Getting Your Team to Give Meaningful Interview Feedback

August 26, 2015 at 10:36 AM by Rob Stevenson

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Once you’ve done your job finding, contacting, psyching up, and scheduling your candidate, you may find yourself in the anxiety-laden position of sitting back and letting the team make the decision. Once you’ve passed off the candidate, you want to make sure they’re in the best position to succeed, and part of that is ensuring your own team is in the best position to complete an accurate assessment. Here are some ways your friends here at Entelo go about making sure we get a comprehensive view of candidates.

 

Divide and Conquer

Firstly, you want to make sure your team is prepped on what specifically they should cover in their interview. Take some time to figure out who’s best off covering what, according to individual expertise. When candidates have to repeat themselves, it wears them out and their enthusiasm will wane. Further, this overlapping means you’re wasting time not turning over new rocks. Have a brief pre-interview pow wow to delineate interview responsibilities. 

Secondly, once you’ve divided the team, make sure they stay divided. Try to stop people from discussing candidates until they’ve given an official yes or no, as talking to a fellow interviewer is sure to color someone’s judgment. Once people have sorted out their thoughts and given an initial yes/no, by all means open up the floor for discussion. First, though, you want to make sure you’re painting an accurate picture of the candidate, and you can’t do it if each person’s judgment is passed through the filter of their colleagues first.

 

Proper Feedback

Once your team is done interviewing, they’ll likely head over to your ATS-powered scoresheet to share their thoughts. Here’s where you need to do the bulk of your work. The comments left by each interviewer should not just be their disparate notes taken throughout the meeting, errantly scrawled throughout the margins of resumes. Rather, it should tell a story about what specifically impressed them or left them begging. Walking through first impressions, into the bulk of the conversation, and taking note of elements such as preparedness and genuine interest. The goal of having your interviewers fill out a scoresheet is not just to share their thoughts, but to qualify their judgment. If they gave the thumbs up, why? Urge them to be specific. Same goes for when someone on your team wants to put on a red light. What turned them off?

Even if your team isn’t packed with aspiring Dostoyevskys, you can still create a scenario which gives you a comprehensive view without the need to write a novel. Many ATSs offer canned or scale response questions, so this is an opportunity to delineate specific rigors of the job and see how your team believes the candidate fits within them. Here’s an example of the responses we require for a entry level sales position here Entelo: 

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How do you go about ensuring your team comes out of their interviews with concrete assessments of talent? Hit us up in the comments!

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