You might encounter a warning when trying to schedule a Zoom interview saying that the Zoom host is hosting another Zoom Meeting during the timeframe of the interview. You might be wondering why this meeting is resulting in a conflict, even though the Zoom host is not attending any of the interviews that you’re about to schedule. The reason for this is, even though the host is not an interviewer, they are still the host of the Zoom Meeting that will be created for this interview (see Gem Scheduling: Zoom Meeting hosts for more information). Due to Zoom’s limits on hosting concurrent meetings, no one can ever be the host of more than one meeting at a time.
What happens if it’s scheduled anyway
If you decide to schedule the interview during this timeframe anyway (which is not recommended unless you plan on moving the other meeting), someone is guaranteed to run into issues. However, what actually happens depends on which meeting starts first.
If the interview starts first (i.e. if either the interviewer or the candidate joins the Zoom Meeting for the interview), then when the Zoom host goes to start the other meeting, they’ll encounter a message saying that they have another meeting in progress and asking if they want to end it. If they select End Other Meeting, it will terminate the interview’s Zoom call immediately.
If the Zoom host’s other meeting starts first, whenever the candidate or interviewer tries to join the interview’s Zoom Meeting, they’ll encounter a message saying that the host has another meeting in progress, and there will be no way for them to proceed unless the host ends their other meeting.
Workarounds
This constraint is unfortunate, but there are a few ways to work around it.
Move one of the meetings
The easiest thing to do is to just move either the interview or the other meeting. This problem only arises when they occur at the same time, so if they’re no longer overlapping, it solves this issue. However, sometimes this isn’t possible e.g., the candidate is only free during this time and the other meeting involves many people that are usually busy.
Change the host of the other meeting
Depending on what the other Zoom Meeting is, it might be easiest to get someone else to host that one. That will free you up to be the host of the interview, avoiding the conflict. If this is possible, you can go ahead and schedule the interview before changing the host because there’s no issue about scheduling two Zoom Meetings at the same time; it’s only a problem if you try to start both at the same time.
Manually specify the host of the interview
You could also go back to the Availability Step when scheduling and manually specify another Zoom host (see Gem Scheduling: Zoom Meeting hosts for more information). Gem Scheduling will still check to see if there are any conflicts before actually scheduling the interview, so you can be sure that you’re picking a Zoom host that is available during that time.
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- What happens if it’s scheduled anyway
- Workarounds
- Move one of the meetings
- Change the host of the other meeting
- Manually specify the host of the interview