Tracking cancellation and reschedule reasons can help you understand why interviewers and candidates can't attend interviews as originally scheduled. Capturing and reporting on this structured data can help you make improvements to your hiring process to reduce the number of interviews that are rescheduled or canceled.
Create new reasons
Site Admins and Job Admins with the Can manage company metadata permission can create, edit, and archive cancellation and reschedule reasons.
Go to Configure > Custom options > Company metadata, then click Manage cancellation and reschedule reasons.
Click Create reason.
Select a Category: Candidate, Interviewer, or Company. Then enter an Internal reason name.
If you select Candidate, two more fields appear: Visible to candidates (selected by default) and Candidate-facing name. Leave Visible to candidates selected if you want candidates to be able to choose this reason when they cancel or reschedule an interview. Clear it to keep the reason internal-only.
Click Save to create the reason.
New reasons are added to the top of the Active tab. Reason names must be unique within their category — you can't create two candidate reasons with the same name, for example, but you can reuse a name across categories.
Configuring reason collection
By default, collecting a reason is turned off. To require or allow it, click the Settings tab.
For Greenhouse users and Candidates, choose whether providing a reason is Off, Optional, or Required. You can set this independently for each audience — for example, you could require a reason from Greenhouse users while keeping it optional for candidates.
Note: Only site admins can edit these settings. Job admins can view this tab, but it displays as read-only.
When you're prompted for a reason
Once reason collection is turned on, Greenhouse users and candidates are prompted to choose a reason wherever they cancel or reschedule an interview.
Canceling an interview: Greenhouse users can cancel interviews from a candidate's profile (the Delete interview button is now called Cancel interview) or from within the scheduling flow. If cancellation reasons are set to optional or required, a modal opens asking for a reason before the cancellation is confirmed. The reason dropdown is grouped by category — Interviewer, Candidate, and Company — matching the reason types below. If cancellation reasons are turned off, the existing cancel modal appears without a reason field.
Rescheduling an interview: If reschedule reasons are set to optional or required, a new reschedule reason section appears on the Send Invites page when a Greenhouse user reschedules an interview. If reschedule reasons are off, this page is unchanged.
Edit or archive reasons
You can edit or archive both custom and default reasons from the Active or Archived tab.
Note: Greenhouse doesn't support permanently deleting reasons — only archiving.
Hover over the reason and click the edit icon.
Update the fields and click Save changes.
Note: If you change a reason's Internal reason name, the new name only applies going forward — reports on past interviews keep the original name.
You can also edit an archived reason. To apply your changes and restore the reason at the same time, click Save and restore.
To archive, hover over the reason and click the archive icon.
The reason will move to the Archived tab. Archived reasons can't be selected when canceling or rescheduling an interview.
To restore an archive reason, go to the Archived tab, then click Restore next to the reason you want to make active again.
The reason moves back to the top of the Active tab. If you haven't archived any reasons yet, the Archived tab is empty.
Default reasons and reason types
In addition to custom reasons you can create, Greenhouse Recruiting provides your organization with the following default reasons:
| Default cancellation reason | Reason type |
| Scheduling conflict | Candidate |
| Illness or emergency | Candidate |
| No longer interested | Candidate |
| Other | Candidate |
| Scheduling conflict | Interviewer |
| Illness or emergency | Interviewer |
| Out of office or unavailable | Interviewer |
| Other | Interviewer |
| Role closed | Company |
| Hiring paused | Company |
| Position filled | Company |
| Other | Company |