Article Summary
📌 The Scorecard is a chart that lists evaluation criteria (technical skills, soft skills, values).
🎯 It ensures reliable selection, avoids biases, and facilitates comparison.
💡 It includes 7-10 priority criteria with appropriate weighting.
🤖 AI can help you draft your scorecard, check out our Job Starter Kit.
What is a recruitment scorecard?
A recruitment scorecard is a document (often in the form of a chart) that defines specific and weighted evaluation criteria to measure how well candidates meet the requirements and challenges of a given position.
Why has the scorecard become indispensable?
The scorecard offers numerous advantages throughout the recruitment process.
✔️ Objectify the recruitment process: The recruitment scorecard helps overcome subjective biases by objectively evaluating candidates according to defined criteria, ensuring a fairer selection process aligned with the job's needs.
✔️ Facilitate candidate comparison: When receiving 5, 10, or 20 quality applications, it can sometimes be difficult to make a choice without a coherent scoring system. The scorecard serves as a quick comparison tool: you can easily see which candidate achieves the best overall score and, importantly, on which criteria they stand out.
✔️ Save time and improve rigor: The prior definition of a scorecard forces the recruiter to clarify needs and identify key skills, thus structuring interviews to effectively evaluate candidates and gain efficiency.
✔️ Improve recruitment quality and longevity: By aligning the recruitment process more closely with the real needs of the company, the scorecard reduces costs and enhances the sustainable integration of employees.
Key elements of a good scorecard
For a scorecard to be truly effective, it must be based on methodical and well-defined elements. Here are the main sections that generally make up a successful scorecard.
🔹Job Title and Main Mission
It's essential to start your scorecard by clearly stating the job title and the main mission (or purpose) of this position.
📌 Example: "Digital Communication Officer – Develop the company's online presence to increase brand awareness and generate more leads." This sentence helps frame the entire document and keep the job's purpose in mind.
🧠 Essential Technical Skills
What are the minimum required skills? For a developer position, is it mastery of a specific programming language? A full-stack approach? Is advanced knowledge in software architecture necessary? This section is crucial as it alone can disqualify a candidate lacking the required technical foundation.
👂 Expected Soft Skills
Some jobs require strong customer orientation, others great autonomy, and still others leadership ability. Soft skills are sometimes harder to assess than technical skills, but they are equally important.
📕 Alignment with Company Culture and Values
Every company has its culture, whether it's the way of working, informal rules, management style, or displayed values (innovation, transparency, ecology, etc.). Evaluating a candidate on this level may seem subjective, but certain indicators (their way of working in a team, deep motivations, vision of success, etc.) can provide good information. The goal is not to impose total uniformity but to ensure a minimum compatibility between the candidate and the environment in which they will evolve.
🗝️ Experience and Achievements
In some positions, experience is a determining factor. Having already managed a team, led a similar project, or worked in a comparable sector. In the scorecard, you can include points such as:
- Number of years of experience in the field
- Type of projects or missions accomplished
- Measurable results or performances (sales increase, cost reduction, etc.)
🏁 Motivations and Project Commitment
Finally, it's often relevant to assess the candidate's motivation and understanding of the role. Is it just a stopgap job or a true opportunity they've been waiting for? Motivation can tip the balance, especially when the position requires strong commitment or the ability to overcome challenges.
Long-term benefits of using a scorecard
✔️ Standardization of the process: The scorecard standardizes candidate evaluation, continuously improving recruitment quality and efficiency.
✔️ Better internal communication: Providing clear and objective evaluation criteria, thus facilitating collective decision-making.
✔️ Strengthening employer brand: Candidates, even those not selected, recognize the rigor and objectivity of the approach and often retain a good impression.
✔️ Reduced turnover: A well-constructed scorecard reduces turnover by aligning skills and company culture for successful integration.
Limits and common mistakes to avoid
🚫 Ignoring the job's evolution and not thinking long-term
🚫 Too many or overly complex criteria
🚫 Poor definition of evaluation levels
How to build a Scorecard step by step?
1️⃣ Define job objectives
To ensure you're heading in the right direction, the best strategy is to start by defining the job's objectives. Answer these questions:
- What is the number one objective of the position in the next 3 years?
- Beyond this objective, what are the other key tasks or projects you want to see accomplished?
- In 3 years, what will be the job's scope in terms of team size to manage and geographical coverage?
Remember that you're recruiting to achieve ambitious goals, not to manage the present.
💡 Tip: If you can't complete this step due to lack of knowledge or perspective on a position, ask your peers; they may be more advanced on the relevant function.
2️⃣ List key criteria
To achieve the objectives set just before, what are the essential hard skills, priority soft skills, and most important values? For example, "Experience in technical direction," "team management of 5 people," "English," etc.
You should end up with 7 to 10 criteria to remain concise. Beyond that, it's a sign that you're not focusing on the essentials and are complicating the scorecard.
💡 Tip: Use AI to help brainstorm and find key criteria for a position.
3️⃣ Weight the criteria
Not all criteria are equal. Some skills are "nice to have" while others are absolutely essential. It is often wise to assign a weighting coefficient. In the end, you get a more representative overall score of the job's priorities.
📌 An effective weighting system could range from "1 - Moderately important criterion" to "4 - Essential criterion."
4️⃣ Choose mandatory criteria
Feel free to mark one or two criteria as mandatory if you think it's essential for the position. This will allow a very quick initial filter of candidates.
Often the mandatory criterion is related to the number of years of experience in a position, a mastered technology, or a managed team size.
5️⃣ Share your scorecard
Gather all decision-makers from the internal recruitment process and share the scorecard with them so everyone agrees. This step is essential before starting the screening interview to avoid wasting valuable time backtracking.
Ensure that the business objectives, criteria, weighting, and mandatory criteria are correct.
6️⃣ Use your scorecard
The scorecard is the foundation of everything. From it, you can create your job description and especially prepare interview questions to ask candidates. We also wrote an article on the STAR method, one of the most popular techniques for evaluating a candidate's competence based on past experiences, take a look.
These questions will allow you to measure the achievement of the scorecard criteria. A simple system is to score each criterion out of 5 points (1 = Poor, 2 = Fair, 3 = Good, 4 = Very good, 5 = Excellent). Others prefer a 10-point scale. The important thing is to remain consistent and ensure each point on the scale corresponds to a clear description.
You have your criteria, you have a score per criterion, you have a weighting, and thus you have an overall score for the candidate. That's it, you have a great dashboard to manage your recruitment clearly and objectively.
Case Study: Scorecard Implementation
We are looking to recruit a product manager at Tiple who will have 3 business objectives:
- Define the product roadmap
- Deliver the features of this roadmap in collaboration with tech teams
- Build their team by hiring 3 people in the next 2 years.
And here is the scorecard created.
The future of the scorecard: towards automation and AI?
The emergence of digital tools and artificial intelligence opens new possibilities for the scorecard and recruitment:
- Writing a scorecard is an easy-to-implement AI recruitment use case
- Assistance in preparing interview questions - Discover Job Starter Kit by Tiple
- Automatic CV analysis and sorting - Discover Talent Screening by Tiple
- Online tests to evaluate technical skills
AI is just a tool to aid preparation and decision-making. The human dimension remains essential to assess the candidate's personality, motivation, and cultural alignment.
FAQ
🔹 What is a recruitment scorecard?
It is a chart that defines and weights evaluation criteria (skills, values, etc.) to objectively compare candidates.
🔹 Why is the scorecard essential in recruitment?
It limits biases, facilitates the comparison of multiple profiles, and improves the quality and longevity of recruitment.
🔹 How to build an effective scorecard?
First, define the job's objectives over several years, list 7 to 10 key criteria (hard & soft skills), assign them a weighting, then prepare interview questions for each criterion.
🔹 What mandatory criteria should be included?
Those that are indispensable for the position (e.g., a specific technology or a minimum number of years of experience). They allow for a quick initial filter.
🔹 What common mistakes should be avoided with the scorecard?
Ignoring the future evolution of the position, multiplying too many criteria (at the risk of complicating the scoring), and poorly defining the evaluation scale.