Candidate Scorecard Builder

The scorecard isn't bureaucracy — it's the difference between hiring the best candidate and the most charming one. Most hiring decisions collapse into "they seemed strong" or "I had a good feeling," which are clean restatements of three biases: affinity (they remind me of me), halo (one great answer coloured the whole evaluation), and recency (the last candidate had an unfair advantage). A scorecard doesn't remove judgment. It structures it — same criteria, same scale, same weight, every candidate.

The framework runs three tiers — Critical, Important, Desired — split 60/30/10 across 100 points. Critical competencies are dealbreakers; a score of 1 on any of them is an automatic No Hire regardless of total. Important competencies differentiate; Desired competencies break ties. Weights are set by job impact, not by how testable a competency is. Technical skill is often easiest to assess — but if collaboration is what actually determines success in the role, collaboration gets the weight.

Every competency gets behavioural anchors at every level. Without them, "3" means whatever the interviewer wants it to mean, and the scale dissolves. The 4-point scale is deliberate — five points lets people drop a "3" on everything and avoid a decision. Four forces a call: above the bar, or below it.

The skill also produces a stage-aware version. A phone screen scores 2–3 must-haves, not the full sheet. A technical round weights technical competencies at 70%+ of the stage score. A final round runs the full scorecard. Using the same detailed form at every stage produces scorer fatigue and worse data.

Two structural rules sit underneath the output. Scorecards are completed independently before any group discussion — otherwise the highest-status person anchors the room. And evidence supports every score: "they described a specific example of X" is a score; "I had a feeling" is not. The comparison view then lays candidates side by side, weighted totals visible, so the decision is grounded in what the panel actually saw — not who told the best story in the debrief.