With Interview Scheduling, Less is More!
Jan 3rd 2021
With Interview Scheduling, Less is More!
“But HR Guy….using an interview scheduling tool is impersonal and prevents us from adding value to the recruitment process!” they say to me with a furrowed brow in a vain attempt to understand my passion for doing things efficiently.
In most cases, I don’t respond to comments as dumb as this. However, in my more tolerant moments, I’m likely to say something like this:
“Are you kidding me?” And then it quickly becomes apparent that, no, much like their accounting classes back in business school, they are failing to get it.
Honestly, I do hear this and it never fails to blow my mind that people who make a career out of recruitment would think this way. Or that people actually walk around in life with the idea that all things can be improved if you make them more complicated and intrusive. This runs contrary to my stoic approach, which I will touch on in future posts.
One of the biggest developments in recruitment since I started my career is the advent of the online jobs website. If you’ve been doing this recruiting stuff for 10 or more years, you will remember a time when you advertised your positions in one of two ways: a sign out front of your building, or the Saturday classified ads in your local daily newspaper. The movement to online jobs board was transformational (sorry, gotta love them buzz-words). And…imagine the horror: it was a movement to a self-service, impersonal advertising approach that increased direct content with applicants in no way, shape or form.
So why has the online job posting become the standard in recruitment advertising? This is debatable, but I think we could largely agree it’s because of the proliferation of the related technology. You know…the Interwebs? Posting job ads online not only speeds up the advertising process, but it’s more cost-effective than print advertising ever was or could be.
Having the internet infrastructure in place kind of makes online job advertising a given for recruiters, but there are advantages from the other side of the equation as well. As an applicant, the ability to search multiple jobs from numerous employers, at one website, is way more convenient than scouring numerous classified ads. I’d argue that once applicants got a taste of this level of convenience, it would have been detrimental to any employer who actively avoided digital advertising…and don’t laugh, I know some who did.
But how could such a game-changer (sorry…buzz-worded you again) take place that didn’t increase our ability to personalize the recruitment process and add value? Because some things are better done with a self-service model, and sometimes we add value via subtraction.
Much like the movement to online job boards, more organizations are using interview scheduling software because the technology makes it faster and more efficient, and applicants like it.
Why is it faster and easier for the recruiter to use Interviewer Assistant for scheduling interviews? First of all, you don’t have to contact every candidate individually. Rather you create your interview schedule template once, and then email it to all of your candidates (please use the magical blind copy feature for that!). Additionally, you don’t have to wait for the inevitable phone tagging, back and forth to nail your interview schedule down. When you candidates open their email interview invitation, they can instantly check their calendar and select their preferred interview time….even if they are:
- Stuck in a bus in rush hour traffic
- In the middle of a 4 hour buzz-word planning session
- Watching a hockey game
- Etc.
Don’t you think your candidates like being able to do this instantly via an online interview scheduler? And, if you setup your interview invitation template correctly to include all the info your candidates might need (job description, org charts, etc.) they will probably be much better prepared for the interview (without having to call you).
Don’t be surprised if you are able to schedule interviews for all your candidates in under a half hour without making or taking a single phone call (I’ve seen it happen). Now just think of all the “value-adding” and “personalizing” of your recruitment process you can do with the several hours you just saved!