Employers - Man Your Calendars

One of the biggest challenges of the hiring process is effective scheduling for onsite interviews/meetings. The best onsite meetings/interviews usually involve many people from different layers in the organization. Obviously the hiring manager must be present, but so should peers, subordinates (or representatives from subordinate groups) and possibly constituents too if the position is in an internal department with service responsibilities for other groups. As a candidate this type of exposure is wonderful and really gives her/him a good sense of the organization across the enterprise. While this is incredible from the perspective of the hiring process, it is usually a scheduling nightmare.

If you are the internal person responsible for putting together a schedule for an onsite meeting with a potential hire, you know what I mean about the hassle factor associated with getting many busy people available to meet candidates. To facilitate the ease of scheduling candidates, perhaps in advance of having candidates onsite there could be two interview teams identified. If the teams are equally composed with representatives of all the groups which need to have a say in the hiring, then the teams can share the responsibility for seeing candidates. Also, one team could borrow members from the other team if there was a vacancy caused by scheduling challenges.

However, if the staff required to see potential hires isn't deep enough to support developing two interview teams; when a critical player has a scheduling conflict be prepared to backfill with a well orchestrated phone interview for that key player. This still allows the onsite visit to take place, but also allows the conflicted critical player to participate in a timely manner without requiring a complete rescheduling of the onsite meeting.

The impression the company makes with a candidate is important - and a well done onsite interview round is a chance to really let your company shine. Managing the scheduling process so that the onsite flows from meeting to meeting is a challenge but doable with some creative thinking and strategy.

Happy hiring.