Giving Interview Feedback

Giving negative feedback sometimes feels awkward and like you’re a jerk for telling them, but it’s a selfless act that helps only the candidate?after all, you really have nothing to immediately gain from it. So why do it? Well, hopefully you believe in the “greater good” or Karma, but at a minimum you can look at the reputation score of companies that never provide candidates with feedback at all. The fact is that word gets out on and it circulates in the industry that you're in and reaches the people that you typically hire for. Don’t take the chance of potentially scheduling your next “rockstar” developer to meet with you only to have the “rockstar” cancel the interview after consulting his developer friends and hearing negative opinions about your company that his friends formed based solely on never hearing back from you.

Don’t Wait

Feedback should be given immediately after an interview, or better yet, at the end of the interview. Waiting on giving feedback just kills your incentive to help and let the candidate know how they did. I’ve talked to many candidates who have gone on interviews, and even though they didn’t end up getting the job, they respect and admire the hiring manager for telling them, at the end of the interview, why they think the candidate wouldn’t be a fit for the position. After all, if you were interviewing for a position, wouldn’t you appreciate that as well?

There’s also the chance that you, as a hiring manager, may be completely off base in your assessment. When you tell a candidate his .NET skills are not appropriate for what you’re looking for and you tell him why, the candidate has the opportunity to touch on something you may have missed in the interview process. Recently I was faced with a similar situation during a sales interview when I said that the candidate didn’t possess an “edge” to him to be entrepreneurial enough for what I was looking for in my sales environment. Not only did I misassessthis candidate, the candidate responded in a way that was by far the most impressive part of the interview and I ended up hiring him. Had I just shaken his hand and said the typical: “I have more interviews to do this week and next, but will circle back with you if we’re interested,” I would have completely missed out on a successful hire.

When you know that you want to offer the candidate the position then give him an idea that you want to make him an offer. Why? In today’s market, especially for technology professionals, it’s becoming increasingly hard to keep good candidates in the “queue” while you put together an offer. Not providing positive feedback in a timely manner just runs the risk of the candidate accepting a job somewhere else. If you’re a mid-sized company that means you have red tape to go through before making an offer, and this red tape takes time to navigate through, so what’s the point of going through all the red tape when by the time you have something ready to offer there’s no candidate to offer the job to anyway?

Honesty

Be honest with the candidate, or better yet, if you’re using a recruiter be honest with them about your feedback. Talk through your concerns, surface them to see if they stick if they do, then you’re 100% sure that those concerns were valid. If they don’t stick, however, and you were off base with your assessment, not saying anything will ruin your chances of hiring the right person.

Lastly, from a recruiter’s perspective, having a company never give me feedback will usually result in me immediately dismissing the business relationship. While some have the mindset that there are a million recruiters and recruiting companies out there to choose from (which is correct), the chance of partnering with a good recruiter or recruiting firm long term is exceptionally rare. Feedback makes us get better as recruiters and get better candidates in the door to meet with you as a hiring manager. But don’t just give feedback solely for you to get something out of it give feedback because that’s what you’d want if the roles were reversed.