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Are you turning off candidates between interviews?

Updated: Jun 22, 2023

Scheduling communication is an opportunity for your company to build a relationship with candidates and stand out against competing opportunities. Are you making the most of it?


Photo by Georges Malher on Unsplash

Automated scheduling and canned emails create an impersonal interview experience, leading to candidate attrition. Using scheduling communication to develop a relationship with the candidate can increase their engagement and likelihood of accepting an offer.


I spent 5 years manually scheduling meetings for a living, so I get it…


Coordinating interviews is time-consuming work that takes your attention away from other important tasks. Manual scheduling doesn’t only take time, it can lead to miscommunications, technical difficulties, and human errors that fundamentally disrupt the interview process. With so many tools available to automate the scheduling process, why spend your precious time on interview scheduling?


When you rely on self-service scheduling tools and canned emails to handle the majority of your candidate communication, you’re forfeiting the opportunity to build a relationship with the candidate. Adding a personal touch to your communication between interviews shows candidates that you value them as individuals, appreciate their distinct talents and perspectives, and are interested in their feelings when interacting with your team. That genuine human connection could make the difference between hiring that candidate, or having to look for someone else.

“How your recruiting team communicates with the candidate between interviews gives the candidate important signal that informs their excitement about the opportunity and how likely they are to stay engaged or accept an offer. ”

🦾 Don’t give up your automations

Adding a human touch to your scheduling communications doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice the time savings that automations provide. After all, automations enable convenient self-scheduling and help ensure polished, error-free interviews, both of which contribute to a superlative candidate experience. Automated workflows and templates only become a problem when you rely too heavily on them, creating an impersonal, transactional tone that makes candidates feel like “just a number.” The trick is to harness the power of automated tools, and deliver results without sacrificing the human connection.

By putting some thought into your templates and scheduling workflows, you can leverage the efficiency of automations and add a human touch in a fraction of the time. Customizing a formulaic email with a unique sentence about the candidate's situation takes only a minute, but it conveys a personal interest in the candidate as a whole person. When candidates feel seen and supported, it shows that they can expect the same as a member of your team, fostering their emotional investment in return.

Taking a minute to add a unique sentence to your message can reduce candidate attrition. When fewer candidates drop out of your pipeline to accept other offers, it saves the whole team time on sourcing, screening, and interviewing other candidates.



By customizing your templates to each role and interview stage, you can still rely on time-saving smart variables while preserving a more personable tone. Although it may take a few extra minutes to set up such granular customizations, the result reads like an authentic conversation. A personalized opening sentence need not be complicated to establish a warm tone for the remainder of the email. When the candidate sees a message referring to your previous conversations in their inbox, they are more likely to open and read your message.


💪 How to add humanity to your automated scheduling flow

Use the steps below to update your interview scheduling process, and watch candidate engagement rise as attrition decreases. “Set your automations” describes how to automate the factors that influence candidate experience like responsiveness, setting the candidate up for success, and giving them agency over the process. “Personalize the message” provides suggestions for injecting a human touch where it is meaningful.


🫂 Set your automations with care

  1. 🗓 Use self-service scheduling: Giving the candidate agency to schedule their own interviews lets them make the next move when they are most excited about the opportunity. Even if your ATS doesn’t include a self-scheduling tools, the effort of integrating an external self-scheduling tool can save a ton of work and lowers the risk of human error. To make the process less transactional, include a personal message along with the scheduling link, and make sure that the automatic confirmation is consistent with your personality, not robotic boilerplate.

  2. 😘 Keep it simple: Some well-meaning hiring teams try to improve the candidate experience by being overly accommodating to candidate requests. While you should always make accommodations to make your interviews accessible to everyone, keep in mind that customizations not only open the door to bias, they also invite human error. Small details like including the wrong interview description or evaluation criteria, missing or broken videoconference links, lost calendar invites, and messages intercepted by spam filters can make the difference between a candidate passing their interview or failing out of your pipeline. Instead, develop a consistent interview structure so you can dial in a flawless scheduling workflow. When your interviews and their scheduling process are consistent, there are fewer things that can go wrong, and fewer distractions for your recruiting coordinators, letting them focus on delivering the best candidate experience possible.

  3. 👯 Put important information in more than one place: It’s not enough to communicate important information if the candidate never sees it, or can’t find it when they need it. Don’t assume that the candidate reads every email, or that they’ll search for information in the right place. Use automations to over-communicate useful information in more than one message or format without creating extra work for your recruiting team. Try creating the following templates for each position and interview stage:

    1. Email invitation to schedule the interview

    2. Email confirmation that the interview is scheduled

    3. Boilerplate for the “Notes” section of the calendar invite

    4. Email reminder for the day before the interview

    5. PDF with the job description, your company’s approach to interviewing, EEO statement, and anything else the candidate might find useful

Each resource should include the following information:

  1. Interview date & time

  2. Interviewer names and a link to their professional profile

  3. Description of the interview’s structure and what it evaluates

  4. How to prepare (e.g. materials to bring or software programs used)

  5. What to do if they have questions or experience issues.

🪄 Personalize before sending

  1. 🤟 Operationalize the human touch: Starting your message with a sentence that refers to a previous conversation can be enough to show the recipient that there’s a real human on the other side. You don’t have to reach into the depths of their soul to make a connection; calling back to any detail that made an impression will make the recipient feel “heard.” But sometimes it’s hard to know where to start, and easy to waste time overthinking it. Instead, make a plan for where you’ll draw inspiration at each stage and you will know what to say in seconds. For example:

    1. Resume screening - Whatever was most salient to you about their resume. Example: We were especially excited about your Peace Corps experience, since “Giving back” is one of AcmeCo’s core values.

    2. After initial screening call - Pull one positive thing from your post-screen feedback. Example: It was fun to hear about your sabbatical as a lion tamer, and how the skills you learned there improved your effectiveness as a salesperson.

    3. After an interview you didn’t participate in - You can pull one positive thing from the interviewer’s feedback. Example: Marcus was impressed with how quickly you incorporated new information.

    4. If there was a problem - If any miscommunications or technical difficulties arose that affected the interview, this is a great time to acknowledge it. Example: Thanks for bearing with us through the Zoom issues this morning.

  2. 📢 Share the plan: Teams work together more efficiently when everyone knows their role and can communicate directly. When the recruiter makes themself a bottleneck, it eats into the time that interviewers have to evaluate the candidate’s skills, disrupts the coordinator’s work when they have to drop what they’re doing to coordinate, and can throw a candidate off their game. The cost of inefficient communication gets even more expensive when the session must be rescheduled, or the candidate withdraws as a result. Copying everyone who is likely to interact with the candidate at that stage on the schedule confirmation email gives everyone a central resource so that everyone is working off the same information, and speeds up the transfer of information. Therefore, before hitting “send,” take a moment to include the hiring manager, interviewer(s), referrer, office manager, and anyone else who might be called on to help. Even if team members don’t read the email or see the SOS in their inbox right away, the confirmation email will help everyone get up to speed on the original plan if they’re called on to troubleshoot.

  3. ⏰ Send a reminder: 💩 happens, and putting the responsibility on the candidate to catch errors or raise scheduling conflicts will inevitably lead to no-shows and rework. You’d be surprised how many times a simple reconfirmation has prevented problems from scheduling conflicts, missed invites, and cold feet. Even if your scheduling software doesn’t offer a workflow to automatically confirm the details of an appointment the day before, it’s worth taking a minute to manually send the reminder. Although it may take a few minutes to put this reminder together (even from a template), the problems that it prevents are well worth the time investment. Even if the reminder cues the candidate to withdraw from the interview, it’s better to find out that they’re no longer interested before you’ve spent time interviewing them.

💡Takeaways:

The problems caused by disengaged candidates or a sloppy recruiting process cost your team take far more time than a thoughtful, repeatable candidate communication process. Investing time to develop candidate-friendly templates and then adding a few words before sending each message pays off in better candidate engagement, fewer problems, and more efficient problem solving. To deliver a candidate experience that stands out in less time, combine thoughtful automations, a polished scheduling procedure, and personalized communication to show the candidate that you value them and their time.


If you’d like help automating an exceptional candidate experience, or if scheduling blunders are causing candidate churn, I’m here for you. Contact me for a free consultation to discuss your specific situation and pain points.


Want to learn more about creating a great candidate experience? Check out these related articles:

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