Articles 
Chasing people around and being chased around are not enjoyable experiences for anyone. Unfortunately, this is a common reality many recruiting teams face when trying to coordinate candidate interviews. Meanwhile, candidates are sitting at home waiting for something to happen.
Despite the multiple interview scheduling software options available, scheduling remains a major pain point for many organizations. So much so that industry research indicates that recruiters dedicate over 20 percent of their time to interview scheduling, with some spending upwards of 50 percent.
As it occurs with many automated legacy solutions, the reason behind this reality lies in scalability. Or the lack thereof. While these systems might work when dealing with a few candidates, they become ineffective in coping with high-volume hiring demands.
Interview scheduling automation, like all automation, is limited by data. Just having access to a stakeholder’s calendar is not enough. A modern interview scheduling tool should be seamlessly integrated with your ATS, your recruiting workflows and multiple calendars.
An interview scheduling portal showing a calendar and available timeslots for a candidate to provide their availability.
Interview Scheduling Software vs. Plugins
Simple add-ons and plugins are of limited help because they’re not built to adapt to the particularities of your recruiting strategy and hiring processes.
Instead, they tend to be quite rigid and incapable of integrating into differentiated workflows to consistently streamline interview scheduling for your recruiters across multiple scenarios. What’s worse, their lack of flexibility usually forces users to fit their recruiting processes into a mere handful – at best- of ways of using the plugin.
Whenever you need to schedule an interview, you’re facing a critical moment. If the process requires too much back and forth, candidates will likely lose interest. A study found that the main reason why candidates withdrew themselves from the recruiting process in North America in 2022 was that they felt their time was disrespected.
This discontent can severely damage your reputation, especially if it’s voiced on employer review sites or social media. The ramifications of a negative reputation are hard to quantify, but recent research suggests that it can cost an organization as much as 10 percent more per hire.
Beyond that, candidates might also conclude that the lack of coordination displayed during the scheduling of their interviews is representative of the employee experience within your organization, further discouraging them from re-applying in the future. Losing candidates is not a luxury you can afford in today’s market, especially considering that 77 percent of employers report difficulty filling roles.
Interview Scheduling Tools Built Into Your Recruiting Software
As we look to build next-generation interview scheduling functionality, we’re putting the same tools our customers use to build their recruiting strategy, the ones that help them automate entire parts of the recruiting process, into the service of improving the scheduling experience for every stakeholder involved.
Getting interview scheduling right is not trivial. That’s why we’ve decided to bake interview scheduling directly into our platform, enabling the flexibility, scalability and agility that characterize Avature. We’re constantly listening to our customers and refining our interview scheduling software functionality based on their feedback and evolving requirements.
The Avature calendar’s Check Availability feature showing attendees’ availability before scheduling an interview.
What Sets Avature’s Interview Scheduling Software Functionality Apart?
In addition to taking availability into account and finding open spots automatically, Avature Interview Scheduling is also capable of triggering alternative scheduling methods based on the type of interview, the requirements and the stakeholders that will be involved.
In our experience working with customers to optimize interview scheduling, we’ve found intention and control to be as important as automation. By giving users the flexibility to decide how the tool should work and where automation should be deployed, they are able to accommodate the functionality to their needs, not the other way around.
For example, when time-strapped senior stakeholders are involved in the interview process, it’s hard to guarantee that a free slot on their calendars means they’re actually free to conduct the interview. In that case, it is possible to trigger a process that asks the senior stakeholder to manually select when they’re willing to attend.
If, for any reason, there’s a need to reschedule, Avature will kickstart the process all over again. Whether that’s finding a new matching time or asking stakeholders again about their availability, the system can automatically handle the process from start to finish. If somebody can’t attend, it can trigger reminders for recruiters to replace one of the stakeholders.
But scheduling can go beyond just interviews. Our customer-driven roadmap is ambitious, and new features are rolled out every two weeks. In line with this, we’ve released a set of features that allows you to create entire agendas for any candidates attending your events.
An interview scheduling portal showing a calendar and available timeslots for an internal stakeholder to provide their availability.
Interview scheduling is a game-changing feature when it’s deeply embedded into your ATS (or CRM or campus solution). All the capabilities and tools complementing it, from branded sites and emails to SMS integrations to automated workflows, can help you create a candidate experience that is hard to match.
From one-to-one to group to panel interviews to full interview days and high-volume scheduling, Avature’s interview scheduling software functionality can help speed up and smoothen recruiting across a wide range of scenarios.
Our interview scheduling tool can save your recruiters dozens of hours every week, hours that are currently spent chasing hiring managers and candidates. As was the case with World Duty Free, who used Avature’s interview scheduling tool to seamlessly set up interviews with 5,000 candidates and achieved an impressive 98 percent stakeholder satisfaction after the interviews.
Freeing your recruiters from the hassle of scheduling interviews results in more time spent on high-impact activities like getting to know your candidates and finding the top talent your organization needs to stay ahead of the curve.
