Chasing people for a "yes, I'll be there" costs time, and a no-show that nobody saw coming costs more. With RSVP, everyone you invite to an interview — interviewers and the candidate — can accept, decline, or answer "Maybe," and you see every response in Recruitee before the meeting starts.

This article covers what you need to set up first, how each participant responds, where the answers appear in Recruitee, and how to get notified when someone replies.

📌 Note: RSVP works best when the event organizer has connected their Google or Microsoft calendar to Recruitee. If they haven't, a connected team calendar takes over. Without either, calendar invitations aren't available at all and participants can only respond through the email invitation.

RSVP isn't a setting you switch on. It comes with the invitations you send when you schedule an interview, so what you need to get right is the calendar connection and the invitation options.

Recruitee creates the interview in the organizer's external calendar, and that calendar is what invites everyone else and collects their answers. So one of these has to be true:

If neither is available, the Calendar (Outlook/Google) checkboxes are grayed out when you schedule. When you point at them you can see why:

-Connect Microsoft or Google calendar in your Recruitee profile settings

-Unavailable because the organizer has not connected their external calendar — someone else is the organizer and theirs isn’t connected.

📌 Note: Events booked through a scheduler link work the same way. The organizer set on the link needs a connected calendar, or the team calendar has to cover it.

When you schedule an interview, click Show options in the invitations box on the second step. You'll see a row for the candidate and a row for the interviewers, each with two checkboxes:

💡 Tip: Pick one channel per participant. If you tick both, that person gets an invitation from Recruitee and one from Google or Microsoft for the same interview.

A few of these boxes lock themselves, and the reason shows in a tooltip when you point at them:

There are two ways to answer, and which one a participant gets depends on how you invited them.

Participants invited via calendar reply the way they always do — in Google Calendar or Outlook. Recruitee picks the answer up on the next calendar sync and shows it alongside everyone else's.

Participants invited by email only get an RSVP block at the bottom of the invitation, under the line Confirm that you can attend this interview, with an Accept or decline button.

📌 Note: The button only appears for people who aren't being invited via calendar. If you tick both Email and Calendar (Outlook/Google) for someone, their email arrives without it — their calendar invitation handles the RSVP instead.

Clicking Accept or decline opens a page headed Accept or decline the invitation, showing the date, the time, and the recipient's own time zone. From there they choose:

Recruitee then confirms the answer — You've accepted the meeting, You've responded "Maybe," or You've declined this invitation — and offers a Change your response button, so anyone can change their mind later.

Responses show up as a small badge on each participant's avatar:

Point at an avatar to see the person's name and their answer in full: Accepted, Tentative, or Declined. People who haven't answered show their name only.

You'll find these badges anywhere Recruitee lists interview participants — on the event in the candidate's profile, in the event details dialog under Participants, and on your dashboard.

📌 Note: Two answers are filled in for you. Whoever schedules the interview is marked as accepted straight away if they're on the interviewers list, and a candidate who books or reschedules their own slot through a scheduler link is marked as accepted too.

Every response is written to the Activities tab of the candidate's profile, for example, "Candidate Anna Kowalska declined the invitation to interview on 14 April 2026," or "Marc Dubois tentatively accepted the invitation to interview on 14 April 2026."

You also can get an in-app notification each time a participant responds. RSVP notifications sit in your notification settings under Events are scheduled, updated or deleted. Turn on email or mobile there if you'd also be told that way.

Will participants get two invitations if I use both email and calendar? Yes. If the organizer has a connected calendar and you also tick Email, that participant gets one invitation from Recruitee and one from Google or Microsoft. Tick only one option per participant to keep it to a single message.

What happens if the organizer doesn't have a connected calendar? If a team calendar is connected, it takes over and invitations go out as normal. If not, other interviewers see the event in their own connected calendars but without the participants list, and the candidate gets the Recruitee email with an ICS file attached, which they can use to add the interview to their calendar.

What happens if the organizer has several calendars connected? The first calendar in the list hosts the event, and the event syncs to every participant's calendar that's connected to Recruitee. The exception is when the organizer removes themselves from the interviewers list — see the next question.

What if I organize an interview but take myself off the interviewers list? Your calendar still hosts the event and still sends the invitations. In Recruitee, you'll find the event under Team calendar when you display all Recruitee events. In your own calendar, it depends on the provider:

Can interviewers and candidates edit the event in their own calendar? The organizer and the interviewers can edit it.

Who is the organizer, and why can't I change them? The organizer is the person whose external calendar is used to create the event. Usually they attend as well, but they can take themselves off the guest list — Google Calendar allows this, Outlook doesn't.

You can't swap the organizer on an existing event, because that would mean deleting the event from one person's calendar and recreating it in another's. That fires off a round of notification emails and confuses everyone invited. To change the organizer, schedule a new event and cancel the old one.

📌 Note: For Google Meet interviews, this field is labeled Google Meet event host instead. The host is still the organizer — the person whose calendar creates the event.

What does "Maybe" mean for the interview? It records the person as tentative and nothing more. The interview stays in place, and they can switch to Accept or Decline at any time using Change your response.