Design your interview pipeline

What this achieves

An interview pipeline is the list of stages a candidate passes through between applying and an offer. Defining it once means every hire follows the same shape, and the pipeline board shows the same columns to everyone.

Required role: Administrator.

Steps

Go to Recruiting → Templates.
Open the Interview Pipelines tab.
Select New Pipeline.
Enter the Pipeline name.
Select Add stage for each stage in your process.
For each stage, enter its name, choose its Type, and set the duration in minutes, the interviewer count, and the scorecard criteria.
Turn on Default pipeline if this is the process the pipeline board should show.
Save.

Example: HC Corp defines a standard pipeline with a 30-minute phone screen for one interviewer, a 60-minute technical interview for two, and a 45-minute final round for two.

What each stage carries

Option	Description
Stage name	What the stage is called. It becomes a column on the pipeline board, so name it as you would say it to a candidate.
Type	The kind of stage: Phone, Video, Technical, Onsite, Panel, Culture, Case Study, or Other.
Duration	How long the stage takes, in minutes.
Interviewer count	How many interviewers the stage expects.
Scorecard criteria	What this stage assesses, entered separated by commas.

Write the criteria as things an interviewer can form a view on. “Systems design, debugging, communication” gives three interviewers the same brief; “technical ability” gives them three different interviews.

What the criteria do and do not do

The criteria define what the stage is for and travel with the stage. No screen in recruiting captures a completed scorecard against a candidate, so the criteria are a brief for the people interviewing rather than a score the system stores and compares.

Plan accordingly: agree where interviewers write their views down, and treat the criteria list as what they are all writing about.

The default pipeline

One pipeline can be marked as the default, and it is the one the pipeline board builds its columns from. The board reads Applied, then this pipeline’s stages in order, then Offered and Hired.

Marking a different pipeline as the default therefore changes the board every recruiter works from. Do it deliberately, and not while candidates are mid-process.

If no pipeline has been defined at all, the board falls back to a built-in sequence of a phone screen, a technical interview, a culture fit stage, and a final round.

Editing and removing pipelines

The list shows each pipeline with its stage count and whether it is the default. A pipeline can be edited, and deleting one asks you to confirm by name.

Prefer editing to deleting. A deleted pipeline takes its stage definitions with it, and the columns your board showed last month become impossible to reconstruct.

What happens next

The pipeline board shows the stages you defined as its columns, and candidates advance through them one stage at a time. Time in stage is measured against these columns, so the shape you set here is what your process reporting is measured on.