Four strategies for high-volume scheduling

3 mins, 32 secs read time

When you’re a growing company, things are great! Your product is doing well, you’re adding new people to your organization. There’s a certain buzz and energy you can feel in the air.

That also means that it’s a super busy time for your People and Talent Acquisition teams. You probably have a few positions open with multiple interview stages and need to make sure that you’re being efficient while also providing the best candidate experience possible. That’s no easy task.

Here are some strategies I use as the Recruiting Coordinator at Greenhouse to stay on top of it all while scheduling over 1200 interviews this quarter.

Strategy 1: Have a single source of truth

A single source of truth refers to the practice of keeping all of your information in one system for ease of retrieval. There are several ways you can have a single source of truth. What’s most important is that you have one. For me, I use Greenhouse. Specifically, a section on my dashboard page called “My Tasks.”

“My Tasks” gives me a great snapshot of everything that needs to be done: how many and which interviews I need to schedule, or which candidates need to be sent take-home tests. Imagine the time it would take to review every open role and candidate and create a list of everything that needs to be done for each one. That’s a lot of time that could be better used.

My goal is efficiency. Having this one source of truth saves me much-needed time, makes it easier for me to be more productive and enables me to quickly respond to any questions my recruiters or hiring managers may have regarding candidates.

Strategy 2: Automate your help

I’ll be honest, I can’t remember everything. But making sure communication with candidates doesn’t fall through the cracks is one of the most important things I do. There are many reasons I need to circle back with the people in our process: confirming their availability to interview, checking in on the status of their take-home tests, or touching base after not hearing from them for a bit. Automated follow-up reminders are a huge help for me.

If you use Greenhouse, then you already have this feature built in. Right from the candidate’s page, I can set a follow-up reminder and then go about the rest of my day. On the scheduled day, Greenhouse will send me a message reminding me to follow up with them. As an alternative, you can also do this by setting your own calendar reminders.

Strategy 3: Use scheduling tools to your advantage

As citizens of the HR world, we all know that scheduling isn’t always the simplest of tasks. Our hiring managers are busy and so are our candidates. However, there are solutions that can alleviate some of the effort of scheduling.

Fairly recently, Greenhouse released a new scheduling feature that allows you to view your candidates availability and your interviewers’ calendars on the same screen. It now takes me a fraction of the time to schedule.

In addition to using Greenhouse, there are tools within our robust ecosystem, like My Ally and GoodTime, that can help automate the scheduling process and cut down your time spent coordinating schedules.

Strategy 4: Relationships with interviewers

Lastly, what I’ve found to be the single most important strategy for scheduling interviews is creating strong relationships with my hiring teams. It’s crucial to know what times they prefer to interview, how often they can interview, etc. Interviewing is a partnership between us and our hiring teams.

I try to be flexible with interviewers when they need to reschedule an interview. It shows that I want them to have an equally positive interview experience as our candidates, and it helps me create trust with them. When difficult situations arise, interviewers know they can come to me for help and vice versa.

Wrap-up

Interviewing is a busy time where the pressure is on to quickly hire amazing candidates while providing a great candidate experience. That all begins with scheduling. When we’re efficient in our scheduling process, we have better interviews which leads to better hires. In this post, I’ve shared some of the strategies that help me better support my team in our hiring efforts, and I hope they can help you too.