Every company I've worked at had the same broken interview process

There's a dirty secret in tech hiring: the people actually doing the interviews have zero tooling.

HR has their ATS. Recruiters have their pipelines. And the tech lead who just spent 45 minutes evaluating a senior engineer candidate? They have a Slack message and a fading memory.

I've been on the interviewer side of this at several companies — as a tech lead, staff engineer, head of development. I've done hundreds of technical interviews across these roles. And every single company had the same problem.

The "system"

Here's what interview feedback looks like at most engineering teams I've been part of:

• Someone writes a few lines in Slack right after the interview
• Someone else waits until the debrief meeting and goes from memory
• A third person opens a Google Doc, writes half a page, then never shares the link
• Everyone shows up to the hiring debrief with completely different formats and criteria

You end up in a meeting where one person says "she was really strong technically" and another says "I didn't love the communication" and there's no way to actually compare because everyone evaluated different things in different ways.

The candidate who interviewed on Monday gets a different process than the one who interviewed on Friday. It's not fair to them and it leads to bad decisions.

Why nobody builds for this

There's a whole industry of hiring tools, but almost all of them are built for HR and recruiters. They're ATS platforms — Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby — with scorecards bolted on as a feature.

The problem is that the tech lead never logs into the ATS. They get a calendar invite, do the interview, and need to put their feedback somewhere fast. They're not going to learn a new platform for this. They're not going to ask their manager for a Greenhouse license.

So the feedback goes into Slack. Or Obsidian. Or nowhere.

What I built

I got tired of this and built techscore.dev — a simple scoring app for technical interviews. No backend, no signup, no data leaves your browser. Just open it during or after an interview and score.

It evaluates candidates across 6 categories:

• Smart — problem decomposition, adaptability, structured reasoning, learning agility
• Get Things Done — delivery track record, live coding execution, pragmatism, ownership
• Drive — initiative, self-motivation, ambition, persistence
• Culture Fit — collaboration, communication, humility, values alignment
• Technical Experience — architecture, testing, frameworks, code quality
• Domain Experience — domain knowledge, data & analytics, tooling, industry awareness

Each sub-competency gets a 1-4 score. You can add notes per item. The sidebar shows a running total. When you're done, you export a markdown scorecard and drop it wherever your team communicates — Slack, Notion, a PR comment, whatever.

That markdown file is the whole point. It's structured, it's consistent, and when three interviewers all export one, you can actually compare them side by side in the debrief.

The categories are opinionated

I know. Six categories with four items each is a specific framework, not a universal truth. It's based on what I've found useful over years of interviewing engineers — loosely inspired by the "Smart and Gets Things Done" philosophy but extended to cover the things I kept wishing I had tracked.

You might disagree with some of them. That's fine. I'd rather give you an opinionated starting point than a blank template where you have to invent your own rubric every time.

What happened when I shared it

I originally built this just for myself. Then I shared it with the other engineers doing interviews at my company and something unusual happened — they actually used it. Repeatedly. Without me nagging them.

That almost never happens with internal tools. It only works when the tool is faster than whatever someone was already doing. In this case, the bar was "write a Slack message," so the tool had to be really low friction to beat that.

Try it

techscore.dev — open it, score a candidate, export the scorecard. Takes about 2 minutes.

If you do technical interviews and have opinions about the scoring categories, I'd love to hear them. The framework is the part I'm least sure about and most interested in iterating on.