---
name: interview-scorecard
description: Use when asked to build or fill out an interview scorecard — defined criteria, a consistent rating scale, and evidence fields an interviewer completes right after talking to a candidate — as the comparable, defensible alternative to an unstructured post-interview writeup or a gut-feel recommendation.
---

# Interview Scorecard

An interview scorecard is a structured tool an interviewer fills out
immediately after an interview, rating a candidate against criteria
defined in advance — usually drawn from the [[job-description]] —
rather than writing a free-form narrative or relying on how the
conversation happened to feel. Its purpose is to turn one interviewer's
impression into something that can be compared, debated, and defended
alongside every other interviewer's.

## Key components

- **Criteria tied to the role** — pulled from the job description's
  actual responsibilities and required skills, not generic labels like
  "culture fit" or "smart" that mean something different to every
  interviewer who uses them.
- **A consistent rating scale** — the same scale, with the same defined
  anchors (what separates a 3 from a 4, concretely), used across every
  interviewer and every candidate for the role, so a "4" means the same
  thing regardless of who wrote it.
- **Evidence or examples per criterion** — a short note on what the
  candidate actually said or did that produced the score, not just the
  number by itself; the score without the evidence can't be checked,
  challenged, or explained to someone who wasn't in the room.
- **An overall recommendation, kept separate from the individual
  criterion scores** — hire, no-hire, or lean, recorded as one more
  input to a hiring debrief rather than as a veto.
- **Interviewer and stage identification** — who filled it out and
  which stage of the loop it covers, so a debrief can see the full
  spread rather than one aggregated number.

## Why structured beats unstructured

An unstructured post-interview writeup lets each interviewer evaluate
on whatever axis stood out to them that day, which makes candidates
hard to compare to each other and makes interviewers hard to compare to
each other (one person's glowing review might be evaluating something
no one else even discussed). A scorecard built on shared criteria and a
shared scale fixes both problems: candidates for the same role get
judged on the same dimensions, and a hiring decision can be defended
later by pointing to specific, recorded evidence rather than to
someone's memory of how the conversation felt.

## Common pitfalls

- **Vague criteria** — "culture fit" or "strong presence" left
  undefined lets each interviewer score something different under the
  same label, defeating the entire point of a shared scale.
- **Scoring drift between interviewers** — without calibration on what
  each number means, one interviewer's default "3" is another's
  default "5," and the scores stop being comparable across the loop.
- **No evidence recorded, only a number** — a bare score can't be
  debated in a debrief or defended later if the decision is questioned;
  the evidence field is what makes the score usable.
- **Filled out long after the interview** — completed from memory at
  the end of the day, or worse, right before the debrief, loses the
  specific detail that made the evidence field worth having.
- **Treated as a veto rather than an input** — letting the last
  interviewer's low score end the conversation skips the actual value
  of collecting multiple structured scorecards: comparing them.

## Learn more

- [[job-description]] for where scorecard criteria should come from.
- [[offer-letter]] for the document that follows a hiring decision.
- [[smart-criteria]] for writing criteria specific and measurable enough to score consistently.