A Lightweight Structure for Evaluating Non-technical Interviews
Over the past years, I have conducted numerous interviews either as hiring manager or as interviewer supporting other hiring managers in their decision-making. In almost all instances, the interviewers of a candidate exchanged their interview evaluations in written form before we met in person for a debrief. For my interview evaluations, I have developed a lightweight structure that I strictly follow for every non-technical interview that I conduct.
In this article, I’m going to share this structure with you and explain my motivation behind it. It might seem trivial to you and if I’m honest with myself, it probably is. “Lightweight” just makes for a more appealing headline, I suppose 😏. Be that as it may, this structure has served me quite well on many occasions and I’ll explain why throughout the article.
Why have a structure at all?
Following a strict structure when I write my evaluations allows me to gather and organize my thoughts while I go through my notes from the interview. The structure does more than help to externalize my impressions from an interview into a condensed, digestible form, though.
It’s my personal safety check to verify that my evaluation is conclusive: Do the key insights I took from the interview really support my recommendation (hire/no hire)? Are they exhaustive? Do they paint a fair picture of the candidate?
Coming out of an interview, I often already leaned towards either hire or no-hire. Forcing myself to go through the structure nevertheless helped me to solidify that first hunch – or to refute it! It happened more often than I care to admit that my immediate impression was mostly backed by just one or two particularly memorable exchanges from the interview. When I sat down again to write my evaluation, the flaws of my initial assessment became apparent quickly. I also had cases where I felt really unsure about a candidate after an interview only to realize there was a solid case hidden in my still unstructured notes.
The language I use
Interviews are an attempt to evaluate a candidate‘s capabilities and character traits to assess their fitness for the job position in question. That said, it would be presumptuous to believe that an hour-long interview suffices to evaluate any person with 100% accuracy.
That’s why I make a deliberate effort that the language I use in my interview evaluations reflects this uncertainty. At the cost of brevity, I write “I had the impression that…”, “This indicated to me that…”, “This led me to believe that…”, “This felt to me as if…”, and similar.
The structure explained
Every interview evaluation starts as a scaffold of sorts. I write down a series of headlines with empty bodies, which I fill with life while I go through my notes. These are the six sections:
- My conclusion
- I liked …
- I disliked or missed …
- We did not cover (in-depth) …
- The candidate’s questions
- Other notes
I’ll explain what goes into each section below.
My conclusion
For the convenience of the reader, I put this section first. But I actually write it last! I don’t give in to the temptation to share a recommendation prematurely only so that I can quickly move on to the next task on my to-do list.
I fill the other sections as I walk through my notes. I make another sweep through the notes to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything of relevance. Only then, I carefully read what I’ve written and finally compile my conclusion.
The conclusion is a statement of two to three sentences that aim to succinctly explain my recommendation to either hire or reject the candidate. The recommendation can be one of four distinct values: strong yes, soft yes, soft no, strong no. Nothing in-between.
Once I’ve written my conclusion, I run a small exercise: Reading the other sections again, I ask myself, can one possibly make the case for the opposite recommendation? If it’s possible, I need to revisit my notes. In any case, this is a clear sign that my recommendation can only be a soft yes or soft no.
I liked …
Again, language matters. I intentionally named this section I like, because despite employing standardized interview questions and rubrics, there’s no denying that any evaluation is ultimately subjective. Every interviewer has their own preferences, their own experiences that shape what they expect from a candidate in that job position, and their own subconscious biases.
In this section, I list insights that I gained throughout the interview which support the hiring of the candidate. I list them in order of relevance to and impact on the job position in question.
I disliked or missed …
Analogously to the previous section, here I list all insights that may cast doubt on the candidate’s fitness for the job. I order them by relevance to the job position and their severity.
We did not cover (in-depth) …
I try to run interviews as conversations between equal parties. I like it when they flow naturally. The interview questions then only subtly steer the conversation. I believe, this makes the interview experience for the candidate more pleasant and it can allow us to uncover deeper insights.
However, there’s a downside to this. Time management is harder! When we allow ourselves to dive deep into a particular topic, this may reveal real gems, but it also eats up precious time. Even so, I usually manage to cover all essential topics. In the occasional interview, I fail to do so, though. In those cases, I list the topic(s) that we missed to discuss entirely or that we only brushed over in this section.
If the candidate is scheduled for another interview, the interviewers that go next may pay extra attention to the topics I missed. If the candidate is not scheduled for another interview, the hiring manager can decide whether they can still come to a decision without information on the topics that I flagged in this section or if a follow-up call is needed.
The candidate’s questions
I only added this section recently. I have started to collect the questions that candidates ask us. This will allow me to prepare even better for the next interviews with new candidates. Also, if I see questions occurring more frequently, we might want to answer them earlier in the interview process (e.g., on our careers page or in the screening call with the Talent Acquisition Manager).
Other notes
This is a placeholder for any other information that might not be critical for the decision-making but might still be relevant in some other way for the recruitment process. For example, a candidate recently mentioned to me that they already had a valid working visa. This didn’t influence the decision to hire or not hire the candidate, but it became useful downstream.
Now that I’ve shared my lightweight structure for non-technical interview evaluations here, I’m curious to learn from you: What do you pay attention to when you write an interview evaluation? What are you looking for when you read an evaluation?
