👩🏾‍🎓 ⛸️ 🤤 Why is it important to tell the applicant what went wrong during the interview (and how to do it right) 🧑 ♨️ 🧑🏼‍🤝‍🧑🏼

One of the most sloppy things about technical interviews is that it is a black box. Candidates are only informed if they went to the next stage without any details, why it happened.

Lack of feedback or constructive feedback doesn't just frustrate candidates. This is bad for business. We conducted a whole study on feedback and it turned out that many candidates constantly underestimate or overestimate the level of their skills during the interview. Like that:

As statistics have shown, there is a logical relationship between how confident a person is in the success of the interview and whether he wants to continue to work with you. In other words, in each interview cycle, some applicants lose interest in working for the company only because they believe that they performed poorly, even if everything was really wonderful. This plays a cruel joke: if a person is nervous and suspects that he has not completed the task, he is inclined to self-flagellation and in order to get out of this unpleasant state he begins to rationalize and convince himself that he still did not seek to get there .

Practically speaking, timely feedback from successful candidates can work wonders by seriously increasing the number of job openings.

Also, in addition to increasing the chance of getting successful candidates for your team now, feedback is crucial in relations with candidates you are not ready to hire right now, but perhaps this employee will close a burning vacancy in six months. The results of technical interviews are extremely mixed. According to our data, only about 25% of those wishing to find a job go through all stages from interview to interview. Why is it important? Yes, because if the results are ambiguous, there is a high probability that a candidate who is not accepted by you today will become a valuable addition to the team later and therefore it is now in your interests to establish good relations with him, to form his professional portrait and to avoid many difficulties at the next hiring.

I think this tweet perfectly reflects my feelings about this.

Great teams treat rejections of candidates with the same attention as approvals. It's crazy to see people make fatal mistakes, especially with regard to young talents. Why? You have no idea how these guys will grow up in 18 months. To make you understand, you just put Michael Jordan on the bench in high school.

So, despite the obvious advantages of a detailed feedback after the interview, why do most companies prefer to hesitate or not to give it at all? To understand why everyone who ever studied for an interviewer was strongly advised not to give feedback, I conducted a survey among company founders, HR managers, recruiters and labor lawyers (and also asked a few questions about the topic on Twitterverse).

As it turned out, in the first place, feedback is depreciated because many companies are afraid of lawsuits on this basis ... And because interviewers are afraid of an aggressive defensive reaction from potential candidates. Feedback is sometimes neglected because companies simply consider this inconsequential and unimportant.

The sad truth is that the practice of hiring does not correspond to modern market realities. Those recruiting approaches, which are taken for granted today, have appeared in a world with an excessive number of candidates and a noticeable shortage of jobs. This affects all aspects of the process, starting with the unreasonably long execution of test tasks by candidates and ending with illiterate job descriptions of job vacancies. Of course, feedback after the interview is no exception. As Gail Laakman MacDowell, author of Cracking the Coding Interview on Quora, explains :

Companies are not trying to create the most perfect process for you. They are trying to hire — ideally efficiently, cheaper, and effectively. This is about their goals, not yours. Maybe when it’s easy they’ll help you too, but really this whole process is about them… Companies do not believe it helps them to give candidates feedback. Frankly, all they see is downside.

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By the way, once I did the same. Here is a letter of refusal written by me while working as the head of technical recruiting at TrialPay. Looking at him, I want to return to the past and warn myself against future mistakes.

Hey. Thank you very much for taking the time to work with TrialPay. Unfortunately, right now we do not have a vacancy that matches your current skills. We will take your candidacy note and will contact you if anything suitable appears. Thank you again for taking the time and wish you all the best for your future endeavors.

In my opinion, such a written refusal (which is undoubtedly better than being silent and leaving a person in limbo) can only be justified if you have an endless stream of one-time candidates. And it is completely inappropriate in the modern, new world, where candidates have no less leverage than companies. But still, since HR in the company carries the main task of reducing risks and reducing money spending (rather than increasing profits, where the task, for example, is to improve the quality of services), and also because technicians often have a ton of other tasks besides their job responsibilities responsibilities, we continue to move forward on autopilot, perpetuating obsolete and bad habits like this.

In such a hiring climate, companies need to move towards a new approach, giving applicants a new, better interview experience. Is the fear of litigation and the accompanying discomfort justified enough for companies to refuse feedback? Does it make sense to optimize spending in this way, out of fear and the impact of several unsuccessful cases in the face of a severe shortage of qualified technical specialists? Let's figure it out.

Is there any sense in fearing potential litigation?

Analyzing this issue and wanting to find out how often the constructive reviews of the company as a result of the interview (ie not “we didn’t hire you because you are a woman”) regarding the rejected candidate led to legal proceedings, I spoke with several lawyers on labor issues and searched information at Lexis Nexis.

You know what? NOTHING! SUCH CASES NEVER BEEN. NEVER.

As some of my legal contacts have noted, many cases are decided out of court and it is much more difficult to get statistics on them. Nevertheless, in this market, creating a bad impression about a company before a candidate only with the aim of insuring against something that is unlikely seems irrational at best and destructive at worst.

What about the reaction of the candidates?

At some point, I stopped writing corny refusal letters, like the above, but still adhered to my employer's rules regarding written reviews. Also, as an experiment, I tried to give candidates oral feedback by phone.

By the way, I had an unusual, hybrid role in TrialPay. Although the position “head of the technical recruiting department” implied quite ordinary responsibilities for this area, I had to perform another non-standard task. Since before that I was a software developer, in order to reduce the burden on the long-suffering team of our programmers, I held the position of the first line of defense at technical interviews and last year I conducted about five hundred of them.

After repeated, daily interviews, I began to be much less embarrassed to finish them earlier, if it was clear to me that the candidate’s qualifications did not reach the required level. Do you think the end of the interview ahead of time led to disappointment on the part of the candidate?

In my experience, most often the provision of feedback after the interview was perceived as an invitation to discussion or, worse, to a dispute. Everyone says they want feedback after the interview, but this is not really the case.

According to my observations, it is silence and reluctance to explain to the candidate what specifically led to the rejection, which disappoints the candidates much more and sets them against you than explaining what went wrong. Of course, some candidates take a defensive position (and then it’s better to just politely end the conversation), but others will readily listen to the constructivefeedback and in such cases it is necessary to clearly understand what went wrong, recommend books, point out the candidate’s weak points and where to pump them, for example, in LeetCode - and many will only be grateful. My personal experience of providing detailed feedback was amazing. I liked sending books to candidates and I had a strong relationship with many, some of which eventually became the first users of interviewing.io several years later.

In any case, the best way to avoid negative reactions from candidates is through constructive feedback. We will talk about this further.

So, if the feedback does not actually carry serious risks, but only benefit, how to do it right?

The launch of interviewing.io was the culmination of my experiments while working at TrialPay. I clearly understood that the feedback provokes positive feedback from candidates, and in the realities of this market, this means that it is useful for companies. Nevertheless, we still had to deal a lot with the fears of potential client companies (rather irrational), as if most of the candidates came for an interview with a voice recorder and a lawyer on a quick set.

To make the context clear, the interviewing.io portal is a labor exchange. Before proceeding with direct contact with employers, specialists can try to interview anonymously and, if successful, unblock our job portal, where they, bypassing the usual red tape (submitting online applications, talking with recruiters or “talent managers”, looking for friends who can send them) and order real interviews with companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, Coinbase, Twitch and many others. Often the very next day.

The main advantage is that both trial and real interviews with employers take place within the interviewing.io ecosystem and now I will explain why this is important.

Before starting a full-fledged work, we spent some time debugging our platform and carrying out all the necessary tests.

For test interviews, our feedback forms looked like this:

The feedback form that the interviewer fills out.

After each test interview, interviewers fill out the form above. Applicants fill out a similar form with an assessment of their interviewer. When both parties fill out their forms, they can see each other's answers.

Who cares - I recommend looking at our examples of trial and real feedbacks . Here is a screenshot:

Attracting employers, we offered them such a feedback format after the interview and asked them to leave feedback about the candidates to help them improve and minimize unpleasant impressions from unsuccessful interviews.

To our surprise and joy, employers left their feedback without any problems. Thanks to this, on our platform, experts saw whether they passed or not, and why exactly it happened, and most importantly, they received feedback just a few minutes after the end of the interview, avoiding the usual anxiety of waiting and self-flagellation after the interview. As I already wrote, this increases the likelihood of acceptance of the offer by talented candidates.

Real, successful interview with the company at interviewing.io

Now, if the applicant failed the interview, he saw the reason and what needed to be worked on. Perhaps for the first time in the history of interviews.

A real, unsuccessful interview with a company at interviewing.io

Anonymity facilitates feedback

At interviewing.io, the interviews are anonymous: the employer does not know anything about the candidate before and during the interview (you can even turn on the voice masking function in real time ). The identity of the applicant is disclosed only after a successful interview and after providing feedback from the employer.

We insist on the importance of anonymity, because about 40% of the best job seekers from our platform are not white heterosexual men from Western Europe, but this leads to bias. Due to the anonymity of the interview, the ability to discriminate against a person by age, gender or origin is practically absent. We strive for maximum constructive feedback, that is, the only information required by the employer is how well the candidate copes with his duties at the interview. In addition to the fact that anonymity gives the specialist an honest chance of a great job, it also provides insurance for the employer - it is much more difficult to build a case of discrimination due to feedback if the candidate’s identity is unknown to the employer.

Also, watching the interview process, we again and again saw how anonymity makes a person more sincere, relaxed and friendly, improving the quality of interviews for both candidates and employers.

Implementing post-interview feedback practices in your company

Even if you do not use our service, based on the above facts, I strongly recommend using this technique and giving constructive feedback by mail to each candidate, regardless of whether he passed the interview or not.

Here are some tips for giving constructive feedback:

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