LinkedIn's new tool automatically schedules interviews for recruiters, candidates

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, has launched two new tools which automatically schedule interviews and provide salary details respectively. 

The first tool, Scheduler, uses LinkedIn's in-house private messaging service, InMail, to check for free slots on the calendars of recruiters and candidates before scheduling an interview.

"Imagine sending a dozen InMails before lunch, grabbing a bite, and coming back to see your calendar is suddenly full of candidate calls for the next week, without you lifting a finger," LinkedIn wrote in a blog post.

Peter Rigano, Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, was quoted by Indo-Asian News Service as saying that the idea behind Scheduler was to cut down on back-and-forth messages between recruiters and applicants.

To use Scheduler, LinkedIn users need to sync their calendars (only Google and Office365 calendars are currently supported). This will give the recruiter a real-time view of the candidate's availability. 

The recruiter can set scheduling preferences such as duration of the meetings. Recruiters can also send a calendar availablity link via InMail.

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn also introduced a tool called Salary Insights on its platform.

Salary Insights lets users view compensation details on open roles. 

"This feature will appear on job listings and will show an estimated or expected salary range for the role, based on data from our 546+ million members and employer-provided information," Keren Baruch, senior product manager at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post.

LinkedIn said a recent survey found that more than 70% of professionals want to know about salary in the first message from a recruiter.

The company will draw salary information from employers who can provide salary ranges for specific jobs or compile something known as LinkedIn Estimated Salary — an estimated range from member-submitted data.

LinkedIn said that it has also allowed users to hide their salary information. 

The social network had recently expanded its job seeker toolkit to make it easier for candidates in other industries to get noticed by recruiters looking to fill positions with emerging, in-demand skills.

It had also introduced a new feature that pushes monthly notifications to job seekers alerting them about skills trending among people with their job titles.