Interview notes tend to look complete on the day you write them. A week later, at the debrief, the same page reads “seems sharp, good on the migration story, ? on scope,” and you can’t say which answer earned which phrase, or where in the hour it came.

Better interview notetaking starts with deciding what the page is for. A good interview notetaking tool can hold every word the candidate said, and it still can’t write down what you made of those words while you were hearing them.

The notes you take during an interview work best as an index to the conversation: the minute an answer landed, the candidate’s own words for the moments that count, a mark for what to probe, and a line for what you never got to test. I’d leave the full record to a recording when you have one, and save your verdict for the few minutes after the call.

Skip that split and the scorecard gets written from memory, which is the one version of an interview no one else can test. Every tip and template below is built around it, and so is the test for choosing a tool.

What goes wrong with notes taken mid-interview.

A page of interview notes fails when no one can get from a line on it back to the answer it came from. Two habits produce that page.

The first is transcribing. You try to keep up with every sentence, and the page grows as long as the interview with nothing on it marking which answers counted. Finding the one about the migration means reading all of it, so in practice no one does.

The second is summarizing as you go. “Seems sharp” takes two seconds to write and points at nothing: there is no minute beside it and no words of the candidate’s under it, so neither you nor the hiring manager can go back and see what made you think it.

Both mistakes treat your notes as the record of the interview. I’d hand that job to a recording, or to a proper write-up after the call, and give the notes a smaller one: making the record easy to search, and keeping track of what you thought as it happened.

Tips for interview notetaking during the call.

The five tips below run in the order the interview does, from the minute before the candidate joins to the minute after they leave.

Set up the page before the candidate joins.

Number the questions you plan to ask and write them down the left of the page, each with the competency it is meant to test. During the call a note can then say “3” instead of rewriting the question, and any number with nothing beside it is a question that never got asked.

Without numbers, your notes follow the conversation wherever it goes, and a competency you never tested can look covered because the candidate talked at length. If the role has no rubric yet, write one before the first interview. A post on building interview rubrics walks through how.

Write down their words, and hold your verdict.

When an answer counts, write a few of the candidate’s own words in quotation marks, such as “rolled it back the same night.” Four or five words are enough to bring the whole answer back, and they give you something to search for in a transcript.

If a judgment forms mid-answer, put a mark beside the phrase and leave the judgment itself for after the call, when you’ve heard the whole interview. The shorthand key in the templates section gives every interviewer the same marks for this.

Mark the minute when an answer counts.

Glance at the call timer and write the minute beside each phrase you capture. On a recorded call it takes you straight back to the answer. On an unrecorded one, or in person with the clock on the wall, it still tells you the order things were said in, which helps when two answers pull against each other.

Of every habit in this list, this is the cheapest to pick up, and a stamped note can be checked against the recording by whoever reads it later.

Keep a margin for follow-ups and gaps.

Draw a narrow column down the right side of the page for two things: the follow-up you want to ask once the candidate finishes, and anything the interview isn’t reaching. A follow-up written down can wait for a natural pause, and your attention stays on the answer still in progress.

Gaps belong in your notes because no recording can supply them. A transcript holds what was said and has nothing to say about what never came up, such as a candidate who described the plan for a launch at length and never mentioned how it went.

Close your notes before the next meeting.

Before your next call starts, go down the sheet once and convert it with the close-out template below. Marks that read clearly at the end of an interview get harder to decode with every meeting that follows.

“? scope” is obvious for an hour after the call, and three interviews later it could mean almost anything.

How to choose an interview notetaking tool.

Any interview notetaking tool does one of two jobs: it holds what the candidate said, or it holds what you wrote. You’ll often end up using one of each, so I’d choose them by where the notes end up. For most teams that’s the scorecard, which they keep in their applicant tracking system (ATS). How a tool captures the call comes second.

A team running a few interviews a week can carry this method on paper and a shared template, as long as the close-out happens. When interviewers are booked back to back, the sheet shrinks to minutes and marks, and the candidate’s words have to come from a recording, because there’s no slot left to write them up.

If you want named products side by side, a separate post compares recruiting notetakers one by one.

Three interview notetaking templates to copy.

Use the note sheet during the call and the close-out straight after it. The shorthand key sits at the top of the sheet, so everyone marks the same way across the loop.

The note sheet.

Above the table, note who the candidate is and which round this is, then list your numbered questions. Fill one row each time an answer counts. The example rows come from an interview for a customer success manager, scored on ownership and prioritization.

Put quotation marks around words only when they’re the candidate’s exact words. A paraphrase in quotation marks does more harm than an empty row, because the next reader will treat it as something the candidate said.

The shorthand key.

Agree on these marks with every interviewer on the loop and print them above the sheet. I’d stop at five, because a mark you have to look up mid-answer costs the attention it was meant to save.

• “+” is evidence for the competency the question tests.
• “x” is evidence against it.
• “?” is a claim to probe, with the follow-up written beside it.
• “F” is a follow-up you asked, with the minute its answer started.
• “U” is untested, with the name of the round that should pick it up.

The close-out.

The close-out turns the sheet into something other people can use, mark by mark. Work through it before your next meeting, from the sheet and from the recording where you have one.

1. Rewrite each “+” and “x” as a sentence naming the competency, with the minute kept beside it.
2. Settle each “?” from the recording if there is one. If there isn’t, hand it on as a question with a person’s name next to it.
3. Send each “U” to the interviewer who has that round, before they meet the candidate.
4. Write your lean last, once the sentences above it exist, and add what would change it.

The summary you send the hiring manager is a separate document with its own order, and writing an interview summary is its own subject. The close-out is what you write it from.

Where Metaview fits in interview notetaking.

The note sheet can ask much less of you once something else is keeping the words. Metaview’s Notetaker keeps them, and it also drafts the scorecard you start from.

The Notetaker sits in the interview, visible to the candidate as one of the people on the call. It records and transcribes what’s said, then organizes the conversation into structured notes.

With that running, your own sheet can shrink to the minute and the mark. Metaview captures every spoken word. Your sheet then becomes a list of places to look, and you no longer have to keep it complete.

The Notetaker only records an interview once consent is in place, and the way candidates are asked for it is your team’s to design, in line with the rules where you hire. Note sections link back to the transcript moments they came from, the same job a minute stamp does on paper.

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1. 1The transcript, with each turn labeled by speaker and stamped with its minute.
2. 2“4 sources” beside a note heading shows how many moments in the transcript that section draws on.
3. 3“Send to Ashby” at the top right, on a workspace whose ATS is Ashby.

Once the call ends, the Notetaker prepares a draft scorecard from what was said. The interviewer reads it and adds the ratings and the recommendation before submitting. Direct submission into the ATS works with Ashby and Lever. In Greenhouse, Metaview’s browser extension autofills the scorecard’s objective sections. The interviewer fills in the subjective fields and the recommendation.

The “?” and “U” lines from your close-out belong on that scorecard too, written as open questions under your name. Shahriar Tajbakhsh made the same case in his advice on writing scorecards.

A hypothesis written down with its minute is something the next interviewer can test. Left in your head, it turns into a hunch that no one can trace by the time the debrief comes around.

Metaview integrates with your ATS and with your phone and video conferencing tools.

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1. 1The filters down the left side, which also cover video conferencing and calendar tools.
2. 2Ashby, one of the two ATSs where a scorecard can be submitted straight from Metaview.
3. 3Greenhouse, where the browser extension fills in a scorecard’s objective sections.

If your interviews already run on video calls, I’d turn the Notetaker on for one interview loop and keep the paper sheet beside it. You’ll see which of your marks the transcript makes unnecessary, and which ones only you could have written.

Follow one note from the call to the scorecard.

Take the 26:05 row from the example sheet. It shows the tips and templates working on a single line, whatever tool sits beside them.

During the call, the interviewer heard “the team decided” for the third time, wrote the phrase and the minute, and put a “?” beside it with the follow-up “Whose call was it?” in the margin. That took a few seconds and cost no attention, because the question could wait for the answer to finish.

In the close-out, the “?” got settled. With a recording, that meant opening the transcript at 26:05 and reading what came after the follow-up. Without one, it meant writing the question under the hiring manager’s name for the next round. Either way, the line reached the scorecard as evidence with a minute beside it, or as an open question with an owner, and never as a loose impression with no minute beside it.

That one row needed nothing more than the habits above and a free slot after the call. Try it on your next interview with the note sheet and the shorthand key, and see how many rows still make sense when you open the sheet again a week later.