# Interview notes that hold up in a debrief

> Interview notes hold up in a debrief when they record what the candidate said and did rather than how the interviewer felt, with short quotes and times, organized by the competencies on the rubric. Write them up straight after the interview, before talking to anyone, and tell candidates when a call is recorded, because consent rules differ from place to place.

Published by Emoti Research on 2026-11-01, updated 2026-11-01. Article. For hiring managers. Canonical: https://emoti.ai/articles/interview-notes-that-hold-up

## What makes a note useful in a debrief?

A useful note lets someone who wasn't in the room see the evidence behind each rating, without having to trust the writer's memory or mood.

Notes seem to help memory more than judgment. In one study, interviewers who took notes recalled what candidates said more accurately, but their judgments were no more accurate; reviewing conventional notes before judging did help (Middendorf & Macan, 2002). So the value of a note lies in what it lets you and the panel check later. The US Office of Personnel Management's guide to structured interviews asks for notes good enough to document the interviewer's reasoning for each rating, including actual examples of answers (US Office of Personnel Management, 2008).

A note that holds up answers five questions for each competency: what you asked, what the candidate said or did, the words that matter most, the rating you gave and the anchor it matched, and what you didn't get to. If a reader can't find those, the note will be argued about rather than used.

## How do you write evidence instead of impressions?

Write down what the candidate said or did, then, separately, what you concluded from it.

| Impression | Evidence |
| --- | --- |
| Great communicator | Explained the retry design in two minutes without jargon, then answered the follow-up on duplicate events with a concrete example |
| Not senior enough | Described decisions their lead made; asked what they would have changed, said "I'd have to think about it" |
| Seemed unsure about the numbers | Gave two different team sizes, six and then nine |
| Culture fit | Leave it out, or write the specific behavior you mean |

Impressions aren't useless. They are conclusions, and the debrief needs the observations they rest on. If you can't find an observation behind an impression, that is worth knowing too.

Some things should never be in notes at all: comments on appearance, accent, age, family, health, or anything else unrelated to the job. Write every note as if the candidate might one day read it.

## Why include short quotes and times?

A short quote with a time lets the panel check the context instead of arguing about what was said.

Quote the key words, not the whole answer. "We cut the queue from 40 minutes to 5 by batching writes" is worth more than "talked about performance work". If the call was recorded, add the minute. When two interviewers remember an answer differently, a time turns an argument into a 30-second replay.

## How should notes be organized?

By the rubric: one section per competency, each with the evidence, the rating and anything to probe next.

| Competency | Evidence | Rating | To probe next |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Owns production systems | On call for the billing service; led the review after a double-charge incident | 4 of 4 | How they chose which fixes came first |
| Works across teams | "I set up a weekly sync with finance" | 2 of 4 | What changed because of it |

Notes organized by competency make scoring faster and make gaps visible. If a section is empty, the interview didn't cover that competency, and the panel should know that before it decides.

For behavioral questions, capture three parts in the candidate's own terms: the situation, what they did, and what happened. When one part is missing, write that down too ("no result given"), because a story without an outcome is weaker evidence than it sounds in the moment.

## When should you write the notes up?

Straight after the interview, before you talk to anyone else about the candidate.

Take brief notes during the call, then spend a few minutes turning them into evidence under each competency and recording your ratings. The OPM guide describes the same sequence: interviewers review their notes and rate the candidate immediately afterward, and panel members form independent evaluations before any discussion. Talking first can let the strongest opinion in the hallway rewrite everyone's memory of the interview.

A five-minute routine helps:

1. Fill in the evidence under each competency while it is fresh.
2. Mark the one or two quotes that matter most, with their times.
3. Rate each competency against its anchors, not against the other candidates.
4. Note what you didn't cover, so the next interviewer can.
5. Submit your notes and ratings before you read anyone else's.

## How should you tell candidates a call is recorded?

Tell them before the call and again at the start, say why it is recorded and who will see it, and give them a way to say no. Rules on consent differ by place.

In the US, federal law allows a recording when one party to the conversation consents (18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d)), but some states require the consent of every party to a confidential conversation. California is one example (California Penal Code section 632). Other countries have their own rules, including data protection law. The simplest policy that works everywhere is to tell everyone, every time. This article is not legal advice.

A sentence at the start is enough: "I'd like to record this call so I can listen properly instead of typing, and so the hiring team can check what was said. Only the people involved in this decision will see it. Is that all right with you?" If the candidate says no, don't record. Take notes by hand, and make sure their answer doesn't count against them.

## Where do AI notetakers fit?

An AI notetaker records and transcribes the call and drafts notes in your template, so you can listen instead of typing. You still own the ratings, and you should check the draft against the transcript before you rely on it.

Emoti's notetaker writes notes in the template chosen for each kind of call, links each section to the moments it draws on, and answers questions about the call by quoting the transcript with times. When no AI model is available, a rules engine assembles notes and answers from transcript quotes, and the app says which one answered. Recording disclosure is on by default: the calendar invite says the call is recorded, the notetaker joins under a visible name, and it posts a message in the call chat when recording starts.

Notetakers fail in ways worth knowing. Speech recognition makes more errors for some speakers than others; one study of five commercial systems found an average word error rate of 0.35 for Black speakers and 0.19 for white speakers (Koenecke et al., 2020). A summary can also drop a hedge such as "I think" or "roughly". Read the moment before you quote it in a debrief.

Before a draft goes to the debrief, check four things: the quotes you rely on match the transcript, the speakers are labeled correctly, nothing in the draft is an impression you wouldn't have written yourself, and any section that says a topic wasn't discussed really wasn't. How Emoti's notes are built, and where they can go wrong, is in [Grounded interview notes](https://emoti.ai/research/grounded-interview-notes).

## Key terms

- **Debrief**: The meeting after interviews where interviewers share their ratings and evidence and the hiring team decides. It works best when every interviewer has recorded ratings independently beforehand.
- **Scorecard**: The record of one interviewer's or one screen's ratings for a candidate, competency by competency or question by question, with the evidence for each rating.
- **Rubric**: A written guide for rating answers: for each question or competency, what a strong, middling and weak answer contains.
- **Notetaker**: Software that joins a call, records and transcribes it, and drafts notes. Emoti's notetaker writes notes in the template chosen for each kind of call and, by default, tells everyone the call is recorded.
- **Transcript highlight**: In Emoti, a marked moment in a call's transcript with a type (strength, concern, question, logistics or motivation), a short title, a quote and a time that opens the transcript at that moment.

## Questions

### Should I take notes during the interview?

Yes, brief ones. Write key words and short quotes during the call and expand them straight afterward. The OPM guide also suggests telling the candidate at the start that you will take notes.

### Can candidates see interview notes about them?

Sometimes. In the EU, people have the right to a copy of the personal data an organization holds about them under Article 15 of the GDPR. Write every note as if the candidate may read it.

### How long should interview notes be kept?

As long as your retention policy says, and no longer. In the EU, the GDPR requires personal data to be kept no longer than is necessary for its purpose.

### Should I read other interviewers' notes before the debrief?

Only after you have recorded your own ratings. Reading first makes it hard to tell what you saw from what someone else wrote.

## Sources

- Middendorf, C. H., & Macan, T. H. (2002). Note-taking in the employment interview: Effects on recall and judgments. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(2), 293–303. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.2.293
- US Office of Personnel Management (2008). Structured Interviews: A Practical Guide. US Office of Personnel Management. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/assessment-and-selection/structured-interviews/guide.pdf
- United States Congress 18 U.S.C. § 2511, Interception and disclosure of wire, oral, or electronic communications prohibited. United States Code, via govinfo.gov. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2021-title18/html/USCODE-2021-title18-partI-chap119-sec2511.htm
- California Legislature California Penal Code section 632. California Legislative Information. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN&sectionNum=632
- Koenecke, A., Nam, A., Lake, E., Nudell, J., Quartey, M., Mengesha, Z., Toups, C., Rickford, J. R., Jurafsky, D., & Goel, S. (2020). Racial disparities in automated speech recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7684–7689. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1915768117
- European Parliament and Council of the European Union (2016). Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation), Articles 5 and 15. Official Journal of the European Union. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj