How Manager Feedback and Interview Evaluations Improve Hiring

Learn how to standardize your interview evaluation process. This is the best way to identify best-fit talent and collaborate effectively.

Candidate Evaluation Forms For Interview Feedback

What is a candidate evaluation form? It’s a tool that allows members of the hiring team to rate applicants based on the same criteria. It is also called an interview feedback form or candidate feedback form.

8 Ways Candidate Evaluation Forms Improve Recruiting

1. Ensures each interviewer is thorough in their evaluation
2. Speeds up the interview feedback process
3. Helps prevent bias in job interview evaluation
4. Measures hard and soft skills
5. Simplifies collaboration among your hiring team
6. Helps differentiate candidates with near-identical qualifications
7. Improves the candidate experience
8. Saves time when first-round rejected candidates are considered for future positions
9. Increases the value of your talent pipeline database

The Interview Feedback Review Process

How do you evaluate candidates without a systematic way to rate them? As an example, let’s consider a common scenario. You currently have a mission-critical position to fill and a fairly tight deadline to hire a qualified person. Of course, you post the position on your website and other outside resources like LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Indeed and Craigslist. What comes next is a stack of resumes. Following that,  the interview process.

Remember, you’re competing with other companies to find the best talent. Indeed, you can’t afford a slowdown, because your competitor could hire your top candidate. In fact, the most desirable candidates are off the market in 10 days. But you need to proceed strategically so you don’t hire the wrong person.

Continuing on, you pick up the first resume and see mission statements like…

• “Motivated individual seeks challenging position for personal and professional growth”
• “Industry expert and thought leader available to implement revenue-ramping methodologies.”
• “Professional guru with proven track record of driving key performance metrics seeks next challenging opportunity.”

…and you proceed to read through four more pages of the resume.

Buried in the resume amid the industry buzzwords is the relevant information. Unfortunately, after reading about 10, you can’t remember which candidate had which qualifications.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to organize the applicants into categories like “Unqualified,” “Potential” and “Top Prospect” as you are reviewing the resumes. By doing this, you can focus on the shortlist of more qualified candidates when you revisit them.

Next, make every effort to forward only the best applicants to your manager for review. You don’t want to waste the manager’s time or make them doubt that you understand his/her critical needs.

How Can I Get Useful Interview Feedback From My Hiring Team?

At this point, one of the most challenging aspects of the hiring process is about to occur… obtaining useful feedback from your staff. No matter how many employees you engage in the hiring process, it’s important that you gather the feedback in a consistent and meaningful way.

Let’s discuss how you use candidate evaluation forms filled out by your managers and staff during the review process.

How Can I Standardize Interview Feedback?

Use multiple choice, ratings or scale questions when you request feedback so you don’t receive vague reasons they are not interested. Or worse, emails that are difficult to interpret. You will not only find feedback questionnaires helpful during the review process, but even more valuable after the interview.

By all means, when each member of the hiring team contributes to the interview feedback form, you elevate the entire process. That’s because each person’s perspective and expertise improves the scoring. The result? You will find best-fit employees more quickly.

Job Interview Evaluation Comments Samples

Here are some examples of effective interview feedback evaluation forms. You can modify them as appropriate for the specific position. For example, if the position requires additional skills not listed here, add the skills to the first evaluation sample.

Interview Feedback Examples (Pre-Interview)

Managers sometimes use a gut feeling to determine if the candidate should be considered. They may even make a judgment based on the resume format, the number of jobs and where they went to school. If you ask the manager exactly what it is they liked or didn’t like, you will receive more meaningful information and can make a more informed decision about whether you should invite this candidate in for an actual face to face interview. Here are some interview evaluation form samples:

Examples of Effective Manager Feedback Questions (Post Interview)

You can base the feedback you receive on more fair and factual information if you distribute guidelines for evaluation. Firstly, list the skills or competencies the candidate needs so the interviewer can explore these areas during the interview. Then they can rate each candidate effectively. Note the two different examples of sample rating guides below.

Negative/Positive Interview Comments Example #1

Negative/Positive Interview Comments Example #2

How Job Interview Feedback Fits in the Applicant Journey

Job interview evaluation influences other applicant touchpoints. As such, it can help you improve job descriptions, interview scripts, and other candidate communications. Equally important, it helps members of your hiring team become better at evaluating candidates. By all means, it’s a key best practice for any company that is serious about improving hiring outcomes.

Benefits of a Structured Interview Feedback Process

1. Avoids typical evaluations of candidates that may be filled with ambiguity, superficial statements, and generalizations.
2. You base your hiring decision on objective information that the candidate’s skills match your job or project requirements—not because they are an excellent resume writer.
3. The standardized evaluation questions point out the different opinions of the interview/ evaluation staff and help raise any red flags.
4. Ensures your hiring process complies with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
5. Helps avoid costly hiring mistakes.
6. Using multiple selection methods helps to ensure you are choosing the best candidate–no single technique on its own can predict on-the-job performance and success.
7. Better fit hires increase employee retention and productivity.

The Problem Solver Hiring Philosophy

Before you create your interview script and candidate evaluation form, establish your overall philosophy. In the following Quora post, Ryan Duffee, HR manager and consultant, explains how he focuses on finding problem solvers.

When hiring someone, you should always be looking for a problem solver. A business in itself is a problem solver. The company you represent is providing a solution to a problem (whatever is in demand). The product or service you provide is a solution. Inside your business, problems will come up. Especially new start-ups or businesses who have been around forever and operating on antiquated tech or software, policy creation, accounting, personnel, etc. Whenever an organization makes a decision to hire, it is because there is a problem and they need to bring someone in to fix it. Don’t think problems are all negative either. Hiring someone to take on an increase in workload is a positive problem to have. It goes both ways. Moreover, when looking at resumes or interviewing people, the one thing on your mind is, can or will this person fix my problem?

Know The Needs in Your Organization

As an HR Manager, it is my responsibility to know about 99% of the things going on within my company. If you have an HR person that can’t tell you the workload going through a department, that is an issue. I personally make it my routine to meet with dept. managers to ask how their departments. are performing. Not only does it help me understand what they’re doing, it shows them that upper management and/or C-suite are engaged and have better communication. Most of the time I receive a quick, “good-good” or “great, thanks,” but there are those times where I get the needed info, “We’re swamped and John Doe is overwhelmed and falling behind!” Now is when I (your person) come into action.

Link Hiring to Needs

I will sit with managers and discuss a number of things like workflow trends; is the work load increase just a temporary thing? How long has it been this way? How much production or time have we lost? My job becomes a fact finder (investigator) to go to the executive team to say, “Everyone, we have problems X, Y & Z… My recommendation is to hire or not hire more personnel to handle the increased work load. If we hire 1, 2… this is what we can expect in terms of increased production.” If the ROI on hiring a problem solver (new hire) is greater than the expenses, it makes sense.

Create Your Job Description Based on Problems That Need to be Solved

When reviewing resumes, have those problems you need to fix not only on your list of questions, but they should be on the job posting, listed in the form of a job description. Why is that important? This gives the job seeker a chance to see your problems and ask themselves if they’re the right problem solver to help you and apply.

The Problem Solving Perspective

When you know your problems you can clearly define the solution(s) you’re looking for. So, before you go hiring your best friend from the neighborhood because you want to have lunch with them and chat about everything in the world because it’s fun, you need to ask the question of how effective of a solution is this to my problem, or will it create a new problem? Nothing wrong with hiring your friend, I’m just using that as an example. I say, “hire solutions and make a new friends.” (Ryan Duffee)  

In conclusion

To grow your business post-pandemic, use best practices including standardized interview evaluations. It’s superstar talent, after all, that will help your business prosper.

More information on interview evaluations can be found here:

• • Structured Interviewing Questions: The Ultimate Guide
  • How to Hire Your Next Employee
  • Hiring Your Next Employee Series: Collecting Team Feedback

Updated February 11, 2022.