Interview calibration
Also called: calibration session
What a calibration session looks like
A 30-minute meeting before the role opens:
- The hiring manager walks the team through 3-5 dimensions the role needs.
- The team agrees what a “3” vs. “4” vs. “5” looks like on each dimension, with concrete examples.
- Past hires (good and bad) are used as anchor cases.
The output is a one-page rubric. Every interviewer uses the same rubric.
Why teams skip it
Calibration feels like overhead. The cost is real — 30 minutes × 4 people = 2 person-hours per role. Without it, every interviewer scores by personal taste; the debrief becomes a debate about what the question even was; and the hires that get through are the candidates everyone vaguely agreed on, not the candidates the team would have chosen with shared standards.
What changes with calibration
Two big shifts:
- Interviewer disagreement becomes informative (“we’re seeing the same person differently”) instead of noise.
- The hiring bar holds steady across candidates — the 8th candidate of a search isn’t held to a different standard than the 1st.
Where Join fits
Rubrics attach to the role in Join, and every scorecard renders the rubric inline so interviewers score against the same definitions. See the features page.
