Book interviews against real panel availability

The connector will read free and busy information for the panel, which is the availability layer Google exposes without disclosing what the meetings are. A recruiter proposing a slot needs to know a block is taken; they do not need to know it is a one-to-one about somebody's performance review.

For interviews organised by Surhires, the event details are ours to write, so the interview event carries the requisition, the candidate reference and the join link. For everything else on a panel member's calendar, the product sees a busy block and nothing more.

That distinction is what makes panel members willing to connect a calendar at all, and it is worth being explicit about before anyone is asked for consent.

The failure everybody has lived through: three slots are offered to a candidate, the candidate takes two days to answer, and by then two of the three have been filled by other meetings. The candidate picks the one that is already gone.

Proposed slots will be held on the panel calendars as tentative entries for a configurable window while the candidate decides. When the candidate confirms, the chosen slot converts to a confirmed interview and the other holds are released immediately. If the window expires, all holds are released and the recruiter is told rather than the candidate being sent to a dead slot.

The hold duration is configurable per requisition, because a two-day hold is reasonable for an executive panel and absurd for a volume contract desk booking screens for tomorrow.

A rescheduled interview will move the existing calendar event rather than creating a second one. Every attendee sees the change on the event they already have, the candidate confirmation is reissued against the same interview record, and the join link stays valid.

This sounds trivial and is the single most common source of interview chaos. Systems that cancel and recreate leave attendees holding two invitations, one of which still looks live, and panel members turn up to the wrong one.

Cancellation withdraws the event from every attendee, releases any related holds, and records the reason against the interview so the pipeline slip is attributable rather than mysterious.

Time zones are where scheduling software quietly fails. A recruiter in London books a candidate in Bengaluru for a panel spread across New York and Sydney, in a week where one of those regions has just changed its clocks and another never does.

The connector will resolve every participant's zone from their calendar rather than assuming the organiser's, store the event against an absolute instant, and render each participant's local time in the invitation and reminder they receive. Daylight saving transitions are resolved at render time, so an interview booked in February for April shows the right April time.

Where the candidate's zone is unknown, they are asked rather than guessed at, and the interview record carries the zone that was used so a mismatch is diagnosable after the fact.

Interview reminders will go out at a configurable interval before the slot, through the channel the candidate has opted into. For an India-market desk that will usually be WhatsApp, which is live today; elsewhere it is email or SMS.

Panel reminders follow the calendar, since panel members live in it, with an in-product task for the recruiter if a confirmation has not come back inside a threshold. A no-show is recorded as a disposition rather than as a gap, so the pattern is visible if it repeats with a particular client.

It will not read the contents of your calendar events, sync your personal appointments into the product, or write anything to your calendar other than the interviews it organises and the holds it places.

It will not be the only way to schedule. A desk that cannot or will not connect calendars continues to schedule from entered availability, and a mixed panel where two members are connected and one is not is handled rather than blocked.