Scorecards
Score candidates against a shared rubric from the candidate drawer, then let each interviewer's ratings combine into one team summary and recommendation.
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Pro feature
Scorecards are part of Vakanssi Pro. Turn the module on under Hiring, then Tools, then Features. See Managing features for how modules work.
“I liked her” is impossible to compare across five interviewers, and hard to defend three months later. Scorecards Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license replace gut feel with a rubric: a fixed list of things every interviewer rates the same way, plus an overall recommendation. Everyone measures against the same yardstick, the scores can actually be compared, and you build a written record of why each decision was made.
On the free plugin
The free plugin has no Scorecard tab and no Scorecards settings tab. Since v0.36.0 it shows no dimmed preview in their place either. The free Team rating stars (see Two numbers, and which is which) still work.
Set up your rubric
The rubric is defined once and used for every job.
- Click Hiring in the left sidebar of the WordPress admin, then click Settings.
- Open the Scorecards tab.
- Adjust the rubric fields below, then click Save changes. (The Independent scoring checkbox on the same tab is covered further down.)
- Criteria: what interviewers rate, one per line. The defaults are Skills, Experience, Communication, and Culture add. Replace them with whatever your team actually judges.
- Highest score: the top of the rating scale. Interviewers score each item from 1 up to this number, which can be anything from 2 to 10. The default is 4, which gives a 1 to 4 scale. An even number like 4 has a quiet benefit: there is no middle score to sit on.
- Recommendation options: the choices in the overall verdict, one per line, ordered from worst to best. The defaults are Strong no, No, Yes, and Strong yes.
Tip
Keep the criteria few and concrete. Four or five things an interviewer can genuinely judge from a conversation beat ten vague ones, and they keep the averages meaningful.
Score a candidate
Scoring happens in the candidate drawer, the panel that opens when you click a candidate. Do it right after the interview, while your impressions are fresh.
- Click Hiring in the left sidebar, then click Applications.
- Click the candidate’s card to open their drawer.
- Open the Scorecard tab. It carries a count of how many scorecards the candidate already has, so you can tell at a glance whether anyone has scored them. For each criterion, click a rating from 1 up to your highest score.
- Pick an overall verdict from the Recommendation menu.
- Add a short Comment if you like. A sentence on why is worth a lot when the team compares notes later. Write it knowing the candidate could read it: a personal-data export includes your recommendation, scores, and comment, without your name.
- Click Save scorecard.
You do not have to fill in everything: skip a criterion you could not judge, or save a recommendation with no numbers at all. A criterion you leave blank does not count against the candidate, and the form says so. Clicking a score you already chose clears it again.
One scorecard per interview
A scorecard is the record of one conversation, so it belongs to the interview it came out of rather than to the candidate as a whole.
When an application has interviews scheduled, a Scoring menu appears at the top of the tab. Pick which conversation you are scoring, fill in the form, and save. Interview the same person again next week and you score that round separately: your first-round scorecard is kept exactly as you wrote it, instead of being replaced.
The menu opens on the interview you were listed as an interviewer for, most recently first, since that is almost always the one you have just come out of. Options you have already scored are marked. Switching between them keeps anything you have typed but not yet saved, so you can start one, look at another, and come back.
The menu also offers General scorecard, for an assessment that is not tied to any conversation: a CV review, or a take-home you marked. On a site that does not schedule interviews through Vakanssi, that is the only option, so no menu appears and the form works exactly as it always did.
Saving again against the same interview updates that scorecard rather than adding a second, and the form pre-fills with what you saved.
If you start a scorecard and then move to another candidate or close the panel without saving, Vakanssi asks before letting the work go, the same way it does for an unsent message or an unsaved edit. That covers a scorecard you began against one interview while you were looking at another.
Note
If an interview is cancelled after you scored it, your scorecard is not deleted. That round stays in the menu so you can still read and correct what you wrote.
Changing your mind is recorded
You can revise a scorecard whenever you like, and the fact that you did is part of the record.
The panel tells you when you first scored a candidate and, if it applies, when you last changed it. Part-way through editing one you had already saved, it adds “Not saved yet”, so you can tell what is on screen from what is stored. A scorecard you are writing for the first time says nothing.
A teammate’s note in the team summary is marked edited the same way, with the date on hover. The candidate’s Activity tab lists “Scorecard submitted” and every later “Scorecard revised”, under the name of whoever did it.
Pressing Save scorecard without actually changing anything is not a revision, and does not appear anywhere.
Note
Scorecards saved before this was added have no history behind them, so they are not marked either way. That is deliberate: the plugin does not know whether they were ever revised, and saying “never edited” would be a guess.
Tip
This is what makes a hiring decision defensible months later. It also means a reviewer who reads the team’s scores and then quietly raises their own leaves a trace, which is a good reason to write your scorecard before you open the team summary.
How team scores combine
You are not the only reviewer, and Vakanssi does the maths for you. Below the form, a team summary shows the whole panel’s verdict at a glance:
- A per-criterion average: for each criterion, the average of the scores from everyone who rated it. Reviewers who skipped a criterion do not drag it down.
- An overall score: the average across those criteria.
- How many people and how many scorecards: counted separately, because one interviewer who scored two rounds is two assessments but still one opinion in the room. When every reviewer scored once, only the number of reviewers is shown.
- A recommendation tally: a count of each verdict, like “Strong yes: 2, Yes: 1, No: 1”, so you can spot a split panel instantly.
- Reviewer notes: every comment a reviewer wrote, shown under their name alongside their recommendation and the interview it came from, so the team can read the reasoning behind the numbers, not just the scores. A reviewer who left the comment box blank simply does not appear here.
Every scorecard counts once toward the averages, including two rounds by the same interviewer: a phone screen and a final panel are two genuine readings of the same person, not one opinion counted twice.
Tip
Reading the notes by interview is often where the decision is. A candidate who scored 2 on the phone and 4 in the panel is a different story from one who scored 3 twice, and the old single scorecard could not tell you which you had.
Tip
The tally is often more telling than the average. An overall of 3.0 from four aligned “Yes” votes is a very different situation from a 3.0 hiding two “Strong yes” and two “No” votes. The second one deserves a conversation before any offer.
Two numbers, and which is which
The candidate panel shows a Team rating of stars and, below it, the Scorecard average. They measure different things, and the panel now names both so they stop looking like one.
- Team rating is a single shared marker. Anyone allowed to evaluate the candidate can change it, and the last change wins. The Activity tab notes each change and who made it, but not the value or why. It is for triage: a quick “worth a look” you all maintain together.
- Scorecard is the average of what your reviewers actually scored, with their names, their reasoning and the interview each score came from behind it. It is the decision record.
Since v0.37.0, setting the stars counts as evaluating, the same permission as submitting a scorecard, so a Hiring Manager can rate a candidate as well as score them.
When they disagree, the scorecard is the one with evidence behind it. The star rating is worth exactly what a shared field with no reasoning attached is worth.
A candidate nobody has scored shows no scorecard line at all, rather than an empty widget.
Comparing candidates side by side
Scores live on one candidate at a time, so comparing a shortlist means exporting it.
The applications CSV carries two extra columns: scorecard_overall, the team’s average for that candidate, and scorecard_reviewers, how many people scored them. Sort by the average in a spreadsheet and the shortlist orders itself, with the reviewer count there to tell a confident 4 from four people apart from a 4 from one.
A candidate nobody has scored exports blank in both columns rather than a zero, because a zero would sort as a very low score instead of as “not assessed”. A panel that gave recommendations and no numbers exports a blank average with a real reviewer count.
The export is the Export CSV button above the applications list, shown to HR / Compliance and administrators. See Working with Applications.
Independent scoring
By default a reviewer opens the Scorecard tab and reads everyone else’s verdict before writing their own, because the team summary sits under the form. That reliably shifts what they write.
If two colleagues said “Strong yes”, the third is far more likely to agree, even when their own read of the interview was lukewarm. You end up with one opinion and several echoes, which is not what averaging four scores is meant to give you.
Turn on Independent scoring and the team’s scores stay hidden until that reviewer has saved their own.
- Click Hiring in the left sidebar, then click Settings.
- Open the Scorecards tab.
- Under Independent scoring, tick Hide the team’s scores until this reviewer has saved their own, then click Save changes.
Nothing is hidden silently. Where the team summary would be, the reviewer reads “3 reviewers have scored this candidate. Save your own scorecard to see theirs.”, and the Scorecard line on the candidate’s identity card, on the left of the panel, reads “Hidden until you score”. They know the information exists and exactly how to reach it.
- Saving any scorecard unlocks it, for the whole candidate rather than one interview at a time. Otherwise the panel would appear and disappear as you moved the Scoring menu, which reads as a fault.
- People who cannot score are never affected. They are the audience the record exists for, and they cannot be swayed into a score they are unable to give.
- The scores are not sent to the browser at all while they are withheld, so they cannot be read out of the page.
- It covers the candidate panel only. The applications CSV export still carries the team average and reviewer count for anyone allowed to export.
Note
This is off unless you turn it on. Switching it on by default would take something away from every team already using scorecards, which we will not do to a site on an update.
Who can score
Anyone on your hiring team with permission to evaluate can submit a scorecard. Team members who can view applications but not score still see the team summary, just without the scoring form. See Roles and permissions for who can do what.
Permission is checked for each candidate, not once for the whole screen. If something on your site limits who may score a particular person, the tab shows the team summary and says you cannot score that one, instead of offering a form that would be refused when you saved it.
If you have turned on assignment scoping in Collaboration, recruiters and hiring managers can only score the applications assigned to them, or ones still unassigned.