How to hire the right talent, faster with interview scorecards

Key Takeaways

• Structured scorecards are key to ensuring consistency and objectivity throughout your hiring process, enabling hiring teams to focus on relevant candidate skills and competencies for each role during interviews. 
• Scorecards underpinned by data-driven insights support faster, more confident hiring decisions.
• AI can help hiring teams write consistent, evidence-based scorecards through accurate data capture, structured templates, and ATS integration.

Informed hiring decisions rely on data — and interview scoring sheets, or scorecards, are the foundation that transforms candidate interactions into clear, actionable insights. 

Interview scorecards are more than just checklists — they’re structured, dynamic tools designed to provide consistent, objective evaluations. By enabling hiring teams to assess specific competencies and qualities that are crucial for a position, scorecards play a pivotal role in reducing bias, supporting data-driven decisions, and ensuring fair evaluations.

Effective assessments begin well before an interview even starts, so investing in a high-quality scorecard process upfront is key. In this post, we'll give recruiters some tips on how to set your process up for success from the get-go and how to empower hiring teams to write interview scorecards that provide clear, actionable insights to guide your hiring decisions. We'll also tell you more about how Metaview’s tools can help make the process smoother and more effective.

Interview scorecard objectives

Before we get too deep into what makes a strong interview scorecard, let’s get clear about why a scorecard is important. 

Metaview co-founder and CTO Shahriar Tajbakhsh explains, “During the interview process, the objective of a scorecard is to shed light on different parts of a candidate. When you combine the scorecards of the whole hiring team, it helps them create a thesis about whether or not the candidate is a good fit.” 

One interview can’t provide enough signals to make an accurate hiring decision, but the collection of all interviews for any given candidate can. And scorecards help you turn the qualitative data you gather from these interviews into structured data that can help you make informed decisions. Scorecards should give hiring managers a clear picture of how a candidate fares across a set of attributes and how these attributes manifest themselves as strengths or weaknesses.

The role of an interview scorecard

The purpose of an interview scorecard is to ensure consistency, fairness, and clarity in the hiring process. By providing a structured framework, scorecards allow interviewers to evaluate candidates based on specific, relevant competencies — like technical skills, communication abilities, and mentality fit — rather than relying on subjective impressions. Standardization minimizes unconscious bias, offering a more objective, data-driven approach to hiring. 

Scorecards guide interviews by defining key criteria for each role — which promotes consistent evaluations across all interviewees. By guiding interviewers to capture specific responses, scorecards ensure that feedback is detailed and actionable. 

Structured interviews that are supported by well-defined scorecards lead to higher-quality data that talent acquisition pros and hiring managers can use to make better hiring decisions.

How to create a scorecard process that sets everyone up for success 

Effectively leveraging scorecards requires coordinated effort throughout different stages of the hiring process. 

Set the stage with thorough interview preparation

Before any interviews start, recruiters and hiring managers should ensure interviewers are familiar with the scorecard’s structure and criteria. Typically, each interviewer will be assigned a specific subset of competencies to focus on, ensuring comprehensive coverage across the panel. Each interviewer should align the goals of their interview by reviewing the direction provided by the hiring manager on the competencies and qualities most relevant to the position. 

Tie questions directly to job-relevant competencies

During the interview, the scorecard structure should guide interviewers’ questions. It helps interviewers collect specific examples of candidate experience and stay on topic. Interviewers should capture high-quality notes that detail specific examples that the candidate speaks about.

Collaborate post-interview to turn scorecard feedback into informed decisions

After the interview, recruiters should partner with hiring managers to synthesize this information and fill in any gaps. This often happens through a well-structured debrief (for more on that, check out our guide.) Ultimately, the hiring manager leverages the input from scorecards to make the final informed decision.

What does an effective interview scorecard look like?

Manual note-taking during candidate evaluations often results in missed follow-ups or incomplete details. A detailed and structured scorecard template helps interviewers focus on capturing the most relevant examples and nuances so that data can be used to contribute to informed hiring decisions. 

Key components of an interview scorecard

There are two sides to a strong interview scorecard: 1) the template itself has to be well-structured and consistently applied, and 2) the information that’s filled in by interviewers needs to be high-quality and relevant. Here’s more on how to achieve both of those objectives. 

Core competencies

Identifying the right core competencies for a role is essential for creating effective scorecards. Start by determining the key skills and qualities needed for the position. Collaborate with your hiring manager to align on what competencies the candidate must have on day one versus those that can be developed over time. For example, technical skills or knowledge specific to the role might be non-negotiable, while certain leadership attributes or soft skills could be nurtured after onboarding.

By separating essential, immediate requirements from longer-term growth areas, your scorecard will focus on evaluating what matters most for making the right hiring decision.

Rating scale

A clear and consistent rating scale helps ensure objective and fair evaluations. Start by working with hiring managers to define what each score represents, such as a 1 to 5 scale where 1 means "unsatisfactory" and 5 means "exceptional." To make the scale easy to use, include clear benchmarks for each level.

It’s also helpful to provide examples or behaviors that match each score for the skills you’re evaluating. This gives interviewers a shared understanding of the criteria and reduces subjectivity. A well-defined rating scale aligns and focuses the hiring team on assessing the skills that matter most for the role.

Summary of strengths and areas for development

Include space for the top two or three candidate strengths interviewers noted. Also, include space for one or two areas that the candidate can improve based on the interview.

Overall recommendation

Include a section where interviewers can make a “yes" or "no” recommendation and a space where they can provide rationale and supporting details. This is where interviewers will want to include specific examples given by the candidate. While this is not an overall "decision" on whether or not to hire the candidate, it's the interviewer's best assessment of whether the candidate passes muster on the specific attributes they were responsible for assessing.

Additional notes and follow-ups

This is where interviewers will provide any additional context like behavioral cues or areas of interest or specialty. This is also where they can list questions for future interviewers or potential discussion points if the candidate progresses to the next round.

Interviewer guidelines for how to fill-out an impactful scorecard

As we’ve said, it’s also key for interviewers to understand what high-quality feedback looks like. If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, you’ve likely experienced the frustration of opening a scorecard only to find it sparsely populated or lacking the context that paints a complete picture of a candidate. Here’s some guidelines you can share with interviewers to ensure they’re capturing the data you need to underpin a confidence decision. A strong interview scorecard includes feedback that is relevant, opinionated, and reflects outstanding questions. 

It’s important to note that interviewers are not the ones who make the hiring decisions. As Shahriar says, “This is a common misconception that requires a mindset shift: interviewers should instead see their mission as shedding light on a relatively small part of a person that will serve as one data point in a larger decision. Clarifying this mindset also helps to avoid situations in which an interviewer might feel confused or offended if the hiring manager ultimately makes a decision that goes against their recommendation.” 

Shahriar even goes so far as to say that individual interviewers likely don’t have the appropriate context to give a “yes or no” recommendation about a candidate hire. Instead, they should give a recommendation only on the candidate’s ability to deliver on the particular attributes they were responsible for assessing.

With all that in mind, here are some guidelines Shahriar recommends interviewers should follow.

Stick to the rubric

A good scorecard sticks to providing feedback on the attributes the interviewer is tasked with assessing in candidates. For example, one of the attributes we look for in our interviews at Metaview is Data Modeling. So, interview scorecards for that role need to call out how a candidate performed against that attribute, with specific examples of strengths and weaknesses. 

In most cases, interview notes and feedback on candidates should strictly focus on the attributes in question and avoid tangents that can bias opinions. If an interviewer includes notes in their scorecard about a candidate’s hobbies or personal interests, for example, that can unfairly skew perception, which degrades the credibility of the interviewer’s entire assessment.

Be opinionated

Interviewers should put their necks on the line when writing a scorecard. The least helpful thing to see is a lukewarm scorecard with recommendations like “soft yes” or “soft no.” Repeating what a candidate said isn’t enough — scorecards need to include an educated opinion on what the interviewer made of the responses, not leave it up to the hiring manager to form one themselves. 

The interviewer also needs to give context on why and how they formed this opinion, using concrete examples to back up their judgments. Even if an interviewer formed an opinion based on a feeling, it’s useful for a hiring manager to understand which bits of feedback are subjective and which are based in fact.

It’s okay to not be sure

No one interview can cover everything that needs to be investigated. Interviewers shouldn’t be afraid to include hypotheses they didn’t get a chance to verify or falsify. 

An interviewer might say something like “I think this person might break under pressure sooner than we’d expect,” which is something that could later be dug into in other interviews. Interviewers should note things they wish they could contribute to or what they would need to know to have a more confident opinion to evaluate candidates, but didn’t have time to.

How AI can help with consistent, high-quality scorecards 

Capturing high-quality scorecard feedback is no easy feat. Manually capturing notes during interviews often leads to incomplete or inconsistent documentation, making it difficult for hiring teams to align on key candidate takeaways. Without a standardized approach, critical insights can be missed, and hiring decisions may become more subjective and prone to bias.

This is where Metaview can help. By leveraging AI to automate note-taking and summarize key insights, Metaview makes it so much easier to apply an efficient, consistent, and objective scorecard system. Here’s how we can help.

Rubric creation

If you’re not sure where to begin, our Hiring Studio tool can help you create rubrics for candidate responses to different role-specific interview questions. It will help you create guidelines for what an “excellent,” “good,” and “bad” response entails and provide audio samples of each type of response. This can help underpin the creation of scorecards and rubrics at the start of the hiring process. 

Automated note-taking

Metaview’s AI automatically captures and summarizes everything that’s discussed in interviews, allowing interviewers to stay focused on engaging with the candidate and uncovering the signal they need to make an informed recommendation. With Metaview’s AI-powered notes, hiring teams can refer back to an accurate record of candidate responses, improving the quality and consistency of each scorecard.

Here’s one example of how a customer’s scorecards drastically improved after implementing Metaview. When interviewers were left to write up and submit feedback on their own, it often was sparse and severely lacking in the level of insight needed to make evidence-based decisions:

After enlisting the help of Metaview’s AI-powered notes, interviewers could much more easily submit scorecard feedback that includes rich detail with specific examples of what the candidate actually said. The feedback is now structured, well-reasoned, and highly-relevant to the rubric and scorecard. Here's an example:

Data extraction and summarization

Metaview doesn’t just record conversations — it organizes important details into a clear summary that’s relevant to your needs. You can create custom notes templates that are specific to different roles or interview types. So for each competency or area of interest you need to capture in your scorecards, the AI will automatically extract specific examples about what the candidate said about each skill.  When it’s time to fill out scorecards, rich examples and accurate notes are already readily available, and the interviewer just needs to add in their personal judgements. 

Seamless integration with applicant tracking system

Metaview integrates directly with applicant tracking systems (ATSes), allowing recruiters to push scorecards, notes, and summaries straight from Metaview to the ATS. By centralizing all candidate information, Metaview makes it so much easier to have rich, structured candidate data all in one palace, which contributes to faster and more informed decision making. 

Reducing bias and facilitating objectivity

Metaview’s structured, data-driven approach to note-taking minimizes subjectivity and standardizes evaluation criteria. A standardized approach to interviewing and evaluating candidates helps hiring teams reduce unconscious bias and focus on measurable candidate competencies. 

Faster time-to-hire

By making it so much easier to write high-quality scorecards, teams using Metaview often see a significant reduction in the time it takes hiring teams to submit scorecards. Hiring teams can make quicker decisions and move the best candidates through without delay.

Hire the right people, faster with Metaview

An interview scorecard is an impactful and essential tool for turning candidate interactions into meaningful insights. By providing a structured framework, scorecards help hiring teams make more confident, objective decisions based on data — not subjective impressions. 

Metaview’s AI-powered notes make it so much easier to consistently capture high-quality scorecards that hiring teams can use to make more data-informed decisions based on actual facts.