How to Analyze Interviews and Cut the “Bad Fit” Candidates
What we’re looking at here is the hiring score card template. What it’s going to tell you is how you can
analyze your interviews and how to essentially cut the fat and continue down through your funnel. No
matter how many interviews you have, whether it’s one interview or five, you can use something like
this and it will help you through your process and it’ll keep you organized throughout. This is called the
“hiring scorecard template” and we’re going to make this available as Google Spreadsheet which you
copy. This will be also available as an Excel file.
In order to copy this, you’d go to the link and you’d hit “file” and “make a copy” and you’ll have your
own copy of the template.
This is going to be different for everyone. What we’re looking at right here is for a marketing manager.
So keep in mind, I run a digital marketing agency, so in this case I’m looking for a marketing manager
and I’ve tailored this score card to that role specifically. You’re going to have to change this all the time,
but ultimately it’s going to save you a lot of pain and time. It’s not going to take that long to make a few
changes to this document. Just make sure you get it right and spend a little time on it and you’ll be good
to go.
What we’re looking at here, the first section is the culture section. The way you use this document is you
essentially rate each candidate from 1-5, 1 being the poorest and 5 being excellent. You’ll rate them for
each category. Starting from column E here, you have the different candidates, candidates 1-5. This will
just be whomever you’re interviewing for this role. That way it’s organized in one document and you
don’t have a bunch of documents to worry about. The reason why I like using the 1-5 scoring system is
you have numbers you’re going off of. Once you start to stack too many documents for each candidate
and you start to get too detail oriented and you write all these notes during the interview, you start to
be unable to fully focus on the interview because you’re so focused on writing down the answers and
what they’re saying. You can’t listen intently to come back with a response. But if you’re able to come
up with a scoring system and score each individual candidate and go down the list, then you can look at
each one and be able to recall these specific answers. You’ll be able to recall the big answers as well. I’ve
tried other ones that are super detailed and required me to fill in a lot of text, but that’s not necessary.
You want to do what’s effective and efficient. This will get the job done.
Going back to the first section, we have the culture section. Culture will surround your core values. For
us, our core values are grit, action oriented, growth oriented and being data driven. We’ll have
questions surrounding that. For the growth-oriented value, we’ll ask what the last book or blog post
they read and right away we’ll be able to see if this person is interested in learning and getting better.
You can tell immediately once you start asking questions like that. They’ll start to go off and say “Hey
that’s not the only thing I’ve been reading, I’ve been reading this other magazine, I’ve been reading
these other blogs. I just want to get better and better.” You’ll be able to see the hunger immediately.
That’s why we have that question.
Make sure you tailor the first section to your core values and what’s important to you in terms of
culture. Then you can score them 1-5. If someone does a good job, for example, I’ll fill this in. Let’s say
they’ve impressed us. They aren’t the most growth oriented person and won’t go gung ho about it, but
at least they’re a 4/5. Continue scoring down the list and calculate the subtotal. You’ll have a final total
at the end to compare people.
Next section, overall attributes. This one, you probably won’t have to change too much. A lot of
companies are looking for people with a positive attitude, good energy, people that are responsive
through emails, oral and written communication, admirable is an interesting one. Ideally you want to
hire people that you would admire. If you’re going to admire someone, they’ve done something
impressive or you think they’re smart and probably going to be much better than you eventually—
admirable speaks volumes. For me to be admirable about someone that’s saying a lot. Ultimately I
respect this person and that’s important because, if you’re not going to admire this person, you’re not
going to respect this person, chances are you shouldn’t hire them in the first place. You’re trying to
make your team better, you’re not supposed to hire lower.
Team-oriented everyone wants that. Intelligence you can gauge through a myriad of answers or
questions that can be tied back to learning, and the next trait, creative problem solving. You’ll total
those up as well.
The third section is overall experience. I just want to note the first three sections here of culture, overall
attributes, overall experience are tied to the first interview. You’re just getting your feet wet. You’ve
done the phone screen already and this is the first interview—it might be in person or over Skype—you
want to rate their overall experience. For this specific marketing role we’re looking for someone that has
a blog which speaks volumes about them as a person because it shows they understand the importance
of content and how it ties in with everything. You want something that ties in with the overall
experience. That’s what you’re going to look for with a mid-senior type of role.
If you look at row 29 here, where it says grand total. Here you add up all the subtotals and ask yourself
questions after you have the numbers. Why did one person score significantly hire? Is this person really
that much better? You look at numbers in each section and figure out what the right balance is. This is
the analysis portion where you have quantifiable numbers to look at rather than basing everything off
gut feeling. Having something like this is very powerful. At this point, I didn’t do this a lot sooner
because I used to just shoot from the hip. Having a more organized and defined process for this, with
numbers tied to it, is going to make your life a lot easier.
After you’ve done the analysis, you can decide to move specific candidates to the next level—the
interview part 2, which has to do with assigning a homework assignment. You both agree on a price and
you agree to pay that price. Ideally it’s something that’s challenging and very related to what they would
be doing. In some cases, Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm, will bring in people they want to hire for
one week and they’ll pay them for the week. They’ll work together side-by-side. The downside for the
prospect is they have to give up some vacation days, but ultimately that’s the sacrifice they need to
make if they really want to work for the company. It shows commitment as well.
You can switch up the order as you see fit based on your interview process, I’m just going based off what
I do. You will assign the homework and when they finish the homework, they’ll come back in and you
start to ask really detailed questions surrounding the homework. This is when you can get to the nitty
gritty. Row 37 is the beginning of the questions. You can ask as many as you want. The point is to dive
deeper into the homework. Why did they do things a certain way? Why did they miss out on some other
things? How would they go about doing things if they were to do it again? You want to ask tough
questions and continue to ask why, why and why. See how they respond to this in general.
If they did something wrong but they have a good rebuttal each time and they respond cooly under
pressure, great. This is where you really get to evaluate them. I would say the homework is probably one
of the most important things because a lot of people can get through the first section. A lot of people
interview well, but once it comes down to the homework, it’s not going to be as easy anymore. The fact
that you’ve had them do the homework in such a short period of time and you’re asking these very
specific questions, there’s no room for them to be able to get someone else to do the homework.
They’re going to be right in front of you and if someone else did the homework and you ask very tough
detailed questions, you’re going to be able to see if they really know what they’re talking about or not.
Once they finish the homework assignment, you can pass it to the team and say “This is what this
candidate did. Here were the answers. You guys can interview this person as well.” What your individual
team members will do is talk to the candidate about culture. You can pass on some tough questions for
your team members to ask too. What you want to do is make sure that you’ve given a summary about
the candidate so the team will be able the score sheet and where the candidate stands. Talk about the
tough questions you asked so your team has an idea of what you’ve talked about already so there’s less
overlap. The worst thing is you have four evaluators and they all ask the same questions over and over,
it won’t be as insightful. Ultimately, it’s up to them to make a judgment call to understand the
candidate. They’ll score each individual candidate on a scale of 1-5 and total up the scores.
Use this score card and customize it. This will be available as a .csv and a Google Spreadsheet so you can
use both of them. This will help you figure out how to figure out bad candidates after they’ve gotten
through the first and second interview. You can continue to expand this into more interviews. The
analysis portion of this is going to do wonders for you.