How we Create Role Scorecards at OfferZen When Hiring

Need to hire a new person for your team? Creating an internal scorecard should be one of the first steps in your hiring process. A clear scorecard will help your team get on the same page about the role, and will help you make better hiring decisions. Here’s how we approach building a scorecard at OfferZen — and download our scorecard template to create your own!

What is a scorecard?

An internal scorecard should be one of the first things you put together after getting the green light to start hiring for a new role. It will allow you to come up with the practical definition of an A-player for the role you are trying to fill. A scorecard also serves as an “internal” job description for the role. It provides clarity to the entire hiring team involved in the process on what you are looking for.

Ultimately, it should give you an objective idea of what the role entails and who you think can do the job.

A scorecard typically consists of the following:

• Mission: The high level “goal” or mission statement of the job.
• Outcomes: Outcomes define the results you expect to see if the candidate does their job well.
• Responsibilities: The most important tasks the candidates will be responsible for.
• Competencies:
  • Role specific competencies: Competencies required to be successful in the role. This will include both functional and behavioural competencies that are relevant to this specific job.
  • Company specific competencies: Competencies required to thrive in your business and company culture, which often remains the same across roles.
• Background (skills, knowledge and experience): The career experience or background that will help the candidate achieve the objectives set out in the scorecard.

You will create or update a scorecard whenever you activate or hire for a role in your company, regardless of whether the role is new or a backfill.

Why is a scorecard important?

A scorecard serves as the first line of defence against biased hiring decisions. By clearly mapping out every requirement needed for a role, you can be certain that your hiring team is scoring the candidate against those needed skills, attributes and competencies.

Ultimately, a scorecard is the best pre-hiring work you can do. If done correctly, it will act as your north star when making hiring decisions and help you spot the best potential candidates.

How to create a scorecard

Committed to writing a scorecard for your new role? Here are the most important steps to follow to put it together.

Step 1: Write down a brain dump of your thoughts

• Write a long and exhaustive list of every single thing that the person in this role should be doing.
• Think in time frames. In 3, 6 and 12 months time what would they need to be doing?
• Research and refine your role description.
  • Look at external job descriptions that are similar to yours, to ensure you’ve covered all your bases.
  • If this is a new role, have a look at the role descriptions of other roles internally that might have been doing parts of this role in the past. This will help ensure all the relevant tasks have been incorporated.
  • Logically group the tasks in your role description.

Now, you’re ready to refine this list into the sections of your scorecard.

Step 2: Write your mission statement

This describes the overall goal of the role. Keep it short and succinct, and written in plain language. For example, here’s the mission statement we used for a Graphic Designer role advertised at OfferZen:

“As a Graphic Designer, you’ll play a key role in making sure the OfferZen brand translates well across our community touchpoints including events, social media, newsletters and gifts.”

Step 3: Create outcomes for the role

Extrapolate the tasks in your role description into outcomes for the role.

Your outcomes are what defines success in the role. Ask yourself, “What will be in place in 1 year if this person has done their job successfully?”.

The outcomes need to be clear and measurable. Try and keep it focused on the truly important items.

Be rigorous and iterate. You should end up with a list of around 5 (and no more than 10) outcomes for the role. If you have too many outcomes, go back to your role description and group your tasks further.

Review your list of outcomes. For each outcome, you should be able to answer an emphatic ‘yes’ to the question: “must the candidate achieve this outcome in their role within 6 months?”.

If you find that some of the outcomes are “nice to have” and not required, remove them. Save them in your hiring document if you are worried about losing them.

Step 4: List the responsibilities for the role

The responsibilities are the tasks the candidate will be doing once hired into the role, both immediate and more long-term (on a weekly or monthly basis).

Limit your responsibilities to the most important tasks the candidate will tackle once they start the job.

Step 5: Describe the competencies for the role

Now, you can define the key competencies for the role.

Look at both behavioural and functional competencies. Behavioural attributes are any behaviour attributes and personality traits a person might have that’s beneficial to the role whereas functional competencies refers to a specific knowledge or skill area.

• Once you have a list of competencies, group and refine it to be as succinct as possible.
• Now, go through the list and ask yourself “does the person in this role have to demonstrate all these competencies?”. If there are any “nice to haves”, remove them.

Be careful of making your list of competencies too long and unachievable for any candidate to meet. At OfferZen, we construct our scorecards to contain 4 - 6 behavioural and functional competencies in total.

Next, think of a few company-specific competencies that will help the candidate to thrive in your culture and business.

For example, at OfferZen, one of our company specific competencies is the following:

• “Growth mindset – Actively seeks feedback, adjusts behaviour where required, and has the ability and motivation to learn quickly.”

Step 6: Decide on the background for the role

When coming up with the needed background for a role, the goal is to identify any proxy attributes that would help you to identify the right candidate for the role. Identify skills, knowledge, and experience that will be easily measurable.

For example, for a designer role we recently filled at OfferZen, we added attributes such as:

• “Experience with designing and producing physical mockups (posters, banners, packaging, t-shirts etc).”
• “Has a diploma or university degree (Degree in design).”

These attributes should tell you if the candidate has the competencies and experience that will help them to achieve the objectives set out in the scorecard.

Review it all together

You now have all the sections of your scorecard — go over everything to make sure it’s not too long. As a guiding principle, your scorecard should fit into one page. If it is longer, look at how you can condense it further.

Share it in your business

Once you’ve finalised your scorecard, save it where the entire organisation has access to it. That way, everyone has visibility on how this role ties into your company’s mission as a whole.

Download the scorecard template

Need some help to bring all of this together? Download OfferZen’s template for a great scorecard here!

Once you’ve completed a scorecard, you’re ready to set up your public-facing job advert — and start hiring an awesome new member for your team!

Read more

• The Ultimate Developer Hiring Guide. This guide covers every aspect of the tech hiring process, from sending the first message, to interviewing and onboarding developers.
• 3 Tips to Write an Effective Job Spec
• Hiring Developers: Why a Candidate's Experience Matters
• Tech Hiring 101: Writing the First Message to a Candidate

Thanks to OfferZen team members Deborah Watt and Azaria Beukes, who contributed to this article.