Hand picked by our HR Technology experts after product testing, user research, and much debate - enjoy!
The many steps between sourcing candidates and making an offer can easily become a logistical nightmare, especially when you’re dealing with a high volume of applicants. Modern scheduling tools allow for faster time to fill, a better candidate experience, and decreased recruiter headaches. Interview scheduling is a critical part of the hiring process with impacts to both the candidate and hiring team, yet one that can be the most prone to error.
Manual scheduling requires coordinating multiple schedules, sending countless emails back-and-forth, and juggling potential last-minute schedule changes. The process itself is antiquated, time-consuming, inefficient, and creates an inconsistent candidate experience. Some recruiters estimate that they spend up to 90% of their time on scheduling!
We put together this guide after researching the various vendors in the automated interview scheduling space, and talking to recruiting teams about their experiences with these tools. We hope you’ll find the list of best vendors helpful, along with the various advice we’ve outlined below on implementation best practices, questions to ask on demos, etc. Good luck!
We take research seriously. To make sure we’re offering our readers the very best solutions in a given software category, we are methodical, rigorous, and expansive in our research. We consult with HR professionals, vendors, and industry experts. We cut through the noise to bring you a carefully curated list of vendors, along with other essential information, to help you find the right software platform for your business.
Here’s how we chose who makes the cut:
Product: We believe in gaining a comprehensive understanding of a product before we recommend it, so we start by getting to know the software. Whenever possible, we meet with a senior executive (CEO or Head of Product) for a demo and Q&A. We also test the product ourselves to make sure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best-in-class offering.
User feedback: We go straight to the source and compile feedback on user experience. Real-world input supports our commitment to diligence in our software evaluation methods and the products we recommend. Keeping up with the everyday experience of HR pros also puts new vendors on our radar, and it keeps us close to our community so we can better connect the right products to the right people.
Financial metrics: We are certified finance nerds, so we use all the data we can get our hands on to make selections for our guides. We comb through data for concrete statistics like retention rates, growth, profitability, and scalability. We evaluate the bottom line of each product because we know making a software purchase can put your reputation on the line.
Best for a use case: Software is never a one-size-fits-all product. Sometimes the best solution is free or cheap. Other times it’s the one that is best for global companies or the one that’s sized right for early-stage startups. Keeping this in mind, we include solutions across the spectrum so our readers can find the best fit for their unique needs.
Here's more detail if you want to read more about how we research vendors. Our dedicated staff writers rely on hard data, impartial experts, and user feedback to ensure our reviews are helpful, truthful, and hopefully a pleasure to read!
We track thousands of HRTech solutions, these are the best interview scheduling tools per our research and expert council as of 2023.
Why we love it
:
VidCruiter stands out for being quite flexible. They offer a range of robust recruiting solutions that you can purchase individually or combine with one another as needed. It’s also available in seven languages besides English, both for recruiters and applicants.
VidCruiter
Review:
A leader in the video interviewing software category, VidCruiter also offers a robust scheduling tool allows you to automate interview scheduling, integrate third-party calendars and seamlessly sync meetings in real-time so everyone is always up to date. If you purchase the whole suite, you’ll also get to benefit from VidCruiter’s video interviewing, applicant tracking, skills testing, digital interviewing (live and pre-recorded options), and automated reference checking tools.
VidCruiter
Customers:
VidCruiter is used by over 40,000 recruiters, including ones from Lowe’s, Lionsgate, Samsung, Bears, US Foods, and United Nations.
VidCruiter is used by over 40,000 recruiters, including ones from Lowe’s, Lionsgate, Samsung, Bears, US Foods, and United Nations.
VidCruiter
Stats:
VidCruiter
Pricing:
The pricing of VidCruiter’s solutions is not disclosed on their website and is calculated based on your number of hires. You can get in touch with VidCruiter’s Sales team for a custom price quote.
The pricing of VidCruiter’s solutions is not disclosed on their website and is calculated based on your number of hires. You can get in touch with VidCruiter’s Sales team for a custom price quote.
Best For
We recommend VidCruiter for organizations that hire more than 100 people a year, i.e. medium and large-sized companies and recruiting agencies.
Why we love it
:
Paradox's AI assistant, Olivia, automates interview scheduling, reminders, cancellations and more. Just connect your calendar and Olivia will take it from there.
Paradox
Review:
Paradox is best known for their HR chatbot Olivia. While the bot can do many things, one of the core ways it drives value for recruiting teams is through scheduling candidates for interviews. While using Paradox solely for scheduling isn’t doing its full solution justice, it does belong on your radar as you look at various scheduling tools.
Paradox
Customers:
Unilever, McDonald’s, Amazon, 3M, CVS Health, Nestlé, Lowe’s
Unilever, McDonald’s, Amazon, 3M, CVS Health, Nestlé, Lowe’s
Paradox
Stats:
Paradox
Pricing:
Pricing is not disclosed upfront. You will have to schedule a demo to get custom pricing based on your company size. After filling out a demo form on their website, their team will reach out to you within one business day to learn about your team’s challenges and schedule a custom-tailored demo.
Pricing is not disclosed upfront. You will have to schedule a demo to get custom pricing based on your company size. After filling out a demo form on their website, their team will reach out to you within one business day to learn about your team’s challenges and schedule a custom-tailored demo.
Best For
Paradox is ideal for large enterprises that deal with a high volume of job candidates on a frequent basis.
Why we love it
:
Prelude helps recruiting teams with complex interview scheduling needs automate and streamline the hiring process. Their modern and intuitive platform saves time for recruiters and interviewers while improving the candidate experience.
Prelude
Review:
In-house recruiting teams often spend half of their resources on the logistics and admin work that surrounds candidate interviews. They spend too much time on scheduling, conference room management, and emailing people internally about the best time to meet a candidate. This deceptively complex problem is what Prelude was made to solve.
Prelude lets you take parts of your candidate interview scheduling process and automate it based on people’s profiles, rules about calendars, time zones, and other parameters. For example, if a candidate reaches the point when it’s time to have a panel interview, the system can know who’s on the panel based on that particular hiring workflow, read each person’s time zone and individual preferences, and propose appointments based on them. Once a moment is chosen, the invite is automatically sent to everybody involved, containing a conference call link and right to their Google Calendar or Outlook.
Prelude
Customers:
Over a hundred top companies use Prelude, some of which include Cloudflare, Policygenius, Samsara, Duolingo, One Medical, Klaviyo.
Over a hundred top companies use Prelude, some of which include Cloudflare, Policygenius, Samsara, Duolingo, One Medical, Klaviyo.
Prelude
Stats:
Prelude
Pricing:
Prelude has three pricing plans:
The exact pricing of each plan is disclosed only after you sign up for a live demo. The demo is free and you could schedule it by filling a small form on their website.
Prelude has three pricing plans:
The exact pricing of each plan is disclosed only after you sign up for a live demo. The demo is free and you could schedule it by filling a small form on their website.
Best For
Prelude has customers from both small and large recruiting teams, ranging from 30 employees to over 15,000. So, it’s suitable for companies of all sizes that have complex scheduling needs and are in serious need of cutting down their interview scheduling time.
Why we love it
:
HireVue is a pioneer in the video interviewing software space and stands out from its competitors for its AI-powered on-demand interviews that helps recruiters conduct the initial screening of candidates.
HireVue
Review:
HireVue is a hiring software that has a tool for scheduling, apart from other hiring solutions. The scheduling tool is fully automated and they have a conversational AI that coordinates with the job candidates. HireVue allows candidates to self-schedule as per their availability. It can also be used as a scheduler for managing hiring events like virtual career fairs and graduate hiring.
HireVue
Customers:
HireVue has customers in a variety of industries ranging from aviation to retail. Some popular names include Amazon, Unilever, Vodafone, Beacon Health System, SmartLynx Airlines, The Co-operative Bank, and National Safety Apparel.
HireVue
Stats:
HireVue
Pricing:
HireVue has two pricing plans:
Best For:
Large enterprises who frequently have hiring needs.
Why we love it
:
Calendly stands out from its competitors for its ease of use, slick design, and the amount of time it saves. It’s also one of the few scheduling tools with an indefinite free plan.
Calendly
Review:
Calendly is a scheduling software that has native integrations with many popular video conferencing tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams.
One of the best features about Calendly is that it's candidate-centric. What that means is, you wouldn’t have to deal with the headache of figuring out and booking interview slots for all your candidates. All you have to do is share your availability calendar with your candidates and let them choose an interview slot that’s suitable for them. You don’t even have to worry about following up because Calendly automatically sends the invitees all the interview details.
Calendly
Customers:
Calendly has many big names in their customer base, such as eBay, Compass, Lyft, Dropbox, La-Z-Boy, Twilio, and Stack Overflow.
Calendly
Stats:
Calendly
Pricing:
Calendly has five pricing plans that can be billed either monthly or annually. If you choose the latter, you’ll save 20%. Below are the prices you’ll pay per month per user, if you choose to get billed annually.
All the paid plans come with a 14-day trial, at the end of which, you’ll automatically be downgraded to the free plan. They also offer special pricing for non-profit organizations. You’ll have to reach out to their customer support specialists for details.
Best For:
Companies of all sizes looking for an affordable and user-friendly scheduling solution. Sole business owners and small businesses might find Calendly particularly helpful since there’s a free plan as well.
Why we love it
:
GoodTime Hire emphasizes candidate ‘relationships’ over just ‘experience’. It uses Candidate Relationship Intelligence to automate coordination and personalize communication. It also delivers insightful interview and candidate data that you can act on to refine your process.
GoodTime
Review:
GoodTime is a specialized meetings software with a robust module for interview scheduling. It has automated scheduling which means that recruiters don’t have to manually book every candidate’s interview times and instead let candidates give their own availability, which GoodTime then matches with the interviewers’ available times.
GoodTime is packed with a range of features such as interview training and progress tracking, interviewer tags, automated load balancing for interviewers, personalized branding, analytics, and more.
GoodTime
Customers:
GoodTime is used by over 300 companies including many notable ones such as Lattice, HubSpot, Pinterest, Patreon, Zoom, Spotify, Slack, and Quora.
GoodTime
Stats:
GoodTime
Pricing:
GoodTime Hire: Both of the plans for GoodTime Hire below include automated scheduling, interviewer selection, dynamic content personalization, interviewer training management, candidate feedback, reporting, and round the clock support and expert guidance.
GoodTime Meet: This tool is completely free and provides a means for your entire organization to optimize simple scheduling between colleagues, customers or prospects.
Best For:
Medium and large companies looking for a scheduling solution to complement their recruiting products.
Why we love it
:
Unlike other virtual assistants, Clara neither requires an installation of an application nor requires you to repeatedly talk to it. You simply CC it on your mails and Clara takes care of all your scheduling woes.
Clara
Review:
Driven by artificial intelligence, Clara is a virtual assistant that schedules your interviews right from your email, without the installation of any software.
While sending an email to your interview candidates, you simply have to put Clara in the CC and it would coordinate with your candidates on its own to schedule an interview. You’ll then find the interview details added to your calendar. It also automatically follows up, sends reminders, and asks for the interview feedback from both the candidates and the recruiters.
Clara
Customers:
Clara serves both individuals and companies. Some of the top companies that use Clara are Pinterest, Mattermark, Experiment, InVision, Noom, Plaid, Rubrik, Whirlpool.
Clara
Stats:
Clara
Pricing:
Clara has four pricing plans:
Apart from the broad differences mentioned above, there are more features available in the more expensive plans. Clara also offers a 20% discount on all pricing plans for NGOs. You can avail this by emailing them about your NGO.
Best For:
Clara serves companies of all sizes. However, it would be best for companies that already use email for scheduling meetings and also companies who are seeking an assistant for booking meetings.
Why we love it
:
Unlike a lot of appointment scheduling tools, 10to8 has a free plan with features that would be very sufficient for a sole business owner. What really sets it apart though is the free SMS reminder system it comes with that most other scheduling vendors charge separately for.
10to8
Review:
10to8 is an appointment scheduling tool that also lets managers and HR professionals schedule interviews with job applicants. It focuses on reducing wasted time and comes with features that make coordination simple and less chaotic.
All you have to do is, set up your calendar and share that with candidates to pick a mutually convenient time. 10to8 would then automatically send them reminders for the meeting. You could also have a 2-way chat with your applicants and they could respond to the reminders by confirming, rescheduling, or canceling the interview.
10to8
Customers:
Because 10to8 is a versatile scheduling tool, it serves customers from various industries. Some of the notable ones are Yale University, NHS, Mercedes-Benz, US Bank, Expedia, University of San Diego, NSW Government, and ResMed.
10to8
Stats:
10to8
Pricing:
10to8 has five pricing plans:
Best For:
10to8 serves organizations of all sizes but small businesses and sole proprietors relying on appointment scheduling will find it particularly helpful for many reasons; there is a free pricing plan, you can embed the 10to8 appointment scheduler in your own website, and the implementation is super easy and quick.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
Interview scheduling software are tools designed to automate the interview scheduling process.
Interview scheduling software offers the following features:
Key use cases for interview scheduling software are:
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.
When using interview scheduling software, it’s important to note the following pitfalls:
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!
Stay on top of what really matters in HR and People Tech. Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up on the latest news, trends, and culture.