Why this exists
The best time to write down what happened in an interview is the fifteen minutes right after it. The candidate forgets the specifics inside a day. The recruiter asks for a follow-up inside two. This guide is the piece of paper you finish while the interview is still legible in your head.
Everything on the guide fits on four pages. Ten prompts. One rubric. Two sentences the candidate sends the next morning. If a section takes more than three minutes, you are overthinking it.
The ten prompts
Prompt 1 · The room
Prompt 2 · The one question you nailed
Prompt 3 · The one question you fumbled
Prompt 4 · What they cared about
Prompt 5 · What they did not ask
Prompt 6 · What you learned about the role
Prompt 7 · What you learned about the team
Prompt 8 · The signal you saw
Prompt 9 · The signal you missed
Prompt 10 · Your read
The rubric
Score the interview against six factors before you close the guide. Each factor is a score from 0 to 3. A total of 14 or more is a strong interview. 10 to 13 is worth a second round. Below 10, the reason will be in one specific factor and the guide has already named it above.
| Clarity of the role | Do you know what the job is now. (0-3) |
|---|---|
| Interviewer preparation | Did the room read your materials. (0-3) |
| Team fit read | Would you work for this manager. (0-3) |
| Question quality | Did the questions test skill, judgment, or both. (0-3) |
| Signal received | Did you learn something concrete about the company. (0-3) |
| Your performance | Did you sound like yourself in the room. (0-3) |
The two-sentence follow-up
By tomorrow at 9 AM you send the recruiter two sentences. Sentence one names a specific moment from the conversation and thanks the person by name. Sentence two names one thing you did not get to say in the room and want to say now. That is the whole email. Do not include a resume. Do not include a link. Sign your first name.
Draft the two sentences
Two ways this guide gets misused
The first misuse is filling it in a week later. The guide is designed for the fifteen minutes right after the interview. If a week passes, the answers become what you wish you remembered instead of what you actually saw. If you cannot fill it in the same day, throw the sheet away and start fresh at the next interview.
The second misuse is using the rubric as a scoreboard against the interviewer. The rubric is a mirror. It measures how well you understood the room, not how well the room performed. A candidate who scores every interview above 15 is probably not scoring honestly. A candidate who scores every interview below 10 is probably picking rooms that are wrong for them, which is a signal in its own right.
What to do with a stack of completed guides
The guide is designed to be reread. Read the last three every time you prepare for a new interview. Look for the same words showing up in the fumbled-question column. Look for the recruiter names in Prompt 2 that keep landing well and the ones that keep landing badly. The pattern is you. Once you see it you can move it.
The Interviews folder is also useful in offer negotiation. If you have four completed guides at the same seniority and the salary numbers are all clustered in a narrow range, you know where the market sits for your skill. That knowledge shows up as a number on the offer call.
A note on the two-sentence follow-up
The two-sentence follow-up is the one part of this guide that has near-universal impact and near-zero cost. Recruiters read it before the interviewer's debrief. The two sentences are often the only thing the recruiter has to hand up to the hiring manager before the debrief meeting. A specific moment plus a named person forms a memory prompt for the hiring manager, who now walks into the debrief with a favorable, specific memory of the candidate at the top of their mind.
The rule against sending a resume or link is deliberate. The email is not a marketing document. It is a personal note. If the follow-up feels short, that is because it is short. Ninety percent of candidates send a long email. The short one lands harder because of what it does not do.
How to use this guide
Print one per interview. Fill it in inside fifteen minutes of leaving the room. File the completed guide in a folder called Interviews. Read the last three guides before every interview after the first one. The pattern in what you write is the pattern in how you interview, and it is the pattern you will change first if you want a different result.
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