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Candidate Evaluation Scorecards for Better Hiring Decisions

Keeping track of all the details for each candidate could easily take up a lot of time. It is harder to manage when the information you need for decision making is scattered over various systems and you do not use any form of candidate evaluation scorecards. Perhaps the biggest challenge lies in effectively screening and categorizing job hopefuls in order to determine which are the most promising potential employees.

Going through multiple interviews on a daily basis could make it difficult to separate similarly qualified individuals. Notes taken by interviewers can be helpful but an unstructured process with a lot of unstructured data to process could quickly get out of control.  A recruitment platform that provides a structured approach to managing the hiring process and supports candidate evaluation scorecards or online forms can be extremely helpful. Understanding the benefits of structured interview scoring is a necessary step. Realizing these benefits requires using a platform with interview-scoring capabilities built in can greatly improve your hiring decisions. Here are some of the key benefits of implementing a structured interview process  and evaluation scorecards.

Identify Necessary Skills

While managers and recruiters know exactly what they are looking for in an applicant for a certain position, it’s often difficult to categorize the candidates that are the very best match for the job. Modern applicant tracking software will allow you to create an interview evaluation scorecard, giving you instant access to candidate scores for key skills and requirements. To facilitate this, your scorecard creation system should allow complete customizability but also be simple to use.

Turn Interviewing into a data-driven process

The right cloud-based technology will enable every member of the hiring team to have access to candidate evaluation scorecards.

While verbal and written reports from an interviewer can give a manager or other executive that was not present an idea of the candidate, an evaluation scorecard presents a far more complete profile. This combined with Hiring Collaboration ensures the entire recruitment team is up to date and fully appraised on the true potential of each candidate.

Eliminate Bias with Candidate Evaluation Scorecards

Even with the most professional recruiters and interviewers, biases can creep in. A properly designed evaluation scorecard helps eliminate this from the equation – its structured system of scoring specific questions results in a properly merit-based evaluation. Moreover, every candidate can now be evaluated using the same standard criteria for a particular position. This, in turn, makes sure that that the evaluation scorecard method is objective and consistently applied across the board.

Offset Interviewer Bias with Structured Interview Feedback

It is very common for an eventual hire to be chosen on the strength of interviewer recommendation. The phrase, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is commonly heard when someone is searching for a job. While referrals are great, too much emphasis on who knows who may sometimes lead to poor selection, costing the organization valuable time and money.

Whether due to the aforementioned bias or simply being more forceful, one interviewer may take the spotlight in a round table or even through reports. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t have an objective method in place to quickly rule out interview bias. Using a modern applicant tracking system that incorporates structured interviewing and evaluation scorecards ensures the results speak for themselves.

Implement and Encourage Objective Hiring Practices

Part of the profile of any leading organization must be objective and professional hiring practices. A complete lack of documentation is completely unacceptable, and free-form notes can easily be accused of showing bias (whether this is true or not). Well formulated, structured and consistent interview evaluation scorecards leave no room for any speculation – or possible doubts over hiring-related decisions. With a detailed scorecard system, the appropriate information is always available to back up a data-driven decision.

Highlight Competitive Rather Than Comparative Strengths

With a batch of applicants, it can be all too easy for one or two characteristics of some candidates to totally dominate and influence the decision-making for most interviewers. However, interview evaluation scorecards help to level the field by bringing attention to those specific skills that are most important for the position. Such data driven evaluations can quickly highlight the need to consider more candidates or perhaps shine a light on other interviewees with different strengths.

Make the Hiring Process More Effective With Interview Assessments

A interview process is most effective when it is guided by a well-structured process and provides an objective way to record valuable information about a candidate’s suitability to the job in question. When such a well-designed interview process is easy to create apply to each interview process, the results could be incredible in terms of the improved effectiveness if the overall hiring process.

With Simplicant, interview evaluation scorecards can be easily adjusted to match the needs of the organization. No need to keep track of paper-based evaluation forms when you can do the same and much more through an online collaborative system. Depending on the needs of the hiring process and the particular job, the scorecard can be configured to collect detailed information or adjusted to work as a quick list of screening questions.

Interested in learning more about candidate evaluation scorecards and forms? Contact us and see a demo of Simplicant’s recruiting platform.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash