How to document and transcribe a hiring interview

An interview is useful if you can later reconstruct what the candidate said, on what evidence, and what was decided. A loose recording or a summary from memory is not enough: two days later the team is arguing impressions, not facts.

What each interview should leave behind

Keep this, in this order:

1. Role, interviewer, and date.
2. What the candidate said, not what the interviewer remembers. A transcript, or verbatim notes of the answers that matter.
3. Evidence per job criterion. A concrete experience, a signal, an open doubt. "I liked them" is not a criterion.
4. The next step: move forward, reject, or what still needs to be asked.

If one of those four is missing, the interview is not documented. It was retold.

Why a generic notetaker falls short

Note-taking and transcription tools solve the audio. Recruiting needs something else: that transcript living on the requisition, next to the other interviews, and a report you can read without going back to the 45 minutes.

A loose document does not tell the team whether the candidate covers the criterion they defined when they opened the search. It also does not help whoever walks into the next interview.

How a team does this without losing time

• Define 4 or 5 criteria before the first interview. If they are not written down, the note has nothing to be compared against.
• Record and transcribe the conversation. The interviewer should be asking, not typing.
• When it ends, the report has to name evidence, not adjectives. "Led the migration of X" can be argued. "Is senior" cannot.
• Leave the next step in the same place as the candidate, not in a chat.

Before you record

Recording a candidate and processing their voice, in most of Latin America, requires telling them first. Each country has its own regime (LGPD in Brazil, LFPDPPP in Mexico, Law 25.326 in Argentina, Law 1581 in Colombia). What they share: notice when you schedule and again at the start of the call, a documented legal basis for the processing (prior express consent, or legitimate interest where the law allows it, as LGPD does in Brazil, with that assessment in writing), a statement of what the recording is used for and how long it is kept, and the option to continue the interview without recording. Country-by-country detail is in the legal checklist for AI recruiting in Latin America.

Where Selenios fits

Selenios is an AI ATS for recruiting teams in Latin America. The interview stays inside the requisition: the transcript and the report come out of that conversation, and the decision is read next to the rest of the pipeline. It is not a notes app beside the ATS. It is the interview record where you already decide who to hire.

If your team still sends a summary after every call, the next step is one thing: the next interview should leave a transcript, evidence per criterion, and a next step on the same candidate.

Questions this page answers

• How do you document a job interview?
• How do you transcribe a hiring interview?
• What does an interview report need in order to decide on evidence?