Taking notes is something people seem to find difficult at the best of times. We frequently are asked how to arrange notes in a notebook, what symbols or shortcuts we use, and how we find things again.

When it comes to interviewing, our notes become even more important. It’s not because they’re a legal document, though some people will tell you to be careful what you write because they are. It’s because you need to be able to make a decision about whether to hire based on evidence. The only way to remember what you heard and what conclusions you drew is to have good notes.

What to write and where?

Pre-Print the Questions on Your Answer Sheet

If you use our Interview Creation Tool (see the Appendix), you’ll have the ideal output: a pre-printed sheet with each of the interview questions, what to look for, and space to record your answers.

If your HR department uses competencies or standardized questions, they may provide you with a similar sheet. If no one has given you a set of instructions, and you don’t want to license our ICT, you’ll have to create your own sheet.

Why not just take notes on the next blank page in your notebook? You want to ask the same question in the same way every time. That’s the only way you can be sure that you’re comparing like with like when you review the answers from different candidates. If you ask one candidate “Can you tell me about a time when you influenced the direction of a project?” and another “How have you influenced project direction?” the answers aren’t going to be comparable. Yes, the questions are similar, but there’s a subtle difference. Judging candidates against each other when you’ve introduced subtle differences isn’t fair. So however you take notes, you will need a separate sheet with the questions you’re going to ask printed on it.

You could still use your notebook and a separate sheet. But that’s two items, plus your pen and a coffee you’re juggling, whilst you try to listen to the candidate and take notes. Why introduce the complication?

In addition, you might be asked for those notes six or eight months later or perhaps even longer. (There’s some doubt about how long recruitment papers have to be retained in Europe, but the most common answer is six years.) If you had to go back and find one page in a notebook you were using a year ago, would you be able to?

Having each question and the relevant notes on one sheet of paper is easier logistically in the interview and for filing and retention afterward. (Filing it with a copy of the résumé and other candidate correspondence is a great way to look organized when asked for the documentation.)

Handwritten Notes Only

Note taking on a laptop has become quite popular lately. We here at Manager Tools are regularly told that we’re Luddites for suggesting that taking notes on a laptop is almost always a poor choice, but we stand by our guidance. There are a number of reasons.

The most important reason is the purpose of taking notes: having a good record of what transpired. In other words, note taking ought to start with effectiveness and not efficiency. Studies have repeatedly shown that those who take handwritten notes have better recall (they score higher on tests of subjects presented) than those who take notes on laptops.

Our favorite example of note taking effectiveness involved three groups: laptops, handwritten, and a third group who pretended to take notes with pretend pens on pretend paper. The laptop group’s recall scores were the lowest of the three.

There’s even more to it than that. If you’re taking notes on a laptop, your interviewee thinks you’re doing something else, like email. It doesn’t even matter if you turn off all other applications on your laptop: the interviewee will still assume you’re doing mail, or messaging, or Slack. Surely this is enough reason.

And there’s still more. Several years ago Manager Tools trained managers for a firm that sent researchers to interview patients in drug trials. They were thrilled finally to be able to deploy laptops to help with interviewing patients. Previously, they had to handwrite notes, then return to the office and enter them into their system. Laptops would allow more time in the field.

Alas, it was not to be. After a few months, they scrapped the laptop trial. Seems that the patients complained to their doctors that their comments/answers/feelings/symptoms weren’t being adequately captured. As one of their managers put it to us: “They would talk for two minutes after we asked them a question, and didn’t think that hearing only 50 keystrokes could be a faithful record of the exchange.”

Often note taking via laptop is argued for based on efficiency. You don’t have to take the time to type your handwritten notes to have them in your digital system if you type them to begin with. This is technically true, but off the mark. First, we can digitize all our notes by taking a photo of them with our phones and texting them or emailing them or posting them. No, they may not be 100% searchable, but what are the chances that you’re going to search for one word of an interview more than one or two days later? Zero.

Take your notes by hand.

Write Down as Much as You Can

While it’s not fun to hear, our data show that one of the best predictors of those who are good interviewers (identifying true positives and true negatives) are those who write down more of what the candidate said. That’s right—if you only gave us one datum to assess interviewers, we’d want to know how detailed their notes were from the interview: how many words they wrote down that the candidate said.

Of course, you can’t write down everything. But as you know from taking notes, you don’t have to write every word down to capture the key ideas being communicated.

Write Down Exactly What You Hear

This is the Manager Tools secret weapon against hiring litigation. It’s also much easier for you as an interviewing manager. Write down exactly what you hear.

Many managers try to write down what they hear and simultaneously the conclusions they drew. So they might write: “Story about PM who lost control. Seemed to support manager & turned situation around. Good.”

Here’s why that’s not what to do. First, your conclusions “good” or “bad” are written down in black and white. That’s information for lawyers to twist if for some reason your notes should come up in litigation. There’s a reason police statements are factual. The facts of what was said or done cannot be argued. The conclusions drawn can be argued. If your conclusions are not written on the page, they cannot be discussed. We promise you, if you take good notes, in the way we recommend, you will remember the conclusions you drew. We can from interviews we did ten years ago.

Second, it’s much harder. Taking notes on a conversation is not a skill we practice much. Even when we’re taking notes in meetings, we’re generally taking notes on actions to be taken and things we need to remember. That’s not the same as taking notes on what’s said. Because we don’t practice, we find it much harder when we need to do it. Trying to take notes on what’s said, drawing conclusions, and writing down those conclusions are three things for your brain to do at once. Oh, and remembering to smile and nod at the candidate to keep her comfortable, think of your probing questions, and worry about keeping the interview on time? Don’t introduce additional complexity to a task that is already complex.

Write down what you hear. You’ll be able to take more comprehensive notes within the same timeframe if you just concentrate on this part of the task. For example: “Was deputy PM on 1M project. PM lost control & allocation tasks due to firefighting. C. stayed late one evening to update systems to provide accurate picture, talked PM through suggested task reallocation & supported at team-meeting when reallocation was briefed. Project on time & budget.”

Even if you saw those kind of notes on a candidate you did not interview, you’d draw the same conclusion: “Seemed to support manager & turned situation around. Good.” Now though, you know why the candidate is supportive and good, and so will anyone else who reads your notes.

Writing down what the candidate says is behavioral evidence of whatever recommendation you’re going to make in the Interview Results Capture Meeting (IRCM), which we’ll discuss in Chapter 20. You’re going to have to make a recommendation of whether to hire or not hire the candidate, and back it up with specific behaviors from the interview.

If all you write down in your interview notes are conclusions, you won’t be able to easily support that conclusion in the IRCM. If there are those in the IRCM who disagree with you, and they have supportive evidence and you don’t, your recommendation won’t carry nearly the same weight as your colleagues’ recommendations.

Use Abbreviations

You do need your notes to be legible and comprehensible, but you don’t need transcription-level notes. Depending on your industry and role, you’ll probably have some specific abbreviations that you use a lot.

Removing the vowels from words is one way to make them shorter and yet preserve their meaning in most cases. We always use C. for candidate, as it saves writing the name when we need a subject for a sentence. For longer words, just use the first syllable: imp. for important and info. for information, for example.

Don’t go too far though. If your notes look more like a quadratic equation than prose, you might be being too clever and making things more difficult.

Taking notes in interviews is something that managers want to make much harder than it is. Their fears over what’s “required” for HR or in the face of later litigation drive them to erroneous conclusions. It’s easy. One sheet of paper with the question and space to write notes. Write down what you hear. File with the résumé. Done.