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A structured guide and template for writing competency-based job descriptions that attract the right candidates and reduce unconscious bias from the first step of the hiring process.
A poorly written job description is where most hiring processes go wrong. This guide gives HR professionals, recruiters, and founders a structured framework for writing job descriptions that are competency-led, legally sound, and genuinely attractive to strong candidates.
Covers: role purpose and reporting structure, core competency definition, level-appropriate language, requirements vs. preferences, inclusion language, and a reusable template structure that works across any function or leve
FAQS
Q What is a competency-based job description and why does it matter?
A competency-based job description defines what a person needs to be able to do — the skills, behaviours, and capabilities required for success — rather than listing tasks or years of experience. It produces more relevant applications, reduces screening bias, and creates a consistent framework that carries through to interviews and performance reviews. It also gives candidates a clearer picture of what success looks like from day one.
Q Is this suitable for founders or hiring managers with no HR background?
Yes. The guide is written for anyone writing a job description — including founders, team leads, and hiring managers who have never written one before. It includes a reusable template structure, worked examples for a technical and a non-technical role, and specific guidance on the language patterns that attract stronger candidates and the ones that filter out good people unnecessarily.
Q Does this guide help with inclusion and reducing bias in job postings?
Yes. The guide covers inclusive language, explains how requirement inflation (listing qualifications that are preferred rather than essential) disproportionately filters out otherwise qualified candidates, and includes a pre-posting review checklist. It is designed to work alongside the Interview Biases Guide for organizations building a bias-aware hiring process end to end.
Q What format is the document and can I customize it?
The guide is delivered as a fully editable Word (.docx) file. You can add your company name and branding, adapt the template sections for your specific context, and modify any guidance notes. No special software is needed beyond Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
A comprehensive bank of 200+ structured interview questions across 17 competency categories — from leadership and problem-solving to technical judgment and cultural contribution.
Inconsistent interview questions produce inconsistent hiring decisions. This question bank gives every interviewer in your organization the same high-quality, structured starting point.
Covers 17 competency categories including leadership, communication, problem-solving, adaptability, technical judgment, data-driven decision making, collaboration, and culture contribution. Questions are graded by seniority level and include follow-up probes for each competency.
FAQS
Q How many questions are included and how are they organized?
The bank contains 200+ structured interview questions across 17 competency categories — including leadership, communication, problem-solving, adaptability, technical judgment, data-driven decision making, collaboration, conflict management, and culture contribution. Questions are differentiated by seniority level (early career, mid-level, senior/leadership), so you can select the right depth of question for the candidate you are assessing.
Q How do I use these questions with the Interview Scorecards?
The Question Bank and Interview Scorecards are designed to work together. The Scorecards identify which competencies matter most for the role; the Question Bank provides two to three questions per competency to use in the interview. Select three to five competencies from the scorecard for each interview stage, then draw questions from the bank for those competencies. This produces a structured, consistent, and defensible interview process.
Q Are these suitable for structured interviews and does that matter legally?
Yes — all questions are designed for structured, competency-based interviewing (behavioural and situational formats), which are the formats with the strongest predictive validity for job performance. They are also the most legally defensible: because every candidate is asked the same questions against the same criteria, the process is far harder to challenge on grounds of inconsistency or bias.
Q Can I add my own questions?
Yes. The document is fully editable and includes a blank template section for adding company-specific or role-specific questions in the same format as the rest of the bank.
Most hiring managers receive no formal training on how to interview. This companion guide changes that — giving every person in your organization who conducts interviews the knowledge they need to do it well.
Covers interview preparation, the interview structure, open and probing questioning techniques, active listening, how to take legally defensible notes, what you cannot ask, and how to handle common difficult scenarios.
FAQS
Q Is this guide suitable for people who have never been formally trained to interview?
Yes — it is specifically designed for that situation. It covers everything from how to prepare before the interview through to how to take legally defensible notes and avoid common procedural mistakes. Many HR teams distribute it as pre-reading before a new interviewer joins a hiring panel for the first time, and use it as the basis for a short manager briefing session.
Q What questions are interviewers not allowed to ask?
The guide includes a dedicated section covering questions that are prohibited or inadvisable in each of the five jurisdictions (Ireland, UK, US, Canada, Australia) — including questions about pregnancy, family plans, health conditions, age, religion, nationality, and protected characteristics. The guidance is jurisdiction-specific and practical, not just a generic 'avoid these topics' list.
Q How does this companion connect to the other hiring documents?
The three documents form a complete interviewing system: the Guidance Companion explains how to interview; the Question Bank provides the questions; the Scorecards provide the scoring framework. Together they give any organisation a professional, consistent, bias-reduced interview process from preparation through to the hiring decision.
Q Can this be used as training material for hiring managers?
Yes. It functions as both a reference document and a training resource. Many HR teams use it as pre-reading before manager interview training and distribute it to all new hiring managers when they are first added to an interview panel.
Unconscious bias costs organisations better hires. This guide names the 15+ most common interviewing biases — from halo effect and affinity bias to recency bias and confirmation bias — and gives practical, actionable strategies for reducing their impact at every stage of the interview process.
Designed to be used alongside structured interview scorecards and the Interview Guidance Companion.
FAQS
Q What biases does this guide cover?
The guide covers 15+ cognitive biases that affect interview decisions, including: halo effect (a strong positive first impression colours the entire assessment), horn effect (the reverse), affinity bias (favouring candidates who remind you of yourself), recency bias (over-weighting what happened at the end of the interview), confirmation bias (seeking evidence that supports a first impression), contrast effect (rating relative to the previous candidate rather than against the job criteria), and attribution error. Each is explained with a real interview example and a practical mitigation strategy.
Q How is this different from general unconscious bias training?
This guide is specific to the interview context — not a general introduction to bias. It focuses on the precise moments in the process where each bias is most likely to distort judgment (screening, the interview itself, the debrief) and gives interviewers concrete techniques to counteract each bias at those moments. It is designed to be immediately actionable, not just awareness-raising.
Q Is this relevant if we already use structured interviews?
Yes. Structured interviews reduce but do not eliminate bias. This guide covers the biases that persist even in structured processes and explains how to audit scoring patterns across interviewers to identify where bias may be influencing outcomes systematically. It is most valuable when used alongside the Interview Scorecards and Debrief Guide.
Q Does reducing interview bias actually improve diversity outcomes?
Yes — consistently. Reducing interview bias is one of the highest-leverage interventions for improving diversity in hiring pipelines because it addresses the point where diverse candidates are disproportionately filtered out. It also improves quality of hire: bias-driven hiring favours familiarity over capability, which means that bias-free processes tend to surface stronger candidates regardless of demographic background.
The debrief is where hiring decisions are actually made — and where bias does its most damage. This guide gives interviewers and HR professionals a structured, facilitated process for reaching hiring decisions based on evidence rather than impression.
Covers: independent scoring before group discussion, structured debrief facilitation, how to handle disagreement between interviewers, documenting the decision rationale, and communicating outcomes.
FAQS
Q Why do group debrief discussions produce poor hiring decisions?
Without structure, group debriefs are dominated by anchoring (the first opinion expressed shapes the group's view), social proof (people defer to the most senior voice), and recency bias (the last candidate gets the most detailed discussion). This guide addresses all three: independent scoring before group discussion prevents anchoring; structured facilitation draws out all voices; and a documented decision rationale creates accountability for the reasoning.
Q What does independent scoring before discussion mean in practice?
Each interviewer completes their scorecard and submits ratings before the debrief meeting begins. They do not share scores informally beforehand. The meeting opens with each person sharing their overall impression before scores are revealed, then compares scores to identify where there is agreement and where significant differences need to be explored. This sequence substantially reduces the influence of the first speaker on the group's conclusion.
Q How long should a debrief take?
The guide recommends 30 minutes for a standard role with two to three interviewers assessing one candidate, scaling to 60 minutes for senior or complex roles or where multiple candidates are being compared. A structured agenda with time allocations for each stage is included so that debriefs do not overrun or get cancelled when time is short.
Q What documentation does the debrief produce?
A decision record template capturing: the hiring decision, the key evidence that supports it, any reservations raised and how they were resolved, and the next steps. This record provides legal defensibility if a hiring decision is challenged and creates a feedback loop for improving the process over time.
Generic scorecards produce generic hiring decisions. These role-specific scorecards are built around the competencies that actually predict success in each function.
Software Engineer scorecard: technical problem-solving, code quality judgment, systems thinking, and collaboration. Product Manager scorecard: product sense, prioritization, stakeholder management, and data orientation. Sales scorecard: commercial acumen, discovery skills, resilience, and pipeline discipline. Each scorecard includes competency descriptions, evidence prompts, and a weighted scoring model.
FAQS
Q Why are role-specific scorecards better than a generic one?
A generic scorecard applies the same competencies to every role, which means important role-specific predictors are missed. A strong software engineer and a strong product manager require fundamentally different competencies, and the evidence that demonstrates each one in an interview looks different too. Role-specific scorecards define the right competencies, provide evidence prompts tailored to that work, and apply weightings that reflect what matters most for performance in that specific function.
Q What competencies does each scorecard cover?
Software Engineer: technical problem-solving, code quality judgment, systems thinking, collaboration, and communication. Product Manager: product sense, prioritization under constraints, stakeholder management, data orientation, and strategic thinking. Sales: commercial acumen, discovery and qualification skills, objection handling, pipeline discipline, and resilience. Each scorecard also includes a culture contribution section using objective, evidence-based criteria.
Q How do the scorecards connect to the Interview Question Bank?
The Scorecards identify which competencies to assess; the Question Bank provides two to three questions per competency to use in the interview. Together they produce a structured, consistent process: same competencies assessed, same questions asked, scores documented independently before the group debrief. The Debrief Guide then provides the facilitation framework for converting those scores into a hiring decision.
Q Can I modify the competency weightings?
Yes. All scorecards are delivered as fully editable Word documents. The weighting column can be adjusted to reflect your organization's specific priorities — for example, weighting collaboration more heavily for a team-critical engineering role or commercial acumen more heavily for an enterprise sales role.
Three additional role-specific scorecards built for the hiring scenarios where generic frameworks fall shortest.
Engineering Manager scorecard: technical credibility, people leadership, delivery management, and cross-functional influence. Operations / Clinical Ops scorecard: process design, regulatory awareness, data rigour, and operational judgment. Customer Success scorecard: relationship building, product knowledge, retention instinct, and commercial awareness.
FAQS
Q How does the Engineering Manager scorecard differ from the Software Engineer one?
The Software Engineer scorecard focuses on individual technical contribution. The Engineering Manager scorecard shifts the emphasis to people leadership, delivery management, technical credibility (earning respect from engineers without necessarily being the best coder), and cross-functional influence. The two scorecards reflect fundamentally different jobs — managing engineers versus being one — and should never be used interchangeably.
Q Is the Operations scorecard suitable for clinical operations roles in health tech?
Yes. The Operations / Clinical Operations scorecard was designed to cover both general operational roles and the regulated, quality-driven environment of health tech. It includes competencies for regulatory awareness, documentation discipline, process design under constraints, and risk management, alongside the standard operational effectiveness and delivery criteria.
Q Who is the Customer Success scorecard designed for?
The Customer Success scorecard covers the competencies most predictive of CSM success: relationship building, product knowledge depth, proactive retention instinct, escalation judgment, and commercial awareness. It is suitable for junior to mid-level CSM hiring and can be adapted for more senior strategic account management roles with guidance from the Interviewer Companion.
Q Can I use these alongside the first set of scorecards?
Yes — the two scorecard sets are part of the same suite and use the same format, scoring scale, and evidence documentation approach. Organizations that need scorecards for multiple functions can use both sets with a consistent process across every role.
Every candidate communication is a brand moment. This document gives you a complete, professional set of templates for every stage between the hiring decision and the start date.
Templates include: verbal offer call script, written offer letter (with inline jurisdiction flags for IE/UK/US/CA/AU on probation periods, notice periods, annual leave, and right to work verification), offer acceptance confirmation, pre-start communication sequence, candidate hold letter, two rejection letter templates (post-first interview and post-final interview), and candidate withdrawal acknowledgement.
FAQS
Q What templates are included in this pack?
Eight templates: a verbal offer call script, written offer letter (with inline jurisdiction flags), offer acceptance confirmation, pre-start communication sequence (four touchpoints from acceptance to start date), a candidate hold letter, two rejection letter templates (post-first interview and post-final interview), and a withdrawal acknowledgement. Each template includes guidance notes on when and how to use it.
Q Why does the offer letter include jurisdiction flags?
Several offer letter fields carry different legal implications depending on where the candidate will work. Probation periods are statutorily capped in Ireland (6 months under the Employment (Amendment) Act 2023). Notice periods must meet statutory minimums in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Annual leave entitlements differ across jurisdictions. The inline flags explain the rules for each of the five covered jurisdictions so the form can be completed accurately and lawfully without separate research.
Q Is the offer letter the same as an employment contract?
No — and the pack makes this clear. The offer letter is a pre-contractual communication of the key terms. In the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, employers are legally required to provide a written statement of employment particulars or a full employment contract within a defined period of starting work. The offer letter communicates intent; the employment contract is the legally binding document and should be prepared or reviewed by employment counsel in the applicable jurisdiction.
Q Why does the pack include rejection letter templates?
Candidate experience at the rejection stage has a measurable impact on employer brand. Candidates who receive a thoughtful, timely rejection are more likely to apply again, refer others, and speak positively about the organisation. In specialist talent markets like health tech, where the candidate pool is small and interconnected, every candidate relationship has long-term value.
While the 30-60-90 Day Plan guides the new hire, this template guides HR and the hiring manager through the onboarding process on their side — ensuring nothing is missed.
Covers: pre-boarding actions (IT setup, contract, system access), day one logistics, week one structured touchpoints, HR administrative requirements, probation review timing, and the return-to-work conversation at 90 days. Includes a completion checklist and accountability owners for each action.
FAQS
Q What does the HR Onboarding Plan cover that the 30-60-90 Day Plan does not?
The HR Onboarding Plan covers the operational HR side of bringing someone on board — IT setup, contract and right-to-work documentation, benefit enrolment, payroll setup, day one logistics, the first week check-in structure, and the 90-day probation review process. The 30-60-90 Day Plan is the new hire's roadmap; this is HR's checklist. Both are needed for a complete onboarding process.
Q Is this plan suitable for a startup without a dedicated HR team?
Yes. It is designed for organizations where HR responsibilities fall on a founder, office manager, or part-time HR lead alongside other duties. Each action is clearly described, ownership is specified (HR vs manager vs IT vs finance), and the sequence is laid out so nothing is missed even when HR bandwidth is limited.
Q Does the plan cover right-to-work and compliance documentation?
Yes. The pre-boarding section includes right-to-work verification as a mandatory step, with a jurisdiction note covering the process for Ireland and the UK (right to work check), the US (Form I-9), Canada (work permit verification), and Australia (VEVO check under the Migration Act 1958).
Q Where does the onboarding plan end and the performance cycle begin?
The HR Onboarding Plan runs through to the 90-day probation review. At that point the Performance Management Template takes over for the ongoing performance cycle — goal setting, regular check-ins, and the annual review process.
Structured onboarding increases new hire retention by over 50% and reduces time to productivity significantly. This template gives every new hire a clear roadmap for their first 90 days.
The plan is structured around three phases: Days 1–30 (learn: understand the role, the team, and the business); Days 31–60 (contribute: begin applying knowledge and taking ownership); Days 61–90 (perform: deliver against defined goals and establish independent working rhythms). Each phase includes structured objectives, relationship-building goals, and a manager check-in framework.
FAQS
Q How is the plan structured across the three phases?
Phase one (Days 1–30) focuses on learning: understanding the role, the team, the organization, and the context. Phase two (Days 31–60) shifts to contribution: taking ownership of specific work and building key relationships. Phase three (Days 61–90) moves to performance: delivering against defined goals and having the first substantive performance and development conversation. Each phase includes specific objectives, relationship-building goals, and a manager check-in framework.
Q Does structured onboarding actually improve retention?
Yes — consistently. Research shows that structured onboarding increases new hire retention by 50% or more and reduces time to full productivity significantly. The compounding cost of early departures — typically 50–200% of annual salary per replacement — makes structured onboarding one of the highest-return HR investments available to a growing business.
Q Can this plan be adapted for remote or distributed new hires?
Yes. The plan includes specific guidance for remote onboarding, covering virtual relationship-building approaches, the additional structure needed when a new hire cannot observe team culture in person, and how to maintain connection and progress visibility when manager and employee are in different time zones.
Q How does this plan connect to the HR Onboarding Plan?
The 30-60-90 Day Plan is the new hire's tool — their roadmap for the first 90 days. The HR Onboarding Plan is HR and the manager's operational checklist — covering what needs to happen on the HR side before, on, and after the start date. The two documents are designed as companions and are both included in the Hiring & Onboarding Kit.
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