Defining and building your interview criteria into feedback forms

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Available for Roles Super Admin, Admin
Permissions • Manage feedback settings
• Create and edit postings
Packages Lever Basic, LeverTRM, LeverTRM for Enterprise

Defining your interview criteria allows the core recruiting team (recruiter, hiring manager, interviewers) to ensure consistency and calibration of the interview process. By defining what you're assessing for up front, you can compare "apples to apples" - each candidate is being evaluated fairly, against the same criteria. Before proceeding, refer to our help article on creating interview feedback forms


Best practices when opening a new role

Schedule kick-off meetings with stakeholders

Before you open a new role, schedule an intake or "kick-off" meeting between the recruiter and the hiring manager. This will provide an opportunity to align on the role's expectations, review examples of good and bad example candidates, and define the role's interview process before the first interview is even scheduled. Formal kickoff meetings ensure that your team moves quickly - without missing out on the best candidates. Once your team is aligned, build your interview criteria into feedback forms. 

Use interview plans to leverage talent

Feedback forms are completely customizable. You can create separate feedback forms for different stages of your interview pipeline, different open roles, and even different sessions of an interview stage. Breaking down a panel or on-site interview into multiple sessions and assigning different feedback forms to each can have multiple advantages:

  • Allows you to leverage the talents of different team members
  • Protects the schedules of your busiest colleagues, and puts less of a time commitment on individual interviewers
  • Positive candidate experience giving candidates more of an opportunity to meet and interact with the hiring team

For example, while interviewing an engineer, junior engineers could participate in a pairing exercise. Discussions about career aspirations or company values could be led by a member of the recruiting team. Your hiring managers can focus on the candidate's technical skills, without blocking off their entire day.

Here's an example of an on-site interview broken out into different, themed sessions:

Multiple feedback forms associated with single stage on interview plan.

For more information on customizing interview stages, refer to the following help articles:

Refresh your feedback forms

As part of the interview plan setup process, you will need to select feedback forms you would like interviewers to fill out at each interview stage. During your kick-off meeting, take this opportunity to review the feedback forms with key stakeholders to make sure they are up-to-date and align with expectations. 

Feedback form editor

Give guidance

Instill confidence in your interviewing team by providing instructions on what you'd like them to uncover during their interview with a candidate. You can use feedback form instructions as well as helper text in order to provide additional guidance, especially for less-seasoned interviewers. 

Drive your team to make decisions

Make the built-in rating question required by hovering over the asterisk and clicking it until it turns red. Notice there's no neutral option. Our user research demonstrated over and over again that neutral options slow down the hiring process. If you're a recruiter receiving nothing but a bunch of "3" ratings, you'll just end up following up with each colleague to ask for a firm yes or no anyway! To encourage a bias towards action, ask every member of your team, at every stage of the interviewing process, to decide whether this candidate should ultimately be hired.

Focus on what matters

You can define default feedback forms at a company level, a department level, or a job posting level. At each point of the process, make sure to zero in on the most critical strengths, competencies, and traits for the role and for your organization. You can use the 'score' or 'scorecard' response format options to quickly assess a candidate's skills.

Scorecard question on feedback form

Best practices for collecting interview feedback

Use feedback forms for interview feedback - not notes

Feedback forms are one of the most important aspects of your interview process. These forms define the interviewing experience for your candidates, help your team collaborate on the caliber of the candidates, and help you collect that feedback in a customized but structured way. Notes are an unstructured way of collaborating and providing quick feedback on candidates, while feedback forms allow you to set automatic reminders for incomplete feedback, and generate reports on feedback-related metrics. For more information on interview feedback metrics, refer to the following help articles: 

Visual Insights Feedback Dashboard Average feedback scores by interviewer chart.

Assign feedback forms to your colleagues

Assigning specific feedback forms to your interviewers allows you to set up automatic reminders to submit feedback once an interview is complete. By assigning feedback forms, your interviewers have an obvious place to store their notes from an interview, and they'll receive reminders to do so - allowing you to make hiring decisions faster. Feedback reminders can be set during the interview scheduling process: 

For more information on customizing interview feedback reminders, refer to our help article on scheduling interviews

We recommend assigning feedback forms in the 'Interview Plan' tab of every job posting, at the moment you create that job posting. Structuring this process now will save you time and reduce confusion during the interview scheduling process.

Interview plan tab in posting editor with interview stages listed.

Feedback forms can also assigned when scheduling specific interviews.

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