How to stop scheduling interviews you don't need to
Screening calls are the most expensive part of hiring to schedule and the least valuable to do live. Here is what scheduling really costs, how to take the calendar out of your early rounds, and how to answer the objections your team will raise.
Ask anyone who hires regularly what the worst part is, and interview scheduling comes up fast. Not the interviews. The scheduling. The emails offering three slots, the reply asking for a fourth, the no-show, the hiring manager's calendar that is full until Thursday week, and the strong candidate who accepted another offer while you were finding a time.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: most of the interviews you schedule do not need a live interviewer at all. Screening calls certainly do not, and a structured second round usually does not either. This post is about taking the calendar out of those rounds, and what that looks like in practice.
What scheduling a round of interviews really costs
Count it for one role. Say twenty candidates reach the screening round, and each gets a 25-minute call.
The calls themselves: a little over eight hours of someone's time, all inside working hours.
Finding the slots: two or three emails per candidate, each waiting a day for a reply. Forty to sixty emails, and a week of elapsed time before the last call is booked.
Rescheduling and no-shows: expect two or three per twenty. Each one restarts the email thread.
Writing up: ten minutes after each call to turn memory into notes, if it happens at all.
Elapsed time: from first invite to last call, two to three weeks is normal. That is two to three weeks in which your best candidates are also talking to other companies.
And at the end of it, what you have is one person's notes on twenty different conversations, taken at different times of day, with different follow-ups. The thing you spent all that effort on is not even very consistent.
Which interviews don't need a calendar
The final conversation needs to be live. You want follow-ups, depth, and a real chat about the role with someone who can answer the candidate's questions. The rounds before it are different. A screening round asks a few simple questions, the same ones for everyone: do they want this job, have they done something like it, can they think and explain clearly? A second round asks fewer, deeper questions: a worked example, a decision they got wrong, a plan for their first 90 days. Neither needs a live interviewer. They need the same questions, a fair amount of time to answer, and a way for the team to watch and compare.
That is exactly what an async video interview is. If the term is new to you, this guide explains it fully. The short version: you write the questions once, every candidate gets a private link, they record their answers in their own time before a deadline, and your team reviews the recordings when it suits them.
What to do instead: the async round
1. Write the questions once
Three to five questions for a screening round, or three or four longer ones for a second round, each with its own time limit. Save them as a question set so the next role starts from them rather than from a blank page. If you want examples, see first-round interview questions with 20 examples.
2. Set a deadline, not twenty appointments
Pick the date and time the interview closes, usually about a week out. That one decision replaces every scheduling email. Candidates get reminders 48 and 24 hours before the deadline without anyone on your team doing anything.
3. Invite everyone at once
Add candidates one at a time, or paste a list of names and emails and invite the whole shortlist in one go. Each person gets a private link by email immediately. There is no account to create and no app to install; the interview runs in the browser on a laptop or a phone.
4. Let candidates answer when they are at their best
Someone working a notice period can record on Saturday morning. Someone in another time zone can record at 9 a.m. their time. Nobody has to book half a day off for a 25-minute call. Before anything is recorded they check their camera and microphone and answer a practice question, so the format is not a surprise.
5. Review in the gaps
As answers come in, the team gets an email and an in-app alert. Reviewing a ten-minute interview takes ten minutes, or about seven at 1.5×, and it fits between meetings rather than needing a block in the diary. Everyone rates independently and the ratings sit side by side. The whole round, from first invite to shortlist, takes the length of the deadline plus an afternoon.
6. Schedule only the final conversation
Now book live interviews, but only with the two or three people who earned one. If the shortlist is still long, run a second async round first with deeper questions and longer time limits. Scheduling three conversations is easy. Scheduling twenty was the problem.
The objections you will hear, and honest answers
"Candidates won't like talking to a camera"
Some will not, at first. Three things make most of the difference: a short note explaining why you use the format and that it is the same for everyone; a practice question that is never recorded; and a visible timer with warnings so nobody is cut off by surprise. Many candidates, once they have done one, prefer it to finding a slot during their working day. Share this preparation checklist with your invite and you remove most of the anxiety.
"We'll lose the human touch"
You will move it, not lose it. The human conversation happens in the final round, with people you have already decided are worth it, and it is a better conversation because you have watched their answers and can follow up on them. The screening call was never where the relationship was built.
"We can't ask follow-up questions"
True. Write better questions, and save the follow-ups for the live conversation. In practice, teams find that the follow-ups they used to ask on screening calls were mostly filling the 25 minutes.
"What if someone misses the deadline?"
Reminders go out automatically. If a strong candidate asks for more time, you extend the deadline by seven days in one click, even after it has passed. The pipeline shows who has started, who has submitted and whose link closes within three days, with an extend button beside each.
"Is it fair?"
Fairer than the alternative. Every candidate gets the same questions, in the same order, with the same time, and several reviewers can rate the same answer independently. A structured process like that is better at predicting performance and leaves less room for bias than twenty different phone calls. How to review video interviews fairly covers the review side.
What to do with the time you get back
Eight hours of calls and a week of emails per role is a lot of time. Spend some of it on the parts of hiring that actually benefit from attention: writing a clearer job description, giving every candidate a proper reply, preparing properly for the final conversations, and checking references instead of skipping them. Hiring gets better when the people doing it are not exhausted by logistics.
Try it on one role
You do not need to change your whole process. Pick the next role with a decent number of applicants, run the screening round async, and keep everything else the same. Note how long the round took from first invite to shortlist, and how confident the team felt about who made it through. Then compare that with the last role you scheduled the old way.
If you would like to see it before you commit, create an interview with your own questions and send the link to yourself. You can also read how the whole flow works, for your team and for candidates, on how it works, or contact us with any question.
