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Anyone involved in recruitment – be it as a line manager or HR professional – will appreciate the importance of having a fair and structured interview process. As part of this process many employers like to use an Interview Scorecard to assess candidates against the required competencies/experience/attributes required for a job vacancy.
What is an Interview Scorecard?
An interview scorecard is a pre-determined set of criteria which is set against the required competencies, experiences and attributes for a job vacancy. Everyone involved in the hiring process will complete a scorecard and results will usually be pooled to create an average score for each candidate for each given criteria.
Why use an Interview Scorecard?
Interview scorecards can help you eliminate personal bias and unconscious bias from your interview process. They help focus the interviewer on the requirements of the job. Additionally they provide a controlled way of assessing all candidates fairly. Scorecards are particularly useful if you have an interview panel – each panel member completes their own card and then results can be pooled and average scores calculated. Another benefit is that if you have a number of stages to your interview process you can compare a candidate’s scores for various stages and check for consistency (or inconsistency) in their performance.
How to create your Interview Scorecard
Define the criteria you wish to assess your candidates against
Your candidate criteria will be a combination of skills, experience, aptitudes and competencies. See our advice on drawing up candidate criteria for Sales Jobs and Marketing Jobs. ,
Prepare your interview questions
For each of your chosen candidate criteria aim to have at least 1 interview question to explore the candidates’ abilities.
What else do you want to score on?
As well as your interview questions you may also want to score your candidate on non-verbal elements for example – their non-verbal queues, hand-shake, eye contact or dress..You may want to ‘weight’ each criteria according to how important they are. For example certain skills may be vital for the role so would be weighted highly, whilst others could be ‘nice to have’ so would be weighted lower.
Create a defined scoring system
It’s very important to clearly define what each score level represents and then ensure that all members of the interview panel understand what each score means. I’d recommend keeping your scoring scale to say 1-5 rather than 1-10. Then you should define what each score indicates, for example:
- Poor / A poor answer that the missed the key point / poor performance
- Below average / an incomplete answer or performance
- Average / an adequate answer but lacking or falling short
- Good / above average answer.
- Excellent. A very strong answer / performance
Select the format of your scorecard
Try and keep this as simple and user friendly as possible. Ensure it allows each interviewer to clearly score each individual. Consider an additional column for notes / comments. ..
Download our interview scorecard template
To help you get started we have created a free interview scorecard template. It’s fully editable so you can use it as a starting point to create your own bespoke scorecard.
Interview Scorecard TemplateUsing interview scorecards should help you create a robust interview process and will allow you to accurately and fairly assess candidates and hire the right people for your business. If you are an employer in the automotive sector and need help finding great candidates GET IN TOUCH.
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Further Reading:
Interview Advice for Employers
Create a Great Candidate Experience
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Copeland help automotive businesses get the recruitment process right. We use a structured process – based on over 20 years’ experience – to source, qualify and select the right candidates within our clients’ timescales.
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