Why your inefficient scheduling is costing you candidates
Recent research conducted by Cronofy with 7,000 candidates worldwide reveals a sobering reality: 41% of candidates have left a recruitment process entirely because it took too long to schedule. The traditional email chains and calendar juggling just aren’t working. Nearly half of your candidates are walking away before you've even had a chance to showcase your company culture or assess their fit.
When scheduling becomes a back-and-forth email marathon spanning days or weeks, you're inadvertently signaling that your organization is disorganized, slow to move, or doesn't value the candidate's time. 33% say slow scheduling makes them feel their prospective employer doesn’t respect their time.
It’s not just wasted time for candidates, too. The research reveals that hiring teams waste an average of 13 hours on scheduling in candidates in peak hiring weeks by having to click back-and-forth between HRIS systems like Workday, their emails, and their calendars.
Yet expectations for recruiter productivity have never been higher
An even more pressing issue is that teams are having to do more with less. Talent teams are stuck stitching together disconnected systems that don’t speak to each other. Endless tab-hopping between calendars, spreadsheets, email threads, and your ATS turns into time wasting. Before you know it, you’re overwhelmed trying to book candidates into interviews.
Many are looking to supplement their work with AI and automation, yet everyone knows how painful it can be to implement new tools into existing hiring processes. You’re usually looking at 6+ months of implementation, a steep learning curve, and yet another tool that doesn’t speak to Teams, Google Calendar, or the candidate information inside your ATS.
Are you using Calendly for your interview co-ordination needs? Here’s why you might be missing out on productivity gains:
Why scheduling is the perfect automation starting point
When people think of interview scheduling, they reduce it to dropping times into a calendar. But anyone who has to co-ordinate interviews regularly knows it’s never that straightforward. It’s repetitive and prone to errors as you scale. What looks like a minor admin task quickly balloons into one of the biggest time drains in recruiting. Before you see an interviewer’s availability, there’s a chain of back and forth messages, status updates in the ATS and constant outreach to the candidates and interviewer, to make sure they show up.
Here’s why fixing interview scheduling delivers immediate wins:
1. It's purely administrative.
Unlike other aspects of hiring that require emotional intelligence and human judgment, all scheduling requires is calendar information on when interviewers are free or busy. There's no risk of losing the human touch, because there was never required to be one here in the first place.
In fact, 74% of candidates say human touch is vital to them in the recruiting process, but they also recognise that speed and efficiency come first. Top candidates are walking away, and they’re telling each other about poor hiring experiences. Our data shows that as inefficiencies compound, candidates are far more likely to warn their networks or use platforms like Glassdoor to talk about their experience — not a great look for prospective candidates looking into your company.
2. The ROI is immediate and significant.
Those implementing automated scheduling have seen dramatic improvements. Companies like Wise have already reduced their time-to-schedule from six days to just 90 minutes using Cronofy in their ATS. That's not just small gains. That's transformation. Here’s Wise talking about how automating one small co-ordination part of their interview process resulted in hundreds of hours back for their recruiting team:
3. It frees up time for what matters.
Every hour saved on calendar coordination is an hour that can be invested in personalized candidate feedback, meaningful conversations with hiring managers, or strategic talent planning.
Balancing automation and human touch
The goal isn't to remove humans from hiring. It's to ensure they're spending their time where human skills matter most. By starting with interview scheduling automation, you're picking the easiest low-hanging fruit to streamline your hiring process, and keeping your candidates engaged by giving them the extra human touch when they need it.
One small part automated, hundreds of hours saved
When you automate interview scheduling effectively, your recruiters become less stressed and more strategic. Hiring managers appreciate the professionalism and efficiency. All of your candidate information continues to live in one system.
Most importantly, the hours you get back per week create breathing room to focus on the parts of recruitment the human connections that that truly differentiate your organization. Now, you can plug scheduling add-ons like Cronofy directly into your ATS, letting you automate interview scheduling whilst keeping you in your main hiring tool.
Learn more about streamlined scheduling inside your ATS here.
