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You've written a strong job description. You've attracted candidates. You're ready to start interviewing.

There's just one problem: you haven't decided how you're going to evaluate them.

If your plan is to interview several people, compare impressions, and go with whoever felt like the best fit — you don't have a hiring process. You have a bias delivery mechanism. It favors candidates who are polished interviewers, who remind you of yourself, or who simply had a great conversation on the right day. It has almost nothing to do with who will actually perform in the role.

The fix is a Role Scorecard — and it needs to be built before the first interview, not after.

The scorecard concept comes from Geoff Smart and Randy Street's book WHO: The A Method for Hiring. The premise is simple: define what success looks like in the role before you start evaluating candidates, then use that definition as your measuring stick throughout the entire process. When done right, it shifts your hiring from subjective impression to objective evaluation — and it makes every subsequent conversation sharper, faster, and more accurate.

💡The Vault Insight: Gut feel isn't a hiring strategy. A scorecard built before the first interview is.

A complete scorecard has two components:

The Mission. One or two sentences that capture why this role exists and what it's ultimately here to achieve. Not what the person will do day-to-day — what becomes true for the business if they do their job exceptionally well.

A weak mission sounds like this: "Responsible for supporting the sales team and assisting with various go-to-market initiatives." That describes activity. It could apply to a dozen different roles and gives you nothing to evaluate against.

A strong mission sounds like this: "Build and operate a recruiting function that fills roles faster than our competitors without sacrificing quality, so the business never loses growth momentum due to open headcount." That's a standard. You can measure against it.

The Outcomes. Three to five specific, measurable results you expect this person to achieve in their first 6 to 12 months. Not activities. Not behaviors. Results.

"Conduct weekly one-on-ones with direct reports" is an activity. "Build a team environment where direct reports consistently report high clarity on their priorities and are hitting their individual targets within 90 days" is an outcome. One tells the person what to do. The other tells them what to achieve.

Each outcome should be time-bound, measurable, and sequenced — early outcomes focused on learning and quick wins, later ones focused on sustained performance and transformation.

The scorecard does something else most managers don't expect: it becomes the foundation for onboarding, the basis for the 30/60/90 plan, and the anchor for the first performance review. If the outcomes were honest when you wrote them, they serve double duty from day one.

One final use that's easy to overlook — when a hire isn't working, pull out the scorecard. More often than not, the conversation shifts immediately from "this person isn't performing" to "we didn't define what we needed clearly enough." Both are useful realizations. Only one of them is available to you if you did the work upfront.

Define the standard before you start comparing people against it. Everything else gets easier from there.

To make creating your own scorecard as easy as possible, here’s a link to the scorecard template I use for every role on my team and every role I hire.

—Sean McGinnis, 2X President, 2X CMO, COO & EOS integrator