The interview grid, or job interview evaluation grid, is an ideal tool for optimizing your recruitment process. In particular, it makes it easier for you to identify your candidates’ skills, assets and strengths during interviews.

To be optimal and avoid cognitive bias, a job interview grid must be well prepared. To do this, you need to understand what this assessment represents, what it’s for and how it’s used, who prepares it, how it’s constructed, and what it’s supposed to assess.
Would you like to know all about the maintenance grid? Intuition Software gives you its advice on how to create an effective interview evaluation grid, including a free template.

The interview grid in a nutshell

• The interview grid serves as a framework of questions for conducting the interviews;
• It makes the recruitment process more efficient;
• It must be drafted in collaboration between the recruiter and the manager of the position to be filled;
• To prepare a job interview form, you need to define your recruitment needs, structure your questions and set up a scoring system.

What is an interview grid?

The interview grid is a recruitment tool that serves as a framework for for all interviews, indicating the questions to be asked and the scoring system to be applied to each one; Depending on the sector, it goes by several names: evaluation grid, interview sheet, interview grid, interview analysis grid.
The interview evaluation grid is a factual element that also enables you to compare applications on a similar basis, helping to eliminate cognitive bias during recruitment.

Pourquoi faire une grille d’évaluation d’entretien ?

The interview evaluation grid is designed to make your recruitment process smoother and more efficient. When you’re running a large number of interviews, this grid saves time, creates a more level playing field, improves communication and simplifies decision-making.

Let’s take a closer look at the advantages of the interview grid:

• Save time: by gathering all the important information from candidates on a single sheet and structuring your interviews using a pre-prepared framework, you won’t waste any more time during or after interviews;

• Equal opportunities: you follow the same sequence of questions for all candidates, thus avoiding the many cognitive biases that recruiters have to deal with;

• Improved internal communication: by recording interviews on an interview grid, you can gather the information you need to remember and communicate it more easily to other employees;

Simplified decision-making: you’ll get an overview of past interviews and, thanks to the job interview grid, you’ll be able to make decisions more easily by comparing candidate profiles.

Who can write the job interview grid?

The interview grid must be drawn up collaboratively by the HR department and the manager of the position to be filled. In this way, the interview evaluation grid is complete, taking into account the real needs of the company and the position.

Other employees can take part in drawing up the job interview outline, if, for example, they have knowledge to contribute on the skills required for the position.

How to prepare an effective interview grid?

To prepare an effective interview grid, you need to :

• Define your recruitment needs,
• Structure your interview framework by targeting the essential questions,
• Avoid tricky questions.

Determine your recruitment needs

First of all, you need to structure your job interview evaluation grid by listing all the important points to consider for the position in order to create an effective recruitment process.

Each company and each job has its own specificities. You therefore need to discuss your needs with your employees to get more concrete feedback on the skills and assets required by the position. Employees in the field, future colleagues or managers of the person to be recruited, or the departments they will be working with, are in the best position to help you.

Structure the candidate evaluation grid

You can then move on to structuring the candidate recruitment evaluation grid by creating categories grouping together common criteria:

• Basic information about the candidate: surname, first name, contact details, educational and professional background, etc. ;
• First impression/contact ;
• Knowledge of the company/position ;
• Hard skills: technical skills;
• Social skills;
• Mad skills : additional personal skills ;
• Availability ;
• Telecommuting desired or not: if yes, how many days ;
• Desired compensation ;
• Notes on the candidate’s profile: motivation, sense of responsibility, listening and understanding, manner of expression, stress management, adaptability or ease.

You can create as many categories as you need, as long as they are useful for recruitment. However, be careful not to get bogged down in the job evaluation grid throughout the interview. We need to keep the spirit alive and leave room for spontaneous exchanges.

You should think of the interview evaluation grid as a way of taking notes, rather than as a guide. You can also fill in your evaluation grid immediately after the interview, once the candidate has left.

Avoid indiscreet and/or illegal questions

All the questions you ask in your job interview grid must be legal and respect the candidate’s privacy. They must therefore always be relevant to the position and the skills it requires, and must avoid making the candidate feel uncomfortable, as this could have harmful consequences, not least for your employer brand.

Article L. 1221-6 of the French Labor Code states that “. The information requested, in any form whatsoever, from a candidate at an interview may only be used to assess his/her suitability for the job or his/her professional skills. This information must have a direct and necessary link with the proposed job or with the assessment of professional skills. “
Questions about origins, religion or sexual orientation are not allowed. Beyond the legal aspect, you need to put yourself in the candidate’s shoes to remain coherent and relevant. Today, testimonials of perfectly inappropriate interview questions abound on social networks, so don’t minimize their impact.

What are the evaluation criteria for the interview grid?

The evaluation criteria on the interview grid are based on the candidate’s presentation (punctuality, courtesy, eloquence), knowledge of the position and the company, and various skills (hard skills, soft skills).

1 – Candidate presentation

The importance of this point will vary according to the type of position. You won’t have the same expectations if you’re looking for a receptionist or an order picker. However, even if the position does not specifically require contact with customers or partners, the candidate must present himself well, both for the team and the atmosphere in the company:

• Punctuality ;
• General presentation ;
• Courtesy of ;
• Relational skills ;
• Eloquence.

To determine the importance to be attached to this type of criterion, depending on the position, you can set up a rating coefficient in your interview form. For example:

• 5: receptionist, salesperson, commercial ;
• 1: lone worker, watchman/woman, maintenance worker.

2 – Knowledge of the company and the position

Testing the candidate’s knowledge of the company and the position in question is an excellent way of gauging their motivation. You’ll soon realize how committed he is as he answers the job interview questions you ask:

• Knowledge of the company and its products/services;
• Understanding the position and its tasks ;
• Interview preparation ;
• Expectations of hierarchy, future manager ;
• Relevant answers requiring research and interview preparation.

The scoring coefficient for this part of the evaluation grid will be mostly high, as it is an important criterion for targeting the candidate’s involvement and avoiding brown outs or silent resignations later on. However, you can modulate it according to the degree of responsibility of the position.

The more responsible the position, the higher the coefficient for this part of the interview grid. For example:

• 5 : manager, responsible, strategic position ;
• 1: seasonal worker, laborer, unskilled worker.

3 – Hard skills essential to the job

Candidates must master certain technical skills (hard skills) to perform their tasks. This will involve :

• Technical skills of the position;
• Mastery of the software and IT tools used in the course of our assignments.

If the job involves very specific tasks, for which the recruited candidate will be trained in any case, you’ll need to check his or her ability to learn and motivation.

The scoring coefficient for the interview analysis grid can be :

• 5: senior technician, designer, developer, accountant, etc. ;
• 1 : poste pour lequel les compétences ne peuvent être acquises que sur le terrain via vos propres formations.

To save you time in your recruitment process, our Jobaffinity recruitment software allows you to sort hard skills upstream, via CV selection;

4 – The candidate’s soft skills

The more the job involves teamwork, exchanges with management and contact with customers or prospects, the more important soft skills will be. Although there is no “question” that corresponds specifically to soft skills, a general feeling will emerge from all the exchanges you may have had during the interview:

• Relational skills and stress management ;
• Reactivity to a situation ;
• Listening skills ;
• Argumentation skills ;
• Teamwork, autonomy, organization, etc.

Here are some examples of coefficients for your interview evaluation grid:

• 5: manager, team work, customer contact ;
• 1: lighthouse keeper (and still).

5 – The candidate’s motivation

Like soft skills, the criterion for motivating a candidate is based on a general feeling you have about certain criteria:

• Dynamism and commitment ;
• Involvement during the interview (questions about the position, missions, company).

For this part, we advise you to always judge it at an average level: a lot of motivation can’t replace certain key skills, unless your position necessarily involves full training. You can therefore maintain a coefficient of 3 for the rating of this criterion on the interview evaluation grid.

6 – Candidate’s salary expectations and availability

This is a point that needs to be raised: are the candidate’s expectations in line with your budgetary possibilities? Will he be available on the date you want him? You should therefore address the following topics:

• Salary claims ;
• Availability.

While availability is of variable importance depending on the situation, the point of remuneration can be a blocking factor. Here again, it’s better to weight this part with an average coefficient and keep it at 3.

How to use the recruitment interview grid?

To use the recruitment interview grid, you need to set up a candidate rating system adapted to the position. This can be a score out of five for each criterion, then an overall average, or a scoring system with a number of points awarded for each validated criterion.

In our evaluation grid model, we’ve chosen a scale out of 5. This scoring system enables you to obtain an average score and then weight your judgment when comparing different candidates.

Sample interview evaluation grid

To help you prepare an interview evaluation grid, we offer you a sample evaluation grid to download in PDF format. This sample evaluation grid is also available in Excel format.

You can fill in our sample interview grid as you go along. However, you should always adapt this model to your company’s needs for each position to be filled, as the criteria change depending on the job.

Establishing a good interview grid helps you improve your recruitment process, especially when you have a large number of candidates to interview. What’s more, you can store all the information gathered in your Jobaffinity software to make your life easier!