A few years ago, I began wondering why, with so much data available to us for nearly every interaction we have, are we still unable to get any feedback from recruiters on how we interviewed.

It’s often difficult enough to get a recruiter to respond to you – even if you’ve gone through an entire 8-12 person interview loop with the company. But what if you could get real feedback on what you did well and what you could have done better (and what, if you didn’t get the job, the winning candidate did better than you).

As a marketer, we’re always using data to improve the experience and optimize, if not retool, a product or communication. Getting interview feedback so we could constantly be improving ourselves would be enormously helpful.

Lo and behold, I recently interviewed with a prospective employer who sent me an interview feedback survey after I concluded the round of interviews.

My first reaction was to be shocked they wanted my feedback when it’s often nearly impossible for me to get any. Then I was inspired.

I hoped on SurveyMonkey, wrote my own feedback survey which would gather feedback on how I interviewed, and sent it to everyone in my interview loop.

I sent a personal note to the hiring manager letting him know I was inspired to also gather feedback and told him I would complete their survey if they completed mine.

To his credit, he did. And he gave me extremely valuable feedback on how I could have improved my presentation. I should have started doing a follow-up survey years ago. With his feedback, I could quickly see areas I could have cleaned it up. (Huge thank you to him for doing that.)

If companies are going to start asking us for feedback on their recruiting process, they must be prepared to answer our surveys on how we did on our interviews.

Fair’s fair, right?