The use of interview evaluation forms can significantly enhance the effectiveness, fairness, and consistency of the overall hiring process for organizations by streamlining the interview process and ensuring that all candidates are objectively evaluated. This promotes diversity and ensures the best candidate for the job role is hired.
What is an interview evaluation form?
An interview evaluation is a systematic way to assess a candidate’s suitability for a particular job role based on their performance during an interview. This evaluation allows HR professionals and hiring managers to objectively measure a candidate’s skills, experience, and fit within the organization’s culture and job requirements without bias. The evaluation is crucial to the hiring process as it helps organizations make informed decisions regarding candidates, reduce hiring errors, and improve workforce quality.
An interview evaluation form is a structured document used during the hiring process to record and assess a candidate’s performance in the interview. The form typically contains various evaluation criteria, including technical skills, communication skills, experience, problem-solving abilities, cultural fit, and other role-specific parameters.
How to structure the interview evaluation form
An interview evaluation form is typically divided into various sections, each designed to assess different aspects of the candidate’s profile. What’s important to understand about interview evaluation forms is that they are standardized and score candidates according to specific criteria. This is why they are often referred to as interview scoring sheets.
Each answer will have a value, and when those values are added up, there will be candidates who clearly score higher than others in terms of their job role and culture fit. What HR professionals often find interesting when they move to this interview method is that the high scorers are often not who they expected.
Here’s an overview of the sections HR professionals should consider including in an interview scoring sheet:
- Personal information: Record basic information about the candidate, such as their name, the position they applied for, the date of the interview, and the names of the interviewers. This section sets the stage for the evaluation form and allows easy identification and tracking of the candidate’s application.
- Job relevance: Evaluate the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and skills relevant to the job. This section could include questions about the candidate’s education, previous job roles, key responsibilities, and achievements. A rating scale can be used to assess how well the candidate’s experience aligns with the job requirements.
- Applicant’s skills assessment: This is where the candidate’s technical and soft skills are evaluated. Technical skills could include proficiency in a particular software, the ability to perform certain tasks, or knowledge about specific processes. Soft skills might include communication, leadership, problem-solving, or teamwork. Once again, a scoring system or rating scale assesses each skill according to its relevance within the role.
- Applicant’s culture fit: Does the candidate have a cultural fit with the company? Frame questions that look to understand their values, work style, motivation, and how they handle pressure or conflict.
- Interviewer’s impressions and recommendations: While scoring and objectivity are important, interviewers still play a crucial role in the entire process, or there would be no need for face-to-face interviews. This is an open-ended section where interviewers can jot down their overall impressions of the candidate. It may include observations about the candidate’s behavior, body language, confidence, or enthusiasm. The interviewer can also provide a recommendation about proceeding with the candidate or suggestions for further areas to probe in subsequent interviews or assessments.
- Comparison and ranking: Compare and rank candidates against each other after all interviews have been conducted. This can be based on the total scores in each section or based on key parameters defined by the organization.
- Next steps: This is an administrative section where decisions about the next steps are recorded. This can include whether the candidate will proceed to the next round, or whether an offer will be extended. Dates, notes about salary expectations or start dates, and any follow-up actions needed can also be recorded here.
Creating an interview evaluation form in 6 steps
Creating an interview evaluation form is a systematic process that involves understanding the job requirements, formulating relevant questions and criteria, determining a scoring system, and refining the form. We’ve compiled a step-by-step guide to creating an effective interview evaluation form to help HR professionals get started.
Step 1: Identify requirements for the job role
- Clearly define the job role and its requirements
- Refer to your organization’s job description and roles and responsibilities template to understand the skills, qualifications, and experiences needed
- Consider technical skills, soft skills, and cultural fit.
Step 2: Formulate relevant questions and evaluation criteria
- Based on the job requirements, develop questions or prompts that will help you evaluate the candidate’s suitability
- Each question or prompt should relate to a specific requirement. For example, if leadership is a key requirement, a question could be: “Describe a time when you led a team to achieve a specific goal.”
Step 3: Structure your form
- Organize your form into logical sections like personal information, job relevance, skills assessment, personality evaluation, and others per your needs.
- Each section should have its set of questions or prompts derived from the previous step.
- Remember to include space for comments or observations by the interviewer.
Step 4: Determine the scoring system
- Decide on a scoring system that suits your needs. It could be a numerical scale (1 to 5) or a qualitative scale (such as poor, average, good, or excellent).
- The same scale should be applied across all the criteria for consistency.
- Define what each point on the scale represents to ensure clarity and uniformity in scoring among different interviewers.
Step 5: Include the interviewer’s impressions and recommendations
- Create a section where the interviewer can jot down their overall impressions and recommendations Encourage interviewers to share thoughts that the structured criteria may not capture.
- Interviewers should fill out the form as soon as possible after the interview to ensure they capture their impressions accurately.
Step 6: Review and refine your form
- Before the interview evaluation form is put to use, review it to ensure it is comprehensive, clear, and fair
- Test it with a few interviewers and ask for their feedback
- Refine the form based on the feedback received
- Remember, the form should be a living document that evolves with your organization’s needs and learns from previous hiring rounds.
Implementing interview evaluation forms
Now that you’ve created your interview evaluation form, it’s time to implement it. Remember, your goal is to create a more structured, efficient, and above all objective hiring process.
When to implement interview evaluation forms
Interview evaluation forms should ideally be implemented at the beginning of the recruitment process after a job vacancy has been identified and the job role and requirements have been clearly defined. The form should be used in all rounds of interviews to maintain consistency and fairness throughout the hiring process.
How to implement interview evaluation forms
First, following the steps outlined in the guide to creating an interview evaluation form, design a form tailored to each specific job role within your organization. Once this is done, it is crucial that all interviewers are familiar with the form and understand how to use it effectively. This includes understanding the scoring system, what each point on the scale represents, and how to record their impressions and recommendations.
Integrating interview evaluation forms into the hiring process
1. Before the interview: The forms should be prepared and reviewed before conducting the interviews. Interviewers should understand the requirements of the role and the purpose of each question or prompt on the form.
2. During the interview: Ensure the form serves as a guide for conducting the interview. It has been designed to include all relevant topics and to make sure all candidates are evaluated against the same criteria. However, train interviewers to not let the interview evaluation form restrict the natural flow of the interview; rather, it should facilitate a comprehensive discussion of the candidate’s qualifications, skills, and fit with the organization.
3. Post-interview: Interviewers should complete the form promptly after each interview while their impressions are still fresh. The hiring team should then compile, discuss, and analyze these evaluations to make informed decisions about which candidates to move forward in the hiring process.
4. After the hiring process: Interview evaluation forms should be retained as part of the organization’s HR records. They can serve as useful references for future hiring processes, and performance reviews and can provide evidence in case of legal disputes related to hiring.
👉🏻 Download Interview-Evaluation-Template
Creating an effective interview evaluation form may take time and effort. Still, the return on investment can be significant in terms of hiring the right people, reducing bias in the hiring process, and maintaining a high-quality workforce. By using the results of the interview evaluation forms effectively, organizations can make more informed hiring decisions, continually improve their recruitment processes, and gain valuable insights into their candidate pool.
By the way, see what blocks of information you will learn in the 👉🏻 Competency-based interviews course.
- What are competencies. What is the difference between Hard and Soft skills
- How to profile a candidate for an interview
- How to conduct competence-based interviews, how to select test tasks
- CARE Technique and STAR Technique for Detailed Skills Research
- How to assess competences. Assessment tools and their validity
- How to assess motivation, personality profiles and collect recommendations
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