Interview with Pallavi Delgado, CEO and Co-founder, of InterviewPlanner.

Everyone loves an origin story. What is InterviewPlanner and why did you start it?

InterviewPlanner is a scheduling platform that integrates with your ATS to intelligently find optimal schedules and provide a friendly candidate experience. We automate interview load distribution, interviewer training, candidate communication, and streamline scheduling into a single, guided workflow. It only takes a couple of minutes to schedule a candidate, even for a complex virtual onsite.

In 2019, I was an engineer and Robin was an engineering manager at a small startup. We were interviewing dozens of candidates a week, and our recruiting coordinators were swamped. This time of growth really magnified the difficulties we were facing with our existing scheduling tool.

We were spending too much time learning how to configure our scheduling tool in an effective way. Some onsites were taking over an hour to schedule, especially if there were really busy interviewers on the panel. We lost candidates who were on a tight timeline because we couldn't schedule them soon enough. We had little to no visibility into why a schedule couldn't be created or what the most common bottlenecks were. To make up for gaps in the scheduling tool, we found ourselves keeping track of interviewer load, interviewer pools, and training statuses in spreadsheets, but those became outdated quickly.

Most importantly, our existing scheduling tool just wasn’t finding schedules! We ended up writing an algorithm to find working schedules by checking Google Calendar, and it found options that the tool didn’t. From there, we talked to around a dozen coordinators in our network and felt that there was definitely a need for a better scheduling tool. Over the next few years, we built InterviewPlanner part-time while working closely with a small set of teams as early users and design partners.

We recently went full-time on InterviewPlanner at the beginning of 2023, and are rapidly growing our customer base and are excited to talk to more RecOps folks about interview scheduling! 

What do you think InterviewPlanner does differently from your competitors?

• A simple, intuitive interface that’s easy to jump into. We’ve had people start scheduling immediately without any onboarding or training, and be able to do it right the first time. 

• Smarter, easier interviewer training. We let you schedule multiple upcoming training sessions so you can get people trained faster. We update a trainee’s role in all future training sessions automatically if an interview gets canceled or moved around. You can manually update a trainee’s progress through the program without losing their training history. You can retroactively mark an interview as a training session.

• Highly personalized and responsive support. We do live support through Slack, and you’ll be talking directly with the builders of the product! No long chain of communication to go through, just straight answers to your questions. We also provide personalized white-glove setup for all teams that want it, which means that we set up a few roles with our best practices based on your setup in your ATS and/or previous scheduling tool.

For RecOps folks, what do you think are some key questions they should ask when evaluating Automated Scheduling Tools?

• On average, how much time does it take us to schedule a phone interview? What about an onsite? If the answer is over 10 minutes for either one, an automated interview scheduling platform could give you a huge boost in efficiency.

• What makes it difficult for us to find the best schedule? What are your biggest bottlenecks? Room availability? Not enough people who are trained to be interviewers? If you're not sure, this could be a good place to start debugging your process before diving head-first into purchasing a scheduling tool. Once you identify your pain points, you can evaluate which ones a scheduling platform can help with.

• On a similar note, do our recruiting coordinators have all the information they need to do their jobs effectively? If your recruiting coordinators are missing crucial details about interviews—like how long they should be, which interviewers are qualified to conduct them, when interviewers are free—then an automated scheduling tool may not fix your scheduling woes. Developing processes where hiring managers, recruiters, and coordinators finalize these details in an intake meeting ahead of time will save your team plenty of frustration when your first candidates enter the pipeline.

• How do we structure our interview loops? Do you do all-day back-to-back interviews or do you spread your interviews over multiple days? Do you have panel interviews? Do you include shadow interviewers? Do you do group interviews, with multiple candidates interviewing at a time? Whatever your process is, make sure the scheduling platform you choose can handle your specific setup well.

• What is our ideal candidate experience? Consider factors like lunch breaks, video conferencing, and how you'd like to customize your communication with the candidate. Do you want emails to feel more personalized like they’re coming directly from the recruiter/coordinator, or do you want the process to feel more branded and automated? Do you want the candidate to schedule their own interviews? Do you want them to receive reminders if they forget to respond?

Part of RecOps is advocating for a tool to budget holders like Finance and TA Leadership. Imagine you are on the RecOps side of the fence. What arguments would you make for why you need to InterviewPlanner?

• InterviewPlanner makes your hiring team more efficient and able to schedule more candidates with a leaner team. The annual cost of a scheduling platform is significantly less than the cost of hiring more coordinators in the long run.

• Saves time on finding a working schedule, adding video conferencing links, coding links, and last-minute reschedules

• Reduces human error in scheduling and candidate communication, thus creating a better impression for the candidate

• Benefits teams throughout the company, as InterviewPlanner prevents interviewer burnout by automatically distributing interview load and setting interview caps

• Of the scheduling platforms out there, InterviewPlanner is consistently one of the most affordable options. We believe that streamlined interview scheduling, along with interviewer training, interviewer attribute management, and a more polished candidate experience, are foundational building blocks of the recruiting process that will help your team scale smoothly. That means that we prioritize pricing that’s accessible to early-stage startups.

How do you think RecOps folks can help drive meaningful changes in the Automated Scheduling process?

• A common perception that I encounter when speaking with small teams is that they don’t need a scheduling tool yet. It’s sometimes thought of as a later-stage addition, when a coordinator can’t keep up with the scheduling workload. Or it’s something that’s not needed because they have a dedicated coordinator (though a scheduling platform is meant to enable coordinators by giving them a tool to organize and manage their workload!). This perception is bolstered by the exceedingly high price point of some of the incumbents in the scheduling platform space.

• I definitely agree that an automated scheduling tool is not necessary for a lot of teams. Where RecOps folks can help is by guiding hiring teams to think about making this decision proactively based on a company’s interview process, rather than based on company size or number of roles. Much like an ATS is a useful tool at any stage for managing applicants, an automated scheduling platform is useful for managing the interviewing process. The key questions above are a good starting point. If you’re hiring for a senior engineering role with a series of coding and behavioral interviews in a virtual onsite, it doesn’t matter if you’re a team of 50 or 500. Automated scheduling can save you a ton of time and help you keep your interviewers happy. On the other hand, if your hiring process is mostly one-on-one interviews with specific interviewers and you’re thriving with candidates scheduling their own interviews on Calendly or Lever EasyBook…that’s great! That works! I wouldn’t try to convince that team to use automated scheduling.

• RecOps folks can also help teams think strategically about how to manage their interviewer pools and where to implement training programs. Some interviews may need larger pools based on the volume of candidates that need to be scheduled, the number of potential interviewers, and their preferred interview limits. Reporting, whether it’s from your scheduling platform or manually tracked, can let you proactively identify bottlenecks. Automated scheduling platforms that incorporate training programs are a powerful way to ensure that your interview process can scale as applicant volume increases.

What do you wish people knew about the automated scheduling process that isn’t obvious / what kind of enablement do you think the RecOps team should drive?

• There’s a LinkedIn post I saw a few months ago by Troy Sultan (CEO of Guide) that really resonated with me: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/troysultan_hiring-recruiting-coordinator-activity-7031366608463831040-uJR8?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

• Automated scheduling doesn’t take away the role of the recruiting coordinator. Automated scheduling enables the modern-day RC to do all of the things that the role has evolved to require. It’s more than “just” scheduling (though that by itself encompasses so many different things, including crafting hospitable emails that relay all the information needed to prepare the candidate for the interview process, playing complex games of calendar tetris that can take hours, sending out calendar invites, pulling off last-minute reschedules, etc.). It’s also maintaining interviewer databases, defining the candidate experience, tracking metrics on the hiring process, and so much more.

Why do you think there is such complexity in the scheduling process?

• TLDR: Because hiring teams have to balance the experience of the candidate and the experience of the interviewers.

• Three main reasons:

• Lots of interviews. Finding good talent is so crucial to the success of a company. This often means multiple rounds of interviews to ensure a mutual fit between the candidate and the team. More interviews + more interviewers = exponentially more complex calendar tetris.

• Busy interviewers. Interviewers have jobs with roles and responsibilities outside of interviewing. And interviewing takes a lot of time. Other than conducting the actual interview, there’s submitting feedback, discussing the candidate’s performance in debriefs, training for interviews, and sometimes helping to develop new interview process. Many teams implement weekly interview limits to guard employees’ time. Interviewers’ preferences, working hours, availability, and calendar hygiene all contribute to the complexity of finding a working schedule.

• Wooing the candidate. Companies are incentivized to stand out from the other companies that the candidate may be speaking with. The convenience and ‘feel’ of the interviewing process is central to the impression that the candidate develops of the company. Candidates are turned off by a poor experience during the hiring process, so minimizing errors in communication is crucial – and difficult to do when there are so many moving parts to scheduling.

Who is your ideal customer?

• Process-oriented, communicative, and having an organized hiring process helps.

• Some of my favorite conversations with our customers are brainstorming with them! We love being thought partners when customers revamp their interviewing process, to provide insight into how other companies do things and to work with them on how InterviewPlanner can enable them in managing their process changes.

What is your average customer size and industry? Are your customers more SMB, Mid-Market, or Enterprise focused?

• ~200 employees, tech companies. More SMB, though we have customers in all those tiers.

What tools can you integrate with (e.g. an ATS)?

• ATS - Greenhouse and Lever. Ashby integration is planned for this year.

• Calendar and email - Google and Office 365.

• Video conferencing - Zoom and Google Meet.

• Coding tools - CoderPad and HackerRank.

• Slack

Check out https://interviewplanner.com/features/integrations for more details on how we integrate with these tools.

Who are some voices that you follow in the space?

• Jeremy Lyons, Anneli Scopazzi, Riece Keck, Troy Sultan, Nate Guggia

• Underdog.io’s Ruff Notes

• Slack workspaces: #people, peoplegeeks