Overview
Scheduling is part of Eightfold Talent Acquisition, so you don't need a separate scheduling tool. You book interviews from the talent pipeline or from email. Eightfold checks your team's connected calendars, the candidate picks or confirms a time, and the invite goes out with the video link already in it. After the interview, Eightfold sends each interviewer their feedback form, and the hiring team can see what's been submitted on the requisition. It handles one-on-ones, panels, virtual and onsite interviews, reschedules, and interviews across time zones.
How it works
- Set up once (admin). Connect calendars and email, set scheduling defaults, and build scheduling templates and feedback forms.
- Create the interview plan. Define the rounds and interviewers for the requisition, mapped to your ATS stages.
- Schedule from the pipeline. Pick a time based on interviewer availability, or send the candidate a few options.
- Invites go out. Invites land on everyone's calendar with the meeting link included, shown in each person's time zone.
- Interviewers get feedback forms. When the interview ends, each interviewer gets their own link to the feedback form.
- Review and decide. The hiring team reads submitted feedback, and recruiters track what's outstanding in the Interview Feedback Center.
Step 1: Set things up (admins)
Eightfold works with the calendars your team already uses, so setup is mostly a matter of choosing settings. You only need to do this once.
- Connect your corporate calendar and email. This lets Eightfold see when interviewers are free and send invites on your behalf. No coding is needed.
- Set the default time zone, the hours when interviews can be booked, and how much notice candidates should get.
- If you interview onsite, pull in conference room availability from your calendars. For virtual interviews, choose your video conferencing provider.
- Add your logo, contact details, and styling so candidate emails look like they came from your company.
- Build scheduling templates so invites, interview lengths, and messages stay consistent from one recruiter to the next. The Managing & Configuring Scheduling Templates quick guide walks through it.
- Create your feedback forms. Go to Admin Console > Feedback and Assessments > Forms Library and click +Create new form. You can mix open text and multiple choice questions, and add an Upload question if interviewers need to attach images or files. See Creating Feedback Forms and the FAQ on adding image uploads to feedback.
Note: Only admins can create and edit feedback forms. Forms can't be downloaded, but you can request a copy by email. This FAQ has the details.
Step 2: Schedule an interview (recruiters and coordinators)
You can schedule from a talent pipeline or straight from email. Eightfold shows you when interviewers are available, and you decide how to offer times: pick a slot yourself, or send the candidate a set of times to choose from.
- Panels work the same way as one-on-ones. Community members have shared how they handle panel interviews and checking several interviewers' availability at once.
- For virtual interviews, the meeting link (Microsoft Teams, for example) goes into the calendar invite automatically, as this thread confirms. For onsite interviews, rooms are booked from your calendars.
- Turn on Availability to Roll if you want the window of offered times to move forward each day instead of staying fixed to the day you sent the request. It also extends availability when a candidate reschedules. This FAQ explains how it works.
- To keep weekends out of the times you offer, see the answered thread on removing weekends in scheduling.
- Candidates can cancel or reschedule on their own, and you can see which invites are still waiting on a confirmation. Here's what interviewers see when a candidate cancels.
- Scheduling around hybrid teams' office days is still an open conversation. Add your approach to the hybrid scheduling thread.
For a full walkthrough, see the Scheduling Overview and Scheduling Workflows quick guides in the Learning Center.
Step 3: What interviewers get
- An invite that shows the interview in their own time zone. Eightfold also sends reminders to interviewers and candidates.
- Access to the candidate's profile before the interview, including AI insights on the skills the candidate likely has and the job skills worth asking about.
- Their own feedback link. A forwarded link shows an "unauthorized" error, so ask interviewers to use the link in their own email or open the Interview Feedback Center instead. The FAQ on unauthorized feedback links covers this.
- The Interview Feedback Center, which lists their pending and submitted feedback in one place (sign in required). Hiring managers who are new to Eightfold can start with Talent Acquisition for Hiring Managers.
Step 4: Collect and manage feedback
Attach a feedback form from the Forms Library to the interview instead of emailing documents back and forth. The form goes out with the interview, reaches each interviewer when the interview ends, and the responses are saved to the candidate's record. This community thread explains the setup.
- You can change the default email that asks interviewers for feedback. See changing the email sent to interviewers.
- By default, anyone following the requisition's hiring team can read submitted feedback, and you can limit this with position access. If other people need to share feedback or request decisions, an admin can grant the
perm_share_feedbackandperm_request_decisionpermissions. This thread on feedback permissions has more. - Because Eightfold sends the feedback requests for you, recruiters spend less time following up with interviewers.
Step 5: Automate follow-up
Workflow Automation can take over a lot of the repetitive work. It helps most when you're hiring at high volume.
- Set up an interview plan and a workflow so that moving a candidate to a certain stage schedules their interviews automatically. This is Eightfold's recommended approach for scheduling interviews in bulk.
- For automatic follow-up emails to candidates after an interview, see the interview follow-up thread and other customers' workflow automation use cases.
- To track interviewer load and feedback completion, see the thread on interviewer reporting.
Common questions
Why does my interview feedback link say "unauthorized"?
Each interviewer's link is unique, so a forwarded link won't open. Use the link in your own email or find the form in the Interview Feedback Center. If you never got a link, check with your recruiter.
Is the video link included in the invite?
Yes. If you schedule with a conferencing option like Microsoft Teams, the link is in the calendar invite. How it looks depends on the calendar app (Outlook, Gmail, or Apple Calendar).
Can we change the email interviewers get after the interview?
Yes. This answered thread shows how.
Can interviewers download the feedback forms?
No. Admins manage the forms and they can't be downloaded, but you can request a copy by email. This FAQ explains how.
How are times shown when we hire across time zones?
Eightfold converts interview times to each person's local time zone, for both candidates and interviewers.
I'm evaluating Eightfold. Why does built-in scheduling matter?
Scheduling takes up a lot of recruiting time. Research cited on Eightfold's blog found some recruiters spend up to 90% of their time on it, and AirAsia's recruiting coordinators cut their scheduling time roughly in half after moving to Eightfold. The interview scheduling page on eightfold.ai has an overview.
Links and resources
On eightfold.ai (public)
Learning Center quick guides (customer login)
- Scheduling Overview
- Scheduling Workflows
- Managing & Configuring Scheduling Templates
- Creating Feedback Forms
- Talent Acquisition for Hiring Managers
FAQ Hub and community threads
- How Availability to Roll works
- Fixing "unauthorized" feedback link errors
- Creating interview feedback forms
- Feedback visibility and permissions
- High-volume scheduling with Workflow Automation
In the product (customer login)
- Interview Feedback Center
- Feedback forms: Admin Console > Feedback and Assessments > Forms Library
AI Interviewer
AI Interviewer handles first-round screening. It runs structured interviews so every candidate gets the same questions and is evaluated the same way, no matter how many people apply. Customers can start with the AI Interviewer quick start for recruiters and sourcers or the setup and screening workflow course. If you're not a customer yet, you can learn more at eightfold.ai.
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