Practical writing on running a hiring process.

Most scorecards fail because they ask too much. When an interviewer faces twelve competencies and a free-text box for each, they write “good culture fit” and move on.

We looked at 40,000 scorecards submitted in Slatework last quarter. Scorecards with five or fewer competencies were submitted a median of 3 hours after the interview. Scorecards with ten or more took 26 hours, and a third were never submitted at all.

Start with the four or five things the role cannot succeed without, weight them honestly, and give each interviewer one question to own. Then let the weighted total make the first recommendation, and let the debrief argue with it.

A growing number of states and cities expect employers to include a good-faith pay range in job postings, and some apply the rule to remote roles that could be filled by someone living there.

If you hire in more than one state, the simplest approach is to include a range on every posting. Keep the range honest: the band you would actually pay for the role and level, not the widest number you can defend.

This post is general information, not legal advice. Rules change and differ by location, so check the current requirements for every place you hire with your own counsel.

The best-run hiring teams we work with have one thing in common: a short weekly review where the board is the agenda.

Sort by days in stage. For every candidate stuck more than five days, ask three questions: what is the next step, who owns it, and when will it happen. Then close the meeting.

Twenty minutes a week replaces dozens of “any update?” messages, and candidates notice the difference.

Time to fill starts when a role is approved. Time to hire starts when a candidate applies. Mixing them up is the most common reason hiring reports disagree.

Report time to hire for the candidate experience and time to fill for workforce planning. Then add time in stage, because it tells you where to act.

Medians beat averages here: one executive search that took 140 days should not hide the fact that most roles close in under a month.

New interviewers are not bad at interviewing. They are unprepared. A kit fixes that: the role summary, the one competency they own, two questions, what a strong answer sounds like, and the rating scale.

Kits also protect candidates. When every interviewer asks job-related questions from the same kit, you avoid the improvised questions that cause legal and fairness problems.

Build the kit once per role, attach it to the interview, and Slatework puts it in the calendar invite.

Federal contractors and larger employers may need applicant demographic data for their reports. The data has to be voluntary and kept apart from the people making hiring decisions.

In Slatework, self-identification answers are stored separately from the profile and are visible only to roles with reporting access. Interviewers and hiring managers never see them.

This is general information, not legal advice. Your obligations depend on your size, contracts and locations, so confirm them with your counsel.