Interviewing candidates can be a volatile process. Creating a level of interview consistency, while avoiding alienating your potential employees is the goal of every hiring manager. Achieving this goal traditionally, however, is a balancing act that most recruiters would rather avoid. 

Thus, alternative solutions were created to allow recruiters and interviewers to stay on the same page and hire top talent. Today we’ll be discussing one of those solutions — interview scorecards — and how they can improve your interview process. 

What is an Interview Scorecard?

An interview scorecard is exactly what it sounds like — a scorecard that keeps track of how many boxes a candidate checks off. The scorecard is used to compare candidates’ skills against the skills required for the available position. They are filled with predetermined criteria that record any candidates’ hard and soft skills for an available position. 

Other than a checklist, these scorecards act as a notepad for interviewers to write potentially relevant and impactful answers on. It may also be used to note any concerns to look back on. Finally, there may be a note of final evaluation, stating whether or not that candidate is suitable for the role. 

Set Guidelines to Ensure a Fair Hiring Process

Unstructured interviews can create interesting conversations, but they can also lead to preferential treatment. With few set-in-stone standards for what an optimal candidate looks like, interviewers are more likely to gravitate towards candidates they can relate to. 

This is an issue, as any seasoned hiring manager will know, for a variety of reasons. Lawsuits, bad hires, stagnant productivity, and bias is a killer of modern business. 

Interview scorecards allow recruiters to set guidelines early on. Specific skills, both soft and hard skills, can be tallied. Recruiters and interviewers will be on the same page both before and after the interviews. The added layer of objectivity that interview scorecards add to the process will have both internal and external parties satisfied. 

Measure Candidate Consistency

Sometimes, candidates will have to go through multiple interviews before hiring decisions are made. Often, potential employees will change their answers to questions to fit the personality of their interviewer in an attempt to gain favor with them. In unstructured interviews, this may gain them some points, and result in a subpar hire. 

When interview scorecards come into play, not so much. Scorecards give interviewers the opportunity to compare candidates’ answers to one another, allowing them to discover which candidates are simply fabricating personal responses. 

Standardize Large-Team Building Interviews

A scorecard for interviews can help to standardize large-team recruitment interviews. It guarantees that everyone on the interview team is on the same page. This means assessing prospects in the same way by using a set of standards that everyone accepts. When you have a lot of interviewers or interviewers who work in different locations, this is particularly significant.

Additionally, if you’re hiring a large team of workers, each of which should have similar qualifications, using interview scorecards can ensure the group functions well together. Group hiring with this method will create a team with a shared drive, a range of backgrounds, and vast accumulated experience. 

Create Realistic Candidate Expectations

Above all, the formation of an interview scorecard can create realistic expectations for what your future employee will look like. Too often recruiters will overstuff their job descriptions with qualifications and experience in order to find the best candidate possible. What happens a vast majority of the time is the recruiter has to settle for less than they bargained for. 

In addition to potential workers not meeting their standards, the recruiter in this scenario will have to determine which standards to lower on a shortened deadline. By creating and using interview scorecards, you ensure that key qualifications are prioritized and fewer resources are wasted on incompatible candidates. 

Upgrade Your Hiring Process with AI Recruitment Technology

While recruitment is a repetitive and time-consuming process, interview scorecards can help streamline the process of making a good hire. Additionally, understanding what qualities make a good candidate makes AI hiring tools like resume screening software and advanced chatbots much more useful and effective. Input your desired list of skills and necessary experience can be input, and the tools are free to make your recruiters’ lives easier. 

AI technologies allow you to focus on problems that need human thinking by handling routine and minor functions. AI tools with chat functions, like PandoLogic’s pandoSELECT, can help you automate the early stages of the hiring process and keep your records in a single dashboard. The hiring process can be handled in a variety of ways with our technology toolbox providing alternatives for almost every stage.