Stop Asking Your Interviewers for a Yes/No Decision

One of the most challenging transitions our clients make when transforming their hiring processes is letting go of the “Hire/No Hire” question in their interview feedback. 

For many, this sounds unthinkable. Of course, everyone should walk away from their interview either supporting or opposing the hiring decision, right? This mindset is so entrenched that some hiring platforms actually hard-code a “Hire/No Hire” checkbox into their feedback templates.

This is a dangerous convention. When you ask for a “Hire/No Hire” after each interview, three things tend to happen:

• Interviews become broad and superficial. Every interviewer tries to cover too much because passing judgment requires seeing the “full picture.” Nobody goes deep on anything and the combined fact base is surprisingly lean (and redundant).
• Interviewers revert to their gut instincts and biases. They know that a judgment is required, so they form an early hypothesis and seek to confirm it. And time is too short to cover everything, so interviewers must “fill in the blanks” with hunches or impressions rather than facts.
• Candidates hear the same kinds of questions over and over. At best, they find you uncoordinated. At worst, they may question whether you fully trust each other. In addition, weaker candidates will have the opportunity to rehearse and refine their responses as they get closer to that all-important final round.

Embrace specialization and data-sharing

Fortunately, there is a way around these problems, and it comes through specialization and data-sharing. We recommend the following action plan:

1. Specialize roles on your interviewing team, ensuring each interviewer is free to go deep on a subset of the facets (role criteria) in question. 
2. Train your interviewers to take sufficiently detailed notes on the actual information shared by the candidate, so that these data points can be easily shared with others. It’s fine for them to involve a note-taker if this helps — just let the candidate know.
3. Post-interview, only ask interviewers to provide ratings (e.g., 1-4) on their areas of focus, and discourage forays into other subject areas. 
4. Train your interviewers to back their ratings with verifiable facts/data points from their notes and remove the gut impressions. Encourage team members to provide each other feedback, supportively, when biases arise.

When you divide and conquer as an interviewing team, you will get more information and better information. And your best candidates will be drawn to your rigorous, coordinated process.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn. 

To receive blog posts like this one straight in your inbox, subscribe to the blog newsletter.