Hire Better: A Guide to an Applicant Interview Scorecard

If you want to be more efficient in your recruiting process and hire the best candidates, then we have something for you. We’ve created an Applicant Interview Scorecard Template that will help streamline your hiring process, making it less time-consuming and more effective at finding quality employees. Give our template a try by downloading it today! You’ll know immediately if this is what you need to ensure every candidate gets a fair opportunity for employment with your company.

Customize Your Scorecard

The intention of the scorecard should be understood and reviewed by everyone involved in the hiring process.

A scorecard gives all interviewers a process to pursue, allowing various interviewers to extract similar information from candidates and compare their notes in a structured approach.
Invite all stakeholders to contribute to the scorecard’s production. The community is here to determine which hard and soft skills are mission-critical to the job and how they should be assessed. Furthermore, the stakeholders must establish standards for what the person can bring to the table regarding a successful track record.

Multiple stakeholders are in charge of assessing various aspects.

Identifying the Hard Skill Questions

This is done by dividing your scorecard into two categories: soft and hard skills. The proportions should be roughly 60 percent hard and 40% soft.

First, the “difficult” things. These abilities are usually taught. Examples include paid media, math, coding, analytics, digital marketing, social media, and project management.

A rating is the best way to keep yourself organized. Talentfoot scorecards typically use a one-to-five-point scale, with a maximum point total of about 50. So try to keep the number of skills on your scorecard between six and ten.

The broader the category, the more senior the role. The more junior the position, the more you will concentrate on specific skills such as using a marketing automation tool or managing content.

Identify the Soft Skill Questions

Soft skills are more challenging to evaluate. These qualities show a candidate’s ability to communicate efficiently or interpersonal skills.

This is used for choosing the organization’s cultural fit as well as your leadership abilities.

Choosing who will ask these questions is integral to the interview process. Think who does in your company has the soft skills you respect.

In this step, using behavioral interview questions if the soft skill is leadership. For example, inquire about when the candidate had to make a tough decision when leading others.

A good question for this is, “How are you leading your team through this crisis?”.
Use questions like this that ask a candidate to provide evidence of their accomplishments.

Identify Your Top Job Applicants

When dealing with hundreds of applicants, you’ll need to keep yourself organized, stick to the plan and have a system to keep track of all.

Subscribe to an applicant monitoring system if you don’t already have one (ATS). You can either buy a professional device or make your own in Excel.

Anyone actively working with must be listed in the ATS and added to a particular stage in your pipeline.

Here you put each person’s name, title, employer, place, state, LinkedIn address, the status of your contact, and where they are in the interview process.
To keep track of where the applicants are in the recruiting process, color code them.

Most significantly, the scorecard rankings must be incorporated into the ATS. The results can be tabulated automatically by the device. All can see the scores when you post the ATS with the stakeholders.

Calculate the Scores

Lastly, the interviewer should enter their scores into the ATS after each interview. Set up a debriefing conference for the managers. After each interview, suggest having a quick fifteen-minute get-together.

In the end, when you check the scores, you’ll see which candidates meet the minimum criteria and which applicants go above them. You now have a clear view of your candidates and a greater understanding of how they will perform. This will help you in the process of hiring and seeing someone’s hard-working value.