Structured hiring made simple with these useful worksheets

2 mins, 13 secs read time

In an ideal world, recruiters, hiring managers, and everyone else involved in the hiring process would be perfectly aligned. After all, everyone has the same goal: to get great candidates to accept offers and begin working at their company.

At Greenhouse, we believe that structured hiring can help make that ideal world a reality.

Following this process facilitates recruiter/hiring manager alignment, improves candidate experience, and ultimately leads to making better hires. Structured Hiring follows three core tenets: the ideal candidate is defined by the business objectives of the job, a deliberate process and rubric is used to assess all candidates, and hiring decisions are based on data and evidence.

To learn more about key stages of the Structured Hiring Process and how you can put them in place, read on!

1. Kick-off meeting

The kick-off meeting takes place between the recruiter and the hiring manager. This meeting is your opportunity to learn everything you need to know to 1) understand the profile of candidates you’ll be looking for, and 2) design an effective interview process. In addition to defining the basics of the role (what is this title? who does it report to?), use this time to partner with your hiring manager to help them think about the role strategically and start to shape the experience of the eventual new hire.

2. Designing a scorecard and interview structure

The scorecard is a list of the skills, traits, and qualifications someone will need to have in order to be successful in the upcoming role. These attributes are what the interview process will be designed to test and verify for each candidate.

When coming up with your scorecard attributes, remember that they should:

• Be mutually exclusive, but collectively exhaustive. Make sure the attributes you pick don’t overlap with each other but come together to create a pretty complete picture of the person you’re trying to hire.

• Stick to the“need to haves.” If you’re including a “nice to have,” make sure to label it as such to keep things clear for interviewers when it comes time to make a hiring decision.

3. Developing effective interview questions

Now that you know everything you want to understand about the candidates, the next step is to design an interview process that facilitates that discovery.

In order to develop the most effective interview questions, partner with your hiring manager to assign attributes to each interview and come up with a purpose for that stage. Then, think about who might be great at testing that purpose.

If you’d like to put some of these concepts into action, you’re in luck. We’ve put together interactive worksheets to guide you through your kick-off meeting, scorecard design, and interview planning.

Get the worksheets