How to Schedule Interviews with Candidates Across Time Zones

Interview scheduling has a specific failure mode: the candidate converts the time incorrectly, shows up an hour off, and starts the process on the back foot. A missed or late candidate damages the experience before anyone has said hello — and it’s almost always the invite’s fault, not the candidate’s arithmetic.

The most common version: you send “Tuesday at 2pm EST.” The candidate in Berlin converts it to 8pm CET — correct in winter. But if the interview is in June, 2pm EDT is 8pm CEST. If they did the conversion in winter, they’re off by an hour.

The fix is simple. Include UTC alongside local times:

Interview: Tuesday 18 June at 18:00 UTC (2pm Eastern / 8pm Berlin / 11am Los Angeles)

The candidate reads their own city, confirms it, and has UTC as a backstop. Drop in a meetwhen link in the description too — they can check the time in any city they want.

A few other things worth getting right:

• Write “Tuesday 18 June” not “next Tuesday.” “Next Tuesday” means different things depending on when they read it.
• Don’t schedule interviews at the edge of the candidate’s day if you can avoid it. A 7am or 8pm interview for a finalist candidate is a bad trade.
• Be careful in March and October around DST transitions across US/Europe. The actual offset may differ from what you’d expect by a week. Check rather than assume.
• For async rounds (take-home tasks, recorded responses), specify deadlines in UTC: “Please submit by Friday 21 June at 23:59 UTC.” Unambiguous for any timezone.

Send a confirmation email the day before that restates the time in both UTC and the candidate’s local time. This catches any lingering calendar issues before they become a no-show.

Reminder: your interview is tomorrow, Wednesday 19 June, at 14:00 UTC. In your time zone (Berlin), that’s 16:00 CEST.

For self-serve booking, verify the tool shows available slots in the candidate’s local time, not yours. Most modern tools do this automatically — but double-check, especially if you’ve customised the settings.