Residency Applicants Prefer Online System for Scheduling Interviews

INTRODUCTION: Residency coordinators may be overwhelmed when scheduling residency interviews. Applicants often have to coordinate interviews with multiple programs at once, and relying on verbal or email confirmation may delay the process. Our objective was to determine applicant mean time to schedule and satisfaction using online scheduling. METHODS: This pilot study is a retrospective analysis performed on a sample of applicants offered interviews at an urban county emergency medicine residency. Applicants were asked their estimated time to schedule with the online system compared to their average time using other methods. In addition, they were asked on a five-point anchored scale to rate their satisfaction. RESULTS: Of 171 applicants, 121 completed the survey (70.8%). Applicants were scheduling an average of 13.3 interviews. Applicants reported scheduling interviews using the online system in mean of 46.2 minutes (median 10, range 1–1800) from the interview offer as compared with a mean of 320.2 minutes (median 60, range 3–2880) for other programs not using this system. This difference was statistically significant. In addition, applicants were more likely to rate their satisfaction using the online system as “satisfied” (83.5% vs 16.5%). Applicants were also more likely to state that they preferred scheduling their interviews using the online system rather than the way other programs scheduled interviews (74.2% vs 4.1%) and that the online system aided them coordinating travel arrangements (52.1% vs 4.1%). CONCLUSION: An online interview scheduling system is associated with higher satisfaction among applicants both in coordinating travel arrangements and in overall satisfaction.