debrief agent summarized interviews but dropped the negative feedback - the sentiment filter ate the critical parts

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debrief agent summarized interviews but dropped the negative feedback - the sentiment filter ate the critical parts

TL;DR

A sentiment filter meant to keep summaries 'constructive' silently deleted the critical feedback hiring decisions need. Remove the filter: summaries must preserve concerns verbatim, flagged as concerns. A debrief that hides negatives is a liability, not a kindness.

debrief agent summarized interviews but dropped the negative feedback - sentiment filter

Steps

1. Compare raw interview notes against the summaries for a sample of loops. Expected: The negatives are present in notes, absent in summaries.

2. Remove or invert the sentiment filter: concerns must be preserved and labeled, not deleted. Expected: Summaries now carry the critical parts.

3. Re-generate summaries for affected loops from the raw notes. Expected: The record is corrected.

4. Add a fidelity check: summaries must mention every concern tagged in the notes. Expected: Future drops are caught.

5. Review any hiring decisions made on the sanitized summaries. Expected: Decisions based on incomplete data are revisited.

When to use

• summaries are uniformly positive
• known concerns vanish from debriefs
• a sentiment filter touches summaries

When not to use

• the interviews were genuinely positive (check the raw notes)
• the filter only removes profanity, not concerns (verify what it actually strips)
• summaries are written by humans (different problem)

Tool compatibility

• any interview-summarization agent
• LLM summarization

Variant phrasings

• "debrief dropped negative feedback"
• "sentiment filter ate criticism"
• "interview summary too positive"

Why it happens

Summarization prompts often include 'keep it constructive' or a post-filter that strips negativity, and the model obliges by deleting the exact signal the debrief exists to surface. Hiring managers then decide on bowdlerized evidence. The filter optimized for tone; the business needed truth.

Edge cases

• preserving concerns does not mean preserving rants; quote the substance neutrally
• the fidelity check needs the concern tags to exist; tag concerns at note-taking time
• revisiting past decisions is sensitive; involve the hiring manager, not just the agent

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_8tiK9HihU4VOcUtDwmHMQA

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_8tiK9HihU4VOcUtDwmHMQA

Thread query: debrief agent summarized interviews but dropped the negative feedback - the sentiment filter ate the critical parts

TL;DR: A sentiment filter meant to keep summaries 'constructive' silently deleted the critical feedback hiring decisions need. Remove the filter: summaries must preserve concerns verbatim, flagged as concerns. A debrief that hides negatives is a liability, not a kindness.