Overcoming the Scheduling Bottleneck: Tools to Streamline Healthcare Interviews

A recent study of more than 1,600 healthcare business leaders indicated that nearly all planned to hire for new or backfilled positions in the first half of 2025, and 91% recognized it was going to be a competitive hiring environment.

More than half of the respondents to the same study also cited outdated technology as a significant barrier to business success this year.

When you have open roles to fill in a healthcare system, the consequences of inefficient hiring processes are huge. Not only are the business impacts painful, but the negative effect on patient care can be downright dangerous.

Scheduling delays can and will cause your hiring team to miss out on top talent. At the same time, it’s a pretty simple challenge to solve—with the right technology.

Let’s take a look at how automated scheduling can reduce the administrative burden on your team, reduce time-to-hire, and help your team put their best foot forward with your candidates.

Interview Scheduling Challenges in Healthcare Hiring

Difficulties with scheduling are so common among healthcare hiring challenges. Teams like yours are under intense pressure to fill roles quickly, but hiring managers and widespread colleagues can make getting everyone’s calendars aligned for an interview an immense hassle.

This is a particularly acute problem for healthcare, who face complicating factors like:

Unpredictable Schedules

Both candidates and hiring teams in healthcare may work on different shifts and at different locations. Additionally, schedule changes—due to patient needs or staffing considerations—are common.

All of these variables mean pinpointing an overlapping point on the calendar where everyone is free, and booking it quickly can feel just about impossible.

High Volumes of Candidates

For competitive systems or those with many openings, a large applicant pool and a big backlog of required interviews can create significant bottlenecks for recruiters trying to coordinate it all. Their own schedules quickly become overwhelmed with screenings and “next steps,” as do those of providers involved in the process (whose main focus must be patient care).

Manual Scheduling Inefficiencies

When all of these scheduling complexities come to a head, the inevitable, frustrating result is a slew of back-and-forth emails and calls as everyone attempts to align. Recruiters are frustrated by being in the middle; hiring managers are frustrated by the constant questions; candidates are frustrated by long wait times between steps.

All in all? A colossal pain point for everyone involved.

Time-Sensitive Hiring Needs

As frustrating as these challenges may be for staff and candidates, healthcare hiring teams know that their patients are the ones who suffer most as a result of unfilled roles. It’s nearly impossible to maintain a high standard of patient care, without burning out the staff you already have, when you’re short-handed.

How Automated Scheduling Tools Solve These Challenges

That’s a lot of frustration, and a lot of pressure to get the hiring process right. The good news? Many of these challenges can be addressed with just one modern healthcare hiring solution: automated scheduling.

By leveraging interview scheduling software, you can add some essential benefits to your recruiting strategy and significantly reduce your time-to-hire. These benefits include:

• Self-Scheduling for Candidates: No more phone tag or email bounce-backs. Empower your candidates to choose available time slots based on real-time updates to stakeholders’ calendars, reducing scheduling friction.
• Automated Reminders & Follow-Ups: Your recruiting team doesn’t need to set their own alarms to remember to send out these essential touchpoints anymore. Automating these messages can significantly reduce no-shows and keep the hiring process moving without putting more on your team’s plate.
• Video Interviewing Tools: Embracing virtual interviews can further facilitate more seamless scheduling and minimize disruptions. This is especially true if you opt for one-way, on-demand video interviews for candidates in lieu of traditional screening calls.
• Bonus – AI Interview Summaries: After the interview, interviewstream’s AI tools generate a clear, concise summary of each candidate’s responses—no need for manual note-taking or rewatching recordings to jog your memory. This is a game-changer for busy healthcare teams juggling packed schedules, helping you quickly align on next steps and make faster, more informed hiring decisions.

Measure the Impact on Time-to-Hire & Candidate Experience

Once you have the right interview scheduling software, keep an eye on some key metrics tracking the quality and efficiency of your recruiting strategy.

Healthcare teams with this kind of technology behind them often see results like:

• Faster Hiring Decisions: By reducing scheduling delays and empowering candidates to move through the process at their preferred pace, you can accelerate hiring timelines and fill open roles in less time.
• Improved Candidate Experience: Giving applicants a smooth, hassle-free process enhances employer brand and makes them more likely to accept your offer.
• Increased Efficiency for Recruiters: With automated scheduling and video interviews, recruiters will have more time for the substantive work that really matters—making for much happier hiring teams, too.

How Scheduling Tech Cut Hiring Time: Johns Hopkins

Don’t take our word for that—take a look at Johns Hopkins Health System Corporation (JHHS).

The JHHS team was feeling this pain. Eager to improve their process and move candidates along faster, they implemented interviewstream.

As a result, they’ve expedited their screening process, streamlined scheduling, and offer better support to their staff. When they went back to crunch the numbers, they found that they’d saved more than 7,800 hours screening candidates, filled 496 job vacancies, and conducted 20,395 on demand video interviews with the platform.

Choosing the Right Scheduler for Your Organization

Overall, healthcare hiring teams who implement automated scheduling can significantly reduce the time their recruiters waste on juggling calendars, checking for availability, and rebooking meetings. This means faster time-to-hire, happier staff, and more impressed candidates.

Need to learn more? To get deeper insights into the benefits and ROI of automated scheduling software, check out our eBook: “Break Through the Back-and-Forth: Advantages of Adding Interview Scheduling to Your Hiring Process.”

And if you’re ready to learn how interviewstream can meet these needs for you, drop us a line! We’ll walk you through the many ways our platform can streamline your healthcare hiring practices right from the start.

About The Author

Monique Mahler is the CEO of interviewstream. She is an avid researcher of facts, a self proclaimed marketing geek, and an equestrian in her spare time.