Interviews & scheduling

Schedule interviews from the candidate drawer, send calendar invites, reschedule or cancel, and let candidates book their own slot with Pro self-booking.

Interviews in Vakanssi are free. You book them from inside the person’s application, and Vakanssi emails everyone a calendar invite so the meeting lands on their calendar automatically. No separate scheduling tool, no copy-pasting email addresses.

Everything happens in the candidate drawer: the panel that slides open when you click a candidate on the Applications screen. One of its tabs is Interviews.

Schedule an interview

Scheduling, rescheduling, and cancelling interviews (and proposing times, with Scheduling Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license) is open to every hiring role: Administrators, Recruiters, Hiring Managers, and HR / Compliance. Changing the interview defaults under Settings is limited to Administrators and HR / Compliance. See Roles & permissions.

The form asks for a few things:

• Type: what kind of interview this is (for example, Phone screen or Technical interview). The list comes from your settings, and the type, followed by the job title, becomes the title of the calendar event (for example “Phone screen · Senior PHP Engineer”).
• Mode: whether it is a video call, a phone call, or on-site.
• Minutes: how long it runs. It starts at your default (45 minutes unless you change it). Anywhere from 5 to 480 minutes (8 hours) is accepted; type more than that and Vakanssi refuses to save with “An interview can last at most 480 minutes.”
• Location / link: a meeting link, like a Zoom or Google Meet URL, or a physical address.
• Interviewers: tick the people from your team who should attend. Each one gets the invite. Only members of your hiring roles (Administrator, Recruiter, Hiring Manager, HR / Compliance) can be interviewers.
• Internal notes: an optional agenda for the panel, such as what to probe. It goes into the calendar invite your interviewers receive, never the candidate’s.
• Date & time: when it happens. Times use your site’s timezone, so glance at that if your team is spread across zones.

Since v0.34.2, the time is worked out on the server for the date the interview actually falls on, so booking a winter interview during summer (or the reverse) no longer lands an hour off in the invite and the .ics file.

What happens when you schedule

The moment you save, Vakanssi:

• Emails the candidate a calendar invite. The invite is a small file called an .ics file, which is the standard way to share a calendar event. Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple Calendar all understand it, so the interview drops onto the candidate’s calendar with accept and decline buttons.
• Sends an invite to every interviewer you ticked too, so the whole panel’s calendars are booked at once, for the same time and event. If you filled in Internal notes, they appear only in the interviewers’ copy, as their agenda. The candidate’s invite never includes them, though a data request from the candidate would.
• Points replies at you. If the candidate hits reply with a question, it reaches your inbox.
• Records the interview in the drawer and logs each sent invite in the application’s Activity timeline (the running history of everything that happened to this application) as an “Interview invite” row, so the team can see what went out and when.

If sending an invite to someone fails, a bad mailbox or a mail server hiccup, the interview is still saved, and the confirmation notice tells you: it reads “Some invites failed to send” instead of “Invites sent,” so a delivery problem is never a silent success.

Edit, reschedule, resend, cancel, or mark it done

All of this happens from the same Interviews tab, where each interview’s actions sit in one row with Cancel interview set apart at the end:

• Edit: change the type, mode, location, length, interviewers, or internal notes without touching the time, that is what Reschedule is for. On a scheduled interview, Vakanssi updates the same calendar event and re-sends the invite, so everyone’s calendar reflects the change. Since v0.34.2 you can also edit an interview still awaiting the candidate’s pick (Pro Scheduling): nothing is emailed, and they get the corrected details once they book.
• Reschedule: pick a new date and time. Vakanssi updates the same event rather than creating a second one, so the interview simply moves on everyone’s calendar instead of leaving a stale entry behind.
• Resend invite: sends the exact same calendar invite again, with no change to the time, for when a candidate or interviewer loses the original .ics or can’t find it in their inbox. It is only available on a scheduled interview.
• Mark completed: once the interview has actually happened, click Mark completed so it stops sitting there marked “Scheduled” forever. It is only available on a scheduled interview, sends no email (completion is just a note for your own team), and a completed interview can no longer be edited, rescheduled, resent, or cancelled from the drawer.
• Cancel interview: asks you to confirm first. For a scheduled interview it emails everyone a cancellation that removes the event from their calendar; for a still-proposed one (Pro Scheduling, before the candidate has picked a time) it emails only the candidate, since there is no calendar entry yet to withdraw. Once an interview is marked completed, the Cancel link no longer shows.

Every email these actions send (an updated or resent invite, a cancellation) appears in the Activity timeline as an “Interview invite” or “Interview cancellation” row. Marking an interview completed sends nothing, so it adds no row there; the interview itself shows Completed in the Interviews tab.

The same rule from scheduling applies here too: if an invite fails to send when you reschedule, resend, or cancel, the confirmation notice says that some invites or cancellation emails failed to send, instead of claiming success. The reschedule, resend, or cancellation itself still goes through either way, only the email delivery is what’s flagged.

Set your interview defaults

The defaults that pre-fill the scheduling form live in one place.

• Default length: the number of minutes the form starts with (45 out of the box).
• Default mode: video, phone, or on-site, pre-selected on every new interview.
• Interview types: the list behind the Type menu, one per line. Edit it to match how your company actually interviews, for example “Portfolio review” or “Pair programming”.

Let the candidate pick a time Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license

Guessing a time that works often turns into email ping-pong. Scheduling Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license adds a Propose times section to the drawer’s Interviews tab, below the scheduling form, that hands the choice to the candidate.

Instead of one fixed time, you offer a few options. Since v0.34.2 the propose form has the same fields as the fixed-time form (type, mode, length, location or link, interviewers, and internal notes), so a booked slot arrives with its meeting link and every interviewer gets an invite.

Vakanssi emails the candidate a private booking link, one that needs no account or login. If that email fails, the form says so and shows you the link to send yourself. Clicking Send booking link twice does not create a second interview.

The candidate opens the link, sees your proposed times (shown in your site’s timezone, and also converted to their own if their device is elsewhere), and picks one. No time is pre-selected, so nobody confirms a slot they never chose.

This is what the candidate opens:

The booking page picks up the same Brand accent color as your emails and careers pages, set once on the Emails tab.

The moment they book:

• The interview is confirmed at that time, and the calendar invites go out to the candidate and every interviewer, exactly as with a fixed-time interview.
• You get an email letting you know they booked, with a link straight to the candidate. If you also ticked yourself as an interviewer, the calendar invite is your notice and this extra email is skipped.
• The candidate’s confirmation page names who to contact to change or cancel, and repeats the meeting link.

Until the candidate picks, the drawer shows the interview as waiting on them, with a Booking link you can open or copy. To resend it, use Resend on the “Booking link” row in the Activity tab. Resending issues a fresh link and retires the old one, so if you originally sent it to a mistyped address, only the corrected copy still works.

The link is one-time in the ordinary sense too: once a slot is confirmed, it can no longer be used to rebook. If a candidate needs a different time, they reply to you and you reschedule from the drawer.

If you cancel before the candidate picks, their booking link now says the interview was canceled and gives them a way to reach you, instead of leaving them staring at a page that kept promising a calendar invite was still coming. Once you mark the interview completed, opening the link shows an equally plain “already held” message.