You've spent hours sourcing, engaging, and light-selling your candidate, and finally, they agree to come in and meet the team. Unfortunately, as you know, your job is
only half done. As a Recruiter, your troubles start even before you consider the question of whether the candidate will impress the team, fit in with company culture, and be smitten enough with your organization to want the job. You've got to complete one of the most time consuming and frustrating tasks of the hiring process: scheduling.
Interview scheduling is such a thorn in the side of many talent acquisition pros because of the difficulty in finding a window of time that aligns with several different calendars, often on many different days. This represents a unique challenge because:
- time spent scheduling is time spent not recruiting
- you can only ask someone to leave their office in the middle of the day so many times
- you've got to find a gap that coincides with multiple calendars, in progessing order of seniority
To help you cope with the pain of scheduling interviews, below are some methods to minimize your time spent scheduling, and more importantly, create a better candidate experience.
All Aboard
With just about any aspect of recruiting, the more you can get the hiring manager involved, the better. If possible, try and get relevant team members to block out a time of the day, perhaps on one day each week, in which they'll agree not to schedule other meetings. This will create a standing window for you to schedule on sites. This may be a big ask, but hey, recruiting is important.
Many companies have even hired individuals whose main responsibility is to schedule and facilitate interviews. These people, often titled Recruiting Coordinators, find open windows across multiple calendars, welcome candidates when they arrive, and otherwise keep the interviewing machine well oiled and running. What you'll find is the time someone in this role can save a full stack recruiter more than justifies the cost.
Respect Their Time
I fear Recruiters often forget to put themselves in the candidate's shoes when it comes to bringing them on site. Remember that these people have their own jobs, and there's only so many times they can schedule fake Doctor appointments in order to dip out of the office in the middle of the day to come meet your company. As a result, you can't be bringing candidates in to the office over and over again, as it's disrespectful to their time. On the flip side, if you only bring someone on site once, you run the risk of not assessing them fully, and you plant a seed of doubt in the candidate's mind that your organization isn't hiring thoughtfully. The sweet spot here is 2-3 onsites, which provides enough time to meet the right team members and gives you the opportunity between interviews to talk to references. The value of talking with references between meetings is that you'll have more specific material to address, and can push them for more specific material to discuss with the candidate.
Naturally, for more senior roles, more meetings will be necessary. These will include multiple on sites with employees at various stages of seniority, as well as the more Mad Men-esque deal closing fancy dinners. General rule of thumb here is that number of meetings correllates with seniority of hire.
What are some of your strategies when considering candidate experience in terms of the interviewing? Leave a comment or tweet @EnteloRob!
