Interviewing a candidate sounds simple: Hop on Zoom and conduct the interview. But it’s more than that. You need to coordinate a time to meet, prepare questions, conduct the interview, compile notes for your hiring committee, and follow up. And you have to do all of this for each interview for each candidate.

This short guide will show how you can set up Relay to interview candidates more efficiently. Watch the demo video to see how it works, and try out the template to get up and running!

• Start your Relay playbook with a simple form that gathers the candidate’s name, contact information, LinkedIn profile, and role. Plus, determine who needs to interview the candidate. Advanced Tip: Automatically trigger new interview runs for emails to your jobs@ alias or bookings on your Calendly.
• Use an automation to add the candidate to your recruiting tracker (in Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable etc.) to stay organized. Advanced Tip: Automatically create panels or advance the applicant in your ATS (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, etc).
• Review their resume and provide notes directly in Relay with the decision to proceed or not proceed.

• Use an automation to create a copy of a template document you and the rest of the team can use to take notes. Relay can automatically put the details you’ve already gathered into this template.
• Send an email inviting the candidate to set up their first interview. Advanced Tip: Require review so that each message can be customized for the specific candidate.
• After the interview, input the decision to move forward into the full interview process, or pass on the candidate.

• Set up an automation to create a Slack channel with the hiring committee, using the candidate’s name. Include a step that automatically sends a welcome message with the candidate information and notes doc.
• Send email introductions connecting each person on the hiring committee with the candidate. Advanced Tip: Require review if you want to personalize the message connecting each interviewer and candidate.
• Automatically remind each interviewer to add their notes and hiring recommendation to make a decision quickly.
• Create an email automation that immediately follows up with the candidate with either next steps or a polite rejection to ensure a fast response time. Advanced Tip: Add an “approval” step to personalize the email to the candidate.

If you’re ready to use Relay for interviewing candidates, get started with the playbook here.

It will only take 5 minutes to set up and save you much more than that every time you have a candidate to interview. Once you import the template, here’s what you’ll need to do to get it running:

1. Link your own tracker or ATS to the “update tracker” automations so candidate details are added in the right place.
2. Link your own template for the notes document with the important sections you want to take notes on.
3. Customize the message templates for the first email outreach and the emails connecting each interviewer to the candidate.
4. Test out the playbook with yourself as an example candidate.

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Use Relay for HR processes like candidate outreach, closing candidates, onboarding employees, and offboarding employees.