by allowing you to coordinate in minutes, not hours. (Plus, your team will save major time and money.)

Leveraging an automated hiring solution creates a quick and easy hiring experience. This sends the message that you value your candidate’s time. With less bandwidth spent on scheduling and coordination, you’ll have more bandwidth to focus on what matters: better connecting with candidates.

4. Treating Candidate Relationships as Transactional

RC’s who have a transactional mindset interact with candidates with the sole purpose of turning them into new hires to fill open reqs and boost their hiring stats. Too many recruiting coordinators operate this way, and it’s a problem. 

Candidates don’t want to be viewed as just a number. They want to form a genuine connection with your recruitment team built on trust, transparency, and flexibility. Navigating with this transactional mindset is sure to push them away.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

Nurture the recruiting coordinator-candidate relationship. Spend some time learning what candidates look for when interacting with a hiring team, and apply those insights to your daily RC involvements.

Here’s an insight to start off with: 62% of employees cite well-being support as their top priority in their job hunt. Checking up on candidates and offering yourself as a resource if they have any concerns are both excellent, low-effort ways to show that you care about their well-being. 

You could also block off time to brainstorm what’s missing from the hiring process that could boost your team’s candidate relationships. For instance, if you don’t collect feedback from candidates, now is the time to do so. Let candidates speak their minds and remind them that you value their opinions.

5. Neglecting to Prioritize Upskilling

The life of a recruiting coordinator is sometimes downright overwhelming. With all of the tasks on your plate, making time to progress your skills and learnings can seem practically impossible. Or, you might even feel guilty at the thought of putting aside the tasks on your to-do list to focus on your own career development.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

If any of this resonates with you, know this: you must always fill your own cup. A hiring team that truly supports the success of their teammates understands that it’s crucial for everyone to invest in their own skills and knowledge once in a while.

Block off time on your calendar, notify your team that you’ll be heads-down and focused on upskilling, and ask your teammates if they could help out with any urgent tasks while you work on career development, if necessary.

There’s a variety of online classes and certifications for recruiting coordinators. Some of the popular ones include LinkedIn Learning, The Recruitment Education Institute, Alison, and Recruiting Toolbox.

Hey, RCs—Ready To Elevate Your Hiring Process?

Hundreds of companies have leveled up their recruitment process to stand out in the talent landscape. Patreon reduced their time-to-hire by 50%, Box reduced their time spent scheduling by 40%, and Deliveroo hired 700+ employees.

How’d these talent acquisition teams do it? Simple: they used GoodTime. And you can, too.

GoodTime Hire automates interview scheduling, builds relationships during interviews, and provides actionable insights to continuously improve your hiring process. 

If you want to take your recruitment process to the next level, learn more about Hire’s advanced interview scheduling software.

This Interview Confirmation Email Template Will Wow Candidates

Posted on by Rachel Heller

So you found a stellar candidate, received their availability, and got them on the books to interview for your company. Now, it’s time to send out an interview confirmation email.

While this email may seem inconsequential, the interview confirmation email is one of the first impressions that candidates get of your company. You need to set the right tone to start forming a genuine bond with candidates.

Read on for the core elements you should include in your email, and for an interview confirmation email template that’ll start you off on the right foot.

Steps To Creating an Interview Confirmation Email

Make no mistake, this isn’t just your every day email. When confirming your candidate’s interview, follow these steps to refine your communication.

1. Start With the Who, What, When, Where

The last thing you want to do is bury the most important details. Begin your email with the following information: 

  • What: State that you’re confirming their upcoming interview for [position title] at [your company]. They might’ve applied to multiple positions at your organization, so mention which one you’re referring to.
  • Who: Specify who’s interviewing the candidate and what their title is.
  • When: Identify the date, time, and duration of the interview. Include the specific calendar date and the time zone for added clarity.
  • Where: Mention if this interview is virtual or on-site. If on-site, include the address. If virtual, direct them to the appropriate interview link.

Bonus tip: To provide candidates with more information on who they’ll speak to, include a hyperlink to the interviewer’s LinkedIn.

2. Provide Directions for Rescheduling

A candidate may need to reschedule their interview due to unforeseen circumstances. Put empathetic recruiting into practice by openly recognizing that life happens.

Include a sentence that clarifies what a candidate should do if they must reschedule. For instance, provide them with the appropriate contact information to reach out to, or direct them to your recruitment tech’s rescheduling functionality.

3. State Your Openness to Questions or Concerns

You never know what’s going on inside a candidate’s brain. Even if they have questions about their upcoming interview, they might feel reluctant to ask them. This could be due to the pressure to seem 100% polished and well-prepared. 

Convey that it’s natural to have questions or concerns—especially with something as important as an interview—and direct them to an email and/or phone number to reach out to if anything arises.

4. Review for Accuracy, Brevity, and Clarity

Imagine the stress of sending a candidate the wrong date and time for their interview. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.

Before you send out your interview confirmation email, review it for the ABC’s of communication: accuracy, brevity, and clarity. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Accuracy: Does the email include errors in content, spelling, or grammar?
  • Brevity: Are there unnecessary words or sentences that detract from the vital details?
  • Clarity: Is the email’s content and structure easy to read and coherent to follow?

Bonus tip: Along with the ABC’s, review your email for tone of voice. For instance, if your brand voice is fun and upbeat, include some emojis to convey that voice (but don’t overdo it).

The Perfect Interview Confirmation Email Template

Email subject line: Interview Confirmation – [company name] [virtual/on-site] Interview for [position title]

Hello [candidate’s name],

This is a confirmation of your upcoming [virtual/on-site] interview for the {position title] role at [company name]. Below are the details of your interview:

When: [date, time, duration]

Where: [interview link if virtual, address if on-site]

Who: [name(s) and position title(s) of interviewer(s)]

Should you need to reschedule, you can [insert directions here; for example, direct them to your tech’s rescheduling functionality] to change your date and time.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at [email address and/or phone number] with any questions or concerns.

Best wishes,

[your name]

Coordinate Interviews With Ease Using Goodtime Hire

Now that you have an optimized interview confirmation email, why not take a step further and optimize your interview scheduling and coordination? If you want to say good-bye to manual scheduling and emailing, say hello to GoodTime Hire. 

Hire automates the most crucial steps in your recruitment process through the use of smart templates, tags, and intelligent scheduling. Our templates automatically generate personalized and branded email communications for each candidate and interviewer.

Interested in learning why talent acquisition teams at hundreds of companies, from Spotify to Databricks, choose Hire? 

Discover how GoodTime Hire’s interview scheduling software can supercharge your talent acquisition process.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

4 Things Recruiters Do That Destroy Productivity

Posted on by Rachel Heller

The traditional hiring process is dead. The roles within TA teams are expanding alongside increasing organizational expectations. Maxing output and efficiency while tapping into new opportunities to win top talent are table stakes for the new world order.

On an industry level, recruiters scramble to find high-quality, available talent amidst scarcity. Recruiters have to constantly deliver the right candidate experience to attract and secure the best candidates and maintain the employer brand.

Recruiters could do with a productivity boost, or several, since they’re usually swamped with interviews and job postings. On the flip side, overlooking the little things can often cost recruiters precious minutes that add up in a year, affecting their productivity and morale. 

Whether it’s outdated practices or doing things unknowingly, these four productivity killers can seriously stump recruiters’ workflow.

1.  Relying on Manual Interview Scheduling

Allocate time where it makes an impact, not on manual, repetitive tasks. Interview scheduling is just one of the many tasks that recruiters have to do over and over. Recruiters can easily spend half of their work weeks on interview scheduling alone.  Relying on an inefficient scheduling process will just continue to eat into work hours without bringing much value.

A good number of recruiters still rely on manual processes, such as calling, aligning schedules, sending out invitations and blocking out the calendar on the traditional pen-and-paper. However, because of the volume of interviews that they have, recruiters face the risk of making errors. For instance, they may indicate the wrong times, dates, or names. In other cases, they may forget to schedule other interviewers for a joint interview.

Automating interview scheduling can help streamline the procedure and lead to greater productivity. For one thing, it takes only a fraction of the time it takes to manually schedule an appointment. Most times, the recruiter wouldn’t even need to be involved in the back-and-forth discussion. A study by GoodTime found that relying on an automated interview scheduling tool can increase a recruiting team’s output by up to 200%.

2. Spending Too Much Time on Email Correspondence

Emails are probably a recruiter’s best friend. From contacting potential candidates to sending follow ups, recruiting teams send out tens to hundreds of emails every day. Email communication is still one of the main forms of communication for HR departments today, even with the rise of mobile. In the workplace, the average employee can spend almost three hours reading and answering their emails. This is a staggering amount of time, considering the typical work day lasts nine hours.

It may seem counterproductive when we recommend HR teams to spend less time on emails. After all, a cluttered inbox and draft folder doesn’t exactly scream excellent work ethic. Still, there must be a way for recruiters to cut down on administrative tasks like follow-ups and reminders without sacrificing efficiency. Automating follow-up emails is one recruitment hack, and most workplace tools utilize an automation feature also have various built-in templates to make emails more effective.

3. Overlooking the Value of Integration

As the workplace becomes increasingly digitized, organizations will begin utilizing more external tools to navigate the digital space. Given the various roles of HR teams, this can mean anything from video conferencing platforms, candidate assessment tools, applicant tracking systems, and recruiting analytics.

It could be a problem, since recruiters essentially juggle the functionalities over multiple platforms. Maybe you’re spending too much time figuring out the features of a certain software. Or it may just be an unnecessary amount of money to spend on this many tools.

One way to mitigate this is by selecting a robust recruitment tool that uses integrations. Leveraging an integrated platform helps reduce the number of external tools that recruiters use, from over a dozen to just two or three must-haves. This can cut down on a significant amount of time and cost, while maximizing the return on these tools.

4. Manually Sourcing and Screening for Candidates

The fact that it is time-consuming isn’t the only problem when it comes to manual screening and sourcing. The hiring process is subject to preconceived biases and distortion when not done objectively. While many workplaces have taken the stride in the right direction to a more diverse and inclusive workforce, it can be easy to fall back into old habits.

Ultimately, the top priority for recruiters should be candidate quality, rather than other characteristics. In the long term, inefficient sourcing can lead to bad hires and negative performance. 

Learn More

CodeSignal is an assessment company helping the world #GoBeyondResumes. CodeSignal created an advanced job simulation technology so hiring teams can assess skills with better fidelity, provide a better candidate experience, and hire the right talent for roles, at scale. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by the world’s most innovative tech firms, including Brex, Databricks, Facebook, Instacart, Robinhood, Upwork, and Zoom.

GoodTime enables talent acquisition teams to create an efficient, equitable, and personalized candidate experience that lands top talent faster. GoodTime is the only HR tech solution that helps advance diversity initiatives, fostering measurable impact for every candidate. See why the world’s top talent acquisition teams, including Zoom, Instacart, and DropBox, rely on GoodTime to slash time to hire metrics and deliver up to 50% savings on hiring expenditure.

Survey Reveals Importance of Candidate Experience When Scheduling

Posted on by Rachel Heller

How would your candidates rate your interview process? The majority of us would, of course, hope for a perfect ten—but that’s not the case the majority of the time. When it comes to candidate experience, most companies only focus on the part where the candidate comes onsite.

After all, there are a ton of opportunities to make candidates feel welcome. Whether it’s goody bags, well-trained interviewers, or a well-maintained office, there are a million-and-one different ways to give that in-person, personal touch.

However, your candidate experience doesn’t start when they come onsite. In fact, a truly great candidate experience that lands top talent starts much earlier: right when the candidate schedules their interview.

How Candidates Schedule: Then vs. Now

There used to be one main way most candidates schedule their interview: back-and-forth conversations with someone at the company. Whether it’s with a recruiting coordinator or a chat bot, the candidate experience is the same: they’re plugging in times and hoping that what they input works (and isn’t already taken on the interviewer’s calendar by the time they see their message).

Today’s candidates have options like never before. Candidates that use GoodTime Hire to schedule are empowered to schedule their interview by only seeing times and dates that are available on the interviewer’s calendar.

We were curious; we know personally from our time interviewing at GoodTime that candidate-driven scheduling makes for a better experience, but how do our customers’ candidates feel?

Candidates Prefer Candidate-driven Scheduling

After candidates completed their scheduling on Hire, we had a popup in the corner appear asking how they’d rate their scheduling experience. 

Candidates rated on a scale of 1-5. Out of the 6,000 unique candidates that viewed this popup, about half of them completed the survey and gave us an average score of 4.9 out of 5.

What Does This Mean for My Recruiting Team?

It really means one thing: acknowledge and include the interview scheduling process as a part of your candidate experience plan. Many recruiting teams participate in awesome ways to welcome candidates onsite and follow up with them if they have any questions. Those same great teams miss the scheduling process as a part of that—and it’s really not their fault for not realizing it.

As a recruiting team, it’s not as difficult as you may think to make scheduling great. It comes down to not only exploring tools that can help you get there, but also making an effort to put the candidate first.

Ready to Level up Your Candidate Experience?  

Time’s up for interviews full of scheduling headaches. It’s time for candidate-centered, connection-driven interviews instead.

To read more about how to make that happen for your team, download 5 Steps to Hiring Top Talent at Scale.

Weekend Interviews: Yes or No?

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Getting an interview scheduled is more than just making sure the candidate and interviewer’s schedules line up. It also involves the candidate taking a day off from their busy work schedule to speak with your team.

While recruiters certainly shouldn’t be expected to work outside of their normal hours (though many of them do), conducting interviews between candidate outreach and regular meetings can create a lot of context switching. This makes it difficult to properly focus on one task.

The Case for Weekend Interviews

Candidates are encouraged not to prioritize their current job in favor of their potential new one. However, this can put candidates in the awkward position of taking multiple days off.

With some interviews taking an entire day, the company with the pain-free interview process is the one that nabs candidates.

Opening up free time for candidates to interview on the weekends is a way for them to have a candidate-driven experience.

However, it shouldn’t come at the expense of a recruiter’s time.

Are Weekend Interviews Worth It?

There are more jobs in the US than workers. Because of this, candidate experience is a key differentiator. There are many ways to give candidates a great hiring experience, from conveying company mission and values in the interview process, to replying to candidates in a timely manner.

Are weekend interviews part of that equation?

Candidates (and some interviewers) with busy schedules will welcome the opportunity to have an additional interview slot that fits into their calendar, but it’s important to remember that the interview is a reflection of your company and your company’s culture. For many candidates, working weekends isn’t exactly what they’d like to picture.

How Can You Prioritize Busy Candidates?

If hosting weekend interviews isn’t something you see in your future, the initial question still remains: how can you interview busy candidates without disrupting their schedule?

A lot in the interview process has stayed the same since its inception, including the prioritization and scheduling of interviews. This is where technology and tools come in. With something as fast-paced as recruiting, introducing automation is one of the few ways that you can not only see every candidate, but also genuinely connect with each of them.

Some teams (like Box) utilize a Meeting Optimization Engine to assist with hiring. This makes scheduling not only easier, but, most importantly, candidate-driven.

On the most basic level, candidate-driven scheduling is putting the candidate in the driver’s seat to choose their interview. Candidates are busy. By enabling them to choose their interview slot based on their interviewer’s calendar, companies equally prioritize their candidates and interviewers.

At the end of the day, it’s the company with the shortest time-to-hire that succeeds, and you don’t need to open up additional interviewing days to do that. 

Ready to Level up Your Candidate Experience?  

Time’s up for interviews full of scheduling headaches. It’s time for candidate-centered, connection-driven interviews instead.

To read more about how to make that happen for your team, download 5 Steps to Hiring Top Talent at Scale.

3 HR Tools All Recruiting Coordinators Need for Success

Posted on by Rachel Heller

A common misconception about recruiting coordinators is that you’re only scheduling interviews and setting up candidate travel/reimbursements. However, coordinators knows that’s not the full story. Recruiting coordinators possess strong communication skills, intimate knowledge of hiring best practices, and directly impact all interviews. Yep, it’s a big job. And with a job like this, having a little help from HR tools sure does help.

Possessing a robust HR tech stack comes in handy in a multitude of ways. Above all, it’s difficult to leverage all of your knowledge to improve hiring practices without using the right HR tools to free up your schedule. Here are three tools that are key to your success.

1. A Hiring Assessment (Pre-employment) Tool

There are many different types of assessments/pre-employment tools out there, so it’s important to pick the one that will help you find the candidates with the skills necessary to excel at their future job. The most common assessments are job knowledge tests and personality tests.

Generally, recruitment teams administer these tests once a candidate passes an initial phone screen, but they can be implemented at any point within the hiring process. Administering one before a time-consuming onsite interview is a great way to filter out candidates and confirm their skills.

In fact, a recent CareerBuilder survey found that hiring managers caught 56% of candidates lying about the skills that they have on their resume. Leveraging an assessment can save you valuable time—and also provide your hiring managers and interviewers with a great pool of (actually) qualified candidates.

2. A Candidate Sourcing Tool

As a recruiting coordinator, you know more than anyone who exactly your company is looking for and how long the interview process will take. Leveraging a sourcing tool is a great way to help automate one of the most time-consuming aspects of your job.

So, how does it work? A typical sourcing tool takes any of your open job postings and automatically finds candidates with the skills to match the posting. It’s a great way to augment the outreach that you’re already doing—and you might even find candidates you wouldn’t have found on your own.

3. An Interview Scheduling Tool

The most time-consuming aspect of a recruiting coordinator’s job by far is scheduling interviews. Don’t believe us? The next time you schedule an interview, try timing yourself. You’ll be surprised (and maybe disheartened) by just how long it takes to line up busy schedules.

Software with interview scheduling capabilities, however, automate that entire process. This means that everything from phone screens to onsite interviews are on the books in under one hour. Speeding up this typically arduous process means you can spend more time talking to candidates and helping prepare them for their interviews. With a reported one million more job openings than unemployed individuals, any tool that can improve the candidate experience (and, thereby, differentiate your company) is a game changer for your organization.

Being a recruiting coordinator can feel a lot like juggling. Leveraging any of the above tools will finally give you the opportunity to use the skills you’ve been cultivating. And who knows; with all that extra time, maybe you’ll finally be able to work on an interesting project to nab that promotion.

Ready to Level up Your Candidate Experience?  

Time’s up for interviews full of scheduling headaches. It’s time for candidate-centered, connection-driven interviews instead.

To read more about how to make that happen for your team, download 5 Steps to Hiring Top Talent at Scale.

4 Calendar Hygiene Tips to Effortlessly Schedule Interviews

Posted on by Rachel Heller

In the world of busy schedules and dynamic workflows, maintaining an up-to-date calendar is more than just a routine task – it’s a key aspect of effective calendar hygiene. Ensuring that your calendar accurately reflects your availability and commitments is fundamental to successful interview scheduling and efficient time management. Let’s delve into the importance of keeping your calendar updated and explore practical steps to achieve optimal calendar hygiene.

But first…

What’s Calendar Hygiene?

Calendar hygiene is just the habit of keeping your calendar organized and accurate. This ensures it accurately reflects your true availability. Not doing so means other people or software reading your calendar won’t know your availability well. This results in interviews needing to be rescheduled, further increasing your company’s time-to-hire.

Your calendar serves as a digital representation of your time and commitments. When it’s accurate and current, it becomes a reliable tool for scheduling interviews, meetings, and other activities. Calendar hygiene is essential because:

  • Minimizes Scheduling Conflicts: An updated calendar helps you avoid double bookings and conflicting commitments that could lead to rescheduled interviews.
  • Enhances Efficiency: When colleagues and recruiters can rely on your calendar’s accuracy, they can seamlessly schedule interviews without unnecessary back-and-forths.
  • Improves Candidate Experience: Consistently maintaining your calendar demonstrates professionalism and respect for candidates’ time, leaving a positive impression.

So, how can you make sure you’re not the bottleneck in your company’s hiring process? Here are four tips and tricks to maintain calendar hygiene so you can maximize your time.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

1. Keep Your Calendar Updated

First and foremost, make sure your calendar is up to date. This includes adding travel buffers for customer visits (or if you’re going out for a bite to eat), removing canceled meetings from your calendar, and ensuring that all meetings with coworkers are reflected on your calendar.

Additionally, make sure you RSVP to your invites right away so other people know if you are attending. Making it a habit to reply to all meeting invites as soon as you receive them will ensure you don’t miss important meetings.

2. Set Company Keywords

If your company uses interview scheduling software, you have the added benefit of leveraging company keywords. This means that the recruiting coordinator (or whoever is scheduling the interview) doesn’t have to guess if a calendar event is a hard or soft conflict.

Soft conflicts are events such as happy hours, office hours, calendar “holds” that you’ve set, and more. Hard conflicts are anything that can’t be scheduled over, such as PTO or travel buffers.

By setting up company keywords in Hire, the system will automatically recognize these events and either offer them as potential interview times for soft conflicts or avoid scheduling over them for hard conflicts. This greatly increases likely interview slots, which helps get top talent in the door faster. That’s a win-win.

3. Make PTO/OOO Events Clear

Every company and team seems to handle PTO/OOO differently, which can feel confusing. This confusion can make scheduling interviews difficult.

This is especially true when many people, usually managers, are invited to the PTO/OOO event, making it hard to tell who’s actually out of the office.

As a general rule of thumb, your team should have a separate PTO calendar so everyone can see who’s out of the office. In the title of the event, you should write your name. This decreases the possibility of confusion, even if you (or others) invite individuals to the PTO event.

4. All-day Events

All-day events are tricky simply for the fact that there are many different kinds of them.

An all-day event can just be an event title, like “John’s Work Anniversary,”  or it could be an actual conflict, like “John in Mexico.” Because of this, it’s essential to make sure that you and the other interviewers on your team follow the same naming protocols when it comes to all-day events.

When using an interview scheduling tool, the platform will likely try its best to understand if you’re available for the interview based on the words used in the event title, but it’s always just better to follow company keywords and mark yourself free or busy.

Overall, if you want to make an impact on your recruitment efforts, leveraging a scheduling platform is the way to go. The tool will help eliminate manual work (to save your team major time and money) and maximize your team’s interview availability so you can interview the best candidate before your competition.

First master calendar hygiene, then the rest of the candidate experience

Remember, calendar hygiene is an ongoing practice. By implementing these steps, you contribute to a smoother interview scheduling process, enhance collaboration, and make the most of your valuable time.

Keeping your calendar updated is more than just a routine task – it’s a strategic approach to effective time management and successful interview scheduling. By maintaining an accurate and up-to-date calendar, you create a foundation of reliability and professionalism that benefits both you and those you collaborate with. The effort you invest in calendar hygiene pays off in smoother operations, improved candidate experience, and enhanced productivity.

Time’s up for interviews full of scheduling headaches. It’s time for candidate-centered, connection-driven interviews instead.

To read more about how to make that happen for your team, download 5 Steps to Hiring Top Talent at Scale.