Translate an Engineering Levelling Rubric
When to use it
Work out what actually separates two levels at your company, before levelling a candidate against it.
The prompt
I'm not an engineer. Explain this levelling rubric in plain English, focused on {{the two levels I'm trying to tell apart}}. {{Paste the rubric or career ladder}} WHAT THE HIRING MANAGER HAS SAID ABOUT THE BAR: {{quotes from intake, if any}} THE COMP BANDS FOR THESE LEVELS: {{if known}} Give me: 1. The two or three things that genuinely separate these levels, described as behaviour rather than years. 2. What a resume looks like at each: scope of projects, who they influenced, what they owned end to end. 3. How each level sounds answering the same question, with a short example of both. 4. Two screening questions that separate them, and what each answer tells me. 5. Where this rubric is vague enough that two interviewers would level the same person differently, and what I should ask the hiring manager to pin down. 6. Anything in it that describes tenure rather than capability, since that's where levelling arguments usually start. Quote the rubric's own words where you can, rather than paraphrasing it into generic ladder language.
Tip
Point five is the one to take back to the hiring manager. The gap between what the rubric says and what Staff actually looks like there lives in people's heads, and it's what a levelling argument at offer stage is really about.
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 Technical Translation prompts
Open the full tool for all 87 prompts, the glossary, and the JD decoder.