Real-time feedback: My closing move in every interview
mgrebler.substack.com
mgrebler.substack.com
If you have scathing feedback for someone you are interviewing, you should probably just shut up. Or at least deliver it in a different context where they aren't being held hostage and having their every reaction scrutinized. Sounds miserable, I seriously doubt they were actually "generally positive"
“Can’t complain!”
Would HR advise you to give this kind of feedback to someone you're terminating? Normally you say zero for this exact reason.
It also doesn't cover the case of junior interviewers interviewing more experienced people either by accident or by design.
There are a lot of failure modes that could simply turn into useful conversations with this approach I think.
"This is utter shite"
"Thank you chef!" (Proceeds to burst into tears as they walk away).
I don't think it should be emulated.
I learned it the hard way that even if someone asks for a feedback be very polite and simply convey that the HR has instructed you to route this via proper (HR/recruiter) channels. In fact in some cases, we were specifically asked to exactly say that and often our recruiters set these expectations with the candidates in advance (I've been informed of this in advance before some of my interviews). In one case a candidate kept mailing my team recruiter that the interviewers (a colleague and I) were very happy with the performance and why they were still not getting the offer.
If I want feedback (and this is only when the interview process was good irrespective of whether my performance, as per me, was good enough for that role or not), I ask for a a feedback via the recruiter and in most cases I don't get a response but that's fine. The last thing I want is feedback from someone who, let's just say, is not very ideal.
Another thing is, unless the candidate is someone who is giving an interview knowing they will get 11 offers out of 10 interviews they might be on the backfoot, a bit defensive, even stressed, or scared, and may not downright tell the interviewer that they are being an ass, or insensitive, etc.
Furthermore, as an interviewer, my job is to be a candidate. Why should this person choose my team/company to work at? It's a privilege that anyone show up to join, and I ought to be as prepared to give answers as they are.
That said, any "feedback" I would give would be arbitrary. I am not this person's mentor and I shouldn't—after only 40 minutes—assume I know enough to give them feedback. Saying that I have concerns about not getting enough information, and that somehow being their "feedback," is bad framing. Try:
Before moving on, I really want to make sure I get a full picture of your time at Acme working with the Foobar team. Would you say that you led project X? Who ultimately decided when it shipped and set deadlines? Was that part of your responsibilities?
I know TFA mentioned similar things about also being a candidate and that the "feedback" is to spur discussion, but the framing of giving "highly opinionated" thoughts about someone's capabilities as a way to ask questions is unnecessarily adversarial is an already power-imbalanced situation. I think it's better to try to tilt the power imbalance in the other direction—giving the candidate a feeling that you, the interviewer, are also auditioning for them. Doing that shows humility and, in my experience, gives a better opportunity to get to honest answers about being a good fit for each other.
Oof, what the hell? I'm not a big fan of people who want to offer feedback but don't genuinely ask first, and accept that the person might say "no". (And then honor that!)
Some of the feedback the author described wasn't really feedback, it was more like they didn't fully ask the questions they wanted to and should have during the interview, got the wrong impression, and then thought that offering feedback was the way to get that fixed up. No, the right thing to do is immediately ask a direct question about what you're looking for, at the point in the interview when you aren't getting it.
There is no fixing an interviewer who doesn't understand the answers really. You need a third party for that.
Have had weird interviews with people who don't introduce themselves and assume that I definitely am interested in whatever the job is even though I know nothing and proceed to ask questions that amount to "how does palantir work" and get irritated when the answer isn't "we used database X".
Fundamentally one needs a meta approach that handles these cases too without knowing who is interviewing who. Could an interviewee give feedback like this without sounding arrogant?
This kind of thing is weird to call out. Your perception of a candidate’s emotions isn’t relevant. People are wired differently. Some people can bullshit with no nervousness at all. Some people can be highly skilled and not able to practice this away. It’s a matter of wiring.
Calling out actions and behaviors and words, observable reality, is fine. Emotions, no.
There is so much randomness that I, as interviewer, decided on the following strategy - put candidate into best possible position and judge from that. I settle on one set of questions - "tell me about your most favorite project, why, and let's discuss in detail". If candidate knows his/her stuff - this is fun/informative discussion. Also easy filter if a candidate cannot say much or doesn't understand details of project they consider their favorite.
Thank you for highlighting the randomness, because I can't understand the (what must be fake) confidence of some interviewers in their assessments. They think someone who aced the interview will be good in their role at work. How often I had to work with what can only be described as sly, but lazy con-men that "really interviewed well", but couldn't even do the most basic tasks, says otherwise. Unless their role is doing interviews all you get from an interview requires some degree of extrapolation towards the real job. Additionally people may have different days, different characters that make them shine or suck at doing interviews and maybe that specific task was just a mismatch and another one would have made them shine.
Interviewers that are not aware of this have not reflected what it means to do their own job in my opinion.
This is why I also try to make the interviewees shine by giving them the best cards possible. To some degree that mitigates the randomness and it also helps soothe overly anxious or excited candidates. They should get the feeling that I as the interviewer try to solve the posed problems together with them, not that I throw bricks their way and try to misunderstand everything they say. I also try to make the tasks in the interview emulate what needs to be done in the actual job/role. Everything else would be silly.
I have actually gotten great feedback on that way of doing interviews over the years.
The first rule for a manager when asking if someone is ready to hear feedback is accepting a no[1].
Posing it as a question when it isn't, immediately negates the validity of what follows. It says, "I'm not taking you input as worthy of consideration," and everything that follows it is hinged on this impotency.
If you're not willing to accept someone's input in the form of a 'no,' it's inconceivable that you'd expect others to take yours.
1. The 'shot across the bow' scenario doesn't apply to interviews - there's no chain of command.
TFA makes it pretty clear this is an ego/status thing on the part of the author.
And if the value is correcting misunderstandings, I don’t see it. The very fact that the communication failed and there was a misunderstanding is a huge no hire red flag. Communicating clearly matters as much as doing the job
What if the miscommunication is 50:50, rather than just the candidate’s fault?
Working in an international organisation I became aware that people from Europe vs. the US speak a different corporate language. At its most extreme, smart experienced colleagues from the US would say things and I literally wouldn’t understand their meaning.
However, colleagues better versed in that particular corporate dialect would absolutely understand their meaning, and might think what they were saying had great value.
And the flipside is that I must assume that at times, my (clear direct, I think) European communication could also be misunderstood.
Which is to say: a miscommunication in an interview might be as much your fault as theirs; and you may reject excellent candidates based on this.
Reading them made me realise that if they just asked to clarify some of those points I would’ve easily explained them, which is something that still stings when I think about it.
Having interviewed people in the past I really feel like this is an amazing tool: not only is a great way to see how people react to feedback but also a way to understand more about a candidate especially if they are anxious or shy. Thanks for sharing
As much as I've enjoyed the article so far, little LLM-isms like this turn me off just a little bit. It's not egregious but it's somewhat distracting.
(There were some earlier that I glossed over because the article's good enough. Good job to the author for making it relatively painless, but still.)
It gets slightly more LLM-ish towards the end, not to an unacceptable level but still noticeably so. Maybe the article could've been a bit shorter, as most of the best information is earlier.
> In Summary
I also think this entire section is unnecessary, and that it would've been perfectly complete to simply end after "This type of negative response is very rare." Just personal preference though.
instead of "i'd like to give some feedback, may I?" at the end, the interviewer should just ask the damn question in real time. "that description is very high level. that is great for an external summary, when the decision is already made and you want to communicate, not discuss. so i appreciate that. can you go into more detail and justify your choices, as if for an audience of peers and for discussion?"
a good interview should be an interactive exercise, not a one way explanation from the candidate. even LC/DSA type rounds should always find the candidate asking for clarifications, asking if they are on the right track is this what you are looking for, should i be attacking this a different way, etc.
and i would never give unsolicited positive feedback. even when you are the final decision maker, other rounds may uncover weak spots and there may not be a consensus to hire. by giving the positive feedback you confuse the candidate and make a no-hire result even worse. leave it to the recuiter/HR to do that.
as an interviewer i always mention whether i will recommend them for hire (if it's a yes) and that's it. iff asked i provide critical feedback. as a candidate i always ask for critical feedback, which gives me the chance to sharpen any answer when the interviewer doesn't do a good job on asking for what they really wanted.
Did YOU ever get feedback? This is not a good interview. Why didn't you just ask the question? Can it be that you don't know how to interview, or was is just so you could get on your high horse and say "you didn't read my mind, so you're a bad fit"? And it seems a pattern in your feedback: you seem to wait for YOUR time to shine as a "benevolent feedback giver" instead of asking the questions when it makes sense, and you can get an immediate answer.
It's a hard thing to do right though. Looking for some very specific topic may not occur to the interviewee that it's what you're interested in, so it's better to just try to give them more general opportunities to show their thinking. The ideal is to get them into the frame of mind where they feel they can reminisce about some difficult task, rather than just "answer the exam question". You get more signal that way, but you have to be prepared to give credit for whatever important things they were able to talk about.
Interviewing is hard, honestly. It's not most interviewers main task, you can go for stretches of your career without any practice, and there are many reasons other than being an arsehole that people might not do it well. And when you do it, you have a fixed amount of time, and can't easily "try another way". As a job seeker one has to realize that a largish fraction of rejections are because an interviewer "couldn't get it to work in 1 hour", not because of you. Although frustrating, as it increases the amount of time you are without a job, it is liberating in a way to realize that interviewers are just people muddling through, not perfect judges whose rejection you need to take as an accurate prediction of how others will see you.
Anyway, I don't usually take feedback. Every company has its own culture and they're often in contradiction to each other. Companies with a strong culture that you have to conform to tend to have high turnaround. Also the guy interviewing me doesn't have to fully represent said culture because people are people and plug in their own opinions and biases regularly.
(I have not been a job candidate in almost 10 years but in B2B meetings I kind of like to do a similar reversal of power in some situations, just to inform the other party I am not a 6-weeks rabbit)
It's best for probing to be explicit and for feedback to be immediate after each question, not after the interview.
No it doesn't - there's nothing in the article about asking for feedback in return. The only reference to somebody actually doing that is extremely negative.
If the author reads this, they may be well-motivated but should consider quite seriously that they are not understanding "two-way" as they intend.
But you are right. Interviews will never be fully equal.
You have poor grasp of human dynamics, communication, coaching, and probably leadership. You are probaly a hubristic ass who is awful to work for.
You are welcome! What a guy I am, so thoughtful.
This read very oddly, as an LLM.
The only right answer is to leave such an interview immediately.
This seems like something you could and should have caught in the moment, without having to use your feedback technique. If they answered, and only mentioned the high-level tests, and you expect them to have low-level tests, then just ask, right then, if that was all of their tests, rather than silently assume the worst and move on.
Heuristic: if a remark seems outrageous, double-check before making a major decision on it.[2] This is not just in interviews, but life in general.
Example: Your friend says "Hey can you toss me through the window [of this skyscraper]?"
Your version: Call their family and 911 to report them as suicidal. Give a long speech about why they shouldn't kill themself. Then explain why you did what you did and ask if you misunderstood anything.
Sane, heuristic version: You reply, "You... want me to throw you to your death?"
Friend: "Oh jeez, no, that's just an expression we use here. I want you lift me up onto the balcony."
[1] Quoted in full:
>I gave one candidate feedback along the lines of “when you explained the app that you built, you talked about the testing that you did at only a very high level, so I’m worried about your depth of testing knowledge, particularly around Test Driven Development (TDD)”. The response was along the lines of “Oh. You’re right. I didn’t really delve into detail, but here’s how I went about doing the testing and here is my general approach in other examples”. The candidate then went into significant depth explaining how they had done TDD over the last 10 years, which clearly demonstrated their understanding and maturity of the practice. Misunderstanding corrected.
[2] Which, to be clear, you are doing by using your technique ... it just feels oddly delayed and lets a misunderstanding accumulate much longer than it needs to; my example is an exaggerated version of the failure mode.
This is also why I hate interview processes where my co-interviewers want to debrief immediately, or when I have a recruiter breathing down my neck as soon as the call ends.
"Candidates express gratitude" is measured by the person who still holds the decision, at the moment the candidate has the most to gain by looking coachable. Someone who genuinely found it useful and someone who is just managing you produce the same reading. An instrument that returns the same value either way isn't measuring the thing.
What's interesting is that the thread already contains the version with the incentive removed: 0plus1 got the feedback attached to a rejection, after the decision, and describes it landing: "if they just asked to clarify some of those points I would've easily explained them." Same feedback, nothing left to lose.
So maybe the closing move is right and the timing is wrong: send it with the outcome, not before it.