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.

If an interviewer said that to me, I would take it to mean "I think you are better than you have presented yourself here". If they were direct and clear about why they were commenting on my demeanour, I don't think it would be a problem for me.

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

What if the miscommunication is 50:50, rather than just the candidate’s fault?

Working in an international organisation I became aware that people from Europe vs. the US speak a different corporate language. At its most extreme, smart experienced colleagues from the US would say things and I literally wouldn’t understand their meaning.

However, colleagues better versed in that particular corporate dialect would absolutely understand their meaning, and might think what they were saying had great value.

And the flipside is that I must assume that at times, my (clear direct, I think) European communication could also be misunderstood.

Which is to say: a miscommunication in an interview might be as much your fault as theirs; and you may reject excellent candidates based on this.

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.

It isn't explained in that section of the article, but after I ask the original question, I will probe again multiple times to try to uncover the depth of a candidate's knowledge. It can be difficult with some questions because you don't want to feed the candidate the answer. The other thing is that if I were to give them feedback on the middle of the interview it could throw out there confidence for the rest of the interview (eg if say that there answer lacked depth, but they thought they did well. Or that it lacked depth because they actually didn't know any more about the topic)

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.

I did many "interviews" as a casting agent for films, so finding the suitable actors for one or more roles in limited time.

Thank you for highlighting the randomness, because I can't understand the (what must be fake) confidence of some interviewers in their assessments. They think someone who aced the interview will be good in their role at work. How often I had to work with what can only be described as sly, but lazy con-men that "really interviewed well", but couldn't even do the most basic tasks, says otherwise. Unless their role is doing interviews all you get from an interview requires some degree of extrapolation towards the real job. Additionally people may have different days, different characters that make them shine or suck at doing interviews and maybe that specific task was just a mismatch and another one would have made them shine.

Interviewers that are not aware of this have not reflected what it means to do their own job in my opinion.

This is why I also try to make the interviewees shine by giving them the best cards possible. To some degree that mitigates the randomness and it also helps soothe overly anxious or excited candidates. They should get the feeling that I as the interviewer try to solve the posed problems together with them, not that I throw bricks their way and try to misunderstand everything they say. I also try to make the tasks in the interview emulate what needs to be done in the actual job/role. Everything else would be silly.

I have actually gotten great feedback on that way of doing interviews over the years.

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.

Oof, what the hell? I'm not a big fan of people who want to offer feedback but don't genuinely ask first, and accept that the person might say "no". (And then honor that!)

Some of the feedback the author described wasn't really feedback, it was more like they didn't fully ask the questions they wanted to and should have during the interview, got the wrong impression, and then thought that offering feedback was the way to get that fixed up. No, the right thing to do is immediately ask a direct question about what you're looking for, at the point in the interview when you aren't getting it.

"You enter legal hot water" in the USA. Not in Australia where this was written.

Interviews nowadays are one way. It’s almost like hiring managers want to appear busy at their work places and the rest of us are there to entertain them. A sort of humiliation ritual. For example, now they like to ask “Tell me about exceptional work you’ve done, that nobody else could do it?”.

Both are reasons I treat a confirmed concern as a flag to check against the earlier stages, not a verdict.

This read very oddly, as an LLM.