Structured interviews provide a structured way to evaluate candidates by asking predetermined questions and using a standardized evaluation scale. They also reduce idiosyncratic bias by having multiple interviewers assess candidates.
When you ask candidates the same questions, you can compare their answers and select the best candidate based on their skills. This makes structured interviews an effective hiring tool.
Reduce Bias
When interviewing candidates, hiring managers often fall prey to bias, especially confirmation bias. This happens when interviewers immediately form a positive impression of a candidate and spend the rest of their time looking for new information confirming this initial impression. This is why structured interviews are so powerful – they make comparing candidates and finding the best fit objectively easier.
Structured interviews, also known as patterned or planned interviews, involve asking the same job-related questions to each candidate. This enables interviewers to compare answers and make more objective evaluations, which can help reduce bias.
Another way to reduce bias is to involve multiple team members in the interview process. By having several interviewers rate each candidate and then averaging the ratings, you can minimize the individual interviewer’s idiosyncratic bias. This is a critical practice that we use at Applied and can significantly improve the reliability of your hiring decisions.
Get to Know the Candidate
Structured interviews give hiring teams a better insight into the candidates’ skills. Asking talent-focused questions with a transparent rating system eliminates the guesswork that can come with unstructured screening and can help recruiters avoid judging a candidate based on personal impressions or biases.
Implementing a structured interview process is paramount in effective hiring practices, as it brings a systematic and standardized approach to candidate assessments, ensuring fair and objective evaluations.
For example, when interviewing for a position requiring teamwork, it’s essential to understand how candidates interact with their colleagues. You can see how they work with others by asking a case study question presenting a scenario and how they would approach it.
This can also be an opportunity to assess whether or not a candidate’s values align with your organization. In addition to assessing their skill set, you can ensure the candidate is a good fit for your company culture by asking questions about how they communicate and manage. This way, you can ensure your new hire matches your organization’s values well and will be a solid addition to the team.
Ensure a Good Candidate Experience
While sloppy interview processes might be efficient for hiring teams, they can create a bad candidate experience for job candidates. And when candidates share negative experiences, it can affect a company’s reputation and brand image.
Structured interviews help ensure a good candidate experience by allowing interviewers to ask the same questions in the same order, and they allow for consistent evaluation of each candidate’s responses using a standard evaluation scale. This ensures that the evaluation process is fair and professional for every candidate.
Another way structured interviews can help ensure a good candidate experience is by minimizing the impact of interviewer bias. By ensuring that all interviewers are trained on how to minimize rater bias and using a standardized interviewing method and scoring system, structured interviews can significantly reduce the unintentional influence of individual interviewers. This can make choosing the best candidate for the job easier without relying on personal preferences or idiosyncratic biases.
Create a Diverse Team
The structured interviews and standardized evaluations leave less room for interviewer bias, making it easier to make fair and equitable comparisons between candidates. This allows for a more objective and fair hiring decision, which is especially beneficial when multiple interviewers are involved.
Structured interviews are also well-suited to support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts by reducing the bias that often favors candidates who look and think like the interviewer. Additionally, careful question design can increase the diversity of responses by allowing for a broader range of experiences and life perspectives.
Want to try structured interviews at your organization? With the online questionnaire builder, you can create structured interview questions and have them evaluated in a few minutes.
