I wonder what job interviewers talk about after the candidate has left the room…

[beeonmybonnett]

I always wonder this when I leave the room after my interview has concluded.

So job interviewers of MN, even if there are still more candidates to interview, do you have a fair idea as to whether or not you’re going to hire that one person that is sat in front of you?

when the candidate leaves the room, do youse say stuff like “OMG he/she was truly awful” or “that person was really good!”

Genuinely curious lol

A lot depends on the professionalism and competence of the organisation you are interviewing with.

The more the people responsible for hiring understand the role and the function, the better the interview questions will be, and the better they will understand your answers and your possible fit. The conversation after those interviews tends to be thoughtful and respectful.

In organisation’s without strong HR support and hiring managers who understand in detail what they want/need, everything gets to be a lot more random. A lot of spit-balling after interviews and more subjective opinions.

We're a small company. I usually lead the interview along with the manager that the candidate will work under.

After the interview, we let them out, go back to the interview room and have the "what did you think?" conversation. This usually involves discussing the candidates answers in more detail, and analysing how prepared we felt they were for the interview. I always email ahead of time to let the candidate know who they'll be speaking with and that we'll start off with any questions they may have about the business/role. A good candidate comes with questions (even if it's just about the team/day to day of the role). We don't tend to hire for jobs that require detailed experience as we are happy to train new hires in our systems, so a lot of what determines success is how well we feel they will integrate into the team.

If it has been truly appalling (rare), we usually just share a look and say no at the same time 😂a bad interview in our eyes is a candidate who answers with one word responses or seemingly has little to no knowledge of the company/industry etc and has not seemingly made any effort to research it. I would rather a candidate say "so I know the company does X but I don't understand what that is, can you explain?" than just try to wing the interview entirely. We don't expect people to know all about us, it's a niche industry, but I expect some level of preparation before they arrive. Thankfully, now we've introduced phone screen interviews, this is a lot less common.