How do I place a hold on the interviewers' calendars?

Sometimes when you're scheduling an interview, you might want to just place holds on the interviewers' calendars without sending any confirmation to the candidate yet. The two most common workflows we see for this are:

• Your interviewers have very busy schedules, so instead of asking the candidate for availability first and then finding a time for the interviewers that work within those times, you find blocks of times that work for your interviewers, and then you ask the candidate which of the blocks they prefer.
• You've found a schedule that works for almost all interviewers, but there's one conflict that you're not sure if you can book over. However, while you're checking on this conflict, if you don't block off this time for your other interviewers, they will probably schedule other meetings during this time, so you want to create temporary events to indicate that an interview will eventually happen at that time.

You can utilize InterviewPlanner's holds to accomplish both scenarios.

How are holds different than scheduling normally?

When putting a schedule on hold instead of scheduling it normally, we do a few things differently:

• We don't send out the candidate calendar event.
• We don't send out the confirmation email, even if you enabled it.
• For interviewer calendar events, we add "[HOLD]" to the event titles.
• We don't report the interview times to your ATS.
• We make a note in your ATS that schedules were put on hold.
• If you have video conferencing enabled and don't use Zoom, we don't create the video conferencing link yet. If you do use Zoom, we do create the link so that we can hold the Zoom host as well.

Once you're ready to confirm a held schedule, we then continue creating all of the items that we didn't create yet.

How do I place a schedule on hold?

To get started, you don't need to configure anything special for the stage or candidate. To create holds for a candidate, just go through the normal scheduling process. Once you get to the Schedule step, you'll see a checkbox for holding schedules. When you check it, you'll see checkboxes appear for each schedule option.

By checking it for a specific option, you'll indicate that you want to hold that schedule. This is how you'd hold more than one schedule at once.

Everything else about the scheduling process will be exactly the same. On the Review step, if you selected more than one schedule, you'll be able to review all of them. You can click on them to see the details of each one.

If you just want to hold one schedule, you don't have to enable the holds checkbox on the Schedule step. If you don't enable it, on the Review step, you'll see a button to put the schedule on hold instead of scheduling it.

Can I edit a held schedule?

For any held schedule, you can change just about everything about it before confirming. Just like non-held schedules, you can change anything about the interviews (e.g., swap out interviewers, change times, enable/disable video conferencing, etc). You can also edit the candidate calendar event and the confirmation email as well.

How do I confirm a held schedule?

Once you have a held schedule that you're ready to confirm and send out details to the candidate, you can do so by going to the held schedule and clicking on the link at the top to confirm it.

You can also click on the Schedule button at the top to either confirm a held schedule or to make a new one.

Using either method will jump you to the Review step of the scheduling process, with everything already filled in using the held schedule's details. At this point, you still have the opportunity to edit the schedule before confirming it. You'll only be able to edit things on the Schedule step and the Emails and Events step since you won't be able to generate new schedules at this point.

Once everything looks good, you can confirm the schedule, and we'll start making the changes to finalize it, including sending communication to the candidate. We'll also automatically delete any other held schedules you may have had for this candidate as well.