Most K-12 hiring processes follow a familiar arc. Post the job. Review applications. Run through screening. Meet with finalists for a formal interview. Check references. Make an offer.
It's a reasonable process. It's also missing something important.
By the time a district reaches the finalist stage, it has gathered a lot of information about candidates: their credentials, their experience, how they present in a structured setting, and what their references say. What it almost never has is any sense of how those candidates handle being told something they didn't want to hear.
The gap tends to close after the hire. That’s too late.
The fix is a feedback round. After your finalists have been through every other stage of the process, you bring each one back separately for an informal conversation. You ask them what they thought they did well. You share your own observations. And then you ask the question that reveals more than any formal interview ever will: what do you wish you had a do-over on?
It sounds simple. The results are anything but. Some candidates become reflective and self-aware. Others become defensive or dismissive. In either case, you find out something critical about who this person actually is before you hand them a classroom full of kids, not after.
Danielle Carter, Director of Human Resources at Grayslake Community High School District 127 in Illinois, has spent seven years refining her district's hiring process. She's added and removed steps, piloted new approaches, and built a guide that new leaders across her district use as a reference. But the most recent addition to that process came from a vulnerable place.
A few years ago, her district made a wrong hire. It became clear quickly.
"I went to my leadership coach and said, I need to do this better. I can't get this wrong. And he helped me vet and audit my hiring and interviewing process. He shared some tips, and told me more about this feedback round."
Out of that conversation came what Danielle now considers the most important step in her entire process.
The feedback round happens after the finalist stage. Two candidates remain. Each one is brought in separately for an informal conversation. The tone is deliberate: dress down, wear jeans, get comfortable. It's Danielle, the building principal, and usually another member of the interview team.
The conversation starts with acknowledgment. The candidates have been through a lot. Walk-and-talks, coffees and conversations with staff, a presentation round. They've made it to the final two. The team starts by asking them what they thought they did well. What are they proud of? Then the team shares their own observations.
And then comes the question that matters most.
What do you wish you had a do-over on? What would you say differently? What would you do differently?
Then it's the team's turn to share honest feedback, with candor and care, but without softening it to the point of uselessness.
What happens in those moments tells Danielle more than any previous round of the process.
"Do they become defensive? Do they become red-faced? Do they throw their hands in the air and say, ‘why would people have thought that?’ Or are they like, ‘oh my goodness, I never meant to say it that way. And in fact, I thought about that all the way home.’"
That second response is what she's looking for. Not a perfect candidate, but a self-aware one.
The feedback round surfaces things that structured interviews are designed to hide. A traditional interview rewards rehearsal. Candidates who have interviewed many times know how to present well, how to frame weaknesses as strengths, and how to answer the "tell me about a time you failed" question in a way that actually sounds like a win. The feedback round interrupts that. It creates a real moment instead of a performed one.
Danielle walked into one finalist conversation fully expecting to hire candidate A. After the feedback round, she hired candidate B.
It has also changed the minds of interview team members who came in with a preference. Staff who had spent the previous rounds advocating for a candidate they already knew, a colleague, someone from within the building, found themselves reconsidering once they watched that person receive feedback.
"It's been a way to get people on board with candidates they weren't initially in support of, just because that person wasn't their friend or colleague. You get them in the room in that feedback round and they suddenly realize, this person can't accept feedback. And that person can."
Being liked by your future teammates is not the same as being coachable. The feedback round makes that distinction visible in a way that little else in a hiring process can.
"I don't think there's a district in the state of Illinois doing this round. And when you don't do it, you find out too late how this person can receive feedback. If I could make a change, I'd have all the districts across the country incorporate the feedback round."
It's easy to understand why it hasn't spread. It takes time. It requires candor that many hiring managers find uncomfortable. And it asks finalists, people who are often simultaneously interviewing elsewhere, to stay engaged through one more stage.
But those are also reasons why it works. The candidates who respond well to the feedback round are the ones who will respond well to the honest, sometimes difficult conversations that come with working in a school. And the ones who don't, well, you found out before you hired them.
The feedback round doesn't require a complete overhaul of your existing process. It slots in after your finalist stage, before the offer goes out. Danielle's advice to anyone trying it for the first time is don't go alone. Bring your building principal or another leader in with you. Having a second perspective helps you calibrate what you're observing.
Keep the setting informal. The goal is to create a moment that feels real, not another interview box to check. Candidates should feel like the pressure of the formal process has lifted, which is exactly when you'll learn the most about who they actually are.
For districts that have ever made a wrong hire, and most have, the feedback round is worth the hour it takes. The cost of a bad hire in a K-12 setting isn't just financial. It's the students in that classroom. It's the colleagues managing the fallout. It's the principal who knew something was off but didn't have a process that let them see it in time.
You can teach curriculum. You can train classroom management. You cannot teach someone how to receive feedback gracefully, and you cannot afford to find out they can't once they're already in front of your kids.