A simple recruitment scorecard

Several of my clients are hiring right now, so I’m returning to recruitment scorecards fairly often.

A recruitment scorecard is a simple way to add some rigour to your hiring process. There are a few reasons why that’s a good thing:

• People have a habit of hiring people who look like themselves, where often diversity (of thought and background) would go a long way
• Some people interview better than others, but maybe aren’t the best candidates (especially if you’re hiring a new business professional, which I help my clients do often)
• It can steer the conversation during the interview itself, if you’ve identified that something appears to be lacking (potentially on a CV or during a first stage interview)
• You can review things like notice period and salary expectations in context
• It helps to check your unconscious biases (there’s lots of research into how male and female candidates behave differently in interviews, for example).

A simple recruitment scorecard, like the one I use, looks like this:

Here’s the process, which takes a couple of minutes:

1. In a Google Sheet I list the names of the candidates; links to any documents (maybe a LinkedIn profile) that other people I’m involving in the hiring process will find relevant; a few criteria that I think I’m looking for in the role; and the basic info that I’ve probably identified in a screening interview or first stage interview (such as notice period and salary expectations)
2. I score each candidate on a scale of 1-3 on each criteria and conditionally format the cells (where 3 is best/green and 1 is worst/red)
3. The final column averages the scores of the criteria and I can sort the candidates from high to low scoring.

Thinking through the criteria

Obviously the scorecard is very simple; the most difficult part is thinking through the attributes that I think will make someone successful in the role. Here are a few I use frequently, with examples:

1. Location: where would this person ideally be based? E.g. Ride Shotgun had several offices in the UK; a remote candidate would score 1 (but could obviously be so good on the other dimensions that they could still come out on top); there were offices in Leeds and Manchester where a candidate could work…these offices had account managers, so there was an ability to upskill and cross-sell, so that would score 2; Sheffield would score 3 because the rest of the the hire’s teammates are there - including me - which meant I wouldn’t have to travel to see them in person. There are other things to consider when it comes to location for certain roles: where would this person’s clients be located (would it be good if they are in a certain city so they can see their clients more easily)? Where are the events that they might need to attend in order to drum up business (should they be located in London so they can network the agency better in the capital)?
2. Experience working with similar brands: has the candidate worked with clients like the ones they’re going to be working with at our agency? This is separate from technical ability because it’s less a question of “do they know their craft” and more “do they know how to get things done?” e.g. has the candidate worked with large corporates that have many stakeholders, because they’re going to need to do that here? Has the client worked with brands that have multiple territories? Has the client worked with brands that have the small or large budgets that we deal with?
3. Values: some agencies disqualify candidates completely if they’re not a values fit; some score candidates based on evidence. I would usually score based on values for a junior role - where experience is less crucial and attitude is everything - and disqualify for senior roles if there are some obvious cultural problems coming our way.
4. Influence: when Rise at Seven had news, you were unable to login to social media without seeing it…solid walls of our staff talking about what we had going on was the norm. I’m often asked (and recorded a whole podcast episode with my friend Bethan Vincent) about how we got our staff to post on social media so frequently: there’s an element of culture, where it’s celebrated and, to a degree, expected; there’s a larger element of leading by example (your staff probably won’t post if you don’t); and there’s an even bigger element of hiring for it. We looked for people - and scored people - based on their apparent willingness to post on social media. As with all the criteria, you might score poorly on this dimension and well on everything else, so prove to be the best candidate anyway, but it was certainly a consideration.

You can adjust candidates’ scores up and down (e.g. when you interview someone who’s obviously more technically competent than someone else you’ve interviewed and already scored a 3/3) and, once you’ve got an average, you can take things like salary expectations and notice period into consideration (e.g. if two candidates feel equally well suited, but one is immediately available).

The exact criteria (and attributes you should collect) will depend on your agency and your job…but a scorecard will help you to think through those desired attributes in advance, instead of hiring the person who had the most enjoyable interview, which can sometimes be the case.