You can, and most recruiting agencies start out doing exactly this. A tab per client, a row per candidate, columns for dates and statuses.
It holds together for a while. But coordinating interviews across multiple clients is a fundamentally different challenge than tracking them, and that's where a spreadsheet starts to quietly fall apart.
What coordinating interviews across multiple clients in a spreadsheet looks like
A common setup involves separate tabs for each client, with rows for each active candidate and columns covering role, interview date, contact details, current status, and notes. Some agencies build a master tab that pulls key details from each client sheet for a bird's eye view. With enough colour coding and filtering, you can get a reasonable snapshot of where things stand across your book of clients.
For a small agency managing two or three clients at once, this is manageable. It's familiar, it costs nothing, and it gives everyone on the team access to the same information.
Where it breaks down
Coordinating interviews isn't just about knowing where things stand. It's about actively moving them forward, and that's where a spreadsheet stops helping.
Each client requires its own coordination loop
For every open role across every client, you're running a separate back-and-forth: emailing the client for availability, chasing the candidate for their times, manually comparing the two, and then sending the confirmation. Multiply that by ten open roles across five clients and the spreadsheet becomes a scoreboard for work you're constantly doing by hand.
The sheet is always behind
A candidate responded this morning. A client just pushed back a proposed time. A role just went on hold. None of that is in the spreadsheet yet because someone hasn't updated it. Across multiple active clients, the gap between what the sheet says and what's actually happening is almost always growing.
You can't see what's at risk
A spreadsheet can't tell you which interviews are in danger of going cold, which candidates haven't responded in three days, or which clients are waiting on something from your side. It shows you the last thing someone typed in, not the current state of play. When you're managing ten or fifteen active interviews across multiple clients, the things you can't see are exactly the ones that slip through.
Client context gets siloed
Each client tab lives separately, which means getting a genuine cross-client view of your workload requires either a lot of tab-switching or a master sheet that someone has to manually keep in sync with everything else. Neither scales well as your client list grows.
Nothing is connected to how the work actually happens
The coordination itself happens in email, the calendar invites go out separately, and the ATS gets updated afterward. The spreadsheet sits to the side of all of this, waiting to be updated, rather than being part of the process.
The bottom line
A spreadsheet can give you a record of your interviews across multiple clients. What it can't do is coordinate them. The actual work of getting a client and a candidate aligned on a time still happens entirely through manual effort, and the spreadsheet only reflects it after the fact.
For agencies managing a growing number of clients simultaneously, that gap becomes expensive. Time spent chasing availability, manually relaying information between parties, and keeping a spreadsheet current is time not spent on the work that actually moves placements forward.
Arrange handles the coordination itself across all your client relationships at once. Scheduling links, availability matching, confirmations, and calendar invites all happen automatically, and the live stage tracker gives you a real-time view of where every interview stands across every client, without anyone having to update a row.
FAQs
Can you use separate spreadsheet tabs to manage interviews per client?
Yes, and many agencies start this way. A tab per client helps keep information organised, but it doesn't solve the coordination problem. You're still managing the back-and-forth between each client and candidate manually, and keeping multiple tabs current as things move quickly is a constant overhead.
What's the difference between tracking interviews and coordinating them?
Tracking is recording what has been agreed. Coordinating is the active process of getting to an agreement, which involves availability requests, follow-ups, confirmations, and calendar invites. A spreadsheet handles the former but plays no role in the latter.
When does a spreadsheet stop working for multi-client interview coordination?
Usually when the manual overhead of keeping it current starts taking more time than the value it provides. For most agencies, that point comes when they're managing more than a handful of open roles across more than two or three clients simultaneously.
