Giving Feedback

Feedback is asked for constantly and provided rarely, usually because of a fear of saying something actionable against you. Both concerns are manageable.

The principles in “Giving Feedback” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating the planning resource can use it to coordinate the administrative work around assessment, identify stages that repeatedly expand and plan capacity, while keeping the hiring decision tied to job-relevant evidence instead of raw activity totals.

For an independent benchmark, compare the process with WHO guidance on mental health at work; the useful test is whether the local method remains job-related, proportionate and explainable.

Who should get it

Anybody who invested substantial time: an exercise, a panel, a final round.

Not every applicant, which is not feasible at volume.

A reasonable line: anybody who met a human or spent more than an hour.

What to say

Specific to their performance against the criteria.

One or two things that were strong.

One or two things that were missing or weaker, with an example.

And what that means: not selected this time, or selected for a different role, or encouraged to apply again.

Three or four sentences.

What to avoid

Comparisons with other candidates, which is both unhelpful and exposes you.

Anything relating to protected characteristics, obviously, but also anything that could be read that way — comments about presentation, accent, manner or culture fit are the risk area.

Promises about future applications you cannot keep.

And vagueness. "It was very competitive" is not feedback and candidates recognise it as a non-answer.

The fear about legal exposure

The concern is that specific feedback creates evidence for a claim.

In practice the opposite is more often true: a specific, job-related reason recorded at the time is a defence, and a vague brush-off invites the suspicion that the real reason was something else.

Where a decision was made on job-relevant criteria and documented, saying so is safe. Where it was not, the feedback is not the problem.

Written or spoken

Written is quicker and creates a record.

Spoken allows questions and lands better for senior candidates.

Offer written by default and a call on request for anybody who reached a late stage.

Keeping it to five minutes

Draw it from the assessment record, which already contains the evidence notes if the recording note was followed.

A template with two fields — strengths, gaps — filled from the scoring.

The reason feedback is expensive is usually that nobody wrote anything down during the assessment, which is a different problem.

When the answer is awkward

Somebody was not close.

Say it kindly and honestly: the gap was in this area, and it was substantial.

People handle honest answers better than evasive ones, and a candidate who is not close benefits more from knowing than from encouragement.

What to check

Who currently gets feedback at your organisation?

Is it drawn from records or invented afterwards?

Does it reference the criteria?

And have you read what your team actually sends?

The point

Specific job-related feedback is a defence, not an exposure.

A vague brush-off invites the suspicion that the real reason was something else.

Underlying all of this

Almost everything in this collection reduces to one discipline: write down what the job requires, assess that thing directly, record the evidence, and look at your own outcomes afterwards. None of it requires buying anything, and organisations that do those four things consistently outperform ones running longer processes built from instruments chosen before the requirements were known.

The recurring pattern

The recurring failure across every section here is the same: measuring what is convenient rather than what matters, then never checking whether it predicted anything. The check is an afternoon of work once a year, and it is the step that separates a process that improves from one that merely persists.