Most of the work in a screening round is the first one. Deciding what you actually want to know, wording it so it cannot be answered from the job advert, choosing the lengths. Two hours, easily.
The second round for a similar role should take ten minutes. That is what templates are for, and the difference between a template library that gets used and one that rots is entirely down to how you organise it.
Split by role family, not by seniority
A support template and an engineering template are genuinely different sets of questions. A junior engineer template and a senior engineer template are usually the same four questions with different expectations of the answer — and expectations belong in your scoring notes, not in a second template.
One template per family keeps the library small enough that people can find the right one.
Let the limits travel with the questions
The time limit and the attempt count are part of the question, not part of the interview. A five-minute technical walkthrough with one attempt should stay a five-minute walkthrough with one attempt wherever it is used. Setting those again from scratch each time is where reuse quietly stops happening.
Edit the copy, never the original
Every role has one question that needs the specifics — the stack, the market, the customer. Importing a template should give you a copy to change freely, with the original untouched for the next role. If editing an imported question changes the template, people stop importing and start duplicating.
Prune once a quarter
Templates accumulate. Fifteen minutes every few months, deleting the ones nobody has imported and fixing the question that everyone rewrites the same way after importing — that rewrite is a bug report about the template.
A library of four good templates that people use beats twenty comprehensive ones that they scroll past.
