How to Debrief Candidate Interviews with AI (Two Simple Methods)

But now it’s time to debrief the calls with the rest of your hiring team - hiring manager or client, to make a hiring decision.

Simple, right?

Unfortunately, not always. Hiring managers are notorious for their lack of time when it comes to interview debriefs.

So how can you get your job done without too much back and forth?

The simple answer is by letting an AI interview assistant handle this task for you and generate the job interview debriefs automatically. This saves all parties time and makes the interview process much easier for everyone involved.

The problem with interview debriefs

For most agency recruiters, debriefing interviews is one of the most annoying parts of the hiring process.

Here’s why:

1. Time-consuming

Just like the interview preparation tasks, debriefs are time consuming, but they’re essential to the hiring process. Especially if you manage multiple clients and requisitions, and hold several interviews per day, doing the debriefs can eat a significant portion of your time.

Imagine a company that wants to hire three new sales reps. You and your team have screened and interviewed dozens of candidates to fill those three vacancies. So, you have to collect information from other recruiters, compare notes, and see who the top candidates are.

Then, you have to connect with each one of your clients and debrief the various interviews they’ve had with candidates. All this takes time.

2. Inconsistent feedback

Despite having a checklist of interview questions, there are discrepancies in each interviewer’s style and way of handling candidate conversations. This leads to different information being collected from each candidate, making it harder to streamline your debriefs and reach a final decision.

3. Recency bias

It’s no surprise that the most recently-interviewed candidates are still fresh in your or your client’s mind compared to those you interviewed earlier in the week or even last week.

You may have had a couple of candidates or job seekers stand out, but you can’t really remember which ones! So your debriefing sessions will be biased.

4. Lack of structure

You may have received a document with a structure for interviews on day one when you joined this agency, but chances are few recruiters stick to that structure.

The result? Lots of mismatched information, absence of a standardized process, different evaluation criteria for candidates in the same role, among other challenges.

5. Vague notes

How are your note-taking skills during interviews? If you’re like most recruiters, probably not great, and you’re not to blame for it. In the end, your role is to get to know the candidate and build rapport, to sell them the role.

Focusing on notes instead of paying attention to the candidate is a sure way to make them feel less valued, and to compromise the candidate experience.

Not to mention your colleagues notes might be too cryptic to understand without a discussion. With vague, hand-written, and often incomplete notes, there’s a big chance you and your team are missing out on important information.

6. Hard to quantify skills

For effective interviews, you need consistency in evaluating both hard and soft skills. Hard, technical skills are easier to quantify, but what about soft ones?

Unexperienced recruiters might find this task challenging, resulting in subjective insights and biased interview data that can hinder the decision making process, especially when opinions on a candidate vary greatly.

So, although the candidate interview debrief process is important for recruiting teams, you may see them as a ‘necessary evil.’

Is there a way out?

As mentioned in the intro, artificial intelligence can help.  AI-powered tools like Carv can join your calls, listen in and take notes during interviews, and automate the debriefing process for you and your team, improving the overall interview experience.

Here’s how it works in practice.

What to look for in an interview debrief

First, let’s look at what an interview debrief should cover. When meeting with team members and other stakeholders, you should consider the following points:

• The candidate’s skills and qualifications: Do they match the job requirements? Are their hard and soft skills aligned with the role’s needs? What about their technical knowledge and certifications required?
• Adaptability and willingness to learn: Evaluate the candidate's adaptability, especially in fast-paced roles, and their eagerness to learn new skills.
• Behavioral indicators: Consider their responses to questions about past experiences and how they apply their skills in professional situations. Are they excited and motivated about the role, is it their dream job? Are they able to manage themselves and take initiative?
• Assessment results: In case the role required them to go through some assessments, what was the candidate’s performance?
• Cultural fit: Identify whether the candidate will fit the company’s culture, contributing to higher employee retention and job satisfaction.
• Logistics and practical considerations: Ensure the candidate’s salary expectations align with the hiring manager’s offering. This is a big friction point in many interviews. Assess the candidate’s comfort with commuting or their preference for a fully-remote position.
• Overall impression and red flags: Be aware of inconsistencies in the resume or any potential red flags. Form an overall impression while being mindful to distinguish gut feelings from potential biases.

This type of debrief template can help guide your discussion with the hiring manager or client during the call, to make sure you stay on point and keep things structured.

All right, now let’s go to the practical part and see how you can use an AI assistant like Carv to get the debrief done for you in seconds.

How to use AI tools to debrief candidate interviews

There are several ways you can use AI to debrief candidate interviews, reducing your admin time and ensuring consistency in your logged ATS data.

Recording analysis

The first option is to record the candidate interview. This can be as a video interview or regular phone call, which you can then upload to an AI transcription tool for automatic transcription.

You can then ask an AI assistant to analyze the transcript for you, highlighting key points discussed, candidate responses, and so on.

AI tools like Otter for transcriptions and ChatGPT for interpretation can support you, but the answers might not be consistent.

So let’s move to approach number #2, which is more effective and less prone to error.

AI meeting assistant

The second option is to use an AI assistant that can do both - join your calls, take notes, and summarize, transcript, or debrief the call for you automatically.

Carv, for example, is built to do exactly that. The AI workmate joins recruiters where they work -in virtual interviews, face-to-face meetings, and phone calls, listening in and taking notes. After a call, Carv provides a summary, transcript, and action items.

Moreover, it can directly create a candidate profile or write-up for you, which can serve as basis for the debrief call.

Alternatively, you can ask the AI workmate to write your debrief by feeding it an example structure, like the one we’ve shared above. This way, you don’t have to switch between tools for your recordings, transcripts, and summaries or debriefs.

The nicest part is that you can connect all the interviews your team had with a candidate under their profile, and ask the AI assistant whether the candidate’s answers were consistent. You can also ask Carv to summarize the call between the candidate and hiring manager, so you can form an impression before talking to the HM yourself.

Note: If you have recordings of interviews from other tools, you can also upload those to Carv, connect them to the candidate in your ATS, and let the AI workmate handle the rest, from candidate presentation to interview debriefs.

More AI capabilities for debriefing interviews

Next to taking over your admin tasks, AI can help you improve the quality-of-hire and time-to-hire by improving your agency’s overall recruitment process effectiveness.

1. Sentiment and emotion analysis

It’s easy to miss aspects like tone and emotion when conducting several interviews in a single day. However, using artificial intelligence, you can analyze the candidate’s tone and emotions during the interview, be it a video or audio recording.

If you’re using Carv, simply ask the AI workmate about the general feel of the interview and see whether it detected changes in the candidate’s tone or emotions between calls.

Were they more stressed during the call with the hiring manager? Did they maintain a professional attitude in all the calls? Were their answers consistent, or did they adapt their responses a little too much just to get the job?

2. Keyword and topic extraction

Interviews make way for lots of topics. As you’ve seen from the list above, there are many points you need to tackle with each interviewee. So, it’s easy to get lost in all of this.

AI recruitment tools like Carv can help you pinpoint the key topics discussed, including specific keywords from the interview transcript.

For example, if you want to surface only candidates who mentioned a certain topic, you can ask Carv to find them for you. You can also give Carv’s AI workmate a list of talking points and ask it whether all those points have been covered or not by a candidate.

Ensuring all your main points are covered allows you to compare candidates easily and ensure they are all on equal footing.

3. Comparison to job requirements

Another way to use AI in debriefing candidate interviews is to add the job requirements and ask the AI tool to compare the candidate’s responses to the requirements. Do they check all the boxes?

If you’re using Carv, you can upload the job description and requirements to the platform, connect them to the candidate, and ask the AI workmate to make the comparison between the resume, the answers they gave during interviews, and the job requirements doc.

4. Follow-up communication

Finally, you can use an AI tool like Carv to speed up your interview preparation and follow-ups, and consequently your entire recruitment process.

With generic interview question generators, results may be off for some roles or types of interviews. However, with a tool like Carv, you can get follow-up questions and post-interview communication done for you in seconds, with the right context and tone of voice.

Over to you

Although essential to the recruitment process, the interview debrief stage can be long, tricky, and above tiresome. If you can cut some of the admin to speed things up for you, clients, and candidates, you should do it.

Using AI to debrief candidate interviews save hours of talks, streamlines the process for all parties involved, and contributes to a better candidate experience.

If this sounds like something you could use some help with, get a Carv account below - it’s free to start with.