1. Greenhouse Support
  2. All Recruiting topics
  3. Scheduling and calendars

Scheduling overview

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Greenhouse offers a flexible scheduling system that helps hiring teams coordinate interviews efficiently. Automated scheduling surfaces strong time options based on availability and scheduling preferences, helping reduce manual work and streamline coordination. When a specific setup or level of control is needed, you can schedule interviews manually using the calendar.

This overview introduces the core concepts that shape scheduling in Greenhouse, including availability and interviewer management, and shows how these features support a consistent, scalable scheduling experience across your organization.

Note: We’re continuing to add scheduling features as part of our roadmap. To stay up to date when new features are released, follow our release notes.

In this article

The interview scheduling process

You can schedule interviews for a candidate on their profile. When you schedule a candidate's interview, it will create an interview schedule and send an invitation to their email. An interview won't show up as scheduled until the candidate accepts the invitation.

It's easiest to understand Greenhouse's scheduling process in a three-step flow:

  1. Create an interview schedule and invite the candidate to it
  2. Configure and send interviewer invites
  3. Confirm interviews and send a confirmation email

Individual interviews can be added to the calendar by clicking Automated scheduling or Schedule manually:

  • Automated scheduling automatically searches the calendar for the best time slots based on the candidate's availability, the interviewer's availability, and different scheduling setups like default interviewers, working hours, and interviewer training settings.
  • Manual scheduling allows the user to select a specific time slot in a traditional calendar view.

Ways to schedule interviews

Greenhouse offers multiple ways to schedule interviews, depending on how much coordination you want Greenhouse or the candidate to handle.

Automated scheduling

Automated scheduling helps reduce manual coordination by allowing Greenhouse to identify available interview times based on candidate and interviewer availability. If default interviewers are assigned in the interview plan, they’re automatically included when identifying available time slots.

With automated scheduling, Greenhouse can apply settings such as working hours and interview limits, and use interviewer groups to identify eligible interviewers.

Manual scheduling

Manual scheduling allows you to select a specific interview time using a calendar view and send invitations directly to interviewers and candidates.

This option works best when interview details are still being finalized or when you need full control over interview timing.

Candidate self-scheduling

Self-scheduling allows you to send a self-schedule request to a candidate so they can choose an interview time from a set of available options.

This approach uses the same availability rules and scheduling preferences as automated scheduling, while giving candidates more control over selecting a time that works for them.

Availability preferences

These features allow every Greenhouse user at your organization to clearly define when they’re available to take interviews, improving scheduling accuracy.

Working hours

All users within your Greenhouse account can set their working hours and time zone preferences to reflect when they’re available. This reduces conflicts and ensures interviews align with individual availability.

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Interview availability

Interview availability settings allow your team to indicate the specific days and times they prefer to conduct interviews. By having access to their availability in advance, recruiters can schedule more efficiently and avoid unnecessary back-and-forth conversations during coordination.

Interviewer management

Efficient interviewer coordination is essential to keeping the hiring process smooth and scalable, especially for growing teams or high-volume hiring. By standardizing how interviewers are selected, rotated, and scheduled, teams can reduce manual oversight, and ensure a consistent candidate experience across every role and department.

Interview limits

Help prevent interviewer fatigue by setting up interview limits. This ensures a more balanced workload across the team, protects time for other responsibilities and promotes a healthier, more sustainable interview process.

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Interviewer training programs

Interviewer training programs make it easy to track and manage who’s qualified to conduct specific types of interviews. You can automatically update their status in your program as they progress.

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