It’s rare for there to only be one person in an organization who can take on the role of interviewer for a job, and equally you may often need more than one interviewer for each interview. As such, for any given interview Gem Scheduling allows you to create one or more interviewer seats, and configure pools of potential interviewers to choose from.

In this article we’ll talk you through what interviewer pools and interview seats are, how interviewer pools work, and how to create them.

For a video walkthrough of how to create and configure interviewer seats an interviewer pools, watch Gem Scheduling How-to: Configuring job stage settings.

What is an interviewer pool?

Every interview will always need at least one interviewer, but it’s often best to select from a pool of possible interviewers rather than relying on one specific person always being available. By creating an interviewer pool, you can increase availability and the chances of being able to schedule an interview at the preferred time.

When determining what the makeup of an interviewer pool should be in Gem Scheduling, you can either:

• Select individual names or hiring team roles, if there are particular interviewers you’d like to include.
• Use eligibilities or tags if you want the pool to be based on specific criteria. See our Managing Eligibilities and Tags article for more information, including examples of how you can use this functionality.

What is an interviewer seat?

A single interviewer seat equates to one interviewer. You can fill that seat with a specific interviewer if you know exactly who you want to take the interview, or instead you can create an interviewer pool to choose from.

If you want to have more than one interviewer for a particular interview, you will need one seat for each interviewer.

Creating an interviewer pool

When you first create a new interview, select the + Add interview seat button from the Create interview pop-up to create your first seat and start adding interviewers.

Keep selecting this button to add additional seats if you need them.

Rules

By default, each seat uses a ‘one of’ rule which means that when you come to select an interviewer to fill that seat, you can choose one of the available interviewers in the pool.

Using this default rule, you can:

• Add one individual interviewer.
• Add one hiring team member.
• Add a single tag or eligibility.
• Add multiple tags or eligibilities. Some considerations when doing this include:
• Tags and eligibilities can be combined interchangeably.
• For each tag and eligibility there is also a Not version, which means any interviewers with that tag or eligibility will not be included in the pool.
• This rule uses AND logic, which means an interviewer will only be included in the pool if they have both tags/eligibilities.

If you want though, you can expand the interviewer pool to include a broader range of potential interviewers, using a different set of criteria.

To do this, select the + Add rule button - this will add in a second line marked as OR.

You can add multiple rules here, if you need to - just keep selecting + Add rule.

With one or more people added, you can then either choose an interviewer from the first set or from the second set.

Examples

Here are some examples of how you might want to construct an interviewer pool.

A single eligibility

To create a pool of interviewers who can conduct a particular type of interview - a coding exercise, for example - you can use a single interviewer eligibility.

In this example you can see that the interviewer pool consists of four possible interviewers.

Multiple eligibilities

You can also use multiple eligibilities, if you need to make sure that any interviewer in the pool has all of the capabilities required for the interview. For example, if your coding exercise is going to involve two programming languages you’ll need to make sure any interviewer is proficient in both of them.

You can see in this example that while three possible interviewers are proficient in Python, only one is proficient in both Python and Java - so the interviewer pool is limited to one possible interviewer.

Combine an eligibility with a tag

You can also combine an eligibility and a tag - for example if you only want to include interviewers who work in a particular office.

Here you can see that while four interviewers are eligible to conduct coding exercises and two work out of the NYC office, only one has both the relevant eligibility and tag - so the interviewer pool is now reduced to one possible interviewer.

Exclude certain interviewers

Rather than using a tag to narrow things down, instead you might want to exclude certain interviewers who you don’t want to be part of the pool. In this instance, you can combine the original eligibility with ‘Not a particular interviewer’.

As you can see here, this has excluded that particular interviewer to reduce the interviewer pool down to three, from four people who are eligible to conduct a coding exercise.

Multiple locations

So far all of the examples we’ve shown have involved reducing an interviewer pool, but you can also use tags and eligibilities to broaden an interviewer pool. For example, if you’re running an interview using video conferencing you might want to include interviewers who work remotely as well as those who work in a particular office.

By doing this, the interviewer pool consists of the sum of the two tags - in this case that’s four interviewers.

Multiple cross-department individuals

Another scenario might be if you want to include a number of specific individuals who don’t naturally fit into existing tags or eligibilities - perhaps because they work in different departments. The simplest way to do this is to add each interviewer as an additional rule.

As you can see, this has created an interviewer pool of those four possible interviewers.

Including or excluding the hiring team from a department

For some interviews, you might want the interviewer to be someone who plays a particular role in the candidate's hiring process. You can use hiring team roles to do this, specifying either the candidate's recruiter, hiring manager, sourcer, or coordinator.

Alternatively, you can exclude hiring team members from interviewer pools. For example, if you want a candidate to meet all of their potential team members without the hiring manager being present (perhaps for a more informal conversation), you could combine their department tag with ‘Not hiring manager’.

In this example, there are seven team members in Engineering but as one of them is the candidate’s hiring manager, the interviewer pool is reduced to six possible interviewers.

Have any issues or questions on this topic? Please feel free to contact your dedicated Gem Customer Success Manager directly or our Support team at support@gem.com.

• What is an interviewer pool?
• What is an interviewer seat?
• Creating an interviewer pool
• Rules
• Examples
• A single eligibility
• Multiple eligibilities
• Combine an eligibility with a tag
• Exclude certain interviewers
• Multiple locations
• Multiple cross-department individuals
• Including or excluding the hiring team from a department