Sharing Candidate Feedback

Sharing feedback is one of the most impactful things you can do for a candidate's experience — and one of the easiest places to accidentally harm a client relationship. This article covers what to share with candidates, what to keep confidential, and how to handle ambiguous cases.

Best practices

Summarize feedback into clear, distinctive themes. Translate internal hiring-manager notes into high-level, neutral dimensions. Deliver the feedback in your own professional voice rather than forwarding internal phrasing. Where possible, include practical, tactical next steps that help the candidate improve for future opportunities.

Remove all confidential or identifying details. Before sharing anything with a candidate:

• Exclude interviewer names, scoring, rubrics, or anything tied to internal evaluations

• Strip deliberation notes, internal disagreements, or decision-making rationale

• Ensure what remains is respectful and appropriate for the candidate to read

Validate with the hiring manager when in doubt. If feedback seems unusually detailed, sensitive, or ambiguous, confirm with the HM or your talent partner before passing it along. Align on what level of detail is appropriate to share and what should stay internal. When uncertain, err toward sharing high-level ideas rather than specifics.

What to avoid

Never share internal feedback verbatim. This means no copy- pasting, forwarding, screenshotting, or direct quotations from HM notes or ATS comments. If the feedback wasn't explicitly written for the candidate, don't pass it along as-is.

Avoid sensitive or speculative content. Don't relay personal opinions, emotional phrasing, or signs of internal disagreement. Don't speculate about future roles, strategic decisions, or hiring dynamics. Always prioritize confidentiality and professionalism over completeness.

Enforcement

Confidentiality breaches with client feedback are treated more strictly than most other policy issues on Paraform. Unlike submission-quality or platform-activity issues — which go through phased warnings and review periods (see Paraform Recruiting Charter & Guidelines) — sharing confidential client feedback inappropriately can result in immediate and permanent removal from the platform.

This stricter standard exists because a single breach damages the trust our clients place in the recruiters on the platform, and that trust is what makes Paraform work.

For questions or clarifications on what's appropriate to share in a specific situation, contact team@paraform.com.