Interview Guide

What goes into an interview guide

A complete guide, often called an interview kit, has six parts:

1. Role context. Two or three lines on what the job is, the must-haves and the interview's place in the process ("Round 2 of 3, 45 minutes, hiring manager").
2. Competencies for this round. Usually three to five. Each round should cover different ground so candidates are not asked the same thing four times.
3. Questions and probes. One or two main questions per competency, each with two or three follow-up probes.
4. Rating anchors. What a 1, 3 and 5 answer sounds like for each question, written in observable terms.
5. Timing. Minutes per section, including intro and candidate questions.
6. Logistics and legal reminders. What to tell candidates about next steps, plus topics to avoid.

The ratings themselves are recorded on an interview scorecard, which many teams build into the same document or ATS form.

How to build one, step by step

Start from the job, not from a question bank. Talk to the hiring manager and one or two strong performers in the role and ask what separates the best people from the rest, and what got people fired or caused them to quit in the first 90 days. That gives you the competencies.

For each competency, write a behavioral question ("Tell me about a time…") and, for entry-level roles, a situational alternative ("What would you do if…"). Then write anchors. This is the step most teams skip, and it is the step that makes ratings consistent. A useful test: could two interviewers who have never met each other give the same answer the same score by reading your anchors?

Pilot the guide on two or three internal people or recent hires, cut anything that runs long, then lock it. Changing questions mid-search makes earlier and later candidates hard to compare.

Sample outline: customer service representative, first interview

• 0 to 3 minutes: Introductions, explain format and note-taking.
• 3 to 10 minutes: Customer handling. "Tell me about a time a customer was upset before you could help them." Probes: what did you say first, how did it end, what would you change?
• 10 to 16 minutes: Reliability. "Tell me about a time you had to keep a commitment when it was inconvenient."
• 16 to 22 minutes: Learning systems. "Walk me through the last time you had to learn new software for work or school."
• 22 to 26 minutes: Schedule and job realities. Confirm shift availability and explain the role honestly.
• 26 to 30 minutes: Candidate questions and next steps.

The same outline, questions and anchors are used for every candidate in that round. This is the core of a structured interview.

Interview guide vs. interview plan vs. scorecard

The terms get mixed up. An interview plan usually means the whole process for a role: how many rounds, who interviews in each, what each round covers. An interview guide is the detailed script for one round. A scorecard is the form where ratings and evidence are recorded. Small teams often combine all three into one document, which is fine as long as each interviewer knows exactly which questions are theirs.

Getting interviewers to actually use it

Guides fail when they are long, buried in a shared drive, or seen as HR paperwork. What helps:

• Keep it to one or two pages per round.
• Put it inside the ATS or calendar invite so it is open during the interview.
• Cover it in interviewer training, including a practice round scoring a recorded answer.
• Make the hiring manager co-author it so they own the questions.
• Review scorecards for missing ratings and follow up quickly with interviewers who skip them.

For high-volume roles, the guide is also the basis for automation. Once questions and anchors are fixed, the same content can drive recorded or AI-led first-round interviews, which keeps early screening consistent across hundreds of applicants and frees recruiters for the final rounds.

Legal reminders to include

Add a short do-not-ask list to every guide: age, national origin, religion, marital or family status, pregnancy, disability and health, and in many states and cities, salary history and criminal history before a conditional offer. Instead of asking whether someone has children, ask whether they can work the stated shifts. Rules vary by state and city, so have HR or counsel review the list once a year.