Structured Interviews for Small Teams: A Scorecard You Can Copy

Here is the template. Copy it into a Google Doc, a Notion page, or a Greenhouse or Ashby scorecard, and adapt the competencies to your role.

Competency	Anchor question	Weight	Rating (1-5)	Evidence notes
Problem solving	Tell me about a time you diagnosed a complex problem with limited information.	2x
Communication	Describe a time you had to explain a technical idea to a non-expert audience.	1x
Collaboration	Give an example of a disagreement with a teammate and how you resolved it.	1x
Ownership	Tell me about a project you drove end to end. What broke, and how did you handle it?	1x
Role-specific skill	Insert the technical or functional question for this role.	2x
Overall recommendation	Strong hire / Hire / No hire / Strong no hire			Summarize the deciding factor in one or two sentences.

Five competencies is the sweet spot. Four to six is the recommended range, and anything beyond that turns into a survey nobody fills in properly.

The weighting column matters more than people expect. If problem solving and the role-specific skill are 2x, a candidate cannot coast on charm and a nice portfolio while failing the thing you actually need. The rating scale needs behavioural anchors: write down what a 4 in communication looks like in observable terms, for example "explains complex ideas clearly and adapts style to the audience without prompting." Without that, your 4 and your co-founder's 4 are different numbers.

Monday, 45 minutes: you and the hiring manager write the scorecard. Start from what success looks like in the first 6 to 12 months, not from a generic competency list. Keep the job description open beside you and map each competency to a real requirement.

Tuesday, 30 minutes: calibration. The three of you review the anchors and independently score a recorded mock interview or a past candidate. Where your scores diverge, rewrite the anchor. This is the step teams skip, and it is the step that makes the data comparable.

Wednesday and Thursday: interviews. Assign each interviewer specific competencies so you are not all asking the same question. Use the anchor questions, probe for evidence, and take notes live. Fill in the scorecard within 10 minutes of the call ending, before you talk to anyone else. Memory degrades fast, so block the time in Calendly or your calendar if you have to. Submit before the debrief: independent scores first, discussion second.

Friday, 60 minutes: debrief. Compare scores, dig into the gaps, and decide. The person with the strongest evidence wins the argument, not the loudest voice.

The most common failure is inconsistent use. One interviewer fills in the scorecard, another sends a Slack message saying "seemed good." Your data is only comparable if it is collected the same way every time, so do not allow exceptions, including for the founder.

The second is vague criteria. "Communication skills" is not a competency, it is a vibe. "Ability to explain a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder" is something you can score and defend.

The third is scores without evidence. A number with no written justification is an opinion wearing a lab coat. Make the evidence notes mandatory for every rating. It slows the debrief down by five minutes and speeds the decision up by a day.

Finally, review the data after a few hires. Are certain questions consistently producing low scores? Is one interviewer always more generous? Use that to refine the scorecard rather than letting it calcify.

You can run this entirely in a shared doc. If you already pay for an ATS, use its scorecard feature: Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Workable, Teamtailor and Recruitee all support structured scorecards attached to the interview plan, which means the scores land next to the candidate record instead of in three different inboxes.

For scheduling, Calendly or your Google or Outlook calendar is enough. The important thing is the 10-minute buffer after each interview for scoring, not the tool.

If you want the first pass handled for you, Moments AI turns a plain-words role brief into a shortlist with the evidence behind each score, writes the first email from your own mailbox, and books the intro call when a candidate says yes. It is a sensible fit when you are the founder, the hiring manager and the recruiter at the same time. The interview scorecard is still yours to run.

Faster decisions, because the debrief starts with data instead of impressions. Better quality of hire, because you are assessing job-relevant competencies rather than who reminded you of yourself. A documented process that stands up to scrutiny. And a candidate experience that feels professional and fair, which matters when the good ones have other offers.

Start with one role this week. Write five competencies, define the anchors, book the calibration session, and score within 10 minutes of every call. That is the whole system.