Gathering feedback from a group interview

I’ve been a manager since 2007 (about 14 years at the time of writing this). In that time I’ve interviewed hundreds of people (mostly software engineers) and made many dozens of hires. I’m not an expert, but I have played in this particular field quite a bit.

One phenomenon in interviewing is the group/panel interview. Where between 2-4 (ideally no more than 4… but, I’ve seen folks violate that threshold… hell I’ve violated that threshold) are asked to two things for the hiring manager. (1) give the candidate an idea of what it is like to work here by meeting more of the people they’ll be working with (2) give me, as the hiring manager, multiple perspectives.

Great… everyone knows what I want them to focus on the most (an aspect of culture and/or technical nature of the job… and overall how do they think the candidate will be as a collaborator)… everyone is fully present… great questions are asked in both directions.

What happens next?

I used to have a final 30 minute interview with the candidate (same day as their panel interviews) where we’d give the candidate the opportunity to respond to any yellow flags or unanswered questions that came up through the panel interviews (I love this concept, but that is for a different note). In order to get those questions and flags, I used to get the panel interviewers together and hear them out.

I now think getting a panel of interviewers together to share thoughts on a candidate is a terrible idea.

Why? Two reasons:

1) Group think

There was this engineer that was interviewing with my company… we’ll call them J. Well J was young, and a bit raw (made some statements that came off a tad arrogant or didn’t make eye contact with the person asking the question), but intelligence through the roof.

I’ve been doing this a long time… I was CONVINCED that J had the goods (and I’m VERY anti-brilliant-jerk). I knew he was going to be special and those rough edges were fixable with just the tiniest bit of coaching. J was a good person, and IMO you could tell almost immediately.

Well, I got the group together and they eviscerated J. I completely lost control of the convo. At the end, the mob energy was palpable

Shit.. what do I do?

I went to each of them individually to try and better understand more specifically what their take was of J. 4 out of the 6 said they liked J and thought he’d be a solid teammate. All 6 said J had the tech chops. So 2 folks, who hadn’t done a ton of interviewing, and passed their own judgement in a group setting, completely molded how the group was thinking.

That was the second time this happened on that team, and after this time I changed my views on this (more on that at the end)

2) Voice, not vote

In a note I wrote a while back (A Leader is / is not (modified MLK quote)) I suggested that leaders have to mold consensus. However in hiring, it is the hiring manager’s direct responsibility. I need to be crystal clear here: it is incredibly valuable to get the perspective of a candidate from as many trusted teammates as possible. At the same time; it boils down to the hiring manager being the one trusted to make the final call. Just like design-by-committee is bad, IMO getting everyone 100% in consensus isn’t ideal either (now to provide a counter-argument to myself, which is me trying to express that I have and will continue to evolve my thinking on this).

I want to take a moment and say how bad I wish/hope I was/am wrong about this. A good fried and former colleague used to run his hiring processes differently. He would require 100% of the panel to say yes before he’d make any offer to any candidate. I hire in Product, he hires in Marketing, and the sheer applicant volume of applicants alone makes our worlds a bit different… but, I do see the merits in his way. Also, this is one of those things that I love about note.garden… I may change my stance on this, and if I do, I’ll have this note to reference how I felt in yester-year.

So, my point is that the panel is usually there to give their sentiment and perspective as an INCREDIBLY valuable voice that goes into the decision… but it is not a vote. The responsibility lies with the hiring manager.

So what do I do now?

My answer is pretty straight forward. I have a scorecard (with clear multi-choice AND free text questions) for every interview… for every panelist to fill out. I ask the panelist to immediately fill this scorecard out. Easy Peezy.

Now I’ll get rich context from everyone without the group think.

Clean, clear data that I’ll use to make one of the most important decisions that has to be made on any team… to hire or not to hire.

So next time you think of spinning up a slack channel to discuss a candidate or a quick zoom call to debrief, I encourage you to at least require everyone to have filled out their own scorecard first!