How would your candidates rate your interview process? The majority of us would, of course, hope for a perfect ten—but that’s not the case the majority of the time. When it comes to candidate experience, most companies only focus on the part where the candidate comes onsite.

After all, there are a ton of opportunities to make candidates feel welcome. Whether it’s goody bags, well-trained interviewers, or a well-maintained office, there are a million-and-one different ways to give that in-person, personal touch.

However, your candidate experience doesn’t start when they come onsite. In fact, a truly great candidate experience that lands top talent starts much earlier: right when the candidate schedules their interview.

How Candidates Schedule: Then vs. Now

There used to be one main way most candidates schedule their interview: back-and-forth conversations with someone at the company. Whether it’s with a recruiting coordinator or a chat bot, the candidate experience is the same: they’re plugging in times and hoping that what they input works (and isn’t already taken on the interviewer’s calendar by the time they see their message).

Today’s candidates have options like never before. Candidates that use GoodTime Hire to schedule are empowered to schedule their interview by only seeing times and dates that are available on the interviewer’s calendar.

We were curious; we know personally from our time interviewing at GoodTime that candidate-driven scheduling makes for a better experience, but how do our customers’ candidates feel?

Candidates Prefer Candidate-driven Scheduling

After candidates completed their scheduling on Hire, we had a popup in the corner appear asking how they’d rate their scheduling experience. 

Candidates rated on a scale of 1-5. Out of the 6,000 unique candidates that viewed this popup, about half of them completed the survey and gave us an average score of 4.9 out of 5.

What Does This Mean for My Recruiting Team?

It really means one thing: acknowledge and include the interview scheduling process as a part of your candidate experience plan. Many recruiting teams participate in awesome ways to welcome candidates onsite and follow up with them if they have any questions. Those same great teams miss the scheduling process as a part of that—and it’s really not their fault for not realizing it.

As a recruiting team, it’s not as difficult as you may think to make scheduling great. It comes down to not only exploring tools that can help you get there, but also making an effort to put the candidate first.

Ready to Level up Your Candidate Experience?  

Time’s up for interviews full of scheduling headaches. It’s time for candidate-centered, connection-driven interviews instead.

To read more about how to make that happen for your team, download 5 Steps to Hiring Top Talent at Scale.

About the Author

Rachel Heller

Rachel is passionate about creating and distributing powerful, engaging, and expert-vetted content. As the former Content Specialist at GoodTime, she covered the latest trends, insights, and expert recommendations for all things talent acquisition and recruiting.