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Job interviews are the magic moment. They’re when cover letters and qualifications and references take a backseat, and the entire hiring process culminates into two people, face to face, talking.
Magical.
But these moments don’t happen if you can’t get them scheduled. Dates need to be hammered out. Time needs to be blocked off on peoples’ calendars. And then you have to wait, hoping the candidate even shows up. If there’s friction in any part of that scheduling process?
Poof. The magic is gone.
Interview scheduling is a historically maligned process. It’s painfully slow for candidates, and it gives the people on your team less time to do valuable work. At worst, manual scheduling leads to more turnover and less profits. At best, it’s just really annoying; a monotony that barricades your team from the magical moments they crave.
But it has to be done.
It just shouldn’t be done by you.
Especially when AI can do it so much faster (and so much better). Here’s five ways that prove it — and how leading companies are using AI to turn their interview scheduling into a competitive advantage.
0. What we mean when we say AI.
AI is everywhere right now. It’s a buzzword’s buzzword. And although we all know what artificial intelligence is, generally speaking, we also all have slightly different perspectives and understandings of what it actually does.
So what do we mean when we say AI?
For starters, we’re viewing AI through a talent acquisition lens — how can we leverage AI to automate certain tasks to make hiring and recruiting easier? Faster? Better? How can we leverage what AI does well — automating simple decisions at scale — to transform hiring processes and save employers’ time and money?
For us, the answer is conversational: AI that communicates in real time, using natural language, via text or chat. Our conversational AI takes the form of an assistant — who we call Olivia — who serves as sort of a career guide, navigating candidates through certain stages of the hiring process, like screening, interview scheduling, and onboarding. This AI assistant is available to interact with candidates 24/7, in multiple languages, on any device they prefer.
Essentially, the AI assistant transforms an application into a conversation.
An important thing to note here is that conversational AI should not make any critical judgments in the hiring process (like who to hire). We leave those to recruiters and hiring managers — but what it does do amazingly well is automate all the other stuff, at scale. It’s fast, frictionless, and accurate.
And that’s what interview scheduling needs to be: fast and right. If it’s not, you’re probably going to lose.
So let’s get into how conversational AI can help you win:
1. AI increases conversion and helps you schedule interviews first, fastest.
Candidates want to convert. The reason they’re applying to jobs in the first place is (brace yourself) to get a job. They want a job so badly, in fact, that they’re often applying to multiple jobs simultaneously.
For instance, hourly candidates are notorious for applying to dozens of jobs at once — and they’re going to choose whoever responds and moves through the process fastest. Therefore, the ideal interview scheduling process is one that is fast and accurate.
It’s one that can immediately interact with candidates when they’re interested in applying, and gets them scheduled for an interview as soon as possible. Our Conversational Scheduling software does just that.
Unlike even the most dedicated humans, conversational AI is always on — meaning that it’s able to screen interested candidates for qualifications 24/7. When a candidate is deemed qualified, an AI assistant can immediately send open times to schedule an interview. The best part? It’s all done via text, right on candidates’ phones.
It’s an application that gets candidates from the first “hello” to a scheduled interview in minutes. Which is great for your hiring team (they don’t have to worry about playing phone tag), but even better for candidates. AI gives them an experience that is fast and right, which doesn’t just get them hired faster, it leads to some truly transcendent results.
Like how McDonald's franchises have been able to reduce time to hire by 60% by letting their AI assistant, Olivia, handle interview scheduling. All while boasting a nearly unanimous candidate approval rating for the process.
Oh, and their restaurant managers save 5 hours every week in the process. So it’s kind of a good deal for everyone involved.
2. AI gives time back to recruiters by syncing directly with their calendars.
We understand the sanctity of your calendar.
And we get that the prospects of AI scheduling you to conduct interviews back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-(you get the point) can be overwhelming.
Which is why our conversational AI software doesn’t just integrate with your calendar — it integrates with your schedule. With Conversational Scheduling, you’re able to adjust which times you’re available for interviews, and more importantly, which times you’re not. When your AI assistant sends interview times to candidates, it only pulls the predetermined availability set by you.
In organizations that hire high quantities of hourly positions, team members often have booked calendars for weeks on end. To mitigate the risk of losing a candidate to a full schedule, AI assistants are able to be configured to centralize all incoming interview information. This means that other users in the organization are notified and can take on the new candidates. This includes other members that either work on the ground-floor, or even those in upper management as well.
So you don’t have to worry about interviewing anyone when you’re out-of-office, already in a scheduled meeting, or on your precious lunch break.
Interviews are great. Too many interviews are not. That’s why you have a scheduled end to your work day — and we have flexibility in our calendar integration.
3. AI eliminates frustration and time-stealers by handling all interview types, even the most complex ones.
I’ll confess: I perpetuate the simple-interview stereotype. Even in this blog!
The idea that all interviews are just two people talking face-to-face is simply not true. Many organizations have multi-stage interview processes: panel interviews where there’s multiple interviewers at once; multi-day interviews that span the course of a week; round robin interviews that have different interviewers speak to a candidate back-to-back.
I could go on. There’s a lot of different ways to interview people.
We know that not every role is the same; the interviews for those roles shouldn’t be the same either. Our Conversational Scheduling software allows you to schedule the exact time of interview you need, and when. And it can manage this across as many calendars as you'd like.
Let’s say you need to schedule a panel interview with your Notoriously Busy and Hard to Schedule Interviews With C-Suite. That could be a three-hour game of calendar Tetris — one that can be immediately undone when your CRO schedules a new important meeting over your allotted time.
Or, it could be done automatically by an AI assistant, who can immediately identify open times across all calendars. Saving you time to do more important things than staring at your computer and trying to find a 30 minute calendar block that nine people have open.
With Conversational Scheduling, you can delineate your specific interview scheduling process, and your AI assistant can still schedule with ease. And no matter the type of interview, it’s still a simplified experience for the candidate. They’re still receiving all of the information on their phone. Should they have questions, the AI assistant can immediately clarify and answer them.
Meanwhile, recruiters can set load management settings to manage their team’s workloads and prevent burnout. Because even your star performers need a break sometimes.
You likely have an interview process that is more complex than a single one-on-one interview. AI simplifies all of the noise so it doesn’t get in the way of the magic.
4. AI reduces drop-off and ghosting by automating rescheduling and candidate comms.
If I’ve done my job, you’ve realized by now how crucial it is to get candidates scheduled for interviews in the first place.
But the post-schedule lead-up to the interview is just as important. Because if you neglect the candidate during this “in-between” period of time — you’re going to see drop-off. More wasted time; like you never even got the initial scheduling right at all.
We’ve seen it first-hand.
Sobeys, a Canadian grocer with over 1,500 stores, used to have a bit of a ghosting problem.
Now they weren’t necessarily doing anything wrong. They were just the unfortunate victim of a universal truth: Sometimes, life comes up. Candidates can no longer meet at the original time, or something happened to make them forget about the upcoming interview. And Sobeys didn’t have the technology infrastructure in place to help work around this problem.
So Sobeys pivoted.
Their team implemented Sam, a conversational AI assistant, as a safety net. Sam is able to text candidates interview reminders (at a frequency determined by Sobeys hiring managers), to make sure candidates don’t forget about their upcoming commitment.
Should a candidate need to reschedule, Sam’s got that covered too. She’ll just immediately send over a new allotment of times to make sure the candidate isn’t lost.
And Sam worked wonders — Sobeys saw an 80% decrease in interview no-show rate after Sam’s implementation. Which saved Sobeys’ hiring managers hours of time from having to schedule more interviews to make up for the candidates that abandoned the process.
Too often, rescheduling interviews drains hours of time from recruiters and hiring managers, playing phone tag and email pong in desperate hopes that this time — things work out.
With Conversational Scheduling, you don’t have to spend your days glued to your calendar app. AI assistants can do all that work automatically — and you can spend less time worrying about life’s inevitable tendency to get in the way of interviews.
5. AI strengthens teamwide communication by helping Executive Assistants manage leadership schedules.
For some people, conducting job interviews is their life. For others, conducting job interviews is an item on a very long list of things they need to do in a day.
Look, executives and leadership teams get busy. We get that! And we also get that, sometimes, these busy people are too busy to manage their own busyness.
Should that be the case, we’ve made sure that AI assistants can communicate with executive assistants or other team members to help manage leaders’ calendars, interview time slots, and other communications. Just to make sure that hiring timelines stay on track.
Being busy is totally understandable. You just don’t want it to be the reason that you lose a candidate.
Manual interview scheduling burdens hiring teams and frustrates candidates. AKA: it’s annoying.
Sure, many things in life are annoying. But while there are annoying things that you have to do (think taxes or flossing), interviewing scheduling isn’t one of them. With Conversational Scheduling, you can maintain a better, consistent relationship with your candidates pre-interview, and you can do it without lifting a finger.
So let AI handle your interview scheduling processes — and you focus on the magical moments that happen during the interviews.
