Welcome to the 17th installment of our series on “How to Conduct a Debriefing.” Let’s get started.
As soon as your team has finished the interviews, you need to debrief on the candidate and decide whether or not to go ahead with an offer.
Here are some best practices for debriefing, written by GEM’s first HR director. Caroline Stevensonhelped us scale from 15 to 150 people.
What is a debriefing?
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Debriefing takes place when a hiring decision is made on the candidate. The goal is to have all interviewers discuss the feedback and make a hiring decision.
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However, during the debriefing, you may realize that you don’t have enough information to make a decision. In this case, the debriefing is still useful, as it can surface signals you may have missed about the candidate and help you align on what next steps (if any) to take (e.g. how you should change your interview process to capture more signals specifically and/or about the candidate).
Advance Report
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All interviewers should keep detailed written notes on how the interview went, along with their assessment of whether or not the candidate was hired. It is very important that this information is provided in writing prior to the debriefing. Also, The interviewer will not talk about the candidate until everyone has written their feedback.. Talking to each other before providing written feedback would bias the interviewers in the panel against each other, forcing them to reassess their own interview performance after hearing about what went well and what didn’t.
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It’s also important to give all interviewers time to write and read their feedback before the debriefing. Consider implementing some guidelines like:
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Reporting session schedule at least This will be a few hours after the last interview has finished, so everyone has time to provide feedback.
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Implement a rule that all feedback must be submitted at least an hour before the debriefing begins, so that everyone can read all the feedback before joining the meeting.
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You should invite all members of the interview committee (including the phone interviewers) to this debriefing. If you have a very small team, you might also consider inviting other members who work closely with the candidate so they can be comfortable with how the candidate will be assessed.
Reporting session structure
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Thirty minutes is usually enough for the debriefing – 45 minutes if it’s a new role and you’re still refining the candidate.
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Go around the room and ask each interviewer to share how the interview went and how they arrived at the rating they chose, about 3-5 minutes per person.
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Have each interviewer begin by summarizing what they’ve been asked to evaluate in the interview so everyone in the room has context.
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If you don’t understand how the interviewer arrived at their rating, ask follow-up questions such as, “This interview left a positive impression, but what would it take for you to rate it a strong positive rather than a positive?” or “Why was it a weak negative this time vs. an outright negative?”
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The order in which you discuss feedback is important. Here’s the order I recommend:
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If no one has provided written feedback, let them speak first. They haven’t put their initial thoughts in writing yet, so they’re the most susceptible to bias.
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After that, go by seniority. It’s a good practice to have the more junior members of your team share their feedback first. Some junior team members (both in tenure and career experience) may feel uncomfortable disagreeing with or giving a completely different assessment than their more senior team members.
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Leave leadership for last. Leadership first is most likely to bias the group.
Make a decision
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You can also end the debriefing with a clear agreement with your team about next steps (moving to an offer, making a reference check, rejecting, etc.).
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It’s okay to end without a clear decision, and you can also end the debriefing unsure of what to do. There are a few different scenarios:
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You believe the candidate is excellent, but you don’t have enough information to make a confident decision. You need to ask yourself:
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Do you need to change your interview process to ensure you pick up this signal next time? Why did you miss it this time?
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Is there a way to get this signal from the candidate at this point? Maybe another interview, a take-home test, or something else.
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The interviewers are divided, so you might be divided too: some you want to hire, some you don’t.
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First, don’t feel like you have to make a decision on the spot. It’s okay to say, “Thank you for your feedback. I’ll think about it and proceed with the next step.”
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If you decide to move forward, there may be additional steps involved as we will need to reconsider what negative feedback we have determined to be significant to the role.
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If you have a small team, it will be important to be well aligned and enthusiastic about your first few hires. If the debriefing is going to be particularly contentious, it may be best to decline.
Other Best Practices
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If the interview feedback trends very negative, it’s clear that this person will not progress to the hiring stage, so it’s fine to cancel the debriefing and save everyone 30 minutes. However, if you’re hiring for a new role, it’s a good idea to keep this meeting on your calendar as it will help you know if there are areas you can improve on. Are you properly screening candidates before they come on-site? Are you targeting the right profile/years of experience? Are your performance expectations right? Debugging issues early can potentially save you a lot of time.
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Always make sure you evaluate candidates against your hiring plan and interview criteria. When you’re small and trying to line up the first few roles, it’s fine to compare candidates side by side, but as you scale, be careful not to make this the norm in your debriefings. This can play a lot into unconscious bias and privilege. For example, one candidate may not have as strong a skillset in one area because they weren’t given the same opportunity or access to the same education to develop those skills. Ultimately, you need to recognize if you’re building a culture where you’re evaluating everyone against what you determine is necessary for the role and stack-ranking candidates against each other.
next
next Part 18Next time we’ll take a closer look at the interview process and one of the most important aspects of hiring: reference checks.
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