When a search goes wrong, the post-mortem usually focuses on sourcing or on the interview loop. In our experience the failure is almost always earlier: the hiring manager and the interviewers never agreed, in writing, what the role must accomplish in its first year.
What a scorecard contains
- Three to five outcomes the hire must deliver in twelve months, stated as results rather than activities.
- The competencies each outcome requires, with an explicit definition of what strong looks like.
- Which interviewer assesses which competency, so nobody assesses everything and therefore nothing.
- The deal-breakers, agreed in advance, so they are not invented mid-process to justify a preference.
Without this, interviews collapse into an assessment of likeability, and the debrief becomes a negotiation between confident opinions rather than a comparison against a standard.
An interview without a scorecard is not an assessment. It is a conversation you will later describe as a gut feeling.
Write the assessment down
Every shortlist we present carries a written assessment against the agreed scorecard for each candidate. It takes an extra hour per candidate and it makes the debrief shorter than the interview, because the disagreements are about evidence rather than impressions.
P. Nair
Partner, HR & Talent Solutions
