What Happens After the Interview?
By Stefan Mai
•
You submitted your last answer, asked a question, said goodbye, and now you're staring at your phone wondering if you bombed it or crushed it. Spoiler: you probably can't tell. But let's pull back the curtains on the other side right while you wait.
I've sat through hundreds of debriefs as an interviewer at Meta and bar raiser at Amazon, and the process is way less mysterious than candidates think. There's a formula. Some variance, sure, but mostly predictable steps that your feedback goes through before you get that call from your recruiter.
What Your Interviewer Is Writing Down
Your interview just ended. Your interviewer is now staring at a form that they need to fill out before moving on with their day. In many cases, they're going to have a rough transcription of your interview either by writing down the words you've said or scratch notes they've taken during the interview. It's popular for interviewers to include timestamps (like "0:05 Candidate started coding...") to help them remember where you were in the interview and to try to benchmark against other candidates.
Example Notes
But the most important thing they're doing is making an assessment. Here's what they're capturing:
Technical Interviews
For coding or system design interviews, interviewers note basic facts first. Did you get to a working solution? Was it optimal? Any major issues that would have broken things in production? This stuff is pretty binary and what a lot of candidates are assuming they're being evaluated on.
Then comes the judgement, but not "candidate was good at coding" or "candidate got the right pieces for the system design". They're answering specific questions like "Would this person have made more progress with another 10 minutes?" "Did they have a structured approach or were they throwing darts?" "Did they course-correct when things went sideways?"
Companies will often try to steer these assessments by giving explicit "competencies" or "signals" that they're looking for. "Logical and maintainable code" or "solution design" are broad categories that push interviewers to look for specific things.
These judgments can make the difference between a hire and no-hire even if your solution wasn't perfect. I've seen candidates with buggy code get a "hire" because they showed they'd figure it out with more time or explained orally their next steps before the interview ended. I've also seen candidates with perfect solutions get a "no-hire" because they couldn't explain their thinking and the interviewer felt like they had memorized the pieces.
Interviewers are trained to assess your trajectory, not just your final answer. If you got stuck but showed good problem-solving instincts, that's actually pretty valuable signal.
Behavioral Interviews
Behavioral interviews most often get broken down by competencies or signals. Your interviewer isn't writing a story about you. They're filling out a rubric.
For a "Bias for Action" signal, they might write: "Candidate is above our hiring bar. They proactively identified an important issue with the payment flow and shipped a fix within a week. Small caveat: their follow-up communication was messy, but this is coachable."
Notice the structure - signal, evidence, caveat, judgment. Those are common pieces.
Behavioral interviews often include a levelling assessment as well. "This candidate seemed to be operating as an L6, but only for the last several months. I'd be weakly inclined for L6 but give an average confidence hire for L5."
Interviewers who care about the process (to be fair: there are a lot of interviewers who don't!) will try to make their feedback reflect a structured decision that isn't just "I liked them" or "I didn't like them".
Many interviewer training programs will include explicit instructions for interviewers to hide their judgement from the candidate. It's a terrible experience to interview with someone who is letting you know they think you're bad at every step of the interview. As such, frequently candidates will misread their own performance "It seemed like I answered every question they asked, so I must have done well." when the reality might be "I got everything I needed in the first 20 minutes and wanted to make sure they felt good about the process." Be careful about drawing unsupported conclusions from your experience in the interview!
Screening Interviews
If this was just a phone screen, your interviewer is making a quick call: move forward or pass.
Very occasionally they'll request a second screen. But internal data at most big companies shows you don't get much extra signal from a follow-up screen, so interviewer training explicitly discourages this. If an interviewer is on the fence, the guidance is usually "let's pass."
Screening interviews often have a lower bar than onsite interviews. Companies do this because they only saw a small slice of your skills, and there's natural variance. You might crush the screen and still struggle in the onsite. It happens.
Often the screening interview will also attempt to identify a target level for the onsite interview. If they were trying to hire you for an L6 position and the interview went ok but surfaced gaps for that level, the onsite may be scaled down to an L5. There is almost always some leeway in the process to up-level or down-level at later stages, but companies are trying to hone in on the right level for you so that they can make the interview as customized as possible. You're often not being asked the same questions in an interview where you're targeted for an L5 vs an L4.
Onsite Interviews
Ok, you finished your last interview of the day. What now?
The Waiting Game
Most big companies wait for all interviews to complete before making any decisions. If you bombed your morning interviews and still got afternoon interviews, that doesn't mean you're doing well. Startups and smaller companies are different - they'll sometimes cut the day short, but FAANG almost never does.
Before things get started, someone reviews all the feedback to make sure it doesn't include protected characteristics or inappropriate judgments. Comments like "I didn't like him" or "seems too old for this role" get flagged and removed.
Once all feedback is in, someone (usually a recruiter or loop lead) does a quick first pass. There's an exceptional path here if you either absolutely crushed it or totally bombed it.
If you crushed it, your recruiter might reach out even before the official decision. They want to keep you warm.
If you bombed it, the process stops here. Your recruiter or a loop lead will have a quick chat: "Is this worth discussing?" If all your interviews were "no hire," the answer is usually no. You get a call or email pretty quickly.
If your interview went really bad - like, all strong "no hire" signals - companies will often do a post-mortem on your screening interview. What did we miss? Why did we waste everyone's time? Companies evolve their processes defensively. They look for places where they wasted time or hired low performers. They typically don't look at places where they missed someone exceptional. Because of these reviews, hiring processes tend to drift toward conservatism over time.
The Debrief Meeting
Most companies have some version of a loop debrief. This is where all your interviewers (or their feedback) gets discussed together.
A loop lead or bar raiser runs the meeting (or email thread). They're looking for inconsistencies. "Alfred noted that problem-solving was strong, but Jan seemed to see some gaps in her interview. What happened?"
Sometimes Alfred clarifies: "Oh yeah, it wasn't that strong. I was just noting it was a high point relative to the rest of the interview."
Sometimes it gets contentious. "No, I'm not sure what Alfred was seeing, but this candidate definitely didn't meet our bar." But honestly, most of the time interviewers look for ways to harmonize their inputs. Nobody wants to be the one blocking a hire if everyone else is positive. Interviewers are sometimes embarrassed when their feedback is outside of a broad consensus.
The Narrative
While all this is happening, someone is assembling a narrative about you. Sometimes it's informal and used as an opening statement: "John showed up really strong in behavioral and seems coachable. We saw some weak points in coding, but this was expected for an ML-leaning engineer."
Sometimes the recruiter puts together a formal write-up that gets presented in later stages.
But in either case there's a story that gets attached to your performance and will be carried through the rest of the process. This narrative matters. A lot.
The Final Decision
The final step is usually a hiring committee, candidate review, or "quorum." Different companies do this differently:
- Amazon: The loop debrief meeting IS the final decision. No one else weighs in.
- Meta and Google: Directors and above make the final decision based on the packet.
Hiring committees have limited bandwidth. They're spending maybe 2-3 minutes per candidate unless there's debate. They're mostly reading the narrative and summaries, not diving into every detail. But directors love to poke and prod to make sure they're not missing anything.
The upside of this process is they're theoretically less biased by personal characteristics or "I didn't vibe with them" reactions. The downside: they're making a decision based on a few paragraphs.
Hiring committees will take interviewer reputation into account. "Sarah rejects candidates at 2x the average rate, so this might be biased" or "Emily is incredibly strong at system design, I trust her judgment here." Your interviewers' track records matter.
The discussion can go any number of different ways, but almost always comes down to risk. What's the worst case scenario if we hire this person? As we discussed earlier, hiring processes are forged by false positives (rather than false negatives), so these committees are trying to surface how things can go sideways.
This doesn't mean they're not going to take any risk! In fact, a lot of risks can be mitigated by signals gathered in the interview process. As one example, showing a growth trajectory and being coachable in your behavioral interview really helps "Yeah, they struggled with system design, but they clearly learn fast and take feedback well. I think they'll get up to speed on systems at our scale fairly quickly."
Hiring committees are often subtly swayed by problems they're reacting to recently. Their oncalls have been a swamp lately, so they're nixing candidates with seem light on operational excellence. Or their org has a bunch of high-level engineers who aren't contributing code so now they want to ensure their staff hires are all strong in their coding interviews. These aren't things you control, but they are part of the reality of the process.
Follow-Up Interviews
Sometimes the committee needs more data. "Jim just didn't get much information about how the candidate deals with conflict. Can we get a follow-up that dives into this?"
If that happens, notes are taken, the follow-up is conducted, and then the hiring committee reconvenes with the additional information.
Getting a follow-up interview is a good sign overall. It means that there's enough potential upside for the company to invest even more effort with you in getting the signal they need. But it's a double-edged sword: the follow-up interview carries a ton of weight. Someone in the committee asked themselves the question "if they did really well on this follow-up, is that enough to hire them?" and the answer had to be an unqualified yes. This means whatever weakness you had previously needs to be addressed in the follow-up.
Sometimes recruiters will share the nature of the follow-up and what interviewers are looking for. If they give you a hint or a suggestion, you should lean heavily into that. In many cases, the follow-up interviewer is not actually given any information about the prior interviews or the nature of the follow-up. In those cases you're flying a bit blind.
Advocates and Champions
At some companies (Meta is one), recruiters might do some digging behind the scenes to build up your packet. One way they do this is collecting references. A top 10% peer reference from someone who actually worked with you can override a poor interview.
In other cases, a particular hiring manager (sometimes called a "Champion") might join the hiring committee for your packet to speak up about your unique skillset. "Andrew is one of a few engineers who have experience with ML in embedded systems." This doesn't happen often, but it's another variable in the mix.
After the Decision
Ok so the hiring committee met, they made a decision, the artifacts are recorded, then what?
Well, it's pretty simple. Your recruiter is on the hook to deliver the news. But here's something most candidates don't know: the strength of your packet affects your negotiating position.
If your packet was really strong and everyone agreed you crushed it, your recruiter has an easier time going to compensation to negotiate top of band. If things were mixed and the decision was contentious, you'll see pushback on compensation changes. I advocated for the ML pipeline in Seattle for several years and routinely got this feedback "we'll consider compensation changes if the candidate was truly exceptional, but this was a mixed loop with a lot of concerns."
The packet strength is just one input among many for negotiation, but it does have some bearing.
Try to get some input from your recruiter about how discussions went. It can be useful during negotiations. More details in our salary negotiation guide.
What You Should (and Shouldn't) Do While Waiting
Real talk: there's not much you can do at this stage.
Candidates frequently try to "read the tea leaves" like "My recruiter responded in 36 hours and the email was only 9 words - does this mean anything?"
Usually not. They might be busy. They might have sat on that email. Reading into timing and tone rarely tells you anything useful.
At this stage, you can't take any actions that will change the outcome. The process is out of your control now. So here's what you should actually do:
- Keep interviewing elsewhere. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
- Follow up politely if you hit the timeline they gave you. "Hey, just checking in - you mentioned I'd hear back by Friday."
- Don't overthink it. Seriously.
If you get an offer, great. If you don't, you'll learn what you can from the feedback (if they give it) and move on to the next one.
The wait is the hardest part. But at least now you know what's actually happening on the other side.
Mark as read
About The Author
Stefan is one of the co-founders of HelloInterview, a platform to help software engineers and other tech professionals to prepare for their dream roles. He's conducted 1,000+ interviews and hired dozens of individuals at big companies and small startups.
Your account is free and you can post anonymously if you choose.