Best practices for evaluating candidates

💡Why should I learn this? Using skills-based evidence to evaluate candidates helps you make fairer and more accurate hiring decisions.

How to rate candidates in interviews

Your objective with interviews is to rate candidates on their skills in order to make a hiring decision. As such, each of your interview questions should map onto a skill, one that you’ve carefully selected as being essential to the job in question. 

As you conduct interviews, it’s best to rate each question in real time. As you listen to a candidates’ responses, evaluate each of their answers by determining whether they are exhibiting a level of skill proficiency required to do the job well. 

To record your rating for each question, you should use a standardized format. Best practice is to rate each question using an anchored rating scale. 

What are anchored rating scales, and why do they help you make good hiring decisions?

Anchored rating scales are a standardized way to capture your assessment of a candidate’s skills based on how they respond to your questions. They consist of a list of sequential numbers (e.g., 1-4, 1-5). Each number is given a nominal ‘anchor,’ indicating what the number represents. 

By recording your evaluations of candidate responses using anchored rating scales, you are generating evidence that can be used to compare your candidates. 

Using evidence from rating scales to compare candidates helps you make evidence-based decisions. This limits bias in your decision-making and helps you hire the best candidate for your role. 

What to do with your ratings after all candidates have been interviewed

Summarize your data for each candidate by aggregating their scores on their anchored rating scales. 

One approach to aggregation is to create a mathematical average of each skill for each candidate. Simply add up all of the questions pertaining to a particular skill, and divide that number by the total number of questions for that skill. Do this for every skill and every candidate. This will allow you to directly compare candidates based on their skills. 

Using these evaluation best practices ensures you make a high-quality, evidenced-based decision so you can mitigate bias and find the best candidate for your role.