Best Interview Scheduling Software - 2023

We think every company hiring more than a few people per year can benefit from adding interview scheduling software to the recruitment process, regardless of your HR/TA team’s structure, or organization’s size. That’s why we’ve done the research to save you time and help you pick the best solution for your company.

These solutions take a tedious, administrative task and automate it, allowing for more efficiency and productivity. Here are some of the core use cases for automated interview scheduling software:

• Better Interviewers: Many platforms offer training modules that allow interviewers to gain the key skill sets they need to be more effective in vetting job seekers.  The right training means more consistency across your interview process.  This means a better candidate experience, and better hires.
• Matching the right interviewers: Research has shown that who someone interviews with is just as important as what they talk about.  For example, if you have a female engineering candidate coming in, you’re going to want to match them with a female engineer interviewer, preferably early in the process.  This creates a better candidate experience which leads to higher offer acceptance rates.
• Scheduling: Ok, this one is obvious, but these tools will actually schedule the interviews for you without any intervention on your part! Eliminating the wasted time spent going back and forth over email to schedule candidates for interviews means a shorter recruitment cycle. Your team can conduct more interviews in less time, getting you to the right candidate faster.

While we strongly recommend automating the interview scheduling process, we’ve seen HR practitioners make mistakes in the process that can negate many of the benefits. Here are a few things to keep in mind to avoid:

• Technology won't replace good human interactions. Yes, interview scheduling software makes the recruitment process much easier, but as with any tech, it’s not a complete replacement for your team members. The burden still rests on you to humanize the process and engage with your candidates in a way that lets them know that you value their time and interest in your company.  For example, don’t just send a calendar link to your prospective colleague asking them to setup a time to chat.  Sell them on working with your company by giving them materials they can look over in the meantime that dives into your employee value propositions.
• Setting the right expectations for your candidates. Interview scheduling software contributes to a seamless candidate experience, but it’s up to you to let candidates know what to expect as they move through the hiring process.  People want to understand how long the process will be, how many steps there are, what you’re looking for, and of course why they should want this job in the first place.  Don’t fall into the trap of optimizing for efficiency and forgetting there is a human on the other side of that email.
• Not just scheduling: A solution that can automate scheduling is great.  But you should be looking at tools that can do a lot more than that.  Let’s face it, unemployment is incredibly low and the war for talent is on.  Beyond that, you are probably in an organization that needs to hire the right people faster.  Leveraging interview training, interview matching (right interviewers for the right candidates), and interview analytics (who are your best interviewers) all contribute to a better hiring process.  Make sure to treat automation as simply the 1.0 implementation of this solution.
  

There are two major ways that these solutions drive tangible value that your CFO can appreciate.  First and foremost, you’re going to save your team time.  Scheduling becomes such a nightmare that many recruiting orgs have full time HR coordinators that are more or less focused on scheduling.  

Here’s the math: Let’s say you spend 1.5 hrs of time scheduling for each person who comes on site.  Let’s say your HR coordinator makes $50k/yr, or $25/hr.  Let’s say you hire 100 people per year, and interview 3 people for each person you hire.  Ok, so that’s 300 onsite interviews per year, and 300 * 1.5 = 450 hours spend scheduling.  At $25/hr, that’s $11k annually.  Add in the time it takes for phone screens/follow ups and you’re looking at a significant amount of money even for smaller companies, let alone large enterprise organizations.

The second way that interview scheduling software can drive meaningful value is through decreasing time to fill.  This happens in two main ways - one is that you are cutting down on the time it takes to go back and forth with scheduling and re-scheduling interviews.  The second is that you aren’t losing candidates due to frustration which of course means more hires faster.

The ROI can be calculated by thinking through how much an employee is worth to your business, and then figuring out how that value adds up when you are able to get people hired and ramped faster.  The value from an employee can come from new sales (sales/marketing colleagues), increased efficiency (engineering/ops), more customer retention (customer success), etc.

The easiest way to think about the value a person adds to the company is through a multiple of their salary.  If a person doesn’t bring value that is equal to their salary, then that person probably won’t have a job for very long.  And, if each person on average isn’t bringing value that is at least 2-3x their salary, there is almost no way that a company can be profitable!

Here’s the math: Let’s say again that we hire 100 people, and our average time to fill is 45 days.  Let’s say we can decrease that by 2 days with interview scheduling software.  That means in total we get those 100 people for an extra 2 days each, or 200 days in total.  What are those 200 days worth to us?  If each person makes $50k/yr, they make around $50k/365 = $137/day (yes I’m using 365 vs days working as let’s face it we are all working a lot more after hours than we used to).  Per our previous discussion, let’s say each person is worth 2x their salary to the organization.  So, that’s $137 * 2 =  $274/day in value.  $274/day times the 200 days that we got our new employees for, is $55k!

You can see how very quickly there is a hard ROI we can capture through implementing automated interview scheduling software.  Of course, the non-economic benefits are huge as well.  Scheduling can be a pain!  Taking this off your recruiter’s plates will be a welcome respite.

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!

What is interview scheduling software?

Interview scheduling software are tools designed to automate the interview scheduling process.

What features does interview scheduling software offer?

Interview scheduling software offers the following features:

• Device syncing
• Interviewer availability and calendar
• Automatic reminders
• Live support
• Training modules
• Automated scheduling
• Interviewer matching

What are key uses cases for interview scheduling software?

Key use cases for interview scheduling software are:

• Training better interviewers
• Matching candidates with the right interviewer
• Efficiently scheduling interviews

What ROI do you receive from interview scheduling software?

You’ll save time and money by using interview scheduling software. You can either measure this by time-to-fill, employee retention, increased efficiency, and employee value.

What pitfalls can occur when using interview scheduling software?

When using interview scheduling software, it’s important to note the following pitfalls:

• Tech doesn’t replace human interaction. 
• These tools are not just for interview scheduling, take advantage of all their functionality. 
• Set the right expectation for candidates. Just because everything is automated does not mean you can let the tech do all the work with following up.

At this point, you know everything you need to understand whether it’s a good idea to pursue video interview software to help automate your hiring process.  If you’ve come to the conclusion that this is something worth exploring, we recommend getting 2-3 demos from some of the top providers to start getting a deeper feel for how this fits into your strategy.  Remember to stay organized, and good luck!