Mastering Interview Feedback to Enhance Your Recruitment Efforts

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Providing a positive candidate experience is crucial to ensuring that your top-choice candidates accept your offer. But what about the candidates you don’t hire? Too often, rejected candidates are left in the dark. This can have a lasting impact on how they perceive your company.

While hired candidates have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 80 and withdrawn candidates have an NPS of 39, the NPS for rejected candidates is -5. These candidates may be less likely to recommend your company as a good place to work. They may also be less likely to do business with your company in general.

Offering interview feedback is an impactful way to turn the interview experience around for rejected candidates. In fact, 70% of candidates say that receiving a clear reason for why they weren’t selected would leave them with a positive impression of the company.

In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of providing interview feedback, how to collect feedback from your interview team, and offer practical, actionable tips to streamline your interview feedback process.

Why interview feedback is important

While 63% of North American employers give limited feedback to internal candidates, only 17% give it to external and referral candidates. This presents an enormous missed opportunity.

Providing interview feedback to candidates can enhance your recruitment efforts in a few key ways:

Enhance your candidate experience

Providing interview feedback can greatly enhance the candidate experience by creating transparency in your hiring process. When candidates invest time and effort into an interview, they expect more than just a rejection; they want to understand where they succeeded and where they fell short. Offering thoughtful, constructive feedback demonstrates that you value their time and are committed to treating them with respect.

Strengthen your employer brand

Delivering interview feedback leads to more satisfied candidates, which can significantly strengthen your employer brand. Candidates who receive clear, respectful communication are more likely to have a favorable opinion of your organization—even if they didn’t land the job. Any word-of-mouth endorsement these candidates provide enhances your brand, making your company more attractive to future talent. A strong employer brand built on respect and communication can give you an edge in competitive hiring markets.

Attract skilled talent

Satisfied candidates are more likely to reapply for future roles, refer their connections, and write positive employer reviews. These actions significantly expand your talent pool, helping you attract high-quality applicants for future roles. Treating your candidates fairly and offering actionable feedback enhances your reputation as an employer of choice. This creates a pipeline of talent eager to engage with your recruitment process, reducing your time-to-hire and helping you secure top candidates who align with your organization’s needs.

How to collect feedback from interviewers

Before you can deliver feedback to candidates, it’s essential to gather consistent and structured input from the interviewers themselves.

Here are some best practices for collecting interviewer feedback:

Use interview templates. Use a standardized interview template with defined hiring criteria, a simple rating scale, and space for interviewer notes. This enables structured feedback and mitigates bias.
Encourage real-time notes. Encourage interviewers to take notes during the interview. Real-time note-taking ensures that feedback is accurate and specific, rather than based on vague recollections.
Hold debrief meetings. Schedule a short debrief with all interviewers after each interviewer has submitted their individual feedback. A 10-15 minute discussion helps ensure alignment on the candidate’s strengths and areas for improvement.
Focus on competencies. Ask interviewers to focus their interview notes and debrief talking points on the core competencies and specific examples of what the candidate did well or where they fell short.

Best practices for providing interview feedback

Delivering effective interview feedback can be tricky, but following some best practices can help ensure your feedback is meaningful, constructive, and positively received.

Prioritize feedback for every interviewee

While providing feedback to every applicant isn’t always feasible, do your best to provide tailored feedback to every candidate who interviews with your team. These candidates have invested significant time and effort preparing for and attending interviews, and deserve thoughtful and constructive feedback.

Provide timely feedback

Most candidates (83%) want to know as soon as possible when they’re no longer being considered for a job.

Sending feedback promptly—ideally within your interview rejection letter or during an interview follow-up phone call—shows that you respect the candidate’s time and effort. It also demonstrates transparency and professionalism, reducing the anxiety candidates may feel and helping them move forward in their job search with a positive impression of your company.

Offer a phone discussion for finalists

Offering a phone discussion for finalists allows you to provide detailed, personalized feedback in a more interactive and respectful way. A phone call can help clarify any questions candidates have about their performance and show them that their efforts were truly valued.

Since your finalists have invested the most time and energy throughout your hiring process, a more personalized approach can offer better closure. This not only leaves a positive impression but also helps maintain a professional relationship, potentially encouraging your candidate to consider future roles or refer others to your company.

Balance positive and constructive points

Balancing positive and constructive feedback is key to delivering effective, well-rounded feedback.

Starting with a candidate’s strengths, such as a skill they demonstrated well or a quality that stood out during the interview, sets a positive tone and shows you recognize their skillset. After acknowledging their strong points, offer constructive suggestions for improvement. This approach makes the feedback more digestible and less discouraging.

A balanced approach not only helps soften the disappointment of rejection but also motivates candidates to focus on areas for growth.

Offer specific feedback

Vague feedback like “You didn’t have the right experience” isn’t helpful. Instead, pinpoint exact areas where the candidate can improve. For example, “Your experience with data analysis tools didn’t quite align with the advanced skills required for this role, especially around data visualization.”

When specific feedback was given to North American candidates, their willingness to refer others increased by 46% and their willingness to increase their relationship with the employer increased by 47%.

Focus on skills, not personality

Avoiding personality-based feedback is crucial to maintaining professionalism and ensuring that the candidate’s experience remains constructive. Instead, feedback should center around the candidate’s skills, qualifications, and how they performed in the interview.

For example, saying “You didn’t seem confident” could feel like an attack on their personality and is neither actionable nor helpful. Instead, offering feedback like “Your responses to technical questions would benefit from more detailed examples” provides specific, skill-based advice.

This keeps the conversation objective and encourages the candidate to focus on areas for growth.

Offer actionable advice

Of North American candidates who said they received feedback after being rejected, only 40% indicated the feedback was useful.

Offering actionable advice is key to making feedback truly valuable for candidates. General comments like “Your technical knowledge was lacking” don’t provide enough guidance for improvement and can leave candidates feeling unsure of what to work on. Instead, focus on giving clear, practical suggestions they can implement. For example, saying “I recommend brushing up on JavaScript frameworks like React to strengthen your coding skills for similar roles” gives the candidate a specific path to follow.

Actionable feedback not only helps candidates improve their skills but also shows that you care about helping them along their candidate journey.

Be mindful of tone

Being mindful of tone is crucial when delivering feedback, especially since it’s often communicated via email or phone. A positive and constructive tone ensures that your message is well-received and encourages candidates to take your feedback as a learning opportunity. Written feedback should always be polite, respectful, and clear, avoiding harsh or overly negative language that could discourage or offend the candidate.

For example, instead of saying, “You completely missed the mark on this task,” you could say, “There’s room for improvement in how you approached this task.”

Final thoughts on interview feedback

Providing interview feedback might seem like an extra step in an already busy recruitment process, but its benefits far outweigh the effort. By offering clear, constructive feedback, you not only enhance your candidate experience but also strengthen your employer brand and future hiring potential.

As your company grows, integrating structured feedback into your hiring process will ensure you’re building long-term relationships with candidates — including those who aren’t hired — and setting a strong foundation for your recruitment efforts.

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