Should the interview feedback be recorded?

Importance of Interview Feedback and Why It Should Be Recorded

One of the most important segments of your campus recruitment drive is the interview round. Very few candidates advance this far since most of them get filtered out in the preliminary rounds, and only the best ones get retained. The interview is a platform for recruiting panel to have a face-to-face interaction with the students and assess them for various skills required for the job. Asking the right questions to the candidates gives you a deeper insight into how they think and how they approach a problem. You can test for their problem-solving skills, attitude towards work, their intent and interest in learning new things and improving themselves, and their drive to perform better.

But you cannot merely recruit all the candidates who attend your interview round. You must maintain feedback about each student’s performance and have further discussions with your peers and higher authorities before shortlisting the final set of candidates and rolling out the offer letters to them. In this blog, we discuss in length about the significance of recording interview feedbacks and how it will ease the decision-making process for the company when it has to shortlist the best suited candidates for the job profile.

Interview panel and interview questions

Interviewing panel and the interview questions determine what type of students will join your organisation. It is a good practice to have a mix of subject matter experts and a senior member of the recruiting team among other interviewers in the panel. This way, the panel is able to assess the technical skills, problem-solving ability, communication skills and other relevant aspects that will help them in selecting or rejecting a candidate.

The panel must come up with the most relevant questions to ask the students that evaluate their knowledge and skill sets. The interviewers should not ask a lot of personal questions and instead ask questions that is related to the respective domain of the job profile. Overall, the panel should aim to make the candidates feel comfortable so that they focus on the questions better and answer them appropriately.

Recording an interview feedback matters

Typically, there are more than one round of interview conducted in a recruitment drive before the HR take a final call on hiring the shortlisted candidates. In such cases, the other interviewers in the panels have to be informed and updated about the candidate performance in the previous rounds. Therefore, it is extremely important to have a transparent channel for communicating the feedback to the panel next in line to avoid confusion and prejudice in the selection process.

Lack of a proper communication channel between the HR and the interviewers of various rounds results in filtering out talented candidates due to their poor performance in the previous rounds, or shortlisting the average ones who may have performed well in the preliminary rounds, but may not have all the desired skills.

Advantages of recording a feedback

To avoid any confusion in the interviewing process, it is a good practise of recording the feedback of the previous interviewers and passing it onto the next interviewing panel.The major advantages of following such a process are:

1. Helps in post interview discussions: After an interview round, the panel members discuss their opinions about the performances of the candidates before they shortlist the best ones for the next round. Typically, such discussions should be followed by recording individual feedback to help the next panel in line get an overview of the candidate performance, and design their session accordingly. This also gives clarity to the other interviewers before they make a final call on shortlisting the candidates.
2. Analyse the interviewing skills of the panel: Recording the interview feedback at every stage is important for the company to analyse whether the interviews are being conducted in the right direction or not. Feedback of an interviewer helps the others to understand what skills of the candidate he has evaluated and gives an insight into his interviewing skills. Analysing the comments and feedback mentioned by the interviewers, the company can decide whether it has to provide them with some formal training or not so that they hire the right candidates for the job profile.  
3. Take a call for re-appearing candidates: If interview feedbacks are recorded properly, the recruiters can refer to them before they take a decision about selecting or rejecting a re-appearing candidate. Instead of spending too much time in assessing the candidates, the interviewers can refer to the old feedback and plan their session in such a way that they focus on asking questions that will help them shortlist the top performers for the job.
4. Assess the candidates ability:  While candidates transition from one interview round to the next, the feedback mentioned by the previous interviewers is what helps the other panel members to analyse the candidate’s performance and understand his capability. This saves a lot of time for the other panel since they can focus on evaluating for other skill sets and jot down their comments before the HR makes a final call. Having everything recorded in a detailed manner helps the company to hire the right candidate for the job profile.

Key Points

Recording interview feedbacks not only saves time and efforts but allows the other interviewers to get an insight into the type of candidates they will be interviewing. Based on the positive and negative points about their performances mentioned in the feedback, the panel is able to frame questions that will help them shortlist the top performers and roll out the offer letters. To know more, visit https://pod.ai/employers