Lever interview notes and feedback: what goes where

Lever has three places for what you learn in an interview, and each has a job. Interview feedback forms hold your judgment of an interview, with required questions and a fixed four-point rating. Notes, typed in the "Add note" field at the top of a profile, hold updates and context, and can be made secret. Forms, added from the profile's menu, hold structured facts you want to report on later. Put your assessment in a note instead of a feedback form and it will not count, show in the Feedback Dashboard or sit next to the other interviewers' views. This follows Lever's help center as of October 2026.

For Lever's built-in AI transcription and the marketplace notetakers that write into it, see AI notetakers for Lever. This page covers where each kind of interview information should go and how to set Lever up so it ends up there.

Where should each kind of interview information go in Lever?

How do you submit interview feedback in Lever?

Lever's getting started guide for interviewers (updated June 17, 2026) gives three ways in:

1. Click View Resume and leave feedback in the interview's calendar event, or
2. open the Interviews section of Lever and click Complete Feedback next to the interview, or
3. click Complete Feedback in the automated reminder email.

Then answer the required questions and the candidate rating, and click Submit Feedback. If you did not attend, dismiss the reminders with the "x" next to Complete Feedback, or with Stop reminders or I didn't attend this interview in the email. Be careful with that: the guide says a dismissed form can only be recovered through the calendar event's link or the original feedback email.

Turning notes into the form works the same way as any structured scorecard. Fill the evidence questions first, from what the candidate actually said; choose the rating last, from that evidence; and keep anything confidential out of free-text fields that the whole panel can read. Our interview scorecard template covers anchored ratings and evidence columns if your forms need them.

What does Lever's four-point rating mean?

Lever's article on feedback forms (updated September 14, 2026) says the four-point rating question is an intentional, fixed element of every Lever feedback form. It has no neutral option, so every completed form states whether the interviewer thinks the candidate should move forward. Lever's developer documentation shows the default options as "4 - Strong Hire", "3 - Hire", "2 - No Hire" and "1 - Strong No Hire". Three rules follow from the help article:

• The rating cannot be deleted, only moved; many teams move it to the bottom so it is the last thing an interviewer answers, after the evidence.
• Only the text of the rating lines can be customized, and Lever Support has to make that change.
• Altering the four-point scale makes the Feedback Dashboard for scoring unusable; reporting on custom scores then needs exports or Data Explorer.

No neutral is a feature, not a flaw. An interviewer who cannot choose between Hire and No Hire usually lacks evidence on one competency. The fix is a follow-up in the next round, written into the form, not a fifth option.

How should admins build feedback forms that take notes well?

Super Admins and Admins create forms under Settings > Feedback > New Form. New questions default to a single line of text; click the response type to change it to a text box, code box, multiple choice, yes/no, checkbox or scorecard. Questions marked Required must be answered before the form can be submitted. A form can be set as the default for an interview stage, and interview plans assign forms to jobs and stages automatically. Lever's article suggests including one optional long-form text question for anything the other questions miss, and warns that deleting a form removes it from every group and posting that uses it.

A layout that works for interviewers who arrive with typed or AI-drafted notes:

[Form title]   e.g. Hiring Manager Interview - Product Designer
Instructions: Fill the evidence first. Quote the candidate where
you can. Rate last.

1. Scorecard question: one row per competency for this stage
   (3 to 5 rows, not 10)
2. Evidence for [competency 1]   - text box, required
3. Evidence for [competency 2]   - text box, required
4. Evidence for [competency 3]   - text box, required
5. What should the next interviewer probe?   - text box
6. Anything else   - text box, optional
7. Rating (Lever's fixed four-point question, moved to the bottom)

One evidence box per competency is the important part. A single "Notes / Comments" box invites a pasted meeting summary; a box per competency forces the interviewer to find the answer that supports each rating.

When should a note be secret, and who sees it?

Lever's article on adding and managing notes (updated March 1, 2026) says you add a note by typing in the "Add note" field at the top of the candidate's profile, optionally ticking Notify followers, and clicking Add note. Notes from all of a candidate's opportunities appear together in the profile's story, newest first. To make a note secret, click the toggle in the lower left of the note box. Secret notes are visible to:

• users @-mentioned in the note, even if they lack the privilege;
• users with the "secret notes" Sensitive Information Privilege for the posting the opportunity belongs to;
• users given one-off access with the + Add users button in the note banner.

Two cautions from the same article. An @-mentioned user with Interviewer access receives the note by email even though they cannot open the profile, so mentioning someone in a secret note sends its content to their inbox. And deleting a note, from the ellipses menu on the note, is permanent. Use secret notes for compensation, competing offers and anything the candidate told you in confidence; keep assessments in the feedback form, where the panel needs them.

Who can see interview feedback, and should interviewers see each other's?

Lever's feedback visibility settings live under Settings > Company > Interview feedback visibility, where an admin chooses which roles can see feedback submitted by others. The setting that matters most is the checkbox Also hide feedback from the interview panel until they've submitted feedback, which keeps other users' feedback hidden from Team Members and Limited Team Members on the panel until they have submitted their own. Turn it on. It protects each interviewer's judgment from the first strong opinion in the thread, and it gives interviewers a reason to submit. Custom roles with the "View other users' interview feedback" permission override the company default, so check those too. Why independent feedback matters is covered in independent interview feedback before the debrief.

When should you use a form instead of a note?

Lever's article on adding forms to candidate opportunities uses a good example: if a candidate declines an offer over compensation and you record that in a note, you cannot easily pull a list of decline reasons at year end; if you record it in a form, you can export and report on it. To add one, click the ellipses (⋯) at the top of the profile and choose Add Form, select the right opportunity if the candidate has several, fill it and click Submit. A toggle sets whether the form is visible to anyone with access to the profile or limited by Sensitive Information Privileges. Completed forms sit on the profile's Forms tab, and form data is exported from Visual Insights under Exports, Feedback, Forms.

For interviews, forms are the right home for structured facts that recur: notice period, work authorization as stated by the candidate, salary expectation band, reason for leaving category. Ask once in the screen, record once in the form, and the next interviewer does not ask again; see handoff notes between rounds.

How do notes from another tool get into Lever?

Either by hand or through the API. By hand, paste evidence into the feedback form's questions, not a whole summary into one box, and choose the rating yourself. Interview Signal works this way: it has no Lever integration, and its Lever-shaped note is copied to your clipboard for you to paste.

Through the API, Lever's developer documentation describes POST /opportunities/:opportunity/notes to create a note on the candidate's profile (an @username in the text triggers notifications, and the older note endpoint under /candidates/ is deprecated) and POST /opportunities/:opportunity/feedback to create a completed feedback form, which requires a perform_as user and the baseTemplateId of the feedback template. API keys are created from the Integrations and API page in Settings, on the API Credentials tab, and the documented default rate limit is 10 requests per second per key. Whether that is worth building, and what to check first, is covered in how to get AI interview notes into an ATS without an integration.