Free template
Role scorecard template
Before you write an advert or speak to a recruiter, write the scorecard. It states what the person must achieve, what they must already be able to do, and what the team can teach. Everything downstream — the advert, the interview plan, the decision — should be traceable back to this page.
Who fills it in
Hiring manager, agreed with the founder or budget holder.
How long it takes
Half an hour with the hiring manager, then ten minutes with whoever signs the offer.
Reviewed
15 August 2026 by Joseph Edney, Managing Director, Humand Talent Solutions.
When to use it
Use it when
- You have decided to open a role but nothing is written down beyond a title.
- Two people in the company would describe the job differently if asked separately.
- You are about to brief an internal recruiter, an agency or your own network.
What good looks like
- Outcomes are written as things that will be true by a date, not as duties. “CI pipeline runs in under ten minutes”, not “responsible for CI”.
- The must-have list is short enough that you could justify every item to a candidate who asked why it matters.
- Anything the team could reasonably teach in the first quarter sits under teachable, not must-have.
- The person who signs the offer has read it and agrees with it before the first interview.
Common mistakes
- Copying a job advert from a larger company. Their scorecard assumes a support structure you do not have yet.
- Listing tools instead of capability. A specific framework is rarely the thing that makes the hire work.
- Writing outcomes nobody could verify. If you cannot say how you would know it happened, it is not an outcome.
- Treating the scorecard as fixed. Revise it once real candidates show you what the market actually contains — but revise it deliberately, not silently.
The template
Anything you type stays in this browser tab. It is not saved, sent to us or added to the link, so it is safe to put real salary numbers and colleagues’ names in. Closing the tab clears it — copy or print before you go.
The role in one line
One or two sentences. If it takes a paragraph, the role is probably two roles.
What breaks, slows or does not happen if the seat stays empty.
Outcomes
Three to five outcomes, each with a date and a way of knowing it happened. Fewer, sharper outcomes beat a long list.
| Row | By when | How you will know |
|---|---|---|
| Outcome 1 | ||
| Outcome 2 | ||
| Outcome 3 | ||
| Outcome 4 (optional) | ||
| Outcome 5 (optional) |
Must-have versus teachable
A must-have is something the person cannot do the job without on day one. Everything else belongs on the right.
| Row | Must have on day one | Teachable in the first quarter |
|---|---|---|
| Capability 1 | ||
| Capability 2 | ||
| Capability 3 | ||
| Capability 4 |
Evidence and boundaries
Work they have shipped, decisions they have owned, problems they have debugged. Not years of experience.
Naming these widens the search without lowering the bar.
Keep this short. Every item here removes candidates.
Record who approved it and when, so nobody rediscovers it at offer stage.
The thinking behind it
- Writing a technical hiring brief that gets resultsWhat a recruiter actually needs to run a technical search: the problem, the stack, the bar, the constraints and the trade-offs you are willing to make.
- Must-have versus learnable skills in early-stage technical hiringHow to split a requirements list into what must be true on day one and what can be learned after joining — and why that decision sets the size of your pool.