A good one converts your hiring process from a series of well-intentioned conversations into a structured assessment that produces consistent, defensible decisions. It removes a huge amount of bias from your hiring. It speeds up every interview. It makes new interviewers as effective as veterans. And it produces evidence you can use to debrief and decide.

Despite that, most companies don't have one. Or they have something they call an interview guide that's actually a Google Doc with a few questions written down and no structure.

This article gives you the template and how to fill it in. Read once, build one, use it for every interview from now on.

What an interview guide actually is

An interview guide is a structured document, one per role, that defines:

The competencies being assessed for the role
Which competencies are tested in which interview
The specific questions used to test each competency
The scoring criteria for evaluating answers
The roles and responsibilities of each interviewer

Every interviewer for the same role uses the same guide. Every candidate gets the same questions. Every score uses the same rubric. The data feeds into a structured debrief where the team makes a decision based on evidence, not impressions.

This is the foundation of what is a structured interview. The guide is what makes it real.

What a bad interview guide looks like

Just so we're clear on what we're not building.

Bad: A list of questions in a Google Doc, with no scoring rubric, used inconsistently by different interviewers.
Bad: A "competency framework" document with abstract values like "ownership" and "collaboration" but no specific questions or scoring.
Bad: A guide that's the same for every role, with generic questions that don't reflect what each specific role actually needs.
Bad: A document so long that interviewers don't actually use it.

If any of these sound familiar, the time to fix it is now.

The interview guide template

Here's the structure to use. Each section is important.

1. Role summary

A short summary at the top:

Role title
Reporting line
Why this role exists (backfill, new position, expansion)
What success looks like in the first 90 days
The competencies being assessed (5 max)

This section connects to your job requisition. If you don't have one yet, see What Is a Job Requisition? first.

2. Competency definitions

For each competency you're assessing, write a clear definition.

A competency definition has three parts:

A one-sentence description of the competency
What a strong example looks like in practice
What a weak example looks like in practice

Example:

Competency: Ownership and accountability

Description: The ability to take genuine responsibility for outcomes, including mistakes, without deflecting.

Strong example: Describes a specific mistake with consequences, takes clear personal responsibility, articulates what they learned and how they changed their approach. Doesn't blame circumstances or other people.

Weak example: Either can't name a real mistake, or describes a mistake while blaming external factors. Doesn't connect what happened to what they learned.

Without this section, "ownership" is a word that means whatever each interviewer thinks it means. With it, every interviewer scores the same way.

3. Interview round structure

A grid showing which interviewer covers which competencies, with a question budget.

Example:

Round	Interviewer	Duration	Competencies
Phone screen	Recruiter	30 min	Motivation, basic fit
Hiring manager	Hiring manager	60 min	Ownership, judgment, prioritization
Functional deep dive	Senior team member	60 min	Functional craft, problem solving
Cross-functional	Peer in adjacent function	45 min	Communication, collaboration
Final round	CEO or department head	45 min	Strategic thinking, culture fit

This grid prevents two common failures: interviewers covering the same ground (which wastes interview time), or important competencies not getting assessed at all (which leads to bad hires).

4. The actual questions

The body of the guide. For each round, list the specific questions to ask, grouped by competency.

Format for each question:

The question itself
Which competency it tests
What a strong answer looks like (specific to this role)
What a weak answer looks like
Follow-up questions to push deeper

Example:

Question: Tell me about a project you owned where things went wrong. What happened, and what did you do?

Competency tested: Ownership and accountability

Strong answer signals:

Names a specific project with real consequences
Takes clear personal responsibility for their role
Articulates what they learned and changed
Can describe what they'd do differently now

Weak answer signals:

Hedges on whether things actually went wrong
Frames the issue as caused by external factors
Vague or generic description of what they learned
Doesn't connect the experience to ongoing behavior change

Follow-ups:

"What did you specifically do? What did the team do? What did your manager do?"
"What was the consequence?"
"What would you do differently now?"

Aim for 4-6 questions per 60-minute interview. Each question with follow-ups takes 8-12 minutes.

5. The scoring rubric

For each competency, a 1-4 scoring scale with definitions.

Example for Ownership:

Score	Definition
4	Strong, specific examples across multiple situations. Clear personal accountability, deep learning, evident behavior change. Would actively raise the team's standard.
3	Solid examples with personal responsibility. Some learning articulated. Would match the team's standard.
2	Some examples but with limitations. Either limited responsibility taken, or limited articulation of learning. Would be below standard.
1	Unable to provide specific examples, or examples revealed deflection of responsibility. Would be a significant gap.

Each interviewer scores each competency they covered. Scores are recorded in the guide, not just in the interviewer's head.

6. The debrief structure

The final part of the guide is how the team comes together to make a decision.

A workable debrief format:

Each interviewer states their overall score (no discussion yet)
For each competency, each interviewer shares their score and the evidence they're scoring on
Disagreements get discussed: what evidence did each side see?
Decision: advance, decline, or further conversation needed

The point isn't to average scores. It's to surface where interviewers disagreed and why. Sometimes one interviewer saw something the others missed. Sometimes one interviewer was anchored by something irrelevant. The debrief is how you sort the difference.

For more on running good debriefs, see Hiring Process Stages: What Each Step Should Actually Include.

How to build your first interview guide

Don't try to build a perfect guide on the first attempt. Build a workable one, use it, iterate.

Step 1: Start from the requisition. What competencies does this role actually need? Limit to 5.

Step 2: Define each competency. Write the description, strong example, and weak example. This is harder than it sounds. Get the hiring manager to weigh in.

Step 3: Map competencies to rounds. Which interviewer assesses which competency? Avoid overlap.

Step 4: Write questions. For each competency, write 4-6 questions you'd actually ask. Pull from our Best Interview Questions to Ask Every Candidate article if you want a starting bank.

Step 5: Write the rubric. For each competency, define the four scoring levels.

Step 6: Use it for your next interview. Don't wait to perfect it. Use it, see what works, refine.

Step 7: Iterate after each search. What worked? What didn't? Update the guide between searches.

The first guide takes 90 minutes to write. The second takes 30. After three searches, you'll have templates for every role type you commonly hire.

What separates a great interview guide from a workable one

Three things.

Specificity to the role. The strong/weak answer descriptions should be specific to what you're hiring for. "Strong analytical skills" isn't useful. "Can explain why they chose Cohort A over Cohort B for the A/B test, citing the trade-offs in sample size and time" is.

Questions tested against real candidates. Some questions sound good but don't actually produce useful answers. Run your guide for a few searches, see which questions consistently generate signal, and replace the ones that don't.

Active use of the rubric, not just the questions. The questions are 30% of the value. The rubric is the other 70%. Without it, you're back to "I just got a good feeling" hiring.

Build your interview guide with Oryx

If you'd rather not start from a blank page, our Interview Guide Builder walks you through the whole process, with role-specific question banks and scoring rubrics built in.

Try the free Interview Guide Builder

Previously in this series: Free Job Description Templates (And How to Write Yours)
Next in this series: Free Interview Scorecard Template