Defining your interview criteria

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Why should I do this?

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.

Best practices

Start early

The best time to begin thinking about feedback forms is during your initial meetings with a hiring manager to discuss the role. Incorporate questions into your feedback forms throughout the interview process to ensure your hiring manager is able to make decisions with confidence. 

We recommend that you assign feedback forms to every job posting before it is moved to 'Internal' or 'Published'. Structuring your interview process ahead of time will save time during interview scheduling.

Give guidance

Instil confidence in your interviewing team by providing instructions on what you'd like them to uncover during their interview with a candidate.

Title and description fields on a feedback form.

Drive your team to make decisions

Make the built-in rating question required by hovering over the asterisk and clicking it until it turns orange. 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.

Rating question on a feedback form with asterisk button highlighted on hover.

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.

Use scorecards to quickly assess a candidate's skills.

Scorecard question on feedback form

Leverage talent

Breaking up your on-site interviews into multiple, themed sessions allows you to leverage the talents of different team members, while protecting the schedules of your busiest colleagues. 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.

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