The host of the created Zoom Meeting depends on the settings used when scheduling the interview. If you have assigned a room to the interview, and if that room is set in Zoom as a specific Zoom Room, then that will default to being the host.
If the interview doesn’t have a room assigned to it, or if the room is not a Zoom Room, then the default host will be the person who’s scheduling the interview (assuming that person is a Zoom user).
Choosing a host
Alternatively, you can manually specify who you want to be the Zoom host. There are two places in which you can specify this:
- In the Advanced Settings for an interview stage, under Calendar events and then Video conferencing & locations, if you want this to apply to all interviews within that stage.
- On the initial schedule page for a specific candidate, under Stage settings , if you only want it to apply to that single candidate.
When you come to select a meeting host, you can choose:
- A room, as long as it is set as a Zoom Room.
- A specific user, as long as they are a Zoom user.
- A tag, for example if you have a ‘Zoom Host’ tag.
- A role: either Scheduler, denoting the person who initially schedules the interview, or First Interviewer (see below).
- A note on First Interviewer: When this option is selected, the system will prefer the first interviewer on the panel that has no other Zoom Meetings during that time. This is most useful for one-on-one interviews where you want the interviewer to be the Zoom host of their own interview, but it can also be used for onsite as well so that not all interviews are being hosted by the same person.
Regardless of how it was configured, you’ll be able to see who the host is when you view the schedule in Gem Scheduling.
What the host does
When it comes to the interview itself, it doesn’t matter who the host of the meeting is. This user will not need to do anything to start the meeting, and they won’t need to join the meeting at any point.
The main reason why it’s important to know who the host is is because of Zoom’s limits on hosting concurrent meetings. If you are the host of a schedule, you shouldn’t create any other schedules that overlap the existing one (see Gem Scheduling: Zoom conflicts for more information).
The ‘Concurrent Meeting Plus’ license from Zoom costs about $336/user/year, and allows up to 20 simultaneous meetings for one host account.
- Your IT manager (or whoever has contact with a Zoom account rep) will be able to ask your Zoom account manager for the license.
- One Concurrent Meeting Plus license should be sufficient for your account. You can give it to someone on your recruiting team or have a separate recruiting@ Zoom account just for hosting interviews.
- This is our recommendation for providing a better candidate experience by not making them switch links for every interview, while also preventing Zoom concurrent meeting conflicts.
An alternative solution: Add a few (4-5?) additional Zoom accounts and use them for hosting interviews. In Gem Scheduling, you can set up a ‘pool’ of Zoom hosts to pick from, and the system will find one that’s available for the entirety of the interview block. This may end up being cheaper than the ‘Concurrent Meeting Plus’ license, and will work as a temporary solution until your interview volume scales up.
Other options: You can use Zoom Rooms as hosts, or have the interviewer pass the host status along as they swap out in the interview Zoom.
Why it works this way
The reason why the Zoom host is set up this way is to provide the best experience for the candidate. The system creates a single Zoom meeting for the entirety of the schedule, instead of creating a separate Zoom meeting for each interview. This ensures that the candidate has a single Zoom Meeting URL that they can keep track of for the whole session, instead of having to leave and join a new meeting every time the interviewer changes. And with a single Zoom Meeting, it’s easier to have a single person be the host for the whole duration instead of “passing on” the host status to the next interviewer.
- Choosing a host
- What the host does
- Why it works this way