Best practices for interviewing
đź’ˇWhy should I learn this? Adding structure to your interviews will help you reduce bias and hire the best person for your role.
What is a structured interview?
Structuring interviews is a way of standardizing your hiring process. It refers to a number of different practices that can be implemented at various stages as you interview and select candidates.
Interviews can range from being mildly structured to highly structured, depending on how many standardized practices you include in your process. More practices means more structure, and more structure means higher quality hiring decisions.
There are generally two areas where structure is relevant in interviews:
- Interview content
- Candidate evaluation
Why structuring your interview process is important
The benefits of structured interviews have been supported by over 50 years of research in organizational psychology and behavioral science.
Adding structure to your interview process:
- Reduces the chance for bias to influence your hiring decisions
- Allows you to make direct comparisons between candidates (apples-to-apples)
- Helps you identify candidates’ skills, so you can hire the best person for your role
Simple steps to add structure to your interviews
Interview content:
- Identify a short list of the most important skills you need for your role. Your list shouldn’t be too long, somewhere between 6 and 10 is best.
- Create interview questions that are closely related to the skills you selected. Each skill should be assessed with at least two questions asked back-to-back. The majority of your questions should follow the situational question or behavioral question format.
- Ask the same questions to all candidates, and wait until the end of the interview to give the candidate an opportunity to ask questions (with the exception of clarification questions throughout).
Candidate evaluation:
- Use a rating system to score candidate’s questions, and rate every question.
- Include multiple interviewers in the interviewing process, and ensure each interviewer independently rates each candidate on every question.
- Wait until all interviews with all candidates have been completed to discuss the candidates’ performance.
Following the practices will help you reduce bias from your hiring process and find the best candidate for your role!