An interview scorecard is a tool that has been used for years by hiring managers to make better hiring decisions. It is a structured way of collecting and analyzing information about candidates during the interview process.

You can learn more about scorecards in our article “Interview Scorecard: pros & cons”

What makes our interview scorecard “smart”?

Our interview scorecard is a tool that helps you stay organized while conducting interviews, as well as make better decisions.

InterviewTime smart scorecards consists of questions grouped under different categories, with a difficulty indicator for each question. The questions are also tagged so that they can be easily located. You can capture answers with a star rating and add notes to each answer.

At the end of each interview, we'll automatically calculate the candidate's score and display their strengths and weaknesses along with analytics dashboard.

How to create an interview scorecard template?

You can create a scorecard from scratch, import questions from file or use our public library of templates to give you a starting point.

The anatomy of a scorecard template

Interview reminders

Interview reminders are two sections at the start and at the end of a scorecard.

• Intro section serves as a reminder of what the interviewer should do at the beginning of the interview.

• End of interview section serves as a reminder of what the interviewer should do at the end of the interview.

Intro section example:

“Allocate 5 min for the intro:

• Describe the structure of the interview and what to expect

• Tell the candidate about the company and why we're hiring for this role”

Questions

Create a list of questions that you want to ask all candidates. To make the interview process fair and consistent aim to ask 80% of the same questions to all candidates. Otherwise, you will not be able to compare candidates with each other.

Grouping questions into categories helps to evaluate skills in a particular competence area and make a more granular assessment. Think of question groups as candidate's competence areas that you want to evaluate. You should always create at least several question groups.

iOS Engineer scorecard groups example: “Core, Networking, Data, UI, Architecture”

All questions also have difficulty indicator and (optionally) tags.

Question difficulty is used in our algorithm to calculate a candidate's score. In order to get more accurate candidate scoring, you should use one of the appropriate difficulty values: “Easy”, “Medium” or “Hard”.

Tags are mainly used as visual indicators of questions that are connected in some way. For example, you can use tags to show that they belong to a similar topic and during interview quickly switch to questions that belong to another topic.

How to use an interview scorecard during the interview?

It’s best to open the scorecard 5 minutes before the interview and quickly scan all sections to refresh your memory. As we discussed already, there are interview reminders sections to help you get started and finish the interview.

During the interview, you will be asking questions from the scorecard and recording answers. We use 3x ⭐ rating system to record how good was the candidate's answers - “Poor”, “Good” or “Excellent”. If the candidate didn’t answer at all you can mark question as unanswered via ❌ icon.

Tags should help you navigate between a list of questions. Aim to ask questions with different tags to assess candidate's skills comprehensively.

There is also the ability to quickly record notes under every question or capture overall candidate notes for your convenience.

How to make better hiring decision?

Making hiring recommendations is an easy process with our smart scorecard since we generate all the data you need to make fair and unbiased decisions.

Based on captured candidate's answers scorecard report automatically provides:

• overall candidate score

• score for every competence area, so you can understand candidate's strengths and growth areas

• list of all questions with assessments and notes

• summary notes

• interview analytic data (like a breakdown of questions by difficulties), so you can discover gaps and improve the interview process

All this data gives you comprehensive candidate profile information, that helps to compare candidates and make confident hiring decisions.

Candidate reports can be easily exported or shared with anyone you need.

Summary

Interviews should be more about the candidates' performance, and less about who is the interviewer. InterviewTime scorecard mechanism helps to ensure interviewers are assessing in line with other interviewers and capture all the data required to make an unbiased, confident decision.