| Available for | Roles | Super Admin, Admin, Team Member, Limited Team Member |
| Permissions | • Manage profiles and view associated postings • Manage company settings • Manage feedback settings • Manage Easy Book links • Create and edit postings |
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| Packages | Lever Basic, LeverTRM, LeverTRM for Enterprise |
Interview plans remove the guesswork and manual setup associated with scheduling interviews, by allowing you to define interviewers, feedback forms, and interview durations as part of each interview "kit." This article will walk you through the best practices for incorporating interview plans into your recruitment workflow. If you are new to interview plans, check out our help article on creating and using interview plans before proceeding.
Best practices when opening a new role
Schedule kick-off meetings with stakeholders
Before you open a new role, schedule an intake or "kick-off" meeting between the recruiter and the hiring manager. This will provide an opportunity to align on the role's expectations, review examples of good and bad example candidates, and define the role's interview process before the first interview is even scheduled. Formal kickoff meetings ensure that your team moves quickly - without missing out on the best candidates. Once your team is aligned, build your interview schedule into an interview plan.
Review interview stages and feedback forms
When creating an interview plan for a posting, by default you will only be shown the interview stages in your pipeline. During your kick-off meeting, review the stages in the Interview section of your pipeline so you can think ahead about the types of plans will you will need to prepare when creating the posting, or whether certain stages can be skipped for this role.
To learn more about the Interview section of the pipeline, refer to our help article on operating the Interview section of the pipeline.
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Missing an interview stage that you would like to incorporate into your recruitment process? You can add stages to your pipeline via Settings > Pipeline and archive reasons. To learn more, refer to our help article on adding pipeline stages. |
As part of the interview plan setup process, you will need to select feedback forms for interviewers to complete at each interview stage. During your kick-off meeting, review the current set of feedback forms to make sure their questions align with the criteria tracked at each specific interview stage. For example, questions and conversations around compensation expectations will likely appear earlier, perhaps on an initial recruiter screen feedback form. Refer to the following help articles to learn how to set up and optimize your feedback forms:
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Further streamline your interview process by setting specific feedback forms as default for any stage in your pipeline by clicking Set as default for at the top of the form editor and selecting a stage. For example, if recruiters at your organization are all expected to ask the same interview questions in their 'Recruiter screen' interviews, set a standard feedback form as default for all interviews that take place in the Recruiter Screen stage (the default can still be changed when scheduling the interview and/or in the interview plan itself). |
Scheduling best practices
Do not overload on interviewers
If you and your colleagues have synced your Google or Office 365 calendars with Lever, you can view each other's availabilities when scheduling interviews with candidates. To keep this feature working seamlessly, do not overload too many interviewers in an interview plan. When a large number of interviewers is loaded in the scheduler, either manually or by loading an interview plan, the availability finder may not load availabilities properly. Learn more in our help article on viewing interviewer availability when scheduling interviews.
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The Visual Insights Interviews dashboard also provides visibility into scheduled interview volume and interviewer bandwidth. Referring to these metrics will ensure you do not schedule certain interviewers for a volume of interviews they cannot keep up with. For more information, refer to our help article on the Visual Insights Interviews dashboard. |
Save one-off interview kits as templates to re-use in the future
Even if you do not have an interview plan in mind for a posting as you are building it, you can add to the interview plan later on as you schedule interviews with candidates associated with posting. This can be done as part of the interview scheduling workflow. If you are scheduling an interview with a candidate associated with a posting that does not have an interview plan configured for that stage, Lever will prompt you to save the interviewers, feedback forms, and event durations that you are currently scheduling as the plan for that stage in the posting's interview plan.
To learn more, refer to our interview plans help article.
Use Easy Book links for 1:1 interviews
While interview plans are ideal for creating templates for complex interviews with multiple interviewers, sometimes you may just want to book a simple 1:1 interview with a candidate. For this, we recommend using Easy Book links, which allow the candidate to select an available time on their interview's calendar.
To learn more, refer to our help article on Easy Book links.
Company settings
Interview feedback visibility settings allow you to control which types of users can view the feedback of other panelists, as well as whether or not they must first submit their own feedback before they can see the feedback of others. These settings help to protect sensitive interview feedback and ensure that an interviewer's feedback about a candidate is not influenced by that of other interviewers.
To learn more, refer to our help article on configuring interview feedback visibility settings.