Sending interview availability to candidates, faster
A recruiter workflow for offering interview times: merge the panel's Outlook calendars and paste one clean list into your outreach.
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Interview coordination is where availability-by-email refuses to die. Booking links feel wrong for candidate outreach at many companies, panel interviews need several calendars intersected, and candidates are frequently in another timezone. So coordinators do it by hand, dozens of times a week.
The usual panel-scheduling grind
Open Scheduling Assistant with the hiring manager and two interviewers, scan for common gaps, convert everything to the candidate's timezone, type it into the outreach email, and hope nothing changed while you were typing. Multiply by every candidate in the pipeline.
The one-click version
In OpenSlot, add the panel members, set the timezone to the candidate's, choose "next 2 weeks," and set the shortest slot to your interview length (say, 60 minutes). The result is exactly what belongs in the email:
All times in US/Eastern • Today 07/08 03:30 PM - 04:00 PM 05:00 PM - 05:30 PM • Thursday 07/09 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM 02:30 PM - 03:00 PM
Because it reads live free/busy at the moment you generate it, the list reflects this morning's calendar changes. The Outlook add-in version inserts it straight into the compose window, which turns a ten-minute coordination task into about twenty seconds — per candidate.
Tips that prevent re-scheduling
Count tentative as busy (the default) so a half-committed interviewer doesn't sink a slot. Offer more times than you think necessary — candidates pick faster from eight options than three. And always state the timezone line that OpenSlot puts at the top; it's the single biggest source of interview no-shows.
The limit that catches recruiters out
Panel interviews are the one scheduling job that regularly reaches outside the company — a client-side interviewer on a staffing engagement, a founder's advisor, a contractor who owns the technical screen. Their free/busy is not readable. By default only people inside your own Microsoft 365 organization can see each other's free/busy; anyone outside is invisible unless your admins have configured an organization relationship. That is a Microsoft setting, not something a scheduling tool can work around, and it is worth knowing before you promise a panel time.
The workable pattern is to merge the calendars you can read — everyone in your tenant — send that list to the outside interviewer first, and add their confirmed slot to the candidate email. You are then proposing times rather than asking two outside parties to find one, which is the whole point of doing this by email. The mechanics of who can see what, and how to read "no free/busy information could be retrieved," are in Outlook free/busy explained.
Numbers worth knowing before you build a workflow on it
- Up to 40 calendars in one merge, 60 days ahead, on Pro — more than any realistic panel. The free plan is you plus one other person over seven days, which is enough to try the workflow but not to run a pipeline on.
- Half-hour resolution, or quarter-hour when you ask for it. Free/busy is read in 30-minute intervals by default; set your shortest slot below 30 minutes and the lookup drops to 15 instead. So a 20-minute screen is schedulable, but the gaps still land on quarter-hour boundaries rather than wherever a meeting happened to end.
- Nothing about the meetings reaches the list. It is built from free/busy alone: free, tentative, busy, out of office or working elsewhere. Titles, attendees and locations never appear in it, so a confidential interview on an interviewer's calendar stays confidential.
If you would rather do it by hand once to see the shape of the output, copying free/busy times out of Outlook as text walks through the manual version.
One number worth knowing before you plan a panel: of the US staffing and recruiting firms we measured, 72% run Microsoft 365 — the highest of any trade, and well above the 50% average. The odds are good that everyone on your side of an interview loop is already on it.
Common questions
Can I include an interviewer who isn't in our Microsoft 365?
Not for the free/busy read. Microsoft only exposes free/busy inside an organization by default, so an external interviewer shows as unavailable rather than busy or free — unless your administrators have set up an organization relationship with their tenant. Merge the calendars you can read, agree the slot with the outside interviewer separately, then send the candidate the confirmed time.
Does the candidate need an account, an app, or a booking link?
No. The candidate receives plain text in your email — a list of times in their own timezone. There is nothing to install, nothing to click, and no page to land on. Only the calendars being merged need to be in your Microsoft 365 organization.
Can interviewers see what the other interviews are about?
No. Free/busy reports only a status for each interval — free, tentative, busy, out of office or working elsewhere. Titles, attendees, locations and notes are never read, and nothing about the calendar is stored.
How many interview times should I offer a candidate?
More than feels necessary. Three options invite a reply asking for different ones; six to eight across at least two days usually gets a pick on the first reply. Spread them across mornings and afternoons rather than clustering them, and remember the candidate may be in a timezone where your afternoon is their evening.
Will it pick up a change an interviewer made this morning?
Yes. The list is generated from live free/busy at the moment you ask for it, not from a cached snapshot, so a meeting accepted an hour ago is already reflected. That is also why it is worth generating the list immediately before sending rather than reusing yesterday's.
Does tentative count as busy?
By default, yes — a tentatively accepted meeting blocks the slot. That is deliberate: offering a candidate a time an interviewer has half-committed to is how interviews get moved. You can change it if your team treats tentative as genuinely free.
OpenSlot
Skip the retyping
OpenSlot reads Outlook free/busy and hands you the merged, paste-ready list in any timezone: up to 40 people and 60 days out on Pro, you plus one person and 7 days free.
Try OpenSlot freeWorks with Microsoft 365 work and school accounts. No card to start.