Days or weeks after a debrief, someone asks why the panel decided what it did. The candidate wants feedback, or the role reopens under a new hiring manager who wants to know what the last panel saw. By then the reason lives in the memories of the people who were in the meeting, and memories drift.

If you’re the recruiter or hiring manager who writes up the debrief, an interview debrief template fixes that: it gives the panel one written record of what it decided and why, built for someone who missed the meeting. I’d put the decision and its reason near the top of that record, and I’d have it finished before anyone leaves, while the panel can still confirm the wording. A “who-said-what” recap doesn’t help that later reader, so I’d include the discussion only where it changed the outcome.

Below is a template with seven fields to copy, each with a filled example. After it come the steps for writing the record during the debrief itself, and four checks to run on your last five records.

What the debrief record is for.

A debrief record exists so that someone who wasn’t at the debrief can see the decision and the reason for it. Four readers come back to it, and each needs something different from it:

• The recruiter writing to the candidate needs a reason they can turn into feedback.
• The hiring manager making the offer needs any condition the panel attached, such as a reference to check first.
• If the role reopens, the next panel needs to know what this candidate showed and where they fell short.
• Anyone reviewing how the decision was made needs the evidence and the name of whoever made the call.

Two things already look like a record, and neither gives those readers what they need. The first is the stage in your applicant tracking system (ATS). It shows that the candidate moved to “rejected” or “offer.” It doesn’t show which requirement decided it, and that’s the part a candidate asking for feedback wants to hear.

The second is the set of scorecards. Each one holds an interviewer’s view from before the meeting. The debrief is where those views get weighed and sometimes overruled, and no scorecard shows how that happened.

The template below gives each of those readers a field of their own.

The interview debrief template.

The template has seven fields, with the decision straight after the basics. The example column shows one filled record for a senior product designer, to give you a sense of how much to write in each field.

The decision field asks for one name on purpose. A record signed by the whole room tells a later reader nothing about who owned the call. If your team hasn’t settled who that is, the steps for giving the call to one owner are in our “how to make a hire/no-hire decision” guide.

Record what the candidate did, and in which interview, as each evidence line in the example does. An impression such as “strong communicator” could describe any finalist, so it can’t explain a decision about this one.

To use the template, paste these seven headings into the document you open for each debrief:

• The basics
• The decision
• The reason
• Evidence by requirement
• Disagreement
• Risks and conditions
• Next steps

How to fill it in before the meeting ends.

The template only works if it’s filled in while the panel is still together. Once people have left, the panel can’t settle a disagreement about what was decided, and the record becomes a reconstruction from memory.

Running the debrief itself, including what to do when the panel disagrees, has its own guide: “how to run an effective interview debrief.”

These seven steps cover the record. The first two are for whoever runs the debrief, and the rest are for the record owner:

1. Before the meeting starts, make one person, the record owner, responsible for writing it. I’d pick the recruiter, since they’ll write to the candidate.
2. Save 10 minutes for writing at the end of the slot. If the discussion fills the whole slot, the record slips to the next day.
3. Before anyone speaks, write the role’s requirements into the evidence field, one line each, so you can file each point under its requirement as it’s said.
4. Write evidence down as interviewers give it, with the interview it came from. When someone offers an impression such as “great energy,” ask what the candidate said or did to give them that read, and write down the answer.
5. When recommendations split, write each position in a sentence, then what settled it. A later reader can’t rebuild that from the scorecards.
6. Before anyone leaves, read the decision aloud with its reason. Ask whoever made the call to confirm the wording. It takes a minute, and anyone who heard a different decision can say so while the panel is still together.
7. File the record with the candidate’s profile in your ATS the same day, and send each next step to the person who owns it.

Most of this falls on the record owner, who has to follow a conversation between four or five people while writing it down, and it’s easy to miss something.

Where Metaview fits.

Metaview, the Agentic Recruiting Platform, backs up that note-taking for the record owner through our Notetaker. When the debrief runs on a video call, the Notetaker joins as a visible participant and records and transcribes the call. Then it turns the conversation into structured notes.

Recording happens only where your team’s consent process allows it, and that process is yours to set under your own policy and local law.

Because our Notetaker captures every spoken word, the record owner can follow the discussion and check each evidence line against the transcript before filing it. Keep the read-back before anyone leaves all the same. The notes show what people said, but the panel still decides, and only the panel can confirm how its decision is worded.

If the candidate’s interviews were recorded too, the record owner can find them after the debrief. The Notetaker’s “Calls” page lists them, with each interviewer’s own recommendation beside the call for their interview.

The Notetaker’s multi-source notes can combine several conversations, such as the interviews and the debrief, with documents such as the resume into one synthesized notes document. For a debrief, that puts the notes from each interview in the same document as the notes from the debrief, so the record owner can check each evidence line against the interview it names.

The combined document includes only the conversations and documents attached to it. If an interview wasn’t recorded, read its scorecard out in the debrief, so what it says is in the debrief’s own notes.

Our 55-second video below shows multi-source notes bringing a candidate’s conversations and documents together.

The transcript has one more use after the debrief. The hiring manager can look back at which scorecards the panel drew on, and tell the interviewers which ones helped the decision and which didn’t. Our Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Shahriar Tajbakhsh, has written about that use of the debrief:

That feedback is for the interviewers, so send it to them and keep it out of the candidate’s record.

Check your last five debrief records.

To see which part of the template your team needs most, pull the records from your last five hiring decisions and run four checks on each:

• Can you find a written record within a couple of minutes? If not, start with ownership: name the record owner before the next debrief.
• Does the reason name a requirement? If it reads as an impression, write the requirements into the evidence field before the next debrief starts.
• Where the scorecards disagreed, does the record show each position and what settled it? If not, add the disagreement field.
• Was the record read back before the panel left? If it was written up afterward, save 10 minutes at the end of the next debrief for it.

I’d call a record “done” when two things are true: it was read back before the panel left, and someone who missed the meeting can tell from it what the panel decided and why.

Where your records exist but fail more than one check, start with the reason field. The candidate’s feedback and the next panel both depend on it.