You know the feeling. The 7th interview of the day has just finished. Your mouth is dry, your back aches, your brain is mush. All the candidates that you met during the day merge in your mind, a couple you already can’t remember at all, like the third movie on a long haul flight.
One diamond sticks in your mind as the candidate you must have. You wait just long enough to make it look like you’re not desperate to secure their services and then you make the call. The call goes well. There are tears of joy (that’s just from you), swelling affirmations, definitive reassurances and shared resolutions for a wonderful future. Your next stop is the corkscrew and an evening basking in the joy of a job well done, another loose tile replaced on the roof. Glug, glug, sigh….
And a bit like the expired windows on an advent calendar, while the victorious candidate rings parents and friends, excitedly sharing news of the new adventure, the other six windows grow dark and cold. That first evening, for the six, hope remains, “they won’t get back to us that quick, it’ll take a day or two”; the days go by…no news is followed by…no news…the candle flame of hope gutters and blows out. By the time the email announcing failure arrives, it isn’t even news.
The optimists amongst those who have not succeeded (aka the failures), might decide to chance their arms and request some feedback. Good luck with that one. The celebratory wine bottle has been emptied and long sent for recycling, the interview roadshow has moved on to other fields of gold, the inquisitors have been replaced by the onboarders and the contract writers. The game is over, don’t ask us to review VAR at this stage, we’d love to but we’re just too busy.
I had the great privilege, last week, of conducting some UK interviews for an outstanding international school in Asia. You can tell when a school does interviews well. The attention to detail, the personal contacts, the forensic selection criteria and filtering procedures; the focus on sharing rich context, student stories, essential details. And, of course, the insistence on quality feedback for the unsuccessful candidates. Too busy? Not this school.
So, why bother?
I can give you a number of reasons and I offer the view that these are ALL reasons to take the time to feedback well, but any one of them is a good enough reason to pick.
- I wasn’t always great at doing interviews. If you weren’t born to it (and I haven’t met many who were), then how are you supposed to learn unless someone helps you? Isn’t that who we are? Teachers? Or do we just teach the people that bring us material benefit?
- Most schools that I work with have wonderfully rhetorical vision and mission statements about making a positive contribution to society. So leaving unsuccessful applicants to swing in the breeze without a word of encouragement isn’t exactly congruent with that mission, is it? Society badly needs good teachers, treating them like discarded milk cartons is hypocritical and counterintuitive.
- There are hideous projections of global teacher shortages by 2030 – which means that if your school isn’t already struggling to find good teachers, it will be struggling pretty soon. Teachers are heavily influenced by the street talk about international schools; reputations are hard to shake once a school has been pinned with a social media identity. Each teacher that is left with a positive final narrative about your school becomes an ambassador for you. Positive developmental feedback is so rare, it gets talked about – I know this to be true from my own experiences – so post interview feedback is a form of marketing which can be priceless. The reverse is also true, ‘you never get feedback from that school, they don’t respond…’
- Unsuccessful teachers remember how they were treated. When future vacancies arise in your school, if they were unceremoniously dumped last time, they won’t apply. And they won’t tell their friends to apply either. If you treated them with care and professional respect, they’ll try again and they will often cite this reason in their applications.
Let’s look at the equation of fairness.
What does a school put into an individual interview?
15-30 minutes to read the application (I’m being generous with this number and excluding the short-listers who go straight to degree/previous schools/ current position); possibly 15 minutes to review an online video; some shortlisting consideration time and then the interview itself. 2 hours? 3 hours at most per shortlisted candidate?
And what does each candidate put in?
- An unquantifiable amount of nervous anticipation – can I really move to …? What about my partner? How would my kids feel? Can I leave my parents/ cat/ potted plants…?
- Several hours of drafting and redrafting an application, finding certificates, looking up addresses of previous schools, contacting referees
- The awkward meeting with a current line manager to say that they are applying out, managing often difficult consequences of those meetings
- A wait of days or weeks to find out if the application was successful
- Follow up activities if required such as online video interviews, personality tests etc…
- Travel to interview
- Interview
- Wait
- Ask for feedback
- Wait…
We talk a lot, don’t we, about being human. Remembering our humanity. Having a duty to society. Trying to live and work with integrity.
Well there is no integrity in failing to tell candidates that they haven’t been shortlisted (this happens in many, many schools); there is no integrity in leaving unsuccessful candidates in the dark for days or weeks after their interviews; and there is no integrity in failing to give professional feedback to an individual who has made the effort to secure a position in your organisation.
Assessment for learning isn’t just about what happens in the classroom. Integrity is about what you do when no one is looking. Don’t be too busy to give feedback to the people who bought the dream that you sold.
