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What is a screening rubric?
A screening rubric is the written list of what a role actually requires, with each requirement marked as essential or desirable and given a weight. It is written before any applications are read. That order is the entire point: a standard decided after you have seen the candidates is a standard shaped by the candidates.
1.What goes in one
Requirements, each stated so that a CV can evidence it or fail to. "Five years of commercial Python" is a requirement. "Passionate about technology" is not — nothing in a CV can settle it, so it will be scored on vibes.
A weight for each, because requirements are not equal. On a Band 6 nursing role, NMC registration is not eighty per cent of the score with the rest made up elsewhere; it is a gate. On a sales role, quota attainment might be worth three times the sector experience.
And a line on what a strong answer looks like. This is the part people skip and the part that does most of the work, because it is what turns a requirement into something two people would score the same way.
2.Why writing it first changes the result
If you read the pile first, the strongest applicant becomes the definition of a strong applicant. Everyone is then measured against a person rather than against the job, which is how a shortlist ends up full of people who resemble each other.
Writing it first also makes the standard portable. Two recruiters working the same rubric produce comparable shortlists; two recruiters working from memory produce two different roles.
3.Rubrics and the client brief
A brief and a rubric are not the same document. The brief is what the client said. The rubric is what you will actually judge against, which usually includes things the client assumed and did not say — right to work, location, notice period, the certification that is legally required for the work.
When a client changes the brief mid-role, the rubric is what you edit. That is a small, visible change with a date on it, rather than an unspoken adjustment to what everyone is now looking for.
4.The honest cost
A rubric takes fifteen to twenty minutes to write properly for a role you have not run before, and about two for one you have. That is real time, and on a role with nine applicants it will not pay for itself.
It pays on volume, on repeat roles, and on anything you might have to defend later. If a role is small, one-off and uncontentious, reading the nine CVs is genuinely the faster path.
Where this gets it wrong
- A rubric written after the applications is not a rubric — it is a rationalisation with a table around it.
- Requirements a CV cannot evidence should not be in it. They belong in the interview.
- It needs revisiting when the brief changes, and the change should be visible rather than silent.
Common questions
Screening rubrics, in short.
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The offer
See it on a role you are working today.
Twenty minutes, your own job description, your own CVs. You judge it on the shortlist it produces.
- 1Twenty minutesYou bring one live role. We look at it together — no deck, no discovery questionnaire.
- 2Set up on the callYour job description becomes a rubric while you watch, and your own CVs go through it.
- 3Then 7 days aloneYou run it on real work and judge it on the shortlist, not on anything we said.