3 ways to automate staff interviews

#1 - Simple interview

Who it's for: Owners and single-site managers who run every interview themselves. No HR team, no second interviewer, no formal scoring system.

What it is: The simplest hiring process you can defend, organised into three groups: Candidate (their name and the role), The interview (the standard questions and your notes), and Decision (an overall fit rating and the call itself). You ask every candidate the same five questions in the same order, take notes under each one, then give a fit rating and record a decision. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that structured interviews are roughly twice as predictive of on-the-job performance as unstructured ones. Most single-site managers don't run loose interviews because they want to. They run them because nobody has handed them a script.

In practice: A single-site cafe owner picks up their phone in the back office and opens the canvas. Under Candidate, they type in the candidate's name and the role they applied for. Under The interview, they walk the candidate through the five questions in the same order they've used for the last six hires, with notes going in under each one. Under Decision, a fit rating goes down, then the decision itself, before they walk back to the floor. The whole interview takes 25 to 35 minutes. It leaves a record that a hiring dispute, a probation chat, or a re-hire decision can look back on six months later.

Why it works: The five questions sit in the interview group as a checklist, so the manager doesn't have to remember them. The rating scale in the decision group is set at 5 = would hire, 3 = would consider, 1 = no, and it nudges you to avoid 3 unless you really mean it. That one nudge stops the "everyone's a maybe" problem that wrecks single-site hiring.

Steps included:

• 3 groups: Candidate, The interview, and Decision
• 4 text inputs (candidate name, role applying for, interview notes, decision)
• 1 checklist (5 standard interview questions)
• 1 rating scale (overall fit, 1 to 5)

#2 - With guidance

Who it's for: Businesses with 2-5 sites that hand hiring to local managers and want interviews run the same way, not just asking the same questions.

What it is: The same three groups, Candidate, The interview, and Decision, plus guidance panels next to the four spots where new interviewers most often slip: asking the questions, taking notes, rating honestly, and deciding without delay. The guidance steers behaviour the way a senior manager would if they were sitting in. Roughly 1 in 3 hiring decisions across hospitality and retail are made by someone who has never been trained as an interviewer. Written guidance on the canvas closes that gap without booking an in-person training session.

In practice: Take a three-site pub group. The owner hires once or twice a year. Their three site managers hire a dozen times each. Without guidance, the three sites end up running three different interviews even though they use the same five questions. The "Stick to the script" panel in the interview group removes the urge to wing it. The "What they said, not what you thought" panel next to the notes field stops the bias that creeps in when notes are already a verdict. The "Pick a real opinion" panel next to the rating breaks the habit of rating everyone in the middle, which leaves you with a bench of threes you can't hire. The "Decide now" panel next to the decision stops the sleep-on-it stall that lets good hires drift away.

What it adds to the simple interview:

1. Three different managers run the same interview the same way
2. Notes capture content, not interpretation
3. Ratings cluster appropriately at the extremes rather than the centre
4. Decisions get made on the day, not deferred indefinitely

Why it works: The guidance sits right next to each field, so the manager reads it at the moment they're doing that step, not in a training session they've half-forgotten. It turns a senior manager's "this is how you interview" into a prompt that's always on screen. That is what closes the gap between a trained and an untrained interviewer.

Steps included:

• The same 3 groups: Candidate, The interview, and Decision
• 4 text inputs (candidate name, role applying for, interview notes, decision)
• 1 checklist (5 standard interview questions)
• 1 rating scale (overall fit, 1 to 5)
• 4 written guidance panels (stick to the script, what they said not what you thought, pick a real opinion, decide now)

#3 - With sign-off

Who it's for: Multi-site chains, healthcare groups, and retail estates hiring hundreds of people a year, with the matching risk of unfair-dismissal claims, discrimination disputes, or DBS and safer-recruitment audits.

What it is: The same three groups, Candidate, The interview, and Decision, plus an interviewer signature confirming the rating and decision above. The signature locks in the verdict against later second-guessing, and stands up if the hire is ever questioned.

In practice: Take a 40-venue casual dining group running 200+ hires a year. Their HR director needs to be able to defend any single decision against a tribunal challenge. With Pilla, the interview canvas holds the conversation, the rating, and the interviewer's signature, all timestamped to the interview itself. The rest of the HR paperwork, job description, references, contract, DBS, induction, probation, sits alongside it, but the interview moment itself is captured once and clearly.

What it adds to the simple interview:

1. An interviewer signature: a clear commitment to the rating and decision, so nobody can later say "I never signed off on that hire"
2. Together with the rating and the notes: a record ACAS treats as best-practice evidence of a fair process

Why it works: The signature is captured in the moment, timestamped to the interview itself. That is far stronger than a memory pieced together weeks later, both for the interviewer's own recall and for any tribunal that looks at the decision. It turns a private opinion into a dated record you can stand behind.

Steps included:

• The same 3 groups: Candidate, The interview, and Decision
• 4 text inputs (candidate name, role applying for, interview notes, decision)
• 1 checklist (5 standard interview questions)
• 1 rating scale (overall fit, 1 to 5)
• 1 signature (interviewer sign-off)

How to pick the right version

You don't need to know our product to choose. Every version here is the same three-part interview, Candidate, The interview, and Decision; the additions change who can run it and what the record proves.

Do other people run the interview?

If you run every interview yourself, the standard lives in your head, and that works. The moment a second manager or another site starts interviewing, that standard has to live on the screen instead, or everyone does it their own way. If only you interview, #1 is enough. If anyone else does, start at #2, where the guidance panels keep everyone asking, noting, and scoring the same way.

Do you need a signed record?

A rating and a decision tell you what was decided. A signature commits a named interviewer to it. If a record is enough, #1 or #2 will do. If you need a signed sign-off for the audit trail, #3 adds the interviewer signature to the same simple interview.

Need both, guidance for the interviewer and a signed record? Open whichever matters most in the playground and add the other's step. That is how the product works anyway: every version here is the same interview with one addition.

Related workflows

• Onboarding - what happens after the offer is accepted
• Performance reviews - the structured review that mirrors a structured interview
• One-to-ones - the regular 1-to-1 cadence that keeps the new hire on track

Conclusion

A structured interview is roughly twice as predictive as an unstructured one, but the gap only opens up if the structure is actually used. Interview #2 backs that structure with guidance so every interviewer runs it the same way. Interview #3 backs it with a signature so the decision is a dated record, not a memory reconstructed after the fact.