How Interviews Are Evaluated
Candidate evaluation form
Date:
Name of candidate:
Job title:
Department:
Interviewed by:
Ascribe the candidate the following scores based on the following key
5 – Superior
4 – good
3 – average
2 – below average
1 – poor
Education/ training/ technical skills
Does the candidate satify the relevant educational qualifications, training, or technical skills for this position?
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Prior Experience
Prior Experience – Is the candidates prior work experience a good ‘fit’ for the rile related experience as evidence in their work history to perform the role in question?
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Job related skills
Job related skills- Does the candidate have relevant hard and job related skills to be able to perform the role in question
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Strengths
How convincing are the candidates strengths, are they relevant to the role in question
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Teamwork
Has the candidate provided strong examples of past or present teamwork. Do they seem capable of working well within the team dynamic
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Communication
How well does the candidate articulate themselves, does the candidate verbalise themselves well?
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Commitment
Has the andidate convincing conveyed why they have applied for the role and what they feel they can bring to the company
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Customer experience
Does the candidate exhibit the necessary customer service experience for the role? Have they provided strong examples outlining times where they have worked to resolve issues in a customer service related capacity?
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Decision-making
Is the candidate able to provide strong examples of times where they have exhibited effective decision making in their role. Have they adequately demonstrated the capacity to make effect decisions over the course of the interview?
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Overall Impressions
Has the candidate provided strong answers over the course of the interview, have they engaged well with you over the course of the interview? What is your overall impression of the?
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5
Interviewer Comments:
Remember that in some interviews, these scorecards and their respective rating systems will be used only as a guideline by which to help the interviewer make an informed decision. In others, they will be used as an overriding basis from which all decisions are derived. It simply depends on the employer and on the latitude they have been given to assess your interview
Takeaways
Where a scorecard is used in an interview, it will be chosen to optimally assess the competencies and qualities that the organization considers necessary for that role
In interviews involving the use of a scorecard, it typically means each answer you give will be assessed against a much more rigid criteria, and this is something that can either work for or against you. Where you may have been able to get by with weaker answers if you’re the type of person that can easily start a conversation and build a rapport with your interviewer, where a scorecard is used, this normally won’t be enough. Consequently, if rapport building is not something that comes naturally, but you’re the type of candidate that is normally able to give strong answers during the interview anyway, you’ll be competing against a narrower candidate pool which will help your chances when the final selections are made, as those who have given weaker answers will have already been filtered out. Where scorecards are used in an interview, many times, the interviewer will tell the candidate they are using a scorecard and give them a brief overview of what the scorecard entails to try and put them at ease. While rapport building is regarded as a fundamental part of any interview, the upshot where the use of scorecards is concerned is that if rapport building is not your strong suit, you can still shine and put yourself on an equally strong footing as the competition simply by giving good, solid answers
Conclusions
For any business, the recruitment process starts at the application stage
Any member involved in an interviewing role will normally work closely with their companies HR department, whose role is also involved heavily with the recruitment process. HR normally performs an important support role during the recruitment process, screening candidate applications, vetting candidate references, performing background checks, and processing a candidate onto the payroll and staff registry once the job offer has been extended
If you make it through the initial screening stages of the candidate selection process, which will normally include things like an application form and C.V vetting, telephone interviews, and in some instances, psychometric testing – then you will next be invited to attend a formal interview. Here you may occasionally be asked to provide additional bits of information such as past performance evaluations, work samples, certifications and qualifications, or other types of evidence. During the interview stages, impressing upon the person who interviews you that you have the necessary skills, qualifications, and motivation to do the role, as well as proving to them that you have the right character and that you are indeed the right ’fit’ for that role, is crucial. To this end, focusing on building rapport with your interviewer is always heavily emphasised
The interview stage is always the hardest part of the candidate selection process, and the part that will take the most time and effort to prepare for. On top of this, sometimes not only one, but two or more interviews will be involved. However, if you manage to successfully traverse this process, the rest becomes plain sailing.
Upon being accepted for the role, a formal job offer will then be extended, and to finalise it you will be required to provide closing documentation such as a passport or proof of residency, proof of address, and any other certifications the HR team might need to verify your qualifications for that particular role, and from there, once these formalities have all been completed, you can sit back and look forward to the new and exciting role that awaits you
A great deal of time, effort, and expertise is put into composing an interviewing framework. As such, they are normally regarded as a highly effective means of determining your suitability for the role in question. Remember that the ultimate goal any interviewer has, irregardless of how the interview is conducted, is to get as good an insight into who you are as a candidate as possible
To this end, your interviewer wants you to feel as comfortable as possible, and making sure your interview is held in appropriate surroundings, and that you feel comfortable and welcomed, is part of their dedicated job duties – because it will help them to learn as much about you as they can. As such, simply knowing this means it’s one of the things you can play off of, and it’s also one of the reasons why being confident and outgoing comes always comes across so well in an interview. Being talkative and outgoing is something most interviewers will take as not only as a good sign of your character, but on a more subconscious level, it signals to them that the interview is going well, which creates a positive atmosphere which is a big plus for you as a candidate too. Your interviewer, whoever they are, will have their own interviewing style and technique that they’ve developed with experience. With this in mind, try to match your tone to that of your interviewer as much as possible. Make the most of the introduction and do your best to establish some common ground with your interviewer before the questions start to intensify. Rapport building is heavily emphasised in most kinds of mainstream interviewing advice, and rightly so, but this can mean different things depending on the person who’s interviewing you. While it’s great to hold a conversation, and you’ll normally always get at least some amount of credit for trying, the interviewer is there to assess you against the types of criteria outlined above. While some interviewers will be more engaging and talkative, others won’t be, and will be focused more on the task at hand. That’s why there’s no right or wrong way to approach rapport building, and interviewing experts advise the best starting point is usually to focus on the things that constitute a positive and professional demeanour in the form of good verbal nods, positive body language, and the professional way in which you articulate your responses, and then from there, to try and take it further by making conversation and finding a common ground with your interviewer, most preferably in the form of a shared interest or a shared opinion that you can play on over the course of the interview, making as much conversation at the beginning and ends of the interview as possible when the questions are less intense
Because some personalities meld better with others, as a candidate there is always the element of luck involved when you go for an interview. That’s because your success, at least in part, will be owed to whoever you get as your interviewer. Especially where rapport building is concerned, everyone has a slightly different way of going about this, and as an individual, your methods will have varying levels of effectiveness depending on the person you are dealing with, that’s why general guidance is to go into the interview with the goal of matching your tone and demeanour to that of the interviewer. For more guidance, see our section on Professional Rapport Building here
Interviewers will try to use simple language when their posing questions to try and make them as easy for you to understand as possible, and it’s their job to rephrase a question if you don’t understand it, (although if they have to do this too often it will start to detract from their overall assessment of you). It’s also their job to ask follow-up and probing questions if they want further insight into an answer, or if they feel you’ve not covered a point fully. To this end, the interviewer’s main objective is to learn as much as they can about you over the course of the interview. As a candidate, what this means for you is that you need to balance openness and honesty with the need to put the best side of yourself across to your interviewer. While different interviewers will assess openness in different ways, the recommended approach in any interview is to keep everything as positive and upbeat as possible
To expand on this point further, how you approach the interview is another area of fundamental importance. Interview candidates sometimes express the sentiment that they feel they should just be able to talk openly without having to worry about what the interviewer will think, especially if they believe themselves capable of doing the role. While this sentiment does have merit, most interviewing coaches recommend keeping everything as positive and upbeat as possible in the first instance. Unless legally required to disclose something that requires you to disclose you otherwise wouldn’t want the interviewer to know, or you’re directly asked a question that involves you introducing something you don’t want to bring up, as a rule, you should keep everything you say in an interview as positive and upbeat as you can
The logic behind this simple piece of interviewing advice is simple. It’s an interviewer’s job is to assess everything about you they can in the time they have with you, so if you bring a negative remark into the discourse, it’s their job to investigate further by asking you follow up questions around this. While you may get some amount of credit for being honest, if you introduce a negative comment or remark, you’ll also immediately be putting yourself on the back foot as your interviewer will almost certainly respond with follow up questions such as ‘well how did that make you feel?’, or, ‘why did you do that?’ which you’ll then need to explain. Especially in interviews where scorecards aren’t utilised, this means the interviewer will be assessing how suitable you are for the role based largely on what they can recollect of how the interview went. If you’ve spent a considerable part of time in your interview covering largely negative subjects, when they think back on the interview went, that is what they will remember. Interviewing is partly a fickle process, that’s just the way it is. Keep in mind that you will normally be competing against a dozen or more equally qualified candidates for any one given role, that’s why you want your interview to go as smoothly as possible so that you stand out when it’s time for your interviewer to make their final candidate selections.
By purposely introducing a negative topic into the discourse, it won’t really serve much purpose other than to detract from their overall assessment of how the interview went, and will jeopardize your chances of them considering you to be the best ‘fit’ for the role out of all the other candidates when the time comes for them to make their final selection.
That’s why if you are ever directly asked a question that involves you bringing up a negative subject with your interviewer, answer the question honestly, but take care to frame it as constructively as possible
An interviewer is accountable for every hire they make, for this reason, a certain amount of box ticking is involved in the process of interviewing. Your interviewer will be instructed on which areas to base their assessments on from the employer, (as we have explored above), and will be expected to follow these instructions accordingly. As such, your interviewer needs to justify each and every hiring decision they make. This is something that we also explored in assessing interviewer mentality. For your part as a candidate, the best way to approach your interview is with as much enthusiasm and belief in your own ability as possible. Not only will this make you feel better and help to reduce anxiety levels before the big day, but it should hopefully rub off on your performance in the interview too.
When conversing with your interviewer, focus not only on projecting an outgoing and professional demeanour, but also do your best to be as talkative and outgoing as possible to give yourself the best chance of building a meaningful rapport with your interviewer during the time you have with them, and above all else, make sure you follow the first cardinal rule of interviewing, which is to keep everything as positive and upbeat during the interview as possible. Remember that by following the guidance outlined here that you’ll not only be making it easier for yourself when your big day finally arrives, but you’ll also be giving yourself the best possible chance of standing out amongst the other candidate’s when the interviewer goes to make their final decision