With so many solutions out in the market right now, it might be hard to know what to look for and how to compare different solutions. We’ve pulled together some key criteria that you should consider to help you narrow down your selection and find what truly works for you.
If you’re reading this and happen to be a recruiter—scheduling interviews sucks, doesn’t it?
Are you one of the 54% of recruiters who really wishes this necessary but time-consuming task could be taken off your hands in a reliable way?
Measuring the reliability and success of an interview scheduling solution
What we’ve found through many calls with those in the talent acquisition and recruiting field across different levels and industries is that there isn’t a fixed checklist of features to tick off, but a prioritization of specific benefits.
We’ve organized them for you to help in your quest of finding what best suits your team and company’s focus when it comes to recruitment.
1. Candidate demographic
Your hiring demographic can often be a good place to begin. You might also have a few different candidate segments where different teams of recruiters are assigned to.
There is no strict measure of how you identify your key demographic—whether it’s by industry, seniority, volume, or a combination of them.
For example, you could be focusing on high-volume campus recruitment and hiring for entry-level positions across all verticals. Or, your key market might be something more seasonal, like hiring for part-timers in the retail or F&B industry that tend to get busier at certain times of the year.
You could be sourcing for management to executive-level positions that, though fewer hires are made overall, there is still a time-consuming volume of candidates as you need to find individuals who really suit the job.
How to consider this factor:
Use this as a base to which you consider the next few factors.
2. Scheduling workflow complexity
As you would already have a scheduling workflow in place (whether done manually or supplemented by an existing solution), the simplicity or complexity of your workflow can strongly determine what kind of solution you are looking for.
Looking for a solution based on these terms tends to mean that you are looking for a list of features that a product can offer and are chiefly looking at automating particular workflows. There are many different ways we’ve found companies conduct their interviews: simple one-on-ones; back-to-back interviews in a single day; virtual interviews across time zones; and more.
How to consider this factor:
If you don’t want to change the way things are currently working, you can focus on a product’s features and request for demos from these products, and possibly test out a few solutions to see which most closely resembles your workflow and can execute it efficiently.
If you are open to changing your workflow, take this as an opportunity to enhance other aspects of the interview scheduling experience aside from its operational aspect.
3. Candidate experience
Nurturing candidates is a process that includes everything from sourcing to hire—and that includes the interview scheduling experience.
It might not make or break the interview experience itself but it certainly contributes to the candidates overall impression of your brand.
By taking the above aspects into account, you can attune the intended candidate experience accordingly. For example, if your market is high-volume entry-level positions, you might consider a tool that maximizes efficiency with minimum customization or personalization.
This could be a UI/UX that provides candidates with a web link to directly and manually book a time off the interviewer’s calendar. However, there is a caveat. This works great when interviewers regularly keep their calendars updated as the single source of truth. Otherwise, this often results in reschedules—that adversely impacts the candidate experience.
On the other hand, you could be an internal recruitment team hiring various positions across the globe for a large enterprise. You could be looking to give candidates a simple yet personal and human-like experience that makes them feel important.
A solution that allows interaction with the candidates—such as an AI Recruitment Coordinator that handles the back-and-forth via email—would mimic the workflow of a real person and also offer a human-like experience with natural language understanding.
How to consider this factor:
This is a tricky one as it can be a subjective one. You could use the brand and tone of voice of your company to guide this decision. You could also consider measuring the experience so that you can evaluate if it works; that’s another factor to consider, especially if you need a more tangible outlook for RoI.
4. Data & Insights
We’ve learned from recruiters that they would love to diagnose their interview scheduling workflow.
Is there a recurring factor that’s causing bottlenecks in coordination?
Why is it that so many confirmed interviews get rescheduled?
Could the interview load be more evenly distributed across managers?
Solutions that offer insight to your questions will not only provide clarity on the current state of your scheduling effectiveness but also pave the way forward for improvements to the process.
For example, we’ve found through Evie’s data on scheduling interviews for a group of Siemens’ recruiters that rescheduling rates can be decreased by up to 87%! This is simply by having Evie propose a list of times according to the interviewers’ calendars and check in with them first. It has shown a positive outlook in the direction of having an AI employee work collaboratively with all stakeholders in the interview process.
How to consider this factor:
Have a session where you dissect your scheduling workflow, the inefficiencies that you experience, and the data you’d like to measure if you had the right tool. This can help your recruitment team have a clearer evaluation criteria to make sure a solution can provide the data you need to diagnose for such inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
5. Integration & Customization
Are you looking for a solution where you can readily launch as-is, or are looking for something more bespoke? Are you aware of the organizational and technological barriers to software implementation in your company?
With the abundance of ATS systems and the many different scheduling workflows out there, integrations are often desirable to streamline the connection between different software. However, depending on the maturity of the product, this might come at a cost.
Then there are the other details that are part of interview scheduling, aside from the coordination bit. Do you need to include attachments in your calendar invites? Do you send out separate calendar invites to the interviewers and candidates? Perhaps you need to create one-time video conferencing links and paste them on the invites. All these details add up.
How to consider this factor:
Some questions you might ask yourself are: Do you have a legacy system in place that requires integration? How critical would the customization be to your workflow success? Are the systems that you use able to integrate with these new solutions?
By paying attention to these factors, you can have a more systematic approach to considering what interview scheduling solution could work for you.
There are recurring themes to these benefits and different products out there that focus on each of these themes. The importance of these benefits vary from team to team; it’s all about prioritization and distilling what really resonates with your recruiting objectives.
If you’d like to learn more, have a chat with us.
