Interviews & Feedback
Recently I came across this article explaining that interviewers should try to provide feedback to candidates after the interview, and goes on to explain about how the feedback should be provided, with elaborate examples. It also mentions that there are no known cases of any feedbacks having led to legal action against companies, and despite this, providing feedbacks is not encouraged within companies.
With technical interviews extremely commonplace in the industry when hiring developers, the article goes on to discuss the upsides of providing feedback. Quoting them -
Practically speaking, giving instant feedback to successful candidates can do wonders for increasing your close rate.
In my opinion, it has a lot to do with the culture of the company. Not that I have been at a lot of companies but certainly, where I do work, it is encouraged that interviews be two-way conversations, this not just makes the candidate less anxious and more comfortable, but also has the added benefit of them getting a preliminary glance of the company’s culture. Imagine giving an interview on Tuesday morning 1 and the interviewer shows up with an annoyed and uninterested face. Who would want to work there? Definitely not me.
There is another aspect to it though. Normally, you would find no mention of providing feedback to the candidate! Or it has a very small mention in the context of other things like how to take an interview, how to phrase the question etc, that this is often really ignored. It was only after reading the above article that I realised that maybe I was not letting candidates know how they fared or how they could improve further. Hindsight is certainly always 20/20. 2
In any case, this is something that should be employed at the organization level, but till that happens, I am going to experiment with providing feedback, either in the interview itself, or if that is not possible, via email. Let us see how this whole thing turns out, and hopefully, I will gain more insight on how to make the interviewing process much more pleasant and useful for the candidates.
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