No-Show Incident Playbook: Reminders, Reschedules, Audit Logs

Treat recurring no-shows like an SLA breach with downstream compliance risk, not like a candidate etiquette issue. Scenario: it is Thursday, 10:00 a.m. Two engineers blocked 90 minutes for a final loop. The candidate does not join. The recruiter learns via a forwarded email thread that the candidate "never saw the calendar invite" and wants to reschedule next week. Nothing about the missed reminders, confirmation status, or link access is visible in the ATS. Operational risk: interviewer capacity is wasted, your time-to-offer slips, and the team starts adding "just in case" buffers that inflate cycle time. Legal exposure: if another candidate later claims unfair treatment, you cannot reconstruct whether reminders were sent consistently or whether reschedules were handled uniformly. Audit readiness: if legal asked you to prove who approved the exception and what evidence existed at the time, you are holding screenshots and inbox archaeology. Fraud risk: rescheduling is a common cover for link-sharing and proxy interviews. If your process allows unlimited reschedules without identity gating and a tamper-resistant log, you create an unmonitored access path into privileged evaluation steps.

Legacy scheduling and ATS stacks fail here because they treat reminders, confirmations, and reschedules as communications, not as controlled workflow events. Most setups are sequential and manual. Recruiter schedules, then later sends a reminder, then later updates a calendar, then later asks the coordinator to rebook. Each handoff creates delay and inconsistent enforcement. More importantly, the market did not solve the evidence problem. Calendar tools do not produce unified evidence packs. Background check and coding vendors operate in their own portals. ATS notes are free text. There is no immutable event log that ties: invite created, reminder sent, candidate confirmed, link accessed, reschedule approved, and any step-up verification performed. Without SLAs and audit trails, exceptions become shadow workflows. Shadow workflows are integrity liabilities because they bypass standardized rubrics, bypass reviewer accountability, and leave you unable to show consistency under dispute.

Assigning ownership is the fastest way to stop no-shows from becoming "everyone's problem" with no operator. Recommendation: Recruiting Ops owns the workflow design and SLAs. Security owns identity gating rules, access policies, and audit policy. Hiring Managers own rubric discipline and debrief completion SLAs. Analytics owns dashboards and segmentation. Automation should handle the predictable path: reminders, confirmations, self-serve rescheduling within policy, slot release, and ATS write-back. Manual review should be reserved for exceptions: repeated reschedules, identity mismatches, suspected proxy behavior, or consent and recording disputes. Source of truth must be explicit. The ATS is the system of record for lifecycle state and schedule status. Messaging channels are delivery mechanisms, not the record. Verification service is the record for identity events, but the ATS must receive write-backs so your audit trail is reconstructable in one place.

Implement an instrumented workflow where the conclusion is simple: attendance is a controlled state transition backed by logged evidence. Start by placing an identity gate before access to any privileged evaluation step. That means links expire by default, confirmation is required, and higher-risk cases trigger step-up verification before the interview room or assessment opens. Then shift from manual chasing to event-based triggers. Each candidate schedule event creates automated reminders across SMS-email-WhatsApp at fixed offsets. Candidate actions create logged events: confirmed, rescheduled, requested exception, failed identity check, joined late. Automated evidence capture is not a nice-to-have. It is your defense when process consistency is challenged. Every reminder send, delivery status, confirmation click, and reschedule approval becomes a timestamped entry in an immutable event log and is attached to the candidate Evidence Pack. Finally, operate it with dashboards. You are not optimizing "average time-to-hire". You are tracking time-to-event and SLA breakpoints: invite-to-confirm within 24 hours, confirm-to-attend without last-minute churn, exception queue age, and no-show rate segmented by stage and risk tier.

IntegrityLens supports this model by making reminders, reschedules, verification, and evaluation part of one ATS-anchored workflow with evidence capture as a default control. Use it to instrument the schedule layer so every action becomes a timestamped event tied to a candidate record, not a coordinator inbox. Key enablement:

Do not fix no-shows in a way that increases proxy and link-sharing exposure. Avoid these three anti-patterns:

Recommendation: implement in two passes. Pass 1 reduces no-shows with confirmation and reminders. Pass 2 hardens fraud controls around rescheduling and access. Below is a step-by-step runbook with SLAs, owners, and what must be logged as evidence.

Checkr: Hiring Hoax (Manager Survey, 2025) - 31% of hiring managers report interviewing a candidate who later turned out to be using a false identity. Pindrop: Why your hiring process is now a cybersecurity vulnerability - 1 in 6 applicants to remote roles showed signs of fraud in one real-world pipeline. SHRM: Replacement cost estimates - replacing an employee can cost 50-200% of annual salary (role-dependent).

Recommendation: start with enforceable confirmations and logged reminders, then add identity-gated access and exception SLAs. Your outcome target is not "fewer no-shows" in the abstract. It is reduced time-to-hire, fewer interviewer hours burned, defensible decisions, lower fraud exposure, and standardized scoring across teams. Implementation checklist: