I’ve been the engineer answering the questions, trying to read the interviewer’s face for some sign I’d said the right thing. I’ve been the technical lead deciding whether a candidate’s system-design answer was actually strong, or just confident. I’ve been the hiring manager in the debrief, listening to four different people describe the same thirty-minute interview as if they’d watched four different conversations.
That last one is the moment this product actually came from. Four smart, well-meaning people, no shared language for what “good” looked like. One person’s “solid hire” was another person’s “would not advance.” Nobody was wrong, exactly — there just wasn’t a rubric. There was gut feel, dressed up as judgment.
That gap doesn’t just hurt hiring teams. It hurts candidates just as much, maybe more. If nobody can tell you what “good” looks like before the interview, you’re not being evaluated on your skill — you’re being evaluated on whether you happened to guess right about what this particular panel wanted to hear.
So I built interviewrubric.com to close that gap from both directions.
Paste in a job description, and in under a minute it generates a rubric: clear signal areas, and what actually separates exceeds / meets / below standard for each one. A hiring team gets a shared standard instead of four different gut checks. A candidate gets to see, in plain language, what “good” is actually being measured against before they walk in.
It’s live in open beta right now, and it’s free to use. The plan longer-term is to keep the core rubric generation free for candidates, with pricing eventually coming in around saving results or heavier usage — the exact shape of that is still being worked out, and this beta window is part of how I figure it out. But I’m not leaving the beta open indefinitely. I built this to solve a real problem, not just to ship something — and the only way to know if it’s actually solving that problem, for enough people, is to open it up, watch how it’s really used, and listen. Once I’ve heard from enough of you, I’ll take what I’ve learned and figure out what’s next, including what fair pricing actually looks like.
If you’ve ever left an interview not knowing what “good” would even have looked like, I’d love to hear about it — reply to this post, or just try the tool and tell me where it falls short.
#free #pillar-ai