San Francisco, Feb 14 (IANS): Professional social network site LinkedIn on Wednesday launched a new tool called "Scheduler" that will help ease the hiring process both for recruiters and candidates as well as avoid fallouts.

"LinkedIn Scheduler" automates initial interview scheduling for recruiters and candidates, directly via InMail.

The new tool would help candidates and recruiters save time spent on scheduling a meeting and help recruiters focus their energies on hiring strategically and onboarding the best candidate, the Microsoft-owned company said in a statement.

Using this feature, candidates or recruiters can reach each other via InMail to see one's calendar availability and reserve an interview time that works best for both.

It also gives candidates the liberty to feed in their contact information to accelerate this process.

"Our goal is to help you spend less time on the back-and-forth-and a lot more time delighting, advising, and helping candidates make the decision to join your company," said Peter Rigano, Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, in a blogpost late on Tuesday.

"LinkedIn 'Scheduler' is just the latest way that we're working to make recruiters more productive, powerful, and personal," Rigano added.

To use the feature, recruiters first need to automatically provide availability via InMail by syncing "Scheduler" to Office 365 or Google calendar.

This would automatically set the availability for potential interview times.

Then, using a new "InMail" message, recruiters can easily send a scheduling link directly to the candidate of interest.

The link shares a real-time view of the recruiter's calendar availability with candidates who can then choose what time works best for them, add their phone number and confirm the meeting.

Further, advance settings allows recruiters to manage preferences such as time zones, availability, length of meetings and same-day meetings.