The Importance of Feedback

Feedback is a key part of your career journey – right from the get go of sending off your CV, to weekly/monthly sessions with your line manager or giving feedback yourself to help progress and develop employees. It’s in fact so important, that LinkedIn reported that people are 4 times more likely to consider your company for a future opportunity when you offer constructive feedback. They also found that 94% of talent would like to receive interview feedback, although only 41% had ever received interview feedback before.

Employers can have a real competitive, candidate experience advantage by giving simple constructive and considered feedback to prospects.

With recruitment; interview feedback doesn’t just sit with the employer – in order for us to truly understand the right role for you as a candidate, feedback on what you enjoy in your role, the type of company you want to work for, where your skill set lies and what culture fit is right for you is paramount.

Tom – Director

Feedback is critical for everyone’s progression and development and there is a general common courtesy of letting someone know why a decision has been made. Clients can do themselves real damage in not providing feedback. In marketing especially, it’s quite a close-knit community and if word spreads that a candidate has invested their time into a recruitment process and not received feedback, then that can discourage others from even applying in the first place.

In a candidate short market, you don’t want to cut people off before they’ve even started the process.

Feedback also really helps people to know where they can focus on for the future, and if they might know someone else who is more appropriate based on the feedback. You could actually turn prospects into advocates for the brand, who send others your way, even though you’ve not progressed them.

Ed – Director

With feedback, we often receive from clients a simple ‘no’, ‘not for us’ or ‘just not right’. The truth of this feedback is they are either holding back on being perceived as ‘rude’ about an individual and/or the interviewer has not really done a good structured interview and is going on a ‘feeling’ or ‘gut instinct’. This then opens itself to both conscious and unconscious bias.

When receiving structured feedback it is our job to deliver in a constructive way to leave the candidate positive from the experience, so it reflects well on the clients brand. This can often mean less is more. If you get several points, focus on one or two that will make a real difference to the individual. Listing reams of negatives will only demotivate an individual and knock their confidence.

Here are some of our top tips when it comes to giving interview feedback for both employers and employees:

• Be honest. Honesty is the best policy with interviews – it’s important not to waste anybody’s time or give false hopes, where possible give truthful feedback with examples of key thoughts.

• But not too, honest. Yes, honesty is the best policy, although ensure that feedback is constructive rather than airing on the personal and unprofessional side. It’s important for clients or candidates to have pointers that can build character and confidence positively.

• Don’t give stock answers. It’s very easy to give feedback such as ‘there were other candidates who suited the role better’ or ‘they weren’t quite right for us’. These responses aren’t typically the most useful, as it’s then difficult to understand why. Give examples and try and be specific.

• Be helpful. Interviews can be extremely useful meetings for both employer and employee – it can highlight the skills that are needed, where the gaps are in your company or the level of experience you really need. Giving helpful feedback, which is going to benefit the candidate or client is best. Feedback that they can learn from and take on board for next time, work wonders.

Here at MET we aim to give the most constructive and helpful feedback we can, to help progress both our candidates and client relationships.