An interview scorecard has one author and several readers, and most forms are built for the author. They ask for a rating and a recommendation, the part an interviewer can supply in a minute after the call. The people who open the card later each need something else from it, and the candidate, who never opens it, feels the gap when a later round asks her what an earlier one already covered.

I’d design the interview scorecard template for its readers. Three people act on the card once it’s submitted, so each of them gets a section written for them, and the candidate gets a loop that stops repeating itself.

Leave the form as it is and the card still arrives with its rating. The later rounds lose the rest of the call, and the loss tends to show at offer, once every round is done and a start date or a pay gap can no longer be worked around.

Who reads a scorecard after the interviewer submits it.

Before you choose a field, list who opens the card and what each of them does with it. Three of them act on it, and only the hiring manager reads it to make the decision. The fourth row is the candidate, who never sees the card at all.

Most templates serve only the hiring manager. The other readers need different information from the rating, and a comment box under each competency gives them more of the same thing.

Build the interview scorecard template in three sections.

The interviewer fills in each section below straight after the call, for the reader named in its heading. I’d lay them out in the order the hiring manager reads, with the assessment first.

The assessment, for the hiring manager.

This is the section most forms already carry: a rating for each competency on the rubric agreed at intake. Beside each rating goes a sentence or two quoting what the candidate said that put it there. The hiring manager reads this section to decide, so every number on it needs a reason they can find.

Keep it to the competencies this interview owned. A recruiter screen that rates every row on the rubric is guessing on several of them, and a reader of the card can’t tell which ratings were tested and which were filled in to finish the form.

If the levels behind each rating haven’t been written yet, the place to start is an interview rubric written around the hiring bar.

Open questions, for the next interviewer.

Every interview ends with something unsettled, whether a claim worth testing or a competency the call ran out of time for. Write each one as a sentence addressed to the next interviewer, with what to listen for.

“She led the billing migration, but I couldn’t tell how much of the design was hers. Ask her to walk through one decision she made and one she inherited.” A note like that takes a minute to write, and the next interviewer can open their round on it instead of on the resume.

When the next interviewer starts from what’s still open, the candidate isn’t asked to repeat the first conversation, and the questions she does get go further than the last ones. Of the three, it’s the section I’d least want an interviewer to skip.

What it takes to close, for the recruiter.

Before an offer, the recruiter needs two things from the card: why the candidate would move, and anything that could stop the offer after every round has gone well.

For the first, ask what she wants from her next role that her current one doesn’t give her, and write the answer down in her own words. “A manager who has run a team this size” gives the recruiter something to pitch to and the hiring manager something to speak to in their round. “Career growth” is something every offer letter already claims.

Hold that answer to the job. Her life outside work stays off the card even when she raises it herself, because it has no bearing on the role and the hiring manager will read whatever is written there.

The facts that can stop an offer go underneath, and I’d ask for them on the first call:

• Her notice period, and the earliest date she could start.
• Where she can work from, and whether that fits the role.
• Whether she’ll need visa sponsorship.
• The pay she expects, or the range of the other offers she’s comparing.

Write down the range she named rather than your view of whether it fits the band, so the recruiter can hold it against the band when the offer is built. Ask about the pay she expects instead of what she earns now, since her expectation is the number the offer has to meet. I think most candidates would rather hear in the first week that a role can’t sponsor a visa than after four rounds.

Keep the two new sections short.

The open questions and the close are new work for most interviewers, so I’d hold each to a line or two. A form that takes longer to fill than the gap between calls gets skipped, and a skipped section helps no one.

Not every card needs all three, either. When the assessment already ends the process, the card carries the ratings and one sentence on why, and the other two sections stay blank. Leaving them empty on a rejection costs no one anything. On a candidate who’s going through to another round, an empty open-questions section means the next interviewer starts cold.

The weight also shifts by stage. The recruiter screen fills the close section most fully, because later rounds rarely come back to it. The rounds after it lean on the assessment and the open questions, and touch the close section only when something has changed, such as a new start date or a second offer with a deadline.

Where Metaview fits in scorecard handoffs.

Each section of the card is written by someone who was on the call, for someone who wasn’t. Metaview puts the call itself on the record, so the author and the reader work from the same conversation.

The Metaview Notetaker joins the interview as a visible participant, where it records and transcribes the call and then writes structured notes from what was said. Whether a given call is recorded comes down to the consent your team asks for, in whatever way your team chooses to ask. Metaview captures every spoken word, which lets the interviewer quote the candidate in the open questions and the close instead of paraphrasing her.

When the card doesn’t answer a question the next interviewer has, they can put it to the Metaview Assistant, which answers plain-language questions by drawing on your organization’s captured conversations and can recall a specific detail, such as what the candidate said about her current team in the screen.

The notes behind each card come out in a layout picked per call, and a team can build its own. The picker below is open on a final-stage interview, where a technical round could take a coding-interview layout instead of a general summary.

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1. 1“Final-stage interview · Daniel Okafor,” the call this picker is open on.
2. 2“Coding Interview,” a layout set around problem-solving approach, code quality, and technical communication.
3. 3“Templates,” under “Library” in the sidebar.

Over one summer at the search firm Raines International, people were away traveling or getting married, and Metaview made it easy to hand off their work and help new team members cover for them. Its case study puts the result this way: “They get up to speed without losing context, and can plug and play without clients noticing any change.” A hiring loop makes the same handoff every round: the next interviewer steps into the work, and the card is the context they pick up.

For the hiring manager’s section, the Notetaker prepares a scorecard draft from the recording. The interviewer compares the draft with what they heard, chooses each rating and the recommendation, and submits it: the card goes straight to Ashby or Lever, or gets pasted into Greenhouse. A browser extension also autofills the objective sections of the scorecard in Ashby and Greenhouse, and the subjective fields wait for the interviewer.

Beyond a single candidate, Metaview Reports answers questions about your organization’s own interview data inside the product, as in the illustration below from one team’s sales screens.

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1. 1The subtitle, which ties every bar to one of the scorecard’s competencies and to one team’s sales screens.
2. 2“Proven success / quota,” one of the longest bars on the chart.
3. 3“Customer obsession,” a shorter yellow bar partway down the list.

The structure rests on a point Shahriar Tajbakhsh, Metaview’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, made when he set out what a scorecard is for.

Each card’s open questions are how a loop gets there: they tell the next round which part of that information is still missing.

Add one line to your next screen.

You don’t need a new template to start. On the next recruiter screen you run, add one line at the bottom of the card under the heading “For the next round”: one question for round two, written to the hiring manager. Submit the card before their interview, and their round can open on a doubt the screen raised instead of on questions the candidate already answered, which is the change every other section builds on.