Post Interview Processing

Imagine your company interviews a candidate for the job, with three total interviews. Each one talks to the individual on their own, making sure to ask the questions that they believe are most relevant to the position and gauge the applicant's readiness. Then they all go into a room and discuss the candidate.

Two people like the candidate a lot for the position, while the other person dislikes the candidate. The two people that like the candidate talk first, and begin discussing the issues that they feel describe why the candidate is great for the role. The third interviewer remains generally silent, occasionally voicing his disagreement.

At this point, the discussion was too positive – the discussion introduced bias, because now the third interviewer may not be willing to share why he believes the candidate is not best.

A much better strategy would be to have everyone that interviewed the candidate evaluate the candidate in a way that is free of bias at the end of the interview. They can fill out a form and input what they think are the individual's strengths and weaknesses on the whole, independent of one another. Should they wish to discuss the matter, they can do that in the future.

But at first, their opinions will not be swayed or biased by the words of others. They'll give their scores, evaluating what each believes are the strengths of the candidate and the degree of their qualifications, and then at the end the results will give a basic idea of how well the person appears to be qualified for the role.

Any time you take away the introduction of further biases from subjective analysis you create better data. Discussing candidates can make someone feel even stronger about something that they may have originally found less important, and this can create issues when evaluating someone like a candidate for an open job.

Furthermore, it provides a database of qualified vs. less qualified candidates that can have its own uses in the future. For example, if you have two candidates that appear very skilled or qualified for only one position, you now have a permanent log of the other candidate that can be accessed in the event of an open position or something that meets their needs. Also, the data (depending on what you decide to collect) can be used to notify other departments of qualified candidates, tell hiring managers when to set them up for a second interview in an easy to organize fashion, and so on.

There are ample reasons to use this type of candidate analysis method. It's not common to use surveys to analyze candidates after an interview, but it can be useful, and something your company may want to consider.