Designing a Fair Interview Integrity Score

A pile of raw signals isn't a decision. To be useful to a recruiter, dozens of events have to collapse into one number with a clear meaning — and that number has to be explainable, hard to game, and never the final word. Here's how to design a score that earns trust.

Start from 100 and deduct with evidence

The cleanest mental model is a trust budget. Every interview starts at 100. Confirmed integrity issues deduct points in proportion to their severity, and every deduction is tied to the specific signal and timestamp that caused it. A score of 18 should be readable as a short list: this happened, then this, then this — here's the evidence.

Severity, not a flat count

Not all signals are equal. A confirmed hidden overlay or an active remote-control session is disqualifying on its own. A single tab-away is informational. Weighting by severity — and letting informational signals annotate without lowering the score — keeps the number honest and avoids punishing harmless behaviour.

Make it hard to game

• Correlate, don't enumerate — a score driven by intersecting signals is far harder to defeat than one tied to a single check.
• Don't publish the playbook — surface findings with evidence, without handing bad actors an exact threshold to tune against.
• Severity caps — one critical, confirmed signal should dominate, so stacking trivial noise can't dilute a serious finding.

Always explainable, never automated

The score's job is to focus a human, not replace one. Every deduction shows its cause; the reviewer sees why something fired and makes the call. Pair that with a signed, tamper-evident report and the verdict becomes something your team can defend to a candidate, to HR, or in an appeal.