Private Hiring Notes and a 1 to 5 Rating for Every Applicant

The hardest part of hiring from a pile of applications is not reading them. Three days and eleven candidates later, remembering what you thought of the first one is the real struggle. Notes and a rating fix that, and on WP Career Board both are built into the free plugin: every application gets a private rating from 1 to 5 stars and a running list of team notes, and only the hiring team can see either.

Running a job board? This is a feature your employers will use daily without being told. For an employer on one, it is the difference between “I think she was strong” and a written line you can find again. Ahead: how the two work, who can read and delete what, a scoring habit that keeps ratings honest, and the limits you should know before you promise anything to a customer.

All of it is in the free plugin, and all of it was checked against the plugin code.

Where employers find it

Employers work from the Employer Dashboard, on the page where you placed the dashboard block. Open the Applications tab to see applicants listed newest first, with the job each one applied to. Pick an applicant and the detail panel opens beside the list, or replaces it on a phone.

Inside that panel sit the candidate’s answers, the cover letter and the resume. A section called Rating and notes comes with it, with a line under the heading that says only your hiring team sees these. The five stars sit at the top, followed by the notes already written, then a text box with an Add note button.

Nothing here lives in wp-admin, since the notes and the rating belong to the employer’s own dashboard, so you will not find them on the applications screen in the WordPress admin. For support, this matters: if a site owner asks where an employer’s notes are, the answer is the front-end dashboard.

For the full picture of what an employer sees, the employer and candidate dashboards guide shows the rest of the screen.

How the notes behave

Short messages attached to one application, notes work the way a comment thread works on a shared document, with a few details worth knowing.

• Plain text. A note is stored as text. Line breaks are kept, markup is stripped.
• Up to 5,000 characters each. Anything longer is cut at 5,000. A note with nothing in it is refused with a prompt to write something first.
• No limit on how many. An application can carry as many notes as the team writes. The plugin does not cap the count.
• Oldest first. Read as a timeline, the notes leave the last interview comment at the bottom.
• Named. Each note shows its author’s display name, and if that person’s account is later deleted, the note stays and shows “Former member”.

Each note also records when it was written, though the panel shows the author’s name rather than the date. Need dates on screen? That is a request for the roadmap, not something to promise.

Two colleagues can add notes at the same moment without one overwriting the other, because each note is saved as its own record rather than as part of one shared list. Double-clicking Add note does not post twice either.

Who can delete a note

Anyone with access to the application can add a note, but not everyone can remove one. A note can be deleted by the person who wrote it, or by a user with the manage settings capability, which in practice means the site admin. The delete cross only appears on notes you are allowed to remove, so an employer never sees a button the server would refuse.

When two people try to delete the same note, the second gets a calm message that it was already removed or is not theirs, and the panel refreshes to show the notes as they stand.

The rating: one star count, shared by the team

Five stars, shown as buttons, make up the rating. Click the third star and the application is rated 3. Click the same star again and the rating clears, and the panel goes back to showing “Not rated”. Behind the scenes, the value runs from 0 to 5, where 0 means no rating, so an unrated application and a cleared one look the same.

Each application has one rating, not one per team member. When one colleague gives four stars and another then clicks two, the application ends up at two. This design choice is worth explaining to teams. A shared rating works as a “where does this person stand right now” marker. Should your team want separate scores from each interviewer, put each person’s score in a note, with their name already attached.

Stars do not appear on the applicant list rows, and there is no sort or filter by rating. You see the rating when you open an applicant. Be upfront about that if an employer asks whether they can rank 200 applicants by stars.

Who can see it, and who cannot

The same rule governs access as for everything else about an application. To read or write a note, or to set a rating, a user needs the permission to view applications, and one of two things must also be true:

• The job is theirs: they posted it, or it belongs to a company they run.
• Alternatively, they are a site admin with the manage settings capability.

Everyone else is refused. That includes other employers, who can see their own jobs and no one else’s. Candidates are refused too. The notes and the rating are never part of anything a candidate receives, and the routes that return them check the same permission before answering.

For agencies and recruiters, the company rule matters. One employer account can run several companies, which means a company they created, one that names them as its owner, or the one linked to their account. Applications on jobs posted under any of those companies open for that employer, even when a colleague did the posting.

A scoring habit that keeps ratings useful

Without agreement on what they mean, stars drift. After a week one manager treats three as “fine” and another treats it as “reject”. A short rubric, agreed once and pinned somewhere the team will see it, keeps the numbers comparable. Here is one example, labelled as made up so you can change it:

• 1 star: does not meet the basic requirements for the role.
• 2 stars: meets some requirements, with a clear gap.
• 3 stars: a fair fit, worth a call if the stronger candidates fall through.
• 4 stars: a strong fit, worth an interview.
• 5 stars: an exceptional fit, move quickly.

Use notes for the reasons. A star count tells you where someone stands. A note tells you why, and the why is what you need when a colleague asks. Good notes are specific, short and written right after the conversation. “Strong on pricing experience, wants remote only, available in six weeks” beats “good call”.

Build one more habit: write the note before you change the rating, since the act of writing the reason often changes your mind about the number.

Keep notes about the work

Sitting in your database, notes can be read by your hiring team, and a candidate might one day ask what was written about them. Write only what you would be comfortable defending: what the person said, what they showed, how it matched the role. Leave out guesses about age, family, health or anything unrelated to the job. This is a general hiring practice, not something the plugin enforces.

What a worked application looks like

Picture one made-up application after a screening call and a second interview. The names are invented.

• The first reviewer reads the answers and sets 3 stars, then adds: “Right experience, salary expectation is above our band. Worth a call.”
• After the call, the same reviewer adds: “Flexible on salary if the role is remote. Moving to a second interview.”
• The second interviewer adds: “Strong on the pricing work, vague on reporting. Ask for a sample next.”
• The hiring lead moves the rating to 4 stars and adds one line: “Offer range agreed with finance.”

Read from top to bottom, those four lines tell the story of the candidate in under a minute, with the author’s name next to each. Nobody had to dig through email or ask what was said on the call. The rating shows the current standing, and the notes explain how it got there.

What it does not do

Be clear about the edges, because a customer will find them.

• Not in the CSV export. The applications export covers the applicant’s details, status, cover letter, resume link and screening answers. It does not include the rating or the notes. If an employer wants them in a spreadsheet, they need to copy them by hand or ask a developer to read them through the REST API.
• No rating on the list. Stars appear in the applicant detail, not on the list rows.
• No separate scores per person. One shared rating, as described above.
• No dates on screen. Dates are stored with each note but not displayed in the panel.
• No editing a note. You can add a note and delete a note. To change one, delete it and write a new one, and only the author or an admin can do that.

None of this is a flaw in the sense of being broken. This is a small, focused feature that does one job. For more than that, a pipeline with stages and a board per job is the next layer, and the applicant tracking pipeline feature page shows what sits above notes.

For developers: the REST routes

Building an integration? The routes are short. All sit under the plugin’s REST namespace, and all need the same permission described earlier.

• GET /applications/{id}/notes returns the notes, oldest first, each with its author’s name and a flag for whether the current user may delete it.
• POST /applications/{id}/notes adds a note from a text field and returns the updated list.
• DELETE /applications/{id}/notes/{note} removes one note and returns the updated list, or a 404 if it is already gone or is not yours.
• PATCH /applications/{id}/rating sets the rating from a required integer between 0 and 5. A value of 0 clears it.

The data is stored as post meta on the application, under _wcb_notes for notes and _wcb_rating for the rating. Each note is one meta row, which is why concurrent adds are safe. Each application’s current rating also comes back in the employer applications response.

Do not wire these into something public, because they are meant for logged-in employers and admins, and the permission checks are the only thing that keeps the notes private.

A test run before you tell employers

Before you announce it to your employers, spend ten minutes with two test employer accounts and one candidate account. Create a test job and a test application.

• As the first employer, open the application and add a note, then confirm it appears with that employer’s name.
• Sign in as a second user who does not own the job and confirm they cannot read the note or set a rating.
• Click a star, then click the same star again and confirm the rating clears.
• Add a note, then delete it as its author. Try to delete a colleague’s note as an ordinary employer and confirm the button is not offered.
• As the candidate, confirm there is nothing about notes or ratings anywhere in their view of the application.
• Open the CSV export for the job and confirm the notes and rating are not in it, so you can answer that question truthfully.

When all of that behaves as described, you have a feature you can describe to customers without caveats you did not mention.

Why it is worth setting up on day one

A job board that only collects applications is a mailbox, while one that helps the employer decide is a tool they come back to. Notes and a rating are the smallest step from one to the other, and they cost an employer nothing to start using. For the wider picture of how applications move through stages, what an applicant tracking pipeline is is a good next read, and the hiring pipeline without a SaaS guide shows how it fits on a WordPress board. The job board plugin overview lists what else ships in the free plugin.