Why does Hiring Scorecard matter?
Without one, interviewers evaluate against private and conflicting pictures of the job, and the decision gets made on impressions that nobody can compare. A scorecard converts the argument from whether we liked them into whether they can do the specific things we agreed this role must produce, which is the only version of the question that survives disagreement. It also makes the job description honest, because writing the outcomes down usually exposes either a role that is two jobs or one whose success criteria nobody can actually state.
What does Hiring Scorecard look like in practice?
Suppose you are hiring your first support person. A job description lists responsibilities: answer tickets, write documentation, be organized. A scorecard instead says that within six months first response is under two hours during business days, the twenty most common questions have public answers, and the founder no longer reads the queue daily. Now every interview can probe whether this person has done something like that, the offer conversation is concrete, and at six months the review writes itself rather than becoming a negotiation about what the job was.
What are the common mistakes with Hiring Scorecard?
- Listing responsibilities rather than outcomes. Responsibilities describe activity; outcomes are what you would notice if the role were done well.
- Writing it after the first interviews, by which point it is a description of whoever you liked.
- Making it unfalsifiable. If no candidate could clearly fail a criterion, it is not doing any work.
- Skipping agreement. A scorecard the other interviewers have not signed up to is one person's opinion in a document.
Related concepts
- First Ten HiresThe small set of employees hired before the company has real process, whose individual judgment substitutes for the systems a larger company would use to catch their mistakes.
- Reference ChecksTalking to people who have worked with a candidate before. The highest-signal step in hiring, and the one most often rushed or skipped entirely.
- Performance Review BasicsThe lightest formal feedback process that works before there is an HR function: a written, periodic, two-way account of how someone is doing against what was agreed.
- Offer Letter vs. Employment AgreementAn offer letter confirms the basic terms of at-will employment, title, compensation, start date; an employment agreement is a more comprehensive contract, typically for executives, that can add severance, non-compete terms, and specific termination conditions.