Overview
An interview template contains information about an interview’s duration, interviewers, and position in the schedule. You can link an interview template to an interview in order to speed up your scheduling workflow, as you won’t have to enter these details each time you schedule a candidate - we’ll pre-fill them for you. This article covers how to view, create, duplicate, reuse, edit, and archive interview templates.
View interview templates
Follow these steps to see a list of all of the interview templates in your organization’s system:
- Select the Templates page from the main left-hand navigation.
- Select the Interviews & scheduling tab. From here you can see the Interview templates table.
- The columns in the Interview templates table refer to the following:
Column | Description |
Status | Whether a template is Published, Draft, or Archived. |
Jobs | How many jobs the template is currently used in. |
Linked active interviews | How many live interviews are linked to the template. |
Duration | How long the interview in the template is due to last. |
Last modified | When the template was last modified. |
- The default for this list is to show all templates. If you want to filter by one or more statuses though, select the Status dropdown and then untick any of the statuses that you don’t want to see.
See the following sections for details of how to create, duplicate, reuse and edit interview templates.
Create an interview template
Most often, you’ll create new interview templates as you set up a stage for scheduling. For more details, refer to Gem Scheduling: Configure a job for scheduling.
You can also create new interview templates and edit existing templates from the Templates page.
Follow the steps below to create a new interview template:
- Select the Templates page from the main left-hand navigation.
- Select the Interviews & scheduling tab.
- Select the + New interview template button. This opens the Interview template pop-up.
As soon as you open the Interview template pop-up, the system creates a new Draft template entitled Untitled interview. Any changes you make are automatically saved, but the new template is not set to Published until you select the Publish changes button.
- On the default Template tab, fill in the name and duration fields, then populate the rest of the template details. See below for details of each element on this pop-up.
Element | Description |
Template name (required) | The name of the template, as you’ll see in the Template dropdown when you create a new interview. For templates that you expect to reuse, we recommend just ‘Interview name’. For templates that you might only use for one interview, we recommend a combination of the ‘Job name’ and ‘Interview name’. |
Interview name (required) | The name of the interview. |
Interview duration (required) | The duration (in minutes) of the interview. |
+ Add interviewer seat | Select this button to add an interviewer seat. Refer to Gem Scheduling: Interviewer seats and interviewer pools for details. You can add as many interviewer seats as needed. |
Interview prep | An optional free text field in which to add internal information about the purpose of the interview. |
Include [live coding tool] link | Check this box to attach a live coding link to candidate calendar events for interviews using this template. |
Candidate-facing interview name | An optional field where you can enter the name of the interview that you want candidates to see. Anything entered here is used in Interview.Name and Schedule.Agenda tokens. Refer to Gem Scheduling: Available tokens for more details. |
+ Interview description | Select this to add the Candidate-facing interview description text field, which allows you to enter additional information about the interview that you want candidates to see. Anything entered here is used in the `Schedule.Agenda` token. See Gem Scheduling: Available tokens for more details. |
Scorecard: Select from template | Select a scorecard template from the dropdown list. |
Require scorecard | Defaults to checked. Uncheck this option if you want to make scorecards optional (for example for interviews such as “Lunch”). You can manually assign a scorecard to a scheduled interview whose template was set to not require scorecards. |
Scorecard details | This section displays a range of fields, dependent on the questions selected in the scorecard template - see Gem ATS: Complete a scorecard |
- When you’ve finished setting up the template, select the Publish changes button to save and publish the template. The template now displays in the templates list as Published.
Duplicate an interview template
If there is an existing template that you want to reuse, to create a new template either using the exact same settings or with just a few changed settings, you can use the duplicate function to save time rather than manually recreating the original.
Follow these steps to create a new template based on an existing one:
- Select the Templates page from the main left-hand navigation.
- Select the Interviews & scheduling tab.
- Select the Action menu (the three dots) next to any template.
- Select the Duplicate option from the dropdown. This creates a draft template called Copy of [template name] and opens the Interview template pop-up for the new interview.
- Update the Template name and Interview name fields, along with any of the remaining fields that you need to change.
- Select the Publish changes button to confirm the changes and set the template to Active.
Reuse an interview template
You can attach an interview template to as many interviews as you want. Some common examples of reusable interview templates are:
- Lunch
- Wrap-Up Interview
- Greeting Tour
- Culture Add
Sometimes, you might use a more specialized interview across multiple roles. For example, if you have four roles open for software engineers, each for a different team, you might reuse some of the same technical interviews across those loops.
Edit an interview template
You can edit any interview template with either a Draft or Published status, if you need to change any details on a template.
Follow these steps to edit an interview template:
- Select the Templates page from the main left-hand navigation.
- Select the Interviews & scheduling tab.
- Select any template.
- Make any changes you need on the Interview template pop-up.
- Select the Publish changes button to confirm your edits.
Archive an interview template
We recommend archiving interview templates that were used at one point but are no longer being used (if a template has 0 Linked active interviews, you can see that it's not currently being used).
There are two ways to archive an interview template:
- Select the Templates page from the main left-hand navigation.
- Select the Interviews & scheduling tab.
- Select the Action menu (the three dots) next to any template.
- Select the Archive option from the dropdown.
Delete a draft interview template
Once an interview template is in either Published or Archived state, you can’t delete it - only archive it. However, while a template is still in the Draft state it can be deleted.
Follow these steps to delete a Draft template:
- Select the Templates page from the main left-hand navigation.
- Select the Interviews & scheduling tab.
- Select the Action menu (the three dots) next to a Draft template.
- Select the Delete option from the dropdown.
- OR select a Draft template, then select the Delete option from the Actions dropdown.
Additional resources
To learn more about Gem Scheduling, check out the following resources.
- Gem Scheduling: Configure a job for scheduling
- Gem Scheduling: Interviewer seats and interviewer pools
- Gem Scheduling: Schedule an interview
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.