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How Overall Grades Work

The candidate’s overall grade is a weighted average of answered screening questions, subject to a hard-fail check for Required questions.

Weights by importance

Informational interviews

When an interview contains only Info questions, Tenzo shows completion without an overall score in the interview results, candidate list, PDF, and ATS note. These questions collect information without assessing performance. Interviews that also include scored questions or transcript-based grading criteria still show an overall score.

Answer types

Yes/No — Binary. Grade is 100 if the candidate’s answer matches the configured correct answer, 0 if not. Custom grading instructions override this if provided. Multiple Choice — Binary. Grade is 100 if the candidate’s answer matches any one or more of the configured passing options, 0 if not. Custom grading instructions override this if provided. Number — Interpolated by the LLM using the configured min/max and ideal values. Grade is 100 if the candidate meets or exceeds the ideal value, 50–100 if within the acceptable range, and 0 if outside the range entirely. Custom grading instructions override the numeric logic entirely if provided. Date — LLM-graded using the grading instructions if provided. If the question is Info importance and no grading instructions are provided, the date is recorded but not graded. Text — LLM-graded using the grading instructions if provided. Without instructions, the LLM grades based on relevance and how well the answer addresses the question.

Yes/No questions and the weighted average

Yes/No questions at Minor, Normal, or Major importance are included in the weighted average. Their grade is 0 or 100. Yes/No questions set to Required are excluded from the weighted average when the candidate passes — they act as a pure gate. If the candidate fails a Required Yes/No, the overall score is set to 0.

Required hard fail

If any Required question receives a grade of 0 and the candidate answered it, the overall score is set to 0, overriding the weighted average.

Unanswered questions

Questions the candidate did not reach are recorded as Unknown and excluded from both the weighted average and the hard-fail check. The completion ring separately tracks what share of counted questions the candidate answered.

Examples

Number grading example

Question: “How many years of Python experience do you have?” Config: Min = 2 years, Ideal = 5 years (bigger is better) The interpolation formula between min and ideal is: 50 + ((answer − min) / (ideal − min)) × 50

Overall score example

Three questions on a job: The “Legally authorized to work in the US?” passed, so it’s excluded from the weighted average (acts as a gate only). The “Ability to commute” isn’t answered, so it’s excluded from the weighted average. Weighted average = (2 × 80 + 1 × 67) / (2 + 1) = 227 / 3 ≈ 76 If the candidate had failed the Yes/No instead, the overall score would be 0 regardless of the other grades.