How to Train Your Hiring Team to Give Effective Interview Feedback

Providing precise, actionable interview feedback is important, for both candidates and employers. For candidates, it offers a golden opportunity to improve their interviewing skills, and perhaps land the next job they apply for. For employers, it can mean a chance to enhance their reputation and expand their network of candidates for future openings.

Interestingly, LinkedIn's Talent Trends report shows that 94% of talent wants to receive interview feedback; yet only 41% have ever received it before. Why the discrepancy? Realistically, giving feedback isn't always easy. Many recruiters hold back from giving constructive feedback because they worry about potential legal repercussions, or feel that they may offend the candidate.

Nevertheless, hiring managers should know how to provide helpful interview feedback, especially if it's specifically requested by the candidate. A company's HR executives should understand that even hiring managers that have been leading interviews for years may need some training in this regard. After all, the HR department and its hiring managers are business partners, and neither can be truly successful without the other. Teamwork is essential for success.

Here are 5 ways you can train your hiring team to give effective interview feedback:

Form Mini-Workshops with Hiring Managers

You may need to schedule some time to work with hiring managers and their teams to define the interview process, guide them through it, and provide coaching on how to give effective feedback. For instance, you may need to deliver clear answers to the following questions:

• Who should be involved in the process?
• What will the process look like?
• How will the hiring team gather the relevant information? (This may be easy for highly technical roles, but harder for positions that more heavily involve "soft skills.")

You may also need to ensure that hiring managers and/or their interviewers understand how to conduct a behavioral interview. It is important to note that behavioral questions should not focus on hypothetical situations; rather, they should help the interview to uncover the candidate's past performance in relation to specific competencies and experiences required by the open position.

Train Them to Provide Useful Information for the Future

Truly effective interview feedback won't consist solely of observations related to the current job opening. Open-minded candidates will appreciate constructive criticism designed to help them perform better in future interviews, whether for your company or another organization. For example, if the candidate did not answer the behavioral questions in the generally accepted format of the STAR technique, then the interview can bring that to his or her attention for future reference.

Keep All the Comments in One Place

On occasion, an interviewer may not be able to provide constructive feedback simply because he can't find the relevant information that was recorded during the session. The way to prevent this issue from arising is to train your hiring team to consolidate all relevant comments in one location. For instance, if you are exchanging emails to give and receive feedback from hiring teams instead of ATS, then ensure that you organize all the records into subfolders, or use shared document platforms where all team members can access the information 24/7.

Standardize and Automate

Your interviewers should know exactly what skills they're looking for in a given candidate, and how to rate the replies given by each applicant. You may need to create standardized scorecards in order to accomplish this goal. In addition, automate the process whenever possible: the less thought your time-poor hiring team has to put into rating a candidate's performance, the better.

Train Your Team to Give Specific, Precise Feedback

Giving your candidates vague or inaccurate feedback is often worse than giving no feedback at all. Make sure that your hiring managers not only know how to provide constructive interview feedback, but also the underlying reasons why the feedback is warranted.

For more information on how to ensure your hiring team can provide effective interview feedback, reach out to the staffing and recruitment experts at Bonfire Consulting today.