We've made eleven hires in the last two years. Three of them should not have happened. All three looked fine in interviews, and all three failed the same test later: when I pulled out the scorecard we were supposed to fill in before the offer, nobody had actually filled it in.
One sheet. Candidate name at the top. Four sections underneath. The first is the role's two outcomes for the first 180 days, written in plain numbers. For an ops hire that was "close the books by day 7 of the following month" and "cut vendor spend review from 11 hours to under 4." The second section is three skills we actually tested, with a 1-5 score and the name of who tested them. The third is references, with the date called and one real quote. The fourth is the compensation band and where this person lands in it, with a sentence of why.
If any section is blank, the offer doesn't go out. That's the rule.
Interview panels fall in love. Four people in a room talking about a charming candidate will talk themselves into an offer by Friday. The scorecard is boring on purpose. It forces someone to write down, in ink, that we tested the thing the job actually requires. On one of our bad hires last year, the "skills tested" section was literally "culture fit - 5/5" from three different interviewers. That's not a skill. That's a vibe. We missed that she had never run the specific reporting cycle we needed, because nobody checked.
The references section does similar work. "Spoke to former manager, said she was great" is not a reference check. "Spoke to Jamie on 9/22, said she struggled when the month-end process changed in Q2 and needed significant coaching" is a reference check. One sentence of real content, or the box is empty and we're not done.
The hiring manager owns the page. Not HR, not me. The person who will manage this hire on day one is the person who signs the bottom of the scorecard, and that signature means they believe this person will hit the two outcomes in 180 days. If they won't sign, we don't hire. I've had two managers decline to sign in the last year. In both cases they were right, and we saved ourselves a painful six months.
The whole thing takes about 20 minutes to fill out properly, assuming the interviews actually happened. That is cheap insurance against a $90,000 mistake.
If your last few hires have gone sideways and you're trying to figure out what's broken in the process before you make the next one, send us a note. This is the kind of thing we help small teams tighten up before the headcount grows past the point where mistakes get expensive.
— Amanda @ SBATC
