Interview Scheduling is a nerve-wracking job! Hiring the capable candidates who have to meet your expectations is not an easy task and a sloppy application process that includes long delays absolutely kills your time, leaving you in a hassle.
Scheduling interviews can get extremely tiresome, and when you have a series of interviews with a few video conferences with candidates from a different place, it could get any worse. There are more real-time problems that you are going to face while scheduling an interview. Scheduling interviews with never-ending phone calls and back and forth emails is a pain, especially if you find a passive candidate with a common 9-to-5 job. Finding a gap in your passive candidate’s schedule can be hard enough without considering your own jammed calendar. However, you might not be the recruiting lead in 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 other 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 ordeal.
Undoubtedly, you can get the best out of it only when you have a well set up plan before the actual interview happens. Right from bringing in the candidates to hiring the best bunch of them! We are here with some cool ideas to make your interview scheduling a lot easier and a lot better!
1. Invest Time
Most of the interviews last from 5 minutes to 45 minutes, depending on the requirements and then evaluating the candidate's ability. You need to spend specific time for each and every category, sometimes you may have to divide the slots into different parts of the interview, including other recruiting heads as well. This needs more keen and clear planning. When the candidate is going to meet the specifications of each. Planning time efficiently is crucial because the ultimate decision about hiring the candidate and evaluating him lies in that period only.
2. Include Buffer Time
Also, including buffer time in between each interview is necessarily important! Leaving some amount of time could cut down any delays and allow you to breathe from tightly packed schedules. Buffer time can help you relax your mind from the hectic schedule and hold smooth sailing interviews. It also allows for the interview to run slightly over, without letting one candidate be cut short or causing all interviews to run late for the remaining time of the day.
3. Choose the Right Time of the Day
As much as the candidate is trying to sell themselves to you during an interview, you should be trying to sell the company to them as well. For this reason, it’s a good idea to schedule interviews during the time of day when you are more attentive and energetic. If you have an interview lined up before an important meeting or presentation, chances are that your mind will be much more focused on the next meeting than the person in the chair across from you.
4. Allocate Sufficient Time for Breaks
While they allocate sufficient time for each candidate or plan an interview schedule, we may tend to neglect the trivial things. One such thing that recruiters often lead to is missing out on lunch and tea breaks that are equally necessary. You need to consider the amount of time you would like to spend during snack and lunch breaks. You may allocate 15 or 25 minutes to snack and breakfast breaks. Lunch breaks may extend from anywhere to 1 hour. Schedule a lunch hour and make sure that you stick to it. Remember that any delay in these aspects would affect the interview schedule and ruin the entire day!
5. Sync With Your Recruiter
Manage your recruiter's calendar by syncing it with the open slots for taking up an interview. Consider knowing more about their flexibility and preferable time to take up, whether the interview goes on for a couple of days or maybe for a certain amount of time every day. Communication is really important when it comes to organizing such tedious tasks! Understanding the recruiting team’s preferences upfront can reduce the risk of needing to reschedule interviews later.
6. Encourage Self-Scheduling
Human resources group in many companies waste innumerable hours to coordinate and match up everyone’s schedules to reckon the best time for interviewing a candidate when multiple interviewers are involved. Empower your team and candidates to seamlessly book their flexible timings without making hundreds of calls or waiting for an email reply. Instead of taking the pain in fixing the schedule, let your team or candidates get involved into booking any day or time that is flexible for everyone. Save those thankless hours spent exchanging back-and-forth calls that often take place between candidates and interviewers during interview scheduling and also eliminate the risk of double-booking if your team’s schedule changes before your candidate responds with their own availability.
7. Integrate With Social Networking Sites
Hiring the best candidates is not easy, and it is one of the reasons why more companies are looking up to social recruitment in order to find the highest talent they need. Promote your jobs using your personal social media accounts or a smart way to open wider chances is integrating your interview scheduling software directly to post about the jobs on your company’s social media pages by simply adding a book now button to it. This book now widget has an incredible option to grab in attention and easily takes your candidate to the booking page.
8. Know More About Your Candidate
Hiring teams may often require added information from applicants after they have completed the application. This further data could be for background information references or any other documents or information that can help in the hiring process. Online interview scheduling software makes this step a breeze by providing a variety of ways to request details from the candidate by sending them a list of customized questions that they can answer easily from any device or simply by requesting certain documents. Hiring teams now have the capability to easily request, collect and manage all the information that they need about a candidate to make an informed decision on a single platform
With all these tips, you could take up an interview in real quick and smart moves. Just put your fingers on Picktime and watch the wonders it does to help you schedule your interview hassle-free. Keep the stress out of your brains and shoulder up in taking the responsible recruiter role with ease.