That presupposes that the interviewers had no intention to hire the interviewee which is generally not a given and there's no reason to assume,

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.

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.

“How’s life in the gulag?”

“Can’t complain!”

Be the change you want to see in this world.

It's interesting the legal differences between Australia and where you are from (I presume USA). In Australia, there is very little risk of lawsuits. When terminating someone, you have to have give a reason for termination (and usually warnings before hand which have to have reasons as well).

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.

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?

You've got 30-45 minutes with the candidate. Is this question the best use of that time?

I was once asked what's my favorite starter Pokemon in some specific edition of the game. I was baffled to put it mildly. Some other guy from the team jumped in and pretty much said "disregard that question"

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.

Was this written by AI?

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 anyone show up to join, and I ought to be as prepared to give answers as they are.

That said, any "feedback" I would give would be 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 anything framed as 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 know TFA mentioned similar things about also being a candidate and that the "feedback" is to spur discussion, but the framing of giving "highly opinionated" thoughts about someone's capabilities as a way to ask questions is unnecessarily adversarial is an already power-imbalanced situation. I think it's better to try to tilt the power imbalance in the other direction—giving the candidate a feeling that you, the interviewer, are also auditioning for them. Doing that shows humility and, in my experience, gives a better opportunity to get to honest answers about being a good fit for each other.

I've been on both sides of such conversations and being asked such a question as a candidate to me would be a roundabout way of saying "we're not intending to hire you".

Anyway, I don't usually take feedback. Every company has its own culture and they're often in contradiction to each other. Companies with a strong culture that you have to conform to tend to have high turnaround. Also the guy interviewing me doesn't have to fully represent said culture because people are people and plug in their own opinions and biases regularly.

There's a reason why an interviewer might not say what they were looking for: when a candidate raises them unprompted, that gives more confidence that they have actually done the job, rather than just memorized some bullet points.

It's a hard thing to do right though. Looking for some very specific topic may not occur to the interviewee that it's what you're interested in, so it's better to just try to give them more general opportunities to show their thinking. The ideal is to get them into the frame of mind where they feel they can reminisce about some difficult task, rather than just "answer the exam question". You get more signal that way, but you have to be prepared to give credit for whatever important things they were able to talk about.

Interviewing is hard, honestly. It's not most interviewers main task, you can go for stretches of your career without any practice, and there are many reasons other than being an arsehole that people might not do it well. And when you do it, you have a fixed amount of time, and can't easily "try another way". As a job seeker one has to realize that a largish fraction of rejections are because an interviewer "couldn't get it to work in 1 hour", not because of you. Although frustrating, as it increases the amount of time you are without a job, it is liberating in a way to realize that interviewers are just people muddling through, not perfect judges whose rejection you need to take as an accurate prediction of how others will see you.

“ You seemed quite nervous”

This kind of thing is weird to call out. Your perception of a candidate’s emotions isn’t relevant. People are wired differently. Some people can bullshit with no nervousness at all. Some people can be highly skilled and not able to practice this away. It’s a matter of wiring.

Calling out actions and behaviors and words, observable reality, is fine. Emotions, no.

I’ve conducted several hundred interviews, and I no longer invite argument in them. The stress, knowing they are being judged, the stakes involved with a large paycheck on the line is just not a good environment to antagonize someone in. I’m not going to put my interviewers in that situation, or myself.

And if the value is correcting misunderstandings, I don’t see it. The very fact that the communication failed and there was a misunderstanding is a huge no hire red flag. Communicating clearly matters as much as doing the job

I was hoping before opening the article this might be feedback from candidate --> interviewer. Quite a few interviews I've been the candidate have been negative experiences that put me off the job entirely. I think it's often forgotten that interviews are (or should be) two-way exchanges, not just a hazing of would-be employees.

Okay, the biggest confusion I have is the part about the time your candidate got to correct you on TDD[1].

This seems like something you could and should have caught in the moment, without having to use your feedback technique. If they answered, and only mentioned the high-level tests, and you expect them to have low-level tests, then just ask, right then, if that was all of their tests, rather than silently assume the worst and move on.

Heuristic: if a remark seems outrageous, double-check before making a major decision on it.[2] This is not just in interviews, but life in general.

Example: Your friend says "Hey can you toss me through the window [of this skyscraper]?"

Your version: Call their family and 911 to report them as suicidal. Give a long speech about why they shouldn't kill themself. Then explain why you did what you did and ask if you misunderstood anything.

Sane, heuristic version: You reply, "You... want me to throw you to your death?"

Friend: "Oh jeez, no, that's just an expression we use here. I want you lift me up onto the balcony."

[1] Quoted in full:

I gave one candidate feedback along the lines of “when you explained the app that you built, you talked about the testing that you did at only a very high level, so I’m worried about your depth of testing knowledge, particularly around Test Driven Development (TDD)”. The response was along the lines of “Oh. You’re right. I didn’t really delve into detail, but here’s how I went about doing the testing and here is my general approach in other examples”. The candidate then went into significant depth explaining how they had done TDD over the last 10 years, which clearly demonstrated their understanding and maturity of the practice. Misunderstanding corrected.

[2] Which, to be clear, you are doing by using your technique ... it just feels oddly delayed and lets a misunderstanding accumulate much longer than it needs to; my example is an exaggerated version of the failure mode.

Author here. That's a fair point. Interviews will never be fully two-way. The intent of the point is to allow them to correct misunderstanding I as the interviewer may have (making it slightly better than me going away with an incorrect interpretation). Interestingly quite often candidates will give me feedback on the interview process as well.

But you are right. Interviews will never be fully equal.

This is discussion and not mechanical - surely I would understand this and suggest second favorite from not long ago.

[delayed]