Structured Interviews
Five steps from an open role to a scored candidate
Ratio reads what you already have, picks the skills, writes a question and a scoring rubric for each, and rolls up the ratings your interviewers give.
What the video shows
Opening
- Most interviews run on gut feel.
- Ratio turns a job description into structured interviews.
Plan
- Start with what you already have. A senior accountant job description is dragged in. A 32-minute intake call with the hiring manager uploads, and a note is typed: “Hiring manager is targeting strong cross-functional skills.”
- Ratio drafts the interview kit. Four skills appear, split into must-have and preferred.
- You review it. Reorder, edit, confirm. Problem-Solving is dragged up into the must-haves, and the skills are confirmed.
Interview
- Everyone asks the same questions. One behavioral question: “Can you describe a time you had to push non-finance colleagues for missing month-end data?”
- And listens for the same things. The interviewer ticks three of the four RATE checks, writes a note, and gives three of four stars: meets expectations.
Decide
- Each interviewer scores on their own. The hiring manager, the recruiter and a subject matter expert each score Cross-Functional Alignment. The current avg score is 3.7.
- Scored by your interviewers. Never by AI. Overall scores: Julian Zimmerman 87%, Claudia Mitchell 75%. Julian is hired.
Close
- Ratio builds the structure. Your team makes the call.
- Bring a job description. Leave with the interview kit.
What's in an interview kit
An interview kit includes the skills to test, one question per skill, follow-ups, and a scoring rubric, built for one role.
- Standardized questions
- The same questions, in the same order, for every candidate. No improvising.
- Interviewer guidance
- The question, a scoring rubric for consistent ratings, and follow-ups to get the right information from every candidate.
- Scoring
- A four-point rating for every answer, entered by the interviewer against the same rubric. Ratio combines the human ratings; AI never scores a candidate.
- Evidence tracking
- The notes and quoted answer behind each rating, kept with the score, so the team can see why a candidate scored the way they did.
Drop in a job description, notes, or a kickoff transcript
Perfect documentation doesn't exist. Ratio works with the messy reality of how hiring happens, and treats the most specific source as the most important one.
- Transcripts and manager notes take priority over JD boilerplate
- Contradictions resolve in favor of the more specific source
- The result reflects what your hiring manager actually wants
- AI transcripts
- Hiring manager notes
- Job descriptions
Which skills should the interview test?
Like an experienced hiring consultant, Ratio reads your inputs and picks the 8-12 skills that matter, not the 25 requirements copy-pasted from a template.
- Each skill tagged as hard skill, domain knowledge, or core competency
- Must-have versus preferred, weighted by priority
- Proficiency calibrated to seniority, so junior roles get junior expectations
Set up rounds and get questions that reveal the truth
Pick who interviews for which skills. Ratio generates a light screening round and, on Growth and Scale, the deeper questions a hiring manager asks later.
- Hard skills use Applied Skills & Knowledge (ASK) questions, domain knowledge uses Situational, core competencies use Behavioral
- Screening stays conversational; later rounds get more demanding
- Phrasing recruiters can read aloud, with no corporate jargon
How do interviewers score each answer?
The hard part of interviewing is knowing what to listen for. RATE gives every interviewer the same four lenses in every round, formatted for real-time scoring.
- Relevance, Approach, Trade-offs, Evidence: one pattern in every round
- One rating per answer on a four-point scale with no midpoint
- The anchors guide the call; the interviewer always sets the score
How do you compare candidates on the same criteria?
Scores roll up by skill category across every round, so the team compares candidates on the same criteria and can defend the decision.
- Overall and per-category scores with the interview evidence behind them
- Side-by-side comparison across all assessed skills
- Panel interviews: each panelist scores alone, then the lead sets the final score in the debrief
- Read-only summaries to share with the hiring team
Output quality
Ready to use
- Natural language. Questions sound like a smart colleague asking, not a policy document.
- Recruiter-friendly. RATE lead-ins are formatted for scanning during a live call.
- Calibrated to seniority. Question difficulty scales with proficiency. The RATE anchors stay fixed.
- Consistent and job-related. The same questions and the same criteria for every candidate, with the evidence written down.
See it in action
We'll build a complete structured interview plan with skills, questions, and RATE rubrics live, so you can see exactly how Ratio works before you commit.
We'll run a live kickoff to understand the role, then build a complete structured interview plan with skills, questions, and RATE rubrics. You get full access to run that plan in Ratio for 90 days.
See the complete sample interview kit for a senior accountant