We tend to think of our memory as an accurate recollection of reality. In fact, though, memory is notoriously prone to errors. It can be influenced and skewed by all sorts of things, from our mood and beliefs to external factors like another person’s comments.
The brain also likes to prioritize certain details and discard others when forming memories. For example, if it comes up during an interview that a candidate roots for your favorite sports team, you might latch onto that detail while completely forgetting more relevant facts like the last job they held or their technical certifications.
This is why relying on more than just memory is crucial when assessing candidates after an interview. Taking accurate, detailed interview notes can help you overcome the shortcomings of the human brain and make more objective, data-based hiring decisions.
The Importance of Taking Good Interview Notes
Taking good interview notes helps recruiters and hiring managers:
Listen more attentively
Putting pen to paper keeps you focused on the conversation at hand rather than having your mind inadvertently wander to a load of laundry you forgot to put in the dryer or what you’re going to eat for lunch.
Remember key points
Days or even weeks may pass between your interview and the time you make an offer. As we just discussed, human memory is often unreliable. Notes will give you a concrete record of a candidate’s most noteworthy qualifications so that you can refer back to it when making a final decision.
Flag information for follow-up
Rarely is a hiring decision made in the middle of an interview. Aside from speaking with additional candidates, you’ll want to complete many follow-up tasks after the interview, like cross-referencing your notes with the job description, double-checking certain qualifications, or speaking with references about specific topics. Your notes help ensure you don’t miss any important follow-up steps.
Make collaborative hiring easier
You can easily share your notes with other stakeholders and vice versa, simplifying a hiring process when there are multiple decision-makers involved.
Related: Collaborative Hiring: How to Involve Your Employees
Avoid candidate confusion
We’ve heard horror stories of hiring managers making an offer to a candidate only to discover later that they confused their finalists for a different applicant. Interview notes help you distinguish candidates from one another and avoid a disastrous case of mistaken identity.
Make more objective decisions
To make accurate hires, it’s essential to compare candidates fairly against one another without letting your own biases get in the way. Taking good notes helps you put any personal impressions aside and zero in on the most important job qualifications.
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How to Take Good Interview Notes
Follow these steps to take concise, informative notes during interviews with candidates.
1. Use a dedicated note-taking space
Avoid using a stray sheet of paper or the back of a random file folder to take notes. Even taking notes on the candidate’s resume is risky since you want to keep your thoughts as confidential as possible. To stay organized and maintain the security of candidate information, use a physical notebook or an app on your phone that’s dedicated solely to interview note-taking.
2. Walk the candidate through what you’re doing
Before you dive into the interview, inform the candidate that you’ll be taking notes. This will prevent them from getting distracted and assure them that they still have your full attention even if you’re writing. It can also be helpful to let them know why you’re taking notes, i.e., “I want to record the key points of our conversation, which helps ensure a fair and accurate hiring process.”
3. Jot down direct quotes
Try to avoid “translating” the candidate’s answers into your own words. As much as possible, record direct words and phrases from their responses. This helps keep a precise record and ensures that neither meaning nor context is lost in translation.
4. Note highlights and new information
You don’t need to write down every conversation detail; that would be inefficient and impractical. Note the most important highlights, especially anything you didn’t already know from their resume and cover letter.
Here are some of the most important details to take notes on:
- Technical skills
- Soft skills
- Prior experience
- Achievements
- Work style
- Personality
- Career goals
All of the above are directly relevant to the candidate’s ability to perform the job and succeed in your company, so you’ll want to remember them when it’s time to decide.
5. Pay attention to specifics
Specific details are what will help you remember individual candidates and set them apart from others. For example, it’s likely that if you’re hiring for a software developer job, you’ll have several candidates who cite experience with your preferred programming language. If you merely write down ‘JavaScript,’ you have no way of differentiating between Candidate A and Candidate B.
Instead, log specifics that are unique to a candidate. In this case, maybe Candidate A described how they built a mobile app that allowed their company’s customers to schedule and change appointments virtually 24/7, and Candidate B has experience completing updates and maintenance on a B2C e-commerce website. These details are distinct and will help you differentiate between similarly qualified applicants.
6. Ask the candidate to repeat themself
There will inevitably be times when you miss something the candidate said or they transition to a new topic while you’re still writing about the last one. In these cases, it’s appropriate to ask the candidate to repeat themself–one more reason it makes sense to inform them about your note-taking at the start of the interview.
7. Consider recording the conversation
Listening and writing simultaneously takes practice. If you find it hard to master, consider recording the entirety of the conversation with a handheld voice recorder or a phone app. This allows for easy playback and guarantees you never miss an important bit of information.
If you decide to record interviews, you’ll want to inform candidates how the audio will be stored and used. Speak with your HR team about whether you need to obtain explicit consent from the candidate–this will vary by state.
8. Figure out the note-taking system that works best for you
While your candidate scoring system should be standardized among all interviewers, your note-taking method doesn’t have to be. Some interviewers may like the simplicity of an app, while others may prefer good old-fashioned pen and paper. Use the method that works best for you.
You can also come up with your own shorthand codes and abbreviations to help you take notes faster. For example, if you’re interviewing IT candidates, you might use ‘eng’ for engineering, ‘prg’ for programming, ‘alg’ for algorithm, and so on. If there’s a topic you want to follow up on, you might denote that with a circle around the word.
9. Use an interview note-taking template
Some may find it helpful to use an interview note template with prompts to record various types of information. Here’s a basic example:
Notice how some sections prompt you to check a box denoting whether the candidate possesses a necessary skill or trait, while other sections allow for free-response note-taking. Again, you can customize your own template based on what’s most useful for you and the most important information you want to record.
10. Expand after the fact
After each interview, spend a few additional minutes going over what you wrote down, adding more detail and clarifying any information that might seem unclear later. It’s a great strategy to automatically build this time into interview blocks when scheduling. So, if your interviews are 45 minutes long, block off an entire hour so you have 10 to 15 minutes afterward for review and reflection.
11. Complete timely scoring
Your notes should not be the defining document used to make a hiring decision. That’s what candidate scoring sheets are for. Scoring sheets are a formal, objective way of assessing candidates on predetermined criteria using a standardized rating system. Taking notes during the interview makes it much easier and faster to complete these scoring sheets.
By establishing a system that works for you and sticking to a consistent process for interview note-taking, you’ll be equipped with all of the information you need to assess candidates fairly and make an informed decision on who to hire.
Related: How to Shortlist Candidates for Interviews (With Criteria Examples)
