When interviewing a potential candidate for an open position, managing the process is critical. Understanding the role you are going to fill is the first step and then structuring your interview process to highlight the candidates fit for that role will lead you to better interviews and better candidate selections.

What is as structured Interview?

A structured interview is a scientific method of managing interaction with all candidates for an open position. When all candidates have to address the same issues, questions, and methods of defining themselves you can easily spot the differences between candidates by their answers to determine not only who has the right experience, education, and skills, but also how they will fit into the organization by not just the answers to questions but the way in which the questions are answered.

Structured interviews should have a list of questions that are predetermined by the interviewers. These questions should be open ended requiring more than a yes or no answer. The candidates must be given enough information in the question to clearly understand what is necessary to give a complete answer. These questions should be reviewed by the interviewing team before every interview and be asked in the same sequence every time. This allows you to develop a query list that builds on each question and makes a comparison of the answers intuitive and consistent for each interview. 

Interviews should be conducted by the same individuals for all candidates. This is a major factor in getting consistent feedback from your interviewing team on all candidates. When different teams or individuals interview different candidates the variables of each personality interviewing candidates will increase the chances of inconsistent evaluation. This may require additional interviews of the same candidate under various circumstances which may escalate the variability of the results. As in any scientific process, repeatability is essential to confirm the results.

Nextaff provides a scientific method to staffing that increases the performance of the hiring process by improving the process through consistent, measurable and specific activities. To learn more about our approach we have provided this white paper for your review. Let us help you move your hiring process to a proven scientific method that shown consistently superior results for our partners.