What Should An Interviewer Do After A Job Interview

The interview process is finally over. You bid your last job candidate goodbye and return to the interview room. Then, you look blankly at your fellow interviewers and wonder, “So what do we do now?”

This article will answer this very question. The short answer is as follows:

Immediately after the job interview, discuss the candidates with the other interviewers and score the candidates on an interview score sheet. The highest scorer will typically be the preferred candidate. Once confident the preferred candidate can perform the job well, formally offer them the job.

It’s really just that simple. However, simple doesn’t mean easy, and there are caveats and nuances along the path to offering your preferred candidate the job. I’ve listed these below on a rough timeline so that you will know what to do and when to do it.

Right After The Job Interview

Once the last interviewee has left, I would suggest that you don’t immediately discuss the candidates with the other interviewers. (We’ll come back to that later.) Instead, review your interview notes for each interviewee/candidate, and rate them on your interview score sheet.

Hopefully, your interview scoresheet is fit for purpose, with the competencies related to job listed and ready for scoring. (If not, you should go back a step and make sure you have interview score sheets ready.)

Score the interviewees based on their answers to the questions which relate to the competencies on your interview scoresheet. To help with the scoring, ask yourself questions about the candidates you have just interviewed, “how would candidate X perform on the work that needs competency Y?”, or “based on their answer, how well did candidate X do in past situations that required competency Y?”. You can also take things that the interviewees said in reply to other unrelated questions, or even just their general comments, into account while rating them.

To make sure the interview process is fair for everyone, do not take any background knowledge of the candidates into consideration when scoring them. You might have met a candidate once in a social setting and learned that they are a computer whiz, but should not affect your scores for them.

Once you and all the other interviewers have rated the candidates, then you can begin discussing the candidates. This discussion is pushed till after the individual scoring is done so as to prevent the interviewers from influencing each other and preventing groupthink.

Talk to the other interviews about the candidates as a whole, individually, and also by comparing candidates against each other. You can ask the other interviewers similar questions to those that you have asked yourself, such as, “how do you think candidate X will perform on task X that we need the job holder to do?”. Through the discussion, you should be able to see if any candidate stands out more than the rest. At this point, you should also address any red flags that concern you about any candidate.

During the discussion, tally up the interview scores for each candidate from all the interviewers. Typically, the candidate that stands out the most would have the highest scores anyway. Also, the interview score tally works well as a more objective tie-breaker in the event that more than one candidate stands out.

Through the discussion and the interview scores, you should be able to come up with at least a preferred candidate, or at best a preferred candidate plus one or two runner-ups. If you are extremely confident in the preferred candidate, you could go straight to offering them the job. If you are not confident in any one candidate, or even if you are, you can take some time to think about the candidates and/or apply more selection tests on them.

The Next Day (Or Two)

Assuming you still haven’t identified your preferred candidate yet, you can take a day or two to mull over the interviews, digest what was said, and think critically about how the interviewees would do in real-life situations in your work environment.

Just taking the time to think about it usually helps with making a final decision. However, if you are still undecided, or if your recruitment practices allow for more selection tests, then now would be the time to carry out these selection tests.

Selection tests include work sample tests, psychometric tests, and reference checks, et cetera. These will provide a different angle to view the job candidate and possibly give a more holistic view of them. You might confirm that this candidate is indeed as excellent as they say they are, or you might just learn that they were just bluffing in the interview and can’t actually do the job well.

Whatever you do, do it quickly, because you don’t want to lose the candidate to another employer or have the candidate lose interest in switching to working for you.

Once You Have Identified Your Preferred Candidate

Once you have come to a decision on your preferred candidate, quickly move to offer them the job. Check your local employment laws; in some places, you can ‘lock in’ the candidate with a verbal job offer and present them with a full written offer later on, while in other places only a written job offer is valid.

You have to move quickly here because, again, you don’t want to lose the candidate to another employer. If the candidate has applied to work for you, chances are they have also applied to every other employer similar to you at the same time too.

Also, in the event that your preferred candidate ultimately declines your job offer, if you have moved fast enough, you could swoop back in to offer the job to the runner-up candidate. This is assuming they could do the job well and also haven’t been snapped up by someone else.

After The Preferred Candidate Has Formally Accepted The Job

Congratulations! You have won this round.

But even after the preferred candidate has accepted the job offer, your work is still not yet done. You should keep in touch with the candidate to keep them informed about what will happen on their first day when they become a new hire. You should also prepare the orientation for them for the said first day. The new hire will need to know all the essentials and nuances about working in your work environment.

At this point, the recruitment process turns into the orientation and onboarding process, which will, in turn, become an ongoing leadership and management activity. A manager’s work is never done.

A Secret Technique To Do After The Job Interview Ends

A lot of hiring managers and recruiters will often focus on their preferred candidate to the point where they will ignore the other job applicants and interviewees. When you hear applicants say they “never heard back” after their job application or interview, this is the main reason why.

So the secret technique is to not ignore the runner-up job candidates and the other applicants who didn’t make the cut. Build a relationship with these people so that later down the road, when you have another vacancy or job opening, you can easily turn back to these past applicants again and see if they are interested in picking up the job. This way, you could skip through the whole job advertising and interviewing process, and skip out on the time and money that costs.

All the applicants have taken the time to apply for your job, so the least you can do for them is to let them know the outcome. People don’t like to be kept in the dark or ignored. And if a job applicant has had a significantly bad experience trying to apply to work for you, they are not likely to apply again.

In Conclusion

After the job interview is over, there are still multiple things you as a manager need to do immediately after the interview, in the period where you are deciding who to offer the job to, and after you have offered the job. Move quickly to secure your top job candidate before you lose them, and don’t forget to make sure all applicants are informed of their application’s outcome.