Best Interview Scheduling Software - October 2020

These solutions are typically priced on some metric that gets down to usage.  Some are priced based on the number of employees in your organization, number of hires, number of interviews, etc.  The guidelines in the chart below are meant to help you understand at a high level what you may be looking to pay at each size of company.

Also note that as your company gets larger the needs for more customization, higher tiers of support, and integrations with other software (via API or otherwise) can also increase pricing.  

One last note, especially for the most basic use cases, some of these vendors have free personal plans that you can play around with as a minimum viable product to understand how this tool could fit into your broader talent acquisition team.

Before you decide which interview scheduling software to purchase, you’ll want to consider a few of the key potential features.  Many of these shorten the length of the overall hiring process by reducing the time spent emailing back and forth, coordinating schedules, and time spent waiting for a response. Automation generally removes the costly errors that can result from small oversights like typos or time zone differences. These are the key features we’ve identified:

• Automatic reminders. Reminders reduce no-shows. Depending on which software you choose, you’ll be able to customize these reminders based on the intervals, frequency, or messaging.  When customizing reminders, make sure to build in links to articles/posts/PDFs that showcase your employer brand.
• Interviewer availability. Access to up-to-date calendars means more accurate interview scheduling the first time around and less time spent emailing to do it. With each platform you demo, you’ll also want to consider the types of interviews that you can schedule (one-on-one, group, round robin, etc.) and to choose the one that aligns with your organization’s talent acquisition process.
• Device syncing. Calendar syncing across all devices should be standard, as well as a way to integrate with your current ATS.
• Live support. No matter how intuitive the interview scheduling software may seem, a responsive customer support team should be available to help you troubleshoot problems as they arise.  One pro tip is that job seekers should also be able to get access to support if they need it (although it should be so dead simple from their perspective that this is fairly moot).

As we mentioned earlier in this post, most interview scheduling software platforms offer free demos (with the exception being purely self serve tools best fitted for the smallest of recruiting teams).  To make the most of a demo, it’s important that you go into it with a game plan. We recommend preparing a list of questions, which might include the following:

• Does this integrate with my ATS?  If not, do I have to manually input new applicants that I want to interview?
• Can you walk me through the candidate experience?
• Are recruiters sent follow ups if the interview is never scheduled?
• What percentage of interviews get scheduled?
• How do I train my recruiters on how to use this?
• How much human involvement is there in the scheduling process?
• What kinds of smart workflows are there around scheduling the “right” person/people on my team for a given candidate?
• What interview training is built into the system for people on my team?
• What is the average decrease in time to fill you see across your customer base?
• How much time does this save the typical recruiter per month?
• Are there any automated screening tools built in?
• How can I showcase my employer brand through this tool?

Once you’ve completed your demos and selected which platform best suits your organization’s needs, the next step is implementation.  Here are a few best practices we’ve picked up on from talking to various HR practitioners.

• Trigger Point:  The software you’ve chosen should integrate seamlessly with your current ATS.  Moving a candidate to the interview stage should automatically send them the appropriate communication and scheduling.  If there is no ATS integration, you’ll have to find another scalable way to get candidates into your system.  For the smallest teams, it may make sense to simply have a dedicated calendar link for each recruiter that you can send on a one-off basis to interviewees.
• Recruiter/interviewer training: Schedule trainings with your team members to show them the features available to them with this new, time-saving solution. This ensures that everyone is on the same page when your new HR tool is rolled out.  One pro tip here is to explain the why behind the tool to get people onboard.  Namely, you’re going to save people time and headaches through this solution!