Hiring teams need a scoring system that helps them evaluate job seekers objectively. Each hiring team member must also share their distinct points of view regarding potential candidates with other interview panelists so they can agree on which candidates deserve job offers.

That’s where an interview scorecard can help.

Why small business recruiting teams use interview scorecards

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Charlotte A. Burrows recently noted around five in six employers (83%) screen and rank candidates using recruitment automation.

Investing in recruiting software with automation is essential for your small businesses.

Some hiring automation technology can sort qualified candidates from unqualified candidates. This saves your HR team lots of time they can put back into other core HR and hiring tasks.

However, one activity your small business should not allow your recruitment platform to tackle for you is ranking candidates and deciding which ones to hire.

That’s because the human element of hiring is required to make smart decisions about which high-quality candidates to engage, interview, and extend offers to. 

Rating job seekers is a manual task, but it’s one that can be carried out efficiently with an applicant tracking system (ATS) that offers an interview scorecard:

• Let’s say your hiring team has a structured interviewing process. That means you ask candidates who interview for the same role the same list of questions. This allows you to compare each job seeker in an organized way and remove the potential for hiring bias.
• After speaking with candidates, some SMBs use an interview scoring sheet to rate candidates without providing any context around their rating decision. Others create Microsoft Word or Google docs where they simply jot down their thoughts on job seekers.
• The more streamlined and consistent way to evaluate candidates you engage is to use a candidate scorecard, also known as an interview scorecard.
• Interview scorecards help recruiters, hiring managers, and others who speak with candidates make data-backed hiring decisions and help them stay focused on candidates’ answers to interview questions.
• Instead of determining whether a person is worth hiring based on whether they maintained eye contact during an interview or their personality traits, interview scorecards feature the same criteria for all roles your company fills.

To streamline this process, you can easily use the JazzHR Candidate Scorecard tool to rank job seekers based on a candidate fit in the company culture, their past work experience, and whether their resumes match the job-specific qualifications tied to a role. 

This ensures they make fair and objective hiring decisions based solely on this uniform rating system and data-backed insights shared by hiring team members, not any subjective criteria.

How an interview scorecard can improve your hiring process

Skills-based hiring is on the rise. The approach ensures candidates are assessed and selected based on their expertise and abilities that directly apply for roles they interview for.

To ensure your small business hiring team evaluates and chooses qualified candidates with the required qualifications in a repeatable and consistent way, you need two things:

1. An applicant tracking system (ATS) where you can store all candidate info in dedicated profiles that are easily scannable and accessible to all hiring decision-makers
2. An interview scorecard that is included in your small business ATS software and allows your hiring team to compare candidates in a fair and unbiased manner

Here are three specific benefits of using an ATS with a candidate scorecard.

1) Keeps recruiting structured and removes bias 

“Discussions that lack structure can fail to gain insights into a candidate’s ability to manage responsibilities and excel,” recruitment advisor Sean Fahey wrote for Forbes. “Not only can this leave job seekers with a poor brand experience, but interviewers can also fall victim to confirmation bias.”

However, when your hiring team chats about candidate fit and factor ratings from your interview scorecard in your discussions, you can make smarter, bias-free hiring decisions and ensure all talent you engage for job openings are evaluated using the same criteria.

2) Enables SMBs to make data-backed decisions

A candidate scorecard is a form of data. It provides a numeric grade for each job seeker you speak with that you can use with hiring team feedback to decide which candidates to move to the next stage of your hiring cycle and offer jobs to.

The more hires you make based on the use of an interview scorecard, the more quality-of-hire data you can collect and use to update your SMB’s interviewing approach.

“By correlating your predictions with candidates’ actual performance on the job, you can also get quantitative feedback about your accuracy at assessing different criteria,” executive coach and development consultant Ben Dattner wrote for Harvard Business Review. 

3) Ensures the right candidates are ultimately hired

Your quality-of-hire data may show you make bad hiring decisions from time to time. 

The reality is, even when you use an interview scorecard and a structured hiring process, there will sometimes be candidates who don’t pan out for reasons you couldn’t think of when interviewing them.

However, you’re far more likely to see a strong candidate “hit rate,” as Ben called it, than hire poor-fit employees at your small business when you judge candidates with a fixed scoring system.

Chat with us today to learn about JazzHR’s Candidate Scorecard and take the tour of our powerful small business recruitment software. Schedule a custom ATS demo today.

And yet, small businesses must fill critical roles with qualified candidates to improve their daily operations and grow their companies long term. This means addressing their recruitment challenges head on and with the right technology and processes to improve their hiring outcomes.

3 recruiting and hiring challenges small businesses face today

The U.S. Jobs & Hiring Trends Report from Indeed makes the case for cautious optimism in the labor market for employers, based on a stronger economic outlook for the year ahead.

Yet, even with the potential for better hiring conditions in 2024 and beyond, there are recruiting challenges SMBs must contend with near term to hire workers that will drive business results.

Here are three specific hiring challenges many SMBs are dealing with today and solutions that can help them address the issues so they can better attract, engage, and hire top talent.

1) Competing with bigger companies for top talent

The 2023 Employ Recruiter Nation Report found 63% of small businesses cited a lack of qualified candidates in their talent pool as one of their main recruiting and hiring challenges today.

Talent scarcity even requires that some SMBs look abroad for employees.

• Recent Gusto research found 58% of small business owners are “turning to international talent because they’re facing a shortage of available U.S. employees, or because they need additional skills they can’t find in the U.S.”

One reason many small businesses don’t have enough high-quality candidates they can engage for open roles is larger companies are competing for the same talent.

These bigger businesses often win more qualified candidates over SMBs because they have:

• More money to spend on recruitment marketing activities, like targeted job ads
• More recruiters and hiring managers who can tackle recruiting tasks
• More hiring team members who can spend most or all their time reporting on hiring challenges, strengths, and opportunities and help improve the company’s recruiting process

Mineral’s 2023 State of HR report found 57% of small business HR teams said attracting new employees was one of their top business priorities today. That makes it critical for SMBs to find a way to connect with potential candidates and show why their company is worth joining over a larger employer.

Solution: Create a strong company culture that appeals to candidates.

Pay, benefits, time off, and work flexibility matter to many job seekers today. But, many people also want to work for companies with company cultures that foster a sense of purpose and community.

“Creating a sense of connection is crucial for small businesses that want to attract competitive talent,” LaunchCode Interim Executive Director Sarah Mayer wrote for Entrepreneur.

• Learn what your current employees love about your company culture and what they’d improve.

Then, use their feedback to enhance your culture and feature messaging around your improvements in your job descriptions, career site copy, candidate outreach, and social media posts.

2) Lacking time and resources to build a strong employer brand

Another top recruitment challenge small businesses face is having enough bandwidth and resources for creating a memorable and compelling employer brand.

• Remember: Employer branding is basically storytelling.

The better you tell your small business’s story on your website and in other promotions, the better your chances are of getting more customers to buy from you and candidates to apply for open roles.

Your dedicated human resource professional or team has a lot to manage daily. From overseeing payroll and HR-related issues to onboarding new employees to ensuring compliance with workplace laws, investing in employer brand initiatives often can seem like the lowest priority.

That said, showing why your business is a great place to work is one of the most effective ways that your business can attract higher potential candidates and driving hiring efficiencies for your company.

Solution: Get insights and ideas from employees and other SMBs.

While talking to your employees about what makes your company culture unique, ask them how they perceive your small business and what makes them want to stay at the company long term.

Survey employees to reveal what makes working at your company great, get their thoughts on your company mission and values, and discover areas of the business where they think there is room for improvement.

• “If you create exceptional employee experiences first and lean into that, that will allow the employee voice to sing and influence successful recruiting,” Glassdoor Head Strategist, Employer Brand & Voice Taylor Meadows noted at an Indeed FutureWorks event.

At the same time as speaking with employees, research what other small businesses with similar products and/or services as yours are doing to position their companies as the best in your space.

Let’s say a competitor does an excellent job explaining their progress with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and spotlighting their volunteer and charity work on their website in a compelling manner.

Consider featuring your community outreach and DEI initiatives on your site and asking some employees who take part in your volunteer work and DEI programs to share their experiences for testimonials.

3) Relying on too many HR tools to recruit and hire candidates

One of the toughest hiring challenges for SMBs today isn’t related to personnel or processes. Rather, it has to do with the assortment of tools they are forced to use to track and engage candidates.

The most common hiring technology stack for small businesses today is built around their spreadsheets and email. This kind of disjointed setup leads to inefficient recruiting and slow hiring processes.

Solution: Use an applicant tracking system to streamline hiring.

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are “morphing from archaic resume repositories into intuitive, end-to-end recruitment management tools that are more friend than foe in helping recruiters achieve their goals,” HR technology expert Dave Zielinski wrote for SHRM.

An ATS built for SMBs can help your hiring team:

• More quickly and efficiently publish your job postings
• Connect with qualified candidates in your talent pool
• Manage all active and passive job seekers from one location
• Get rid of unconscious biases in candidate evaluation
• Send and evaluate scores of pre-employment assessments
• Improve collaboration across the recruiting life cycle
• Report on your talent sourcing and candidate engagement
• Gather feedback from candidates and interviewers
• Organize and streamline your entire hiring process

With the right ATS for small businesses, you can stop relying on disconnected tools and your inbox to execute your recruiting strategy and more efficiently connect with and hire top talent.

Get more active job seekers to apply and better engage passive candidates with JazzHR’s small business recruitment software. Schedule a demo of our SMB applicant tracking system today.