Design an Interview Loop From Scratch

When to use it

The prompt

Design the interview loop for a {{Job Title}} role at {{Company Name}}. WHAT THIS PERSON MUST BE ABLE TO DO: {{the 4-6 things that genuinely determine success}} WHO'S AVAILABLE TO INTERVIEW: {{roles and rough time each can give}} CONSTRAINTS: {{how fast we need to move, how much candidate time we can justify asking for, remote or onsite}} WHAT WE GOT WRONG LAST TIME: {{a bad hire's failure mode, or a good candidate we lost — if you know}} Design: 1. The stages in order, with what each one uniquely assesses. Every competency should be covered exactly once — tell me where I'm currently assessing something twice and where a stage has no clear job. 2. What each stage is bad at assessing, so nobody over-reads its result. 3. Who runs each stage and why that person. 4. Where the decision points sit: which stage should be capable of ending the process, and what evidence justifies that. 5. Total candidate time, stated honestly, and whether it's proportionate to the level and the market. 6. Where this loop is most likely to lose a strong candidate — and what to cut first if we need to move faster. 7. What to keep consistent across candidates so the comparison holds up. Then tell me the single stage doing the least work for the time it costs.

Tip

Map competencies to stages before you pick the stages. Most inherited loops assess communication five times and the actual job once, then produce a debrief where everyone liked the candidate and nobody knows whether they can do the work.

How to use it

Paste the prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or whichever assistant you use, then replace every {{bracketed}} part with your own detail. The more specific and messier your input, the better the output — a model given raw notes has more to work with than one given a tidy summary you wrote first.

More Interviewing prompts

Open the full tool for all 87 prompts, the glossary, and the JD decoder.