Invitation to attend second interview letter

Where your recruitment process involves holding a second round of interviews for external candidates for vacant roles, you can use our letter to invite a job applicant to a second interview.

Second interviews

Once you’ve carried out your initial sifting of CVs or job application forms, you can use our Invitation to Attend Interview Letter to invite to interview those job applicants who made it through that sift. Where your practice is then to conduct second interviews, you can use our Invitation to Attend Second Interview Letter to formally arrange those second interviews. It would be normal for second interviews to involve a reduced number of job applicants when compared to initial interviews. For example, if you interviewed eight individuals at the first stage and objectively marked them on their interview answers, you might reduce that number to the three highest scoring individuals for the second round of interviews. However, there are no hard and fast rules here about how many people you should interview for each role, so it’s up to you.

A virtual interview?

If you held the first interviews remotely, such as using video conferencing software, it’s likely that you’ll want to hold the second round of interviews on a face-to-face basis, so that you can properly meet the individual to whom you will eventually offer the job, as it can be difficult to truly assess personality over a video call. That said, there’s nothing to stop you holding remote interviews at all interview stages, and so our new letter covers both options.

Letter content

In addition to giving you the option to choose either a real or virtual second interview, our letter sets out the date and time of it and the identity of the interviewers. The interviewers here should ideally be different members of the management team to the initial interviewer(s) so that you can get a wider range of assessments on the job applicants. You might also want to involve HR at this stage. Where it’s an in-person interview, details of the interview location are included – this would normally be at the office where the vacant role is located, and it may also usefully provide an opportunity for the individual to meet members of the team/department in which they would work were they to be appointed to the role. Where it’s a remote interview, our letter provides for you to separately email details on how the individual can join the video call. Our letter goes on to ask the job applicant to expressly confirm that they’ll be attending the second interview, but it also asks them to let you know if either they can’t attend, in which case you can try to re-arrange it, or if they now wish to withdraw their application for the role.

Reasonable adjustments

You’ll need to consider your duty to make reasonable adjustments for job applicants with disabilities to ensure they’re not placed at a substantial disadvantage compared with non-disabled applicants. Our letter covers this aspect too.