How to Reduce Candidate Interview Ghosting

Note: A version of this Blog ran as part of the American Camp Association’s (ACA) Blog Series.

By this time in the recruitment season, it’s likely you’ve reached your boiling point with candidate ghosting (we have too). But what if I told you that by using a simple scheduling automation tool you can drastically reduce your candidate ghosting problem. Would you believe me? 

Well, there’s a little more to it than that, but by using a new feature on Calendly, we’ve had success reducing our no-shows. That magical feature? Custom Workflows. Let me explain. 

In 2021, CampHire’s ghost rate was 40% (yikes!). Extrapolate that across 600+ interviews, and we wasted 3,600 precious minutes last year waiting for people to join Zoom interviews. It was a spooky time to be a CampHire recruiter. 

This year, we smartened up. When Calendly introduced Workflows, we jumped on it, integrating customized automation into our scheduling flow. This enables us to send a sequence of email and text reminders to candidates right up until their interview time. We even created a prompt that invites candidates to proactively confirm their attendance, which many do. The result? We’ve reduced our ghost rate by nearly 50% (yahoo!), and can better detect which candidates are likely not to show up. 

What We Did: Here’s how we set up the workflows in Calendly. 

  1. When a candidate schedules an interview we ask for a phone number

  2. Once a candidate hits confirm, we immediately send

    1. An email confirmation

    2. A text confirmation

    3. A calendar invite

  3. 24 hours before the meeting we send

    1. An email AND text request to confirm attendance (candidates hit a button to select yes or no)

  4. 2 hours before the meeting we send

    1. An email AND text reminder that thanks the candidate for not ghosting us (in those words)

    2. We review the confirmed candidates on our calendar, and proactively reach out to those we haven’t heard from

🔥CampHire Pro Tip: Offering available times outside of regular 9-5 business hours helps reduce no-shows. At CampHire, our most popular interview block is 3-7pm. Since most candidates are busy during the day, we find the night shift sees the least amount of ghosts (ironic, isn’t it?)

If you are struggling with this issue, get creative to boost your success. Building a Calendly Workflow and adjusting available interview hours are great places to start. 

Note to the reader: While this blog may read like a paid ad for Calendly, it’s not. We’ve plugged Calendly in a past blog post, and can’t stress enough how transformative it has been for our recruitment process. If you aren’t using it, get on it.

ACA Feature, Seasonal TipEsther Eisenhard