Interview Scorecard Template and Candidate Evaluation Form (With a Filled Example)

An interview scorecard, also called a candidate evaluation form, is a short document that every interviewer fills in after an interview. It lists the criteria for the role, a rating for each one and the evidence behind the rating.

The point is simple. Without a scorecard, a debrief turns into "I liked her" versus "I wasn't sure about him", and the loudest opinion wins. With one, every interviewer judges the same criteria on the same scale, and the team argues about evidence.

This guide gives you a template you can copy, a rating scale that interviewers read the same way, a filled example and the habits that make scorecards work.

What goes into an interview scorecard

A useful scorecard has five parts:

1. Role and interview details. Candidate, role, interviewer, date and which interview stage this was.
2. Criteria. Four to seven things that predict success in this role. Each one is something you can hear evidence for in an interview.
3. A rating for each criterion, on a scale with a written definition for every point.
4. Evidence for each rating. What the candidate said or did, ideally in their own words.
5. An overall recommendation, with a short reason.

Keep it to one page. If interviewers need ten minutes to fill it in, they will fill it in tomorrow, from memory.

The rating scale

Most scorecards fail on the scale. A bare 1 to 5 scale means something different to every interviewer: one person's 3 is "fine" and another's is "weak". Define every point, and use an even number of points so nobody can sit in the middle.

Rating	Label	Definition
1	No evidence	The candidate could not give an example, or the example contradicts the criterion.
2	Some evidence	One example, but vague, small in scope or mostly someone else's work.
3	Clear evidence	At least one specific example where the candidate did the work, at the level the role needs.
4	Strong evidence	Several specific examples with results, at or above the level the role needs.

The anchors are about evidence, not about how much the interviewer liked the answer. That one change does more for consistency than any other.

Interview scorecard template

Copy this into your document or ATS:

INTERVIEW SCORECARD

Candidate:            Role:
Interviewer:          Date:
Interview stage:      (phone screen / first interview / team interview / final)

CRITERIA                         RATING (1-4)   EVIDENCE (candidate's words or actions)
1. [Criterion 1]                 [ ]
2. [Criterion 2]                 [ ]
3. [Criterion 3]                 [ ]
4. [Criterion 4]                 [ ]
5. [Criterion 5]                 [ ]

DEALBREAKERS (yes / no)
- [e.g. Authorized to work in the country]   [ ]
- [e.g. Available for night shifts]          [ ]

OPEN QUESTIONS FOR THE NEXT INTERVIEWER
-

OVERALL RECOMMENDATION
( ) Strong yes   ( ) Yes   ( ) No   ( ) Strong no

Reason (2-3 sentences):

There is no "maybe" in the recommendation on purpose. If you cannot choose, write what you would need to learn in the open questions section.

A filled example: warehouse shift supervisor

Here is the same template, filled in after a first interview:

Criterion	Rating	Evidence
Shift supervision	4	"I ran the night shift for two years, 14 people, and I planned the pick waves myself." Gave two examples of reassigning staff during a late delivery.
Safety and compliance	3	Described a near-miss with a forklift and the briefing he ran the next day. Holds a forklift certificate, valid until 2027.
Planning under pressure	3	"When the system went down on Black Friday we went to paper pick lists and still shipped 92% on time."
Team development	2	Said he "trains new people", but gave no example of someone he developed. Worth asking in the next round.
Communication with day shift	3	Uses a written handover with three fixed sections; showed a photo of one.

Dealbreakers: Authorized to work: yes. Night shifts: yes. Open questions: Ask for a specific example of developing a team member. Check how he handled a conflict between two pickers. Recommendation: Yes. Strong supervision and planning evidence. The development gap is real but common at this level.

Notice what the evidence column does. A hiring manager who was not in the room can read it and agree or disagree with the rating. "Seemed strong" gives them nothing to check.

How to choose the criteria

Start from the job, not from a generic competency list:

1. List what the person will do in the first six months. Not the job description's adjectives, the actual work.
2. Ask what separates people who did that work well from people who struggled. Those differences are your criteria.
3. Merge and cut until you have four to seven. More than seven and interviewers stop reading.
4. Split them across interviews. Each interviewer owns two or three criteria in depth. Everyone fills in the same scorecard, but not every row in every interview.
5. Write the questions last. Each question should produce evidence for a specific criterion.

For technical roles, criteria are usually about specific skills and the level of problems solved. For customer-facing roles, communication and judgment under pressure carry more weight. For leadership roles, look for evidence of developing people and making decisions with incomplete information.

Three habits that make scorecards work

1. Score before the debrief. Every interviewer submits their scorecard before they hear anyone else's view. Once the most senior person in the room says "I loved her", the other scores drift toward theirs.

2. Write evidence, not impressions. "Great communicator" is an impression. "Explained the database migration in two minutes, without jargon, when I asked for the short version" is evidence.

3. Use the same criteria from CV screening to the final round. If the CV was screened for one set of criteria and the interviews score another, the process contradicts itself and good candidates fall through the gap.

Candidate evaluation form vs interview scorecard

The two terms are often used for the same thing. When teams separate them, the scorecard is per interview and per interviewer, and the candidate evaluation form is the summary across all interviews that goes to the decision-maker or, for an agency, to the client.

A good candidate evaluation form takes each criterion, combines the ratings from every interview, and quotes the strongest evidence for and against. It answers the question "Why should we hire this person, and what is the risk?" on one page.

Filling scorecards without the paperwork

The most common reason scorecards fail is not the template. It is that interviewers are busy and fill them in late, from memory, with half the evidence gone.

Two things help:

• Let a note taker fill the scorecard from the recording. Firstview's Notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams interviews, transcribes each speaker separately and fills your own scorecard template, so the interviewer reviews and adjusts it instead of writing it from scratch.
• Build the evaluation form from every source automatically. Firstview's candidate evaluation reports put the CV evaluation, the AI interview and your team's interview notes on one page, against the same criteria, with the candidate's own words as evidence. You can send it to a hiring manager or, as an agency, to a client in your brand.

The interviewer still decides the rating. The software makes sure the evidence is there when they do.