I recently did not get a job I was a really good fit for and they were kind enough to send me some feedback as part of the rejection letter.
Reading them made me realise that if they just asked to clarify some of those points I would’ve easily explained them, which is something that still stings when I think about it.
Having interviewed people in the past I really feel like this is an amazing tool: not only is a great way to see how people react to feedback but also a way to understand more about a candidate especially if they are anxious or shy. Thanks for sharing
Wow, this post makes me anxious about getting a job. This whole process is so blatantly terrible... Not OP's fault, to be clear. Though asking a rhetorical "is that ok?" isn't exactly nice!
Both are reasons I treat a confirmed concern as a flag to check against the earlier stages, not a verdict.
As much as I've enjoyed the article so far, little LLM-isms like this turn me off just a little bit. It's not egregious but it's somewhat distracting.
(There were some earlier that I glossed over because the article's good enough. Good job to the author for making it relatively painless, but still.)
It gets slightly more LLM-ish towards the end, not to an unacceptable level but still noticeably so. Maybe the article could've been a bit shorter, as most of the best information is earlier.
In Summary
I also think this entire section is unnecessary, and that it would've been perfectly complete to simply end after "This type of negative response is very rare." Just personal preference though.
I've interviewed hundreds (maybe thousands at this point?) of candidates in the course of my career, and as much as I think giving feedback at the end of the call is a great idea, I personally would struggle with doing it in a way that was actually useful to the interviewee. Because unless it's a hard "no" (e.g. someone is obviously lying about their experience), I almost always need to ruminate on the interview afterwards before I can write up useful feedback. Sometimes it's the act of writing itself that helps me form a coherent recommendation.
This is also why I hate interview processes where my co-interviewers want to debrief immediately, or when I have a recruiter breathing down my neck as soon as the call ends.
Interviews are highly subjective when interviewers want answers to questions that they don't even explicitly ask. I have on occasion received terrible quality feedback telling me that I didn't tell them something in sufficient detail. Well, they never asked, and I don't read minds. I don't want to put people to sleep.
It's best for probing to be explicit and for feedback to be immediate after each question, not after the interview.
instead of "i'd like to give some feedback, may I?" at the end, the interviewer should just ask the damn question in real time. "that description is very high level. that is great for an external summary, when the decision is already made and you want to communicate, not discuss. so i appreciate that. can you go into more detail and justify your choices, as if for an audience of peers and for discussion?"
a good interview should be an interactive exercise, not a one way explanation from the candidate. even LC/DSA type rounds should always find the candidate asking for clarifications, asking if they are on the right track is this what you are looking for, should i be attacking this a different way, etc.
and i would never give unsolicited positive feedback. even when you are the final decision maker, other rounds may uncover weak spots and there may not be a consensus to hire. by giving the positive feedback you confuse the candidate and make a no-hire result even worse. leave it to the recuiter/HR to do that.
as an interviewer i always mention whether i will recommend them for hire (if it's a yes) and that's it. iff asked i provide critical feedback. as a candidate i always ask for critical feedback, which gives me the chance to sharpen any answer when the interviewer doesn't do a good job on asking for what they really wanted.
Even for candidates for whom my feedback was scathing, they are still generally positive about the experience
If you have scathing feedback for someone you are interviewing, you should probably just shut up. Or at least deliver it in a different context where they aren't being held hostage and having their every reaction scrutinized. Sounds miserable, I seriously doubt they were actually "generally positive"
This seems like a really dangerous way to expose yourself to a discrimination suit if you slip up in your feedback, or the candidate interprets it the wrong way. And they will.
Would HR advise you to give this kind of feedback to someone you're terminating? Normally you say zero for this exact reason.
Whole this might be true, one thing that is missing is the kinds of interviews where the candidate feels like the interviewer didn't make sense or they didn't expect it to be an interview at all at that point as it was supposed to be a chat about the team and whether it was a fit at all in the first place.
It also doesn't cover the case of junior interviewers interviewing more experienced people either by accident or by design.
There are a lot of failure modes that could simply turn into useful conversations with this approach I think.
By the time an interview ends, a candidate usually has a good sense of whether it went well or not. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates and I would never jump into this feedback mode OP describes. There's not much point in giving positive feedback if they're already feeling good about the interview. If you give someone negative feedback (no matter how constructive) they're going to get defensive and want to plead their case; but it's the end of the interview and there's no time for that. OP says people express gratitude for the feedback, but what does he expect them to do? Anyone who doesn't appreciate it still doesn't want to tank the interview by appearing ungrateful. Never play psychological games in interviews.
There is no fixing an interviewer who doesn't understand the answers really. You need a third party for that.
Have had weird interviews with people who don't introduce themselves and assume that I definitely am interested in whatever the job is even though I know nothing and proceed to ask questions that amount to "how does palantir work" and get irritated when the answer isn't "we used database X".
Fundamentally one needs a meta approach that handles these cases too without knowing who is interviewing who. Could an interviewee give feedback like this without sounding arrogant?
The point of questions like that isn't necessarily to ascertain the actual answer; it can be used to engage the interviewee in conversation to see how they think and communicate, or how they react to minor curveballs being thrown at them.
Ok. It’s not really a question. The ‘is that ok’ isn’t really seeking permission; it’s giving the candidate a few seconds to prepare for what’s coming.
The first rule for a manager when asking if someone is ready to hear feedback is accepting a no[1].
Posing it as a question when it isn't, immediately negates the validity of what follows. It says, "I'm not taking you input as worthy of consideration," and everything that follows it is hinged on this impotency.
If you're not willing to accept someone's input in the form of a 'no,' it's inconceivable that you'd expect others to take yours.
1. The 'shot across the bow' scenario doesn't apply to interviews - there's no chain of command.
Yup, completely agree. Even if you were prepared to accept a "no", asking the question is not showing awareness of the power asymmetry here- the interviewee may feel they can't say "no" because they want the job and the interviewer presumably has some power to affect whether or not that happens.
TFA makes it pretty clear this is an ego/status thing on the part of the author.
As an interviewer, it's my role to get the information I need to help inform a decision that I will not make alone. If I have a concern about some unknown, I have to navigate that; it's on me. I expect an interviewee to be prepared to share relevant information, but interviews are stressful and if I only want to hire good interviewers, I'm going to have a considerably smaller pool.
Furthermore, as an interviewer, my job is to be a candidate. Why should this person choose my team/company to work at? It's a privilege that they want to be here, and I ought to be as prepared to give answers as they are.
That said, any "feedback" I would give is arbitrary. I am not this person's mentor and I shouldn't—after only 40 minutes—assume I know enough to give them feedback. Saying that I have concerns about not getting enough information, and that somehow being their "feedback," is bad framing. Try:
Before moving on, I really want to make sure I get a full picture of your time at Acme working with the Foobar team. Would you say that you led project X? Who ultimately decided when it shipped and set deadlines? Was that part of your responsibilities?
I'd recommend avoiding giving feedback altogether. End interviews by saying "We're all finished with this part of the interview. Thank you for taking the time to go through your work history with us. You should be hearing from [Hiring Person] about the next steps."
I recently did not get a job I was a really good fit for and they were kind enough to send me some feedback as part of the rejection letter.
Reading them made me realise that if they just asked to clarify some of those points I would’ve easily explained them, which is something that still stings when I think about it.
Having interviewed people in the past I really feel like this is an amazing tool: not only is a great way to see how people react to feedback but also a way to understand more about a candidate especially if they are anxious or shy. Thanks for sharing
If they asked about it and you answered, they would no longer have a good excuse to not hire you.
Wow, this post makes me anxious about getting a job. This whole process is so blatantly terrible... Not OP's fault, to be clear. Though asking a rhetorical "is that ok?" isn't exactly nice!
As much as I've enjoyed the article so far, little LLM-isms like this turn me off just a little bit. It's not egregious but it's somewhat distracting.
(There were some earlier that I glossed over because the article's good enough. Good job to the author for making it relatively painless, but still.)
It gets slightly more LLM-ish towards the end, not to an unacceptable level but still noticeably so. Maybe the article could've been a bit shorter, as most of the best information is earlier.
I also think this entire section is unnecessary, and that it would've been perfectly complete to simply end after "This type of negative response is very rare." Just personal preference though.
I've interviewed hundreds (maybe thousands at this point?) of candidates in the course of my career, and as much as I think giving feedback at the end of the call is a great idea, I personally would struggle with doing it in a way that was actually useful to the interviewee. Because unless it's a hard "no" (e.g. someone is obviously lying about their experience), I almost always need to ruminate on the interview afterwards before I can write up useful feedback. Sometimes it's the act of writing itself that helps me form a coherent recommendation.
This is also why I hate interview processes where my co-interviewers want to debrief immediately, or when I have a recruiter breathing down my neck as soon as the call ends.
Interviews are highly subjective when interviewers want answers to questions that they don't even explicitly ask. I have on occasion received terrible quality feedback telling me that I didn't tell them something in sufficient detail. Well, they never asked, and I don't read minds. I don't want to put people to sleep.
It's best for probing to be explicit and for feedback to be immediate after each question, not after the interview.
seems quite stilted.
instead of "i'd like to give some feedback, may I?" at the end, the interviewer should just ask the damn question in real time. "that description is very high level. that is great for an external summary, when the decision is already made and you want to communicate, not discuss. so i appreciate that. can you go into more detail and justify your choices, as if for an audience of peers and for discussion?"
a good interview should be an interactive exercise, not a one way explanation from the candidate. even LC/DSA type rounds should always find the candidate asking for clarifications, asking if they are on the right track is this what you are looking for, should i be attacking this a different way, etc.
and i would never give unsolicited positive feedback. even when you are the final decision maker, other rounds may uncover weak spots and there may not be a consensus to hire. by giving the positive feedback you confuse the candidate and make a no-hire result even worse. leave it to the recuiter/HR to do that.
as an interviewer i always mention whether i will recommend them for hire (if it's a yes) and that's it. iff asked i provide critical feedback. as a candidate i always ask for critical feedback, which gives me the chance to sharpen any answer when the interviewer doesn't do a good job on asking for what they really wanted.
If you have scathing feedback for someone you are interviewing, you should probably just shut up. Or at least deliver it in a different context where they aren't being held hostage and having their every reaction scrutinized. Sounds miserable, I seriously doubt they were actually "generally positive"
“How’s life in the gulag?”
“Can’t complain!”
This seems like a really dangerous way to expose yourself to a discrimination suit if you slip up in your feedback, or the candidate interprets it the wrong way. And they will.
Would HR advise you to give this kind of feedback to someone you're terminating? Normally you say zero for this exact reason.
Be the change you want to see in this world.
Whole this might be true, one thing that is missing is the kinds of interviews where the candidate feels like the interviewer didn't make sense or they didn't expect it to be an interview at all at that point as it was supposed to be a chat about the team and whether it was a fit at all in the first place.
It also doesn't cover the case of junior interviewers interviewing more experienced people either by accident or by design.
There are a lot of failure modes that could simply turn into useful conversations with this approach I think.
By the time an interview ends, a candidate usually has a good sense of whether it went well or not. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates and I would never jump into this feedback mode OP describes. There's not much point in giving positive feedback if they're already feeling good about the interview. If you give someone negative feedback (no matter how constructive) they're going to get defensive and want to plead their case; but it's the end of the interview and there's no time for that. OP says people express gratitude for the feedback, but what does he expect them to do? Anyone who doesn't appreciate it still doesn't want to tank the interview by appearing ungrateful. Never play psychological games in interviews.
The problem is the interviewer though.
There is no fixing an interviewer who doesn't understand the answers really. You need a third party for that.
Have had weird interviews with people who don't introduce themselves and assume that I definitely am interested in whatever the job is even though I know nothing and proceed to ask questions that amount to "how does palantir work" and get irritated when the answer isn't "we used database X".
Fundamentally one needs a meta approach that handles these cases too without knowing who is interviewing who. Could an interviewee give feedback like this without sounding arrogant?
The only right answer is to leave such an interview immediately.
The point of questions like that isn't necessarily to ascertain the actual answer; it can be used to engage the interviewee in conversation to see how they think and communicate, or how they react to minor curveballs being thrown at them.
You've got 30-45 minutes with the candidate. Is this question the best use of that time?
The first rule for a manager when asking if someone is ready to hear feedback is accepting a no[1].
Posing it as a question when it isn't, immediately negates the validity of what follows. It says, "I'm not taking you input as worthy of consideration," and everything that follows it is hinged on this impotency.
If you're not willing to accept someone's input in the form of a 'no,' it's inconceivable that you'd expect others to take yours.
1. The 'shot across the bow' scenario doesn't apply to interviews - there's no chain of command.
Yup, completely agree. Even if you were prepared to accept a "no", asking the question is not showing awareness of the power asymmetry here- the interviewee may feel they can't say "no" because they want the job and the interviewer presumably has some power to affect whether or not that happens.
TFA makes it pretty clear this is an ego/status thing on the part of the author.
I really liked your post.
As an interviewer, it's my role to get the information I need to help inform a decision that I will not make alone. If I have a concern about some unknown, I have to navigate that; it's on me. I expect an interviewee to be prepared to share relevant information, but interviews are stressful and if I only want to hire good interviewers, I'm going to have a considerably smaller pool.
Furthermore, as an interviewer, my job is to be a candidate. Why should this person choose my team/company to work at? It's a privilege that they want to be here, and I ought to be as prepared to give answers as they are.
That said, any "feedback" I would give is arbitrary. I am not this person's mentor and I shouldn't—after only 40 minutes—assume I know enough to give them feedback. Saying that I have concerns about not getting enough information, and that somehow being their "feedback," is bad framing. Try:
I'd recommend avoiding giving feedback altogether. End interviews by saying "We're all finished with this part of the interview. Thank you for taking the time to go through your work history with us. You should be hearing from [Hiring Person] about the next steps."