The exploration of potential energy surfaces (PESs) is central to the understanding of ground- and excited-state reactions. The construction of potential energy surfaces with multireference methods are usually done sequentially, meaning the calculation usually starts from one geometry, and the molecular orbitals and configuration interaction coefficients are carried over to a successive geometry close to the previous geometry, and so on, ensuring fast and reliable convergence to the desired solution. While this likely yields smooth, reasonable PESs, it is slow because each calculation must wait for the previous one to finish. When multiple processors are available, multiple geometries could in principle be computed in parallel, given an appropriate initial guess. In this work, we devise a set of procedures that balance the reliability of sequential calculations with the efficiency of parallel computing to various degrees. We demonstrate their usefulness in constructing ground-state PESs of Cr 2 , Cu 2 , Mg 2 , and O 3 with complete active space self-consistent field and second-order n -electron valence state perturbation theory, and we make recommendations on procedures that maximize the parallelization of PES construction without sacrificing quality. We expect our approach to serve as an important pointer in maximizing the efficiency of PES construction.