How to run an effective interview debrief

Interview debriefs are a critical moment in the hiring process. Done well, they bring clarity to hiring teams, ensure decisions are based on shared evidence, and help improve future interviews. 

Yet many teams still treat debriefs as optional or informal, especially where the number of people involved is low. But as more stakeholders are involved, and the sheer number of interviews increases, you risk misalignment, bias, and missed insights. 

You need a better system that increases your chances (and your confidence) of making better hiring decisions as you scale.

So, we sought advice from two phenomenal thinkers on hiring in tech. Jan Chong, VP of Engineering at Tally and Jill Macri, Partner at Growth by Design Talent, shared their best practices for quality interview debriefs. If you’re struggling to make confident decisions after your interview loops, then this post is for you.

Key takeaways

• An interview debrief is essential for fair, consistent, and efficient hiring decisions. Not just a casual chat, it’s a structured meeting where interviewers share independent feedback, align on evidence, and decide next steps.
• Structure and preparation make debriefs effective. Scorecards, rubrics, and a clear agenda ensure feedback stays focused, evidence-based, and free from bias.
• Debriefs save time and improve outcomes at scale. By consolidating perspectives in one session, recruiters reduce delays, increase alignment with hiring managers, and create a more transparent, candidate-friendly process.

What is an interview debrief?

An interview debrief is a structured session held after a round of candidate interviews, where the hiring manager, recruiter, and interviewers come together to align on feedback and decide next steps. A formal debrief ensures that all perspectives are heard, evaluations are based on evidence, and decisions are made consistently.

A proper interview debrief ensures that:

• Every stakeholder has an equal opportunity to share their evaluation.
• Feedback is given before people influence one another, reducing groupthink.
• Decisions are made based on clear evidence and agreed-upon criteria, not gut feelings.

By defining the interview debrief as a consistent, structured step in the hiring process, companies can significantly improve fairness, reduce bias, and make better hiring decisions.

What happens in an interview debrief?

On the surface, the purpose of the debrief is simple: get to a decision on the candidate. In reality, while vital, that is the least you should expect to achieve from a high-quality debrief. 

There are four important outcomes that you want to design your debrief process around:

1. Get the info you, the hiring manager, need to make as accurate a decision as possible.
2. Calibrate everyone on what good looks like, what’s important, and what’s nice-to-have in a candidate.
3. Get buy-in (not necessarily agreement) from the hiring team on the hiring decision. Even if some disagree, they can commit to the choice if you are transparent about why it was made.
4. Provide a feedback-loop on the quality of the interview process itself. The quality of the signal discussed in the debrief will help everyone involved realize whether you/they need to improve the interviews.

Making a decision on the candidate is just the start. Debriefs are key to building a successful, always-improving hiring machine, and strengthening the fabric of the team.

Who should lead interview debriefs?

That’s simple. “Hiring managers own debriefs,” says Jill. “They’re responsible for the quality of the debrief, because ultimately they are tasked with making a decision and the debrief is where you get a lot of data points to inform that. So it’s the hiring manager’s job.”

While the hiring manager has final responsibility for the quality of the debrief, the other interviewers also have important responsibilities without which it would be impossible to achieve the four outcomes above. 

Specifically, other stakeholders need to run good interviews that focus on the agreed-upon competencies, and provide written feedback in a timely manner (within 24 hours max), alongside a recommendation.

Why good interview debriefs matter

Skipping or rushing an interview debrief might seem like a time-saver, but it often leads to poor outcomes. When run properly, debriefs bring major benefits for recruitment teams:

• Better decision-making: Interviews are inherently subjective. A single interviewer’s impression may be positive or negative for reasons unrelated to job performance. By consolidating multiple perspectives in a debrief, hiring teams get a more balanced, well-rounded candidate review.
• Faster alignment: Without a formal debrief, recruiters often chase feedback for days through emails, Slack, or ATS reminders. A dedicated meeting forces alignment in real time, allowing the team to reach a decision on the spot. This shortens time-to-hire and ensures top candidates aren’t left waiting.
• Improved consistency: When debriefs happen after every interview process, companies ensure that each candidate is evaluated against the same framework. This makes it easier to compare candidates fairly across different interviewers, roles, and hiring cycles.
• Candidate fairness: Perhaps most importantly, structured debriefs minimize bias. They require interviewers to bring evidence from the interview (specific answers or examples) to justify their assessment. Candidates are judged on their skills and behaviors, not on superficial factors or unconscious bias.

How to conduct an interview debrief

Here’s how hiring managers at Metaview, and many top-performing companies in tech, run debriefs:

1. Prepare in advance

Hiring managers (HMs) should go into the debrief meeting with a good sense for the areas of the candidate’s profile that need deeper discussion. So before the meeting they need to:

• Read the written feedback from the interviewers.
• Identify key themes and be ready to summarize them for the group.
• Know which areas they want to probe deeper on and have questions lined up accordingly.

If you're struggling to get interview feedback written in a timely manner, then Jill has two recommendations:

1. Schedule the debrief ahead of time. Don't wait for the feedback then schedule the debrief. That way, it’s clear to every interviewer that if they fail to submit feedback, it will be called out and will slow down the process.
2. Make sure 15-30 minutes in each interviewer’s calendar is allocated to writing the feedback on the day of the interview (the sooner the better).

The importance of the written feedback shouldn’t be understated. Not only does it force interviewers to synthesize their learnings, it also reduces the chances of less confident members of the team conforming to what others recommend in the heat of a discussion.

2. Go around the room

Each interviewer then shares a quick overview (1-2 minutes) of their findings and an assessment of the candidate. Nothing shared here should be a surprise to the HM. Jan recommends these overviews cover:

• Judgment on the candidate’s overall performance in the interviewer’s focus area.
• Particular strengths.
• Weaknesses or other areas of concern.

(Get more of Jan's thoughts about how to run an effective hiring process)

3. Summarize the discussion

The HM then summarizes the key themes, and shares their current thinking around the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. This is a summary of the feedback being provided, so it usually starts with a phrase like "sounds like…”, or “what I'm hearing is..." and ends with the question “is that right?”. 

The goal is to:

• Be transparent on your current thinking and where you’re leaning.
• Give interviewers an opportunity to flag that they have been misunderstood.

4. Dive deeper

Deep dives should focus on areas of concern where the extent of the weakness is important to the final decision, and areas where there was not enough information provided in the feedback so far. 

This is, of course, led by the HM, and there are a few things to be mindful of:

• Don’t completely discredit interviewers’ “feelings”, but ask questions that help them understand where those feelings came from. Probe for examples of the candidate’s behaviors to support their judgment, and ask questions like “Can you remember when you first started to feel that way about the candidate?”
• Your goal is not (necessarily) to get interviewers to change their minds. Again, your goal is just to get maximum signal out of your teammates. Where this is tough, listening back to sections of the interview recordings is a game-changer.
• Even if you’re personally inclined towards hiring the candidate, be honest on whether you have enough information on each of their strengths, too. You want your understanding of their strengths to be just as extensive as your understanding of their weaknesses.

5. Make the decision

Based on the evidence, the team decides whether to advance the candidate, reject them, or gather additional data (e.g., a follow-up interview). This is the most impactful way of ensuring goals 2-4 (above) are met, maximizing your ability to improve your hiring calibration and performance over time.

Sometimes this won’t be possible. But you should be able to make a decision more often than not. In Jill’s experience, the right frequency is around 80% of the time. Below that, and your interview process is likely off. Either there is a lack of alignment on what interviewers should look for in their interviews, the interviewers are not well trained at eliciting signal, or you’re not confident in what you need to see in the candidate.

And you won’t always have agreement between all interviewers. Relying on consensus means that:

• You miss out on outliers. People with insane strengths in a particular area that may not have been seen in all of the interviews given each had a different focus area.
• Every interviewer's recommendation needs the same weight. That’s not realistic, and can actually make the barrier to becoming an interviewer too high.

As long as the HM can use this opportunity to explain their decision clearly, there won’t be any ill effects of disagreeing with the recommendations of your interviewers.

6. Create action items and follow-up steps

The recruiter prepares debrief notes, documents the decision, ensures the ATS is updated, and assigns who will communicate next steps to the candidate. 

Transparency is key: even rejected candidates should receive timely and respectful updates.

Best practices for better debriefs

A successful interview debrief doesn’t happen by accident. It requires careful preparation and strong facilitation. Here’s how to get it right:

• Ensure all interviewers complete scorecards before the debrief begins. This prevents interviewers from being swayed by each other’s opinions. If feedback is written down first, the discussion is grounded in authentic, independent impressions.
• Follow a structured discussion flow. Many teams use a round-robin format, where each interviewer speaks in turn. This ensures that every voice is heard and avoids situations where the most senior person dominates.
• Keep the focus on evidence. Encourage interviewers to cite specific examples from the interview. Share what the candidate said, how they solved a problem, or how they behaved in a scenario. Feedback like “seems confident” is less useful than “explained their thought process clearly when solving the coding challenge.”
• Use interview rubrics to ground feedback in agreed-upon criteria. A rubric provides clear definitions of what strong, average, and weak performance looks like for each competency. When interviewers anchor their evaluations to these standards, the team can make decisions based on shared benchmarks instead of subjective impressions.
• Assign a facilitator. Whether it’s the recruiter or hiring manager, someone should lead the discussion, keep it on track, and ensure the meeting doesn’t spiral into tangents. The facilitator’s role is to move the group toward a decision while making sure all perspectives are captured.

Conduct impactful interview debriefs today

Debriefs are not only a crucial step for arriving at the right decision for the candidate at hand, but also for improving your interview process and team fabric over time. Remember:

1. It’s the hiring manager’s responsibility to run an effective debrief.
2. Read written feedback before the debrief so you’re prepared to dig in where it matters most to your decision.
3. Book the debrief into the calendar and create the expectation that written feedback is available for you to review in advance.
4. After going around the room and sharing your current understanding of their recommendations, probe the interviewers for more info on the areas where you feel least confident in your candidate assessment.
5. Let the hiring team into your thinking when making the decision, even if you’re disagreeing with their recommendations. It’s one of the best ways to improve calibration among interviewers and generate the buy-in needed to set the candidate up for success.

If you think this approach to running debriefs would work well for you too, then download the one-page guide below. And for the best AI recruiting tools that ensure a high-value interview process, try Metaview for free.