The Importance of Interview Feedback

I have been in recruitment for more than 13 years . I speak to my candidates on a daily basis and one of their biggest bug bearers is the lack of feedback they receive when they interview with a company directly.

When they attend the interview there is a percentage of them that never receive any feedback at all.

Because of this, candidates don’t know whether they did a good interview or not, they don’t know where they let themselves down or if they answered the questions right?

When all they get is a refusal letter and no feedback, they are left wondering about where it went wrong??

How do they fix this, and how do they turn the negatives into a positive??

When candidates interview directly with a client and are unsuccessful, they should contact the client or the person they were dealing with and request the feedback. Once they have the feedback they can work on that then going forward.

Benefits of Feedback

  • To let the candidate know how the interview went.
  • Giving the candidate a timescale of the interview process
  • If feedback is positive from the interview, then it’s good to relay that information.
  • If feedback is negative, then provide the weaknesses and discuss how to improve on this going forward.
  • If the candidate has been rejected after the first interview, it is better to be specific and address it as constructive criticism.

Providing Constructive criticism

When providing constructive criticism to the candidate, this has to be handled in a delicate way. The best thing to do is to start with a positive and highlight the areas that they were strong on. From that, then address the areas in which the candidate can change.

By addressing it this way, the candidate then knows that whilst there were some positives from the feedback, there are some areas that they need to work on going forward.