How to Run Better Panel Interviews, Even When Your Team Is Remote

Panel interviews are a go-to recruitment tool for teams across industries, and for good reason: they are an efficient and familiar way to gather diverse perspectives on a candidate all at once.

If you’re looking to assess cultural fit with minimal bias, gather input from many of the collaborators who will work with a new hire, or evaluate across multiple skill sets, panel interviews are a great option. But they can come with their own unique complications.

One of them is managing remote-friendly panels. When your interviewers are spread across locations and aren’t prepped to manage a hybrid experience, the results can be frustrating to candidates and hiring teams alike.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s walk through how the right coordination and organization can make for smooth, effective panel interviews even if your team never steps into the same room.

What is a Panel Interview?

For readers who are unfamiliar, at its core, a panel interview is exactly what it sounds like: instead of meeting with candidates one-on-one, multiple team members interview a single candidate simultaneously.

This collaborative approach typically involves anywhere from three to six interviewers, each bringing their own expertise and perspective to the conversation. The panel might include the hiring manager, potential teammates, cross-functional collaborators, and senior leadership, all working together to evaluate whether a candidate is the right fit for both the role and the organization.

While the format can vary—from a formal boardroom-style setup to a more casual group conversation—the goal remains consistent: to gather comprehensive insights about a candidate’s skills, cultural alignment, and potential contributions in a single, coordinated session.

Why Panel Interviews Work, When Done Right

Panel interviews are popular among hiring teams, and especially in corporate sectors. Advocates for this approach to interviewing cite many benefits, including:

• Increased fairness and reduced bias: By gathering multiple perspectives on candidates via structured conversations, hiring teams can correct for bias, diversify evaluations, and evaluate across multiple functions and skills.
• Aligning teams on a candidate’s evaluation: Making interviewing a team sport offers transparency to many stakeholders, so many of the folks who will work with a new hire can participate in bringing the right person on board and have greater visibility into the recruiting process.
• Giving candidates a broader view of company culture: Just as multiple, diverse first impressions of a candidate benefit hiring teams, the chance to meet multiple potential colleagues helps give candidates a big-picture impression of your company.
• Maximizing everyone’s time: Hosting panel interviews means that you can pack more impressions and evaluations into a single hour, ensuring you’re making good use of the candidates’ and hiring team’s time.

Hard to argue with that. Still, panel interviews can get messy without structure, especially when conducted remotely.

Common Remote Panel Interview Challenges

Eager to take advantage of those pros, recruiting teams nevertheless cite a handful of potential cons when it comes to scheduling, conducting, and evaluating panel interviews. Here are their top five:

• Scheduling hurdles: While packing a bunch of meaningful conversation into fewer hours has big benefits for candidates and your broader organization, finding a mutually open window across three or five colleagues’ calendars is rarely easy.
• Duplicate or overlooked questions: When a handful of folks share the responsibility of evaluating candidates, it’s all too common for questions to get missed, or repeated.
• Disorganized group evaluation and documentation: A lack of shared notes and documentation makes paperwork tricky, and if post-interview evaluation conversations aren’t focused and organized, they can devolve into unhelpfulness.
• Poor handoffs or awkward transitions during the interview: The flow of a conversation matters, and unprepared interviewers may struggle to establish one, especially if they aren’t in the same physical space.
• Overwhelmed candidates: It isn’t easy to meet five people at once and try to balance conversing with each thoughtfully and authentically.

None of these need to be dealbreakers, though. In fact, intentional planning can virtually eliminate all of them.

Tips to Run a Better Remote Panel Interview

Whether your team is hybrid, spread across multiple in-person offices, or fully remote, you don’t have to toss panel interviews out the proverbial window. You just have to build the right structure, and provide the right tools, to make them successful.

So what are the most fundamental steps you can take to ensuring effective, impactful panel interviews?

Let’s start with the best practices your hiring team can adopt right now:

• Assign clear roles: Teams work best when each member knows and does their part. Point out each role you’ll need (e.g., lead, notetaker, culture evaluator, skills experts, and so on) and be sure to assign each to a particular interviewer.
• Share questions in advance: This will help maintain structure and prep interviewers, as well as give them a chance to avoid duped or missed subjects by aligning who asks what questions based on their defined roles.
• Use a shared scorecard: Consistency is critical for fair, productive evaluations and feedback following an interview. Provide a structured feedback format to interviewers to gather more helpful insights.
• Schedule pre- and post-interview check-ins: A quick, 30-minute conversation with interviewers can help you outline roles and expectations before the interview, as well as discuss first impressions afterward.
• Deliver clear, well-paced communication to candidates: While scheduling interviews, be transparent about what they should expect, including who they’ll meet, what topics the interview will discuss, and your anticipated timeline for decisions.

These strategies should help all of the stakeholders in the hiring process stay aligned, focused, and unbiased in how they evaluate each candidate.

Use the Right Tools to Simplify the Process

Of course, tactics alone aren’t a recipe for total success. When you’re working with remote or widespread hiring teams, the right tools are essential as well.

Fortunately, you have plenty of options purpose-built to enable smarter, more pleasant, and more efficient interviews.

If you regularly conduct remote interviews, you should bring some dedicated tools on board to optimize the experience for your team and your applicants:

• Interview scheduling software to coordinate calendars: Offering self-service scheduling options to interviewees, synced with hiring teams’ availability, accelerates time to hire and makes for a much smoother candidate experience.
• Video interviewing tools with built-in structure: Firing up a random video meeting isn’t going to get the job done. Dedicated video interviewing software provides the structure, branded experience, and follow-up enablement your recruiting team needs to put your best foot forward with candidates.
• Live feedback capture and link sharing during or immediately after interviews: You can accelerate collaboration and insights between interviewers by engaging them as quickly as possible, ensuring their impressions are captured accurately and decisions can be made quickly.

Looking for a new platform to help? With interviewstream, you can leverage all these features and more in a single, secure, and intuitive platform.

Bonus: How AI Summaries Help Panel Interviews Post-Call

Sometimes, immediate debriefing isn’t possible. Other times, interviewers lose their notes before they get a chance to complete their evaluations. Human error can pop up in all sorts of places to complicate panel interview follow-ups—but artificial intelligence can help.

Consider adding AI-generated interview summaries to your interviewing process. By reading through these automated recaps, team members can refresh their memory on key moments and insights from their conversation. They can also spend more time focusing on the conversation in real time, without the need for detailed notetaking.

The result? Faster, more aligned decisions with documented takeaways that can help drive the hiring process forward.

What You Can Do Right Now

Remote panels don’t have to be messy. With the right structure and tools, your team can run efficient, insightful panel interviews that lead to better hires, a better candidate experience, and a lasting recipe for successful recruiting strategies.

Get started optimizing your panel interview processes by exploring interviewstream’s interview scheduling tools, AI summaries, and video interview experience today.

About The Author

Joey is a Client Success Account Manager at interviewstream. Before joining our team, he worked for Baylor Football and the Dallas Cowboys, solidifying his love for sports. When not watching a big game, Joey spends his time adventuring outdoors with his friends and family.