What Is an Interview Plan?

An interview plan is a structured template that defines the exact stages a candidate must pass through for a given role — from initial application all the way to hire. It acts as the backbone of your hiring workflow, ensuring every candidate for a job moves through a consistent, well-defined process.

By setting up an interview plan before you begin accepting applications, your entire hiring team is aligned on what each stage involves, who evaluates candidates, what criteria are used, and what automated actions should happen as candidates progress.

What an Interview Plan Contains

An interview plan in Kula is made up of milestones and stages:

• Milestones are the fixed, top-level buckets of the hiring journey. Kula provides five default milestones that cannot be deleted: Prospect, Application Review, Interview, Offer, and Hired.

• Stages sit inside each milestone and represent the specific steps within it. Some stages are locked defaults; others can be added, named, and customized by your team. All stages between Application Review and Offer are grouped as Interview stages in reporting.

Within each stage, you can configure activities — the specific actions that happen when a candidate reaches that stage, such as scheduling an interview, sending an automated email, requesting an assessment, or triggering a review with a scorecard.

Why Interview Plans Matter

Global Plans vs. Job-Level Plans

Interview plans in Kula operate at two levels:

• Global (Settings-level) plans — created under Settings → Interviews & Scheduling → Interview Plan. These are reusable templates that can be applied to multiple jobs.

• Job-level plans — when a global template is applied to a job, Kula creates a job-level copy of that plan. Changes made at the job level only affect that specific job. Changes to the global template after a job has been created do not automatically propagate to jobs already using that template.

Important: Once a template is applied to a job, the two are no longer linked. If you update the global template later, you will need to manually update any existing jobs that use it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need to set up an interview plan before creating a job?

No, but it is strongly recommended. Setting up a plan before you start receiving applications ensures your team is aligned and your automations (emails, assessments, scorecards) are ready to fire from day one. You can apply or change a plan after job creation, but doing so may require manual reconfiguration of elements like interview pools.

Q: Can I have different interview plans for different roles?

Yes. You can create as many global interview plan templates as needed — for example, separate plans for technical, business operations, and senior-level roles — and apply the appropriate one when creating each job.

Q: Can I add interview stages between Application Review and Offer?

Yes. The Interview milestone is fully customizable. By default it includes Phone Screen, Assessment, and Face-to-Face, but you can edit these, add your own, or remove them. All custom stages added here appear as Interview stages in your reporting pipeline.

Q: What happens if I change the interview plan on a job after it's been created?

Changing the interview plan post-creation does not retroactively update interview pools or activities that were already configured. You will need to manually reconfigure the affected stages. To avoid this, finalize your plan before the job goes live.

Q: Are the Prospect, Application Review, Offer, and Hired milestones mandatory?

Yes. These four milestones (plus the Interview milestone) are fixed and cannot be deleted. They represent the core hiring pipeline. You can add custom stages within each milestone, but the milestones themselves are always present.

Need Help?

If you have questions or need assistance with setup, feel free to reach out to us at support@kula.ai or use the in-app chat for assistance.