I just went through this process looking for a job in a VP of Engineering role after spending the last 15 years running my own startups and doing my own hiring. And man it really made me rethink how I will do hiring going forward.
Feedback as a candidate would be great, but based on my own experience hiring it’s difficult to have that conversation go well. Maybe 1 in 10 people would say “hey thanks, I appreciate the feedback” and the rest wanted to debate their worthiness. So there is no ROI for this effort.
But having just been looking for a job I can confirm that almost all of the companies I talked to sucked at communication. They were just awful.
Here's a thought: maybe do most of the feedback during the interview process.
Train interviewers to explain their reasoning for the questions they're asking and what they're trying to evaluate.
And then, at the close, identify all the positive things the candidate demonstrated and what bullet points they're going to bring to the debrief.
I've been doing the former quite routinely, and in the last interview I did, the candidate just asked me why I asked those questions so I went ahead and explained it.
I think it helps make an interview less nerve wracking, and it helps me to think aloud about the case I'm going to present in the debrief.
And, frankly, some interviewers are asking stupid questions and it may help if they have to explain themselves.
