We put a lot of time and energy into interviewing, so giving feedback is the least an interviewer can do.
What is Feedback?
During my years in the staffing industry, I learned that "feedback" often just means "Are they moving forward or are they no longer interested in this candidate?" My goal after a tech interview was to get "you're moving onto the next interview" within a couple of weeks or "you're rejected" within a month.
If you're rejected, but not told why, you can ask for more feedback. You may never get it. Many companies don't want to incur any liability by providing detailed feedback. As an entry-level candidate, you're most likely to hear "There are more experienced candidates."
When you do get detailed feedback, remember it may say more about the interviewer than you. Humans are biased. Interviewing is an art, not a science. Whatever feedback you receive is based on that person's perception of you during a short, stressful situation. Ignore any unsupported criticism. Take any definitive statements about you with a grain of salt. A cruel message means you dodged a company culture bullet.
How To Get Feedback
"Point of contact" refers to the person who is scheduling your interview. This could be a recruiter (internal or external), an admin, an HR representative, or even the hiring manager. Always be polite to them. You never know if they'll be asked for their opinion of you.
- At the end of the interview, ask your interviewer "When should I expect feedback?"
- Email a thank you note to your point of contact on the same day as your interview.
- Mention when you were told to expect feedback in the email with the thank you note attachment.
- If you haven't received feedback 24 hours after you were told to expect it, follow up in that same email chain.
- Follow up every 72 hours after that.
If you're at the beginning of the interview process, you could ask "When should I expect to hear about next steps?" instead of "When should I expect feedback?" It implies confidence that you'll be moving on to the next interview.
Keep your point of contact informed about all your interview processes. Tell them how many companies you're interviewing with and how far along you are in the process. Getting interviews with multiple companies paints you as a highly desired candidate. The further along you are in the interview process, the more pressure you can put on other interview processes to hurry up.
If you get an offer from one of your multiple interview processes:
- Ask the person extending the offer when they need an answer.
- Email or call your point of contact for every other interview process and tell them your offer deadline.
If you're a candidate they're interested in hiring, they'll probably speed up the interview process to meet the deadline. If they're not interested (or their interview timeline is set in stone), they'll probably cancel your next interview.
If you end up with multiple offers, that gives you more negotiating power. You can still ask for feedback if they don't provide any explanation when they cancel.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this helps you get the feedback you need and understand why the feedback process can be so frustrating.
Top comments (30)
Hi Abbey,
I have learned not to trust technical interviews, and much less the feedback, but that is probably because I am a senior developer.
All too often, I am being interviewed by developers much younger than me, which is not a problem for me (however it might sound). Inevitably, the feedback I receive and the manner in which the interview is conducted betrays a hidden agenda.
"Bitter old man" you might be thinking, and you might be right, but you have to question how I can keep a senior position for 20 years yet fail a technical interview.
Staying technical after 50 is a challenge.
Interesting, can you elaborate on that ?
Feedback: "Candidate was not technically competent" - really! Just because I did not answer their questions in a manner that aligned to their check list or level of understanding.
Hidden agenda: "Not wanting to take on someone with more experience, who might usurp their position on the team".
That's ego-based recruiting.
There are two kind of this :
I had similar experience few years ago, the interviewer who just graduated from college asked me 'tell us about yourself'?
He cut me short like okay 'we hear you' 😀😀😀 He looked frightened or threatened. After that time, I would request for the interviewer's name/information and do some research on them ahead. I sometimes advise the recruiter to get someone at my level so that they will understand my responsibilities and experiences or I might just decline the interview, my time is precious!
"Tell us about yourself" is a bad question that reveals a lack of training...
That is a tough one. When I'm to work with someone on eye level, I expect someone in the range of my expertise and confidence. That doesn't have to be a 50 year old, but it has to be someone that actually understands his line of work, not someone trained to do a trick in a "earn 70k/year after 6 months" bootcamp like there are so many.
In my experience this is a lack of buzzwords or use of the wrong tech. If you describe how you would setup a python app and don't dockerize it (cause you how not to, know it's faster to do, know it uses less resources and thus are more technically capable) then you fail.
I always hear about that argument but now working as a recruiter I rarely see them. Maybe your recruiting process is not working smoothly ?
I'm not saying those entitled bootcamp graduates don't exist
I'm saying that I care much more about the opposite issue.
Good devs who can't find the company that need someone like them.
My follow up question is that assuming that the dev is able to learn well, why wouldn't you hire him just because he doesn't know yet what a scalable unique ID generator is ?
Do you lack confidence in your ability to teach him that ?
Well there were defenitely some restrictions in that job that made recruiting harder. Let's call it "cheap unicorn hunting" and you'll probably get what I mean.
It's not about knowledge, but competence. In fact I prefer to look for someone that can complement my skillset with a good enough overlap. But you should have some base knowledge - I shouldn't have to explain what JSON is if I'm recruiting a web developer, whether front or backend and the longer you work in the industry, the more I should be able to assume about patterns you've seen before and tech you've used. This makes it easier to teach as well, since I can use things you are familiar with as a vehicle to absorbing the new tech.
But competence is more about...can you absorb code you've never seen before in a relative timeframe and discuss about it? If you're a React developer, do you understand enough about the framework to analyse what may be a bug in React or do you just swap another 3rd party package in the hope that it fixes things? Are you confident enouh to say "hmm, I don't understand this, let me do some research?" or do you come up with excuses or claims that are unfouded and might not even relate to the issue, but would seem as if you know stuff.
I remember one interview, where the interviewee claimed to have been part of the core team that migrated a monolith to a microservice. When asked what were the challenges you first faced, the answer showed me that they were not part of the core team, but somewhere down the line as an executor. He wasn't able to answer any of the architectural challenges they faced. And I guess that's another thing I would consider someone to have at eye level: architectural view.
Sometimes that is an issue. Some people you have no connection with. After explaining the same things 3-4-5 different ways, it still doesn't click. I've learned to accept that, there's a limit to my abilities to teach. If I can't find something that makes it understandable for you and you can't make me understand what you don't understand, then that's that. Luckily, that's very rare.
Your two first paragraphes are a sourcing issue.
it's easy to fool oneself and believe I am good at interviewing while in fact I never trained for it and therefore make the same mistakes as everyone else
Interviews are all about hiring criterias.
If you don't define them before hand, you let your bias define them.
If you have more than three hiring criterias, it's because your criterias are not well defined or prioritized.
That prioritization is very important.
"Good at learning things and mature enough to say i don't know"
Is usually a much better hiring criteria than "at least 80% good as me"
Refine the three criterias and how good you are at evaluating them objectively.
Iterate and you would be much better at interviewing than most people..
Thanks for coming at my ted talk.
@melvyn_sopacua_afcf30b58a @jmfayard
I'm going to push back on "trained to do a trick" and "entitled" bootcamp grads - those people were scammed. They were told by "experts in the industry" that the the 4-6 month course they paid for would give them the skills they needed to get a developer job. They're earnestly engaging in the interview process, like the bootcamp told them to. That's often how they find out they don't have the skills and just wasted a ton of money and/or time. The ire should be directed at the bootcamp companies.
Oh yes, the ire was definetely aimed at the bootcamps. And the worse thing is that a lot of these students get hired as junior in companies that just need glorified typists, don't get mentored and don't progress unless they have the motivation to that themselves - which is double hard if this is one of your first jobs.
For example, I worked with someone who retrained themself from content to UX via a bootcamp. Because they already had 10+ years experience and content and UX have overlaps they did a good job. But someone in their early twenties, 2nd job, retrained from schooling as a cook. That didn't go so well and they were overwhelmed and disappointed as you describe.
Those companies have done the industry a lot of damage and for interviewers that see of lot of these, it's really hard to not bias yourself and give the next one a fair chance.
By the way, I'm a bootcamp grad. 😅 I worked customer service for 10 years (high volume recruiting admin was over 5 of that) before starting to learn to code in 2020. I had some mentoring in my first role, but it was still sink or swim, as you describe. I mainly fixed code written by short-term contract recent CS grads. I guess I was leveraging my recruiting experience by working on a recruiting app, but I refused to go with the option that would leverage my work history they most - DevRel.
I hope you will keep framing it as the companies' fault and take a chance on the ones willing to put in the work. I talk to a lot of bootcamp grads and career changers. The vast majority know they're in for a steep learning curve and are willing to do whatever it takes. Often, because it means being able to reliably provide for themselves and/or their family.
I absolutely agree that the "entitled bootcamp graduates" were scammed..
And not only by the bootcamp companies but also by the tech robber barons. The Zuckerbergs of this world needs to fill their pipelines with as much people as possible so they spread the message that plenty of well paid developer jobs are waiting just around the corner of a bootcamp.
Why would the entitlted future new devs not trust those super sucessful people ?
"Everyone Should Learn to Code" is Bullshit
Jean-Michel (agent double) ・ May 3
Oh Zuckerberg.
My point really is that in 2023 we know bootcamp/self-taught jr devs can be just as good as jr devs with a CS degree. I hate to see people perpetuating a stereotype that prevents them from getting hired. We know we need to be hiring (and adequately supporting) more jr devs in the tech industry, and bootcamp and self-taught devs are a part of that.
Absolutely.
Everyone stop the blaming the victims of bad bootcamps.
I am really interested in the topic right now, I coach CTO to give better feedback when a good candidate isn't a goot fit for them right now.
Would you mind to describe what the best feedback you got looked like ?
I went into trying to get my first developer job with a mindset I don't think many people have. I saw so many excellent candidates rejected for trivial reasons while in staffing. I had an excellent mentor who stressed that getting the first job has a lot to do with luck. Her advice was to treat every interview as practice for the one that worked.
As a result, I never anticipated getting negative feedback that would help me fix anything about the way I interview. Every interview is different. What one interviewer wants may be the opposite of what another wants. I took negative feedback on my technical skills seriously at first and then only really paid attention if it was a whiteboard-style interview. I stopped doing leetcode-style interview steps and job board assessments by the end.
I focused mostly on the positive feedback and using the feedback process to network.
The positive feedback often just reinforced the timing wasn't right, which softened the rejection and gave me a little confidence. I had one hiring manager confirm I should hold out for a development role rather than try to leverage my customer service experience. One time I managed to get a mid-level interview. The hiring manager offered to be a reference in my interviews with other companies and shared that they took an extra week to try and find a way to support a junior dev. Both helped me keep chugging along in the job search marathon.
As for networking - After getting feedback like "there are more experienced candidates", I would often ask if there another role I would be a fit for (open now or opening soon). That sometimes turned into referrals. I found myself in more than one interview where we knew it wasn't a good fit before it was over. By the time those ended I had leads on other roles and the interviewer often had promised to pass my resume around.
That's a brillant way to put it.
I am doing career coaching for developers at the moment, and that the message I wanted to give but I couldn't explain it so well. I will steal the line :)
Thanks for your message
I'm a week late to the Comment party but as an engineer who crossed over to the dark side into leading all aspects of recruiting - especially technical, but here's the one question that everyone might want to ask at the beginning of the interview process:
Do you have an assessment rubric and has every interviewer been adequately trained on how to use it?
Okay there's another question if they answer yes:
Will you be sharing this with me?
.
I know, I know - no rubric is perfect but it's still far better than "feelings"...
If you're feeling extra bold – and as engineers, I know you are – also ask for the 3-5 most important criteria that go into the final hire/don't hire decision.
Steve
linkedin.com/in/levyrecruits
Spot on.
I frequently tell people to remember it's just another human on the other side of the table and they probably weren't trained to interview. 🤣
Hi Abbey, thank you for sharing, this is really nice and I can relate to every single word you said. The job market is scary these days
Very nice post. You have mostly good advice in here. One of your suggestions is not likely to have any positive impact though. Specifically, you indicated:
When a candidate tells me how many other interviews they have, I ignore it. It is meaningless to me. It might be a real number. It might be fake and just a ploy to try to speed things up. I have no way to know the difference.
Your post then continued with:
That may or may not be true. And regardless of whether or not it is true for a particular organization, you risk annoying them. Trying to rush a hiring decision can potentially backfire.
It had positive impact for hundreds of candidates when I was their point of contact pushing to get them to the next interview step. This is how it works in the staffing industry. Every point of contact who was good at their job asked me this question when I was an interviewee. Same goes for the advice about multiple offers. It helped me, several of my tech mentees, and many of my candidates get better compensation.
Assuming the interviewee is lying about interview processes is an interesting stance to take. A lot of candidates don't even know they can do this. If I, as an interviewee, was treated like I was lying for stating the truth, I would decline to continue in the process.
Yes - in the offer section I mention they may choose to cancel the interview over speeding the process up.
We are literally not allowed to ask candidates about this. And also not allowed to consider it if a candidate offers such information without being asked.
Ignoring unverifiable statements is not the same as assuming someone is lying.
Wait, so your whole point is it's irrelevant, but just talking about it may be annoying, and that's enough to negatively affect their application?
If telling the truth about interview processes reflects negatively on the candidate, I'd say a rejection is a company culture bullet dodged. I've seen companies rescind offers for asking questions before accepting. I'm not going to say don't ask questions before accepting an offer. I'm going to say anything you do in an interview process could backfire and that reflects more on the company/hiring manager than it does the candidate.
I said that "I ignore it" and that it is "meaningless" to me. And that I'm not allowed to ask about it, or to consider it if they offer the info. I did not say that it affects them negatively.
Whether or not someone has other offers or where they are in interview process for other organizations is irrelevant to their qualifications for the position. And irrelevant to the qualifications of other candidates being considered for the position.
interesting
Thank you for sharing some helpful tips on how to get feedback.
Here in India most of the times the recruiters dont even reply to the mails.
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