Hiring tips: structured interview

Finding the perfect employee is tough and we know it, because we do it on a daily basis. Sifting through all those applications requires a lot of time, resources and experience. You look at the CVs stacked on your desk and try to find the best candidates. You then meet them in person and try to figure out how good of a fit they are for your company. WRONG! Well… probably wrong. Did you know that conducting a standard, unstructured interview might be extremely biasing and unfair? Worse even, it might prevent you from hiring the best candidate for your company, because you will not be able to effectively compare all of the candidates. Granted, you might end up hiring the one you like the most, but will he be the one with best performance? Not necessarily. In another article from our ‘Hiring Tips’ series I will write a little bit about job interviews and tell you why structured interview prevents bias and allows you to find the best candidate.

A little bit about job interviews

From a scientific perspective — and that is always going to be my perspective — interviews are the most popular methods both for applicant selection and general qualitative research [1,2]. Interviews can be unstructured, semi-structured and structured [3]. And in this article, I will show you why we think that structured interviews are simply the best. I am basing this on years of research in personnel psychology.

Unstructured interviews are simple conversations that you have with a candidate without really preparing any questions. This type of interview is very spontaneous and may go in many different ways. It all really depends on your interaction with the person sitting in front of you. That is exactly what is problematic about it. Because of the fact that it can go differently for each candidate, it cannot be an objective assessment of a person’s abilities and potential. It prevents you from effectively comparing candidates and finding the best one. Even worse, it can lead to false conclusions! As I mentioned in my previous article, those types of interviews are biased — your judgement can be wrongly influenced by many factors, such as appearance or self-presentation techniques, gender, race, weight or disability, which do not reflect candidate’s true potential [4–6].

On the other side of the spectrum there is a structured interview with an entire list of elements that are required for this interview type. It turns out that structured job interviews can predict future job performance above what can be predicted through cognitive abilities (the best predictor of job performance), and personality [6–8]. Structured interview is also much less biased than unstructured one, which means that you are more likely to judge a candidate for their actual skills, not for how good of a bond they created with you, or what colour of their skin is [6,9]. Yes, structured interviews might be less liked by the candidates, or can cause more stress and hence decrease overall performance [2,6], but there are methods to alleviate this and we use them.

Structured job interviews can predict future job performance above what can be predicted through cognitive abilities and personality

A guide to structured interviews

Let’s discuss what a structured interview actually is. Based on a literature review and on opinions of a panel of psychology experts we now know what elements of an interview actually create the structure [6,10]. Structure elements can be divided into two groups: describing interview’s content and interview evaluation. I will focus on the first group first.

Job analysis

This is usually the first step in which you and your colleagues decide what skills are essential for the position to be filled. So book this meeting room and discuss. You are looking for both the technical skills, but also soft skills, such as communication, team work, or positive attitude.

Same questions

Structured interview should be really well-prepared, there should only be one scenario for all the candidates. This means that each candidate should get exactly the same questions. No exceptions!

Limit prompting questions

You know the moments when you are impatiently waiting for the answer and ask additional questions to help them find it? In a perfect structured interview those questions should not take place.

Ask better questions

Right, that one can mean anything. But again, science comes with an answer. It turns out that the best types of questions to ask, at least while assessing candidates’ soft skills, are past behaviour questions and situational questions [7]. The first type are questions about specific situations in the past and how the candidate handled them, e.g. ‘please describe a situation in which you had to deal with a difficult coworker and describe how you handled it’. The latter type, situational questions, are about hypothetical questions regarding how a candidate would handle a specific situation, e.g. ‘you are working on a project with a deadline that you know you will not be able to meet. How do you handle this situation?’. Remember that the questions should be asked in a way which will allow you to assess the skills you are really looking for. So for example if you are looking for candidates who can meet deadlines and is a team player ask him how he dealt with difficult situations related to deadlines in the past. If they handled almost impossible deadlines by working overtime and pulling all-nighters they probably are not the person you are looking for. The perfect candidate would find a way to distribute the workload evenly in the team to meet a deadline.

Longer interview

Longer interviews can be more structured, can provide employers with more information, and of course can be more relaxing for the interviewees, because there is not added time pressure. But remember that the length of any interview should always be within limits the of reason — no one wants to sit there for 6 hours straight!

Control ancillary information

While conducting an interview, you as the interviewer should not have any additional information about the candidate (their CV, recommendations, test results), or the information that you have should be standardised and the same for each candidate. It is easy to imagine why — knowing how good or bad someone is at a particular task, or how much experience they have in it, at least in theory, might strongly bias your judgment about this person. This bias might be something negative, as CVs do not always reflect the true skills or potential of the candidate. You and I both know it.

No questions from candidate

Well, at least until after the interview. Questions from candidate can reduce structure of the interview and hence decrease its validity. Of course, if the question is necessary for the candidate to understand what you are saying, let them ask it. But if it is unrelated, it can surely wait.

Interview evaluation

This aspect also consists of more elements that I will describe in details below. Remember that it is as important as the interview structure. You can have the most structured interview in the world, but it will not serve its function if you bias the ratings of the candidates.

Rate each question

Pretty self-explanatory, right? You should rate each of the questions asked, ideally still during the interview, or right after it. This point is important, because sometimes interviewers tend to rate the entire interview using one general score. The better approach gives you a more dimensional piece of information and provides others with more fine-grained assessment of the candidate. As an alternative to rating each question, you can also rate the interviewer on multiple scales after the interview and taking into account the entire interview. This approach is probably less time consuming for you and it might be easier to understand information about the candidate later on. Let’s stick to that then.

Detailed notes

Making notes while interviewing a candidate is beneficial for many reasons. One of them is enhancing interview structure, because you, as the interviewer can focus more on the interview itself, not on trying to memorise what the candidate just said. The other reason is that you focus more on what the candidates are saying. A good alternative to note taking is creating transcripts, which in some cases can be done automatically using specialised software [3]. Afterwards the interview can be easily graded and cross-checked by another interviewer or subject matter expert, which brings me to the next point:

Use multiple interviewers

This step can help in memorising what the candidate said, can make the judgements more objective, but also sharing perceptions of the candidate can make interviewers more aware of details they may have otherwise missed.

Use same interviewers

This step is especially important when grading components are unstructured. Having different interviewers interview different candidates might introduce bias in rating their performance. It is unlikely that two people will rate candidates in exactly the same way, because there is always some subjective assessment involved. But we all know how difficult it is to have only one person interview all candidates. That is why it is so important to standardise rating scales — they will minimise the possibility of any subjective ratings of candidates. The more precise the scales are, the better it is for the structure of the interview process, especially when different interviewers are conducting the interviews.

There is one more aspect: Because structured interviews may be more stressful for the candidate and give the impression that the interviewer does not care about them, because he is only following a script, it might be beneficial to first explain the entire process to the candidate [2]. Just tell the candidate why the structure is needed, why the set of questions is so rigid and cannot be change. After all you just want to be fair for your and the candidate’s benefit!

That is a lot of details to pay attention to, right?

At CodersFirst we know this. We know everything about recruitment because we created a whole new way of meritocratic hiring which is based on science and rich&deep data. To learn more about it click here. You can now either use this guide and conduct your own structured interview, or use CodersFirst to do it for you! We have all the expertise needed to send the best candidates for the job your way.

Watch this space for more information soon!

References:

1. Jamshed, S. Qualitative research method-interviewing and observation. J Basic Clin Pharm 5, 87–88 (2014).

2. Bragger, J. et al. The Job Interview and Cognitive Performance: Does Structure Reduce Performance on Selection Batteries, and Can Explanation of Purpose Improve It? Performance Improvement Quarterly 29, 97–124 (2016).

3. DiCicco‐Bloom, B. & Crabtree, B. F. The qualitative research interview. Medical Education 40, 314–321 (2006).

4. Barrick, M. R., Shaffer, J. A. & DeGrassi, S. W. What You See May Not Be What You Get: Relationships Among Self-Presentation Tactics and Ratings of Interview and Job Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology 94, 1394–1411 (2009).

5. Swider, B. W., Barrick, M. R. & Brad, H. Initial impressions: What they are, what they are not, and how they influence structured interview outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology 101, 625–638 (2016).

6. Levashina, J., Hartwell, C. J., Morgeson, F. P. & Campion, M. A. The Structured Employment Interview: Narrative and Quantitative Review of the Research Literature. Personnel Psychology 67, 241–293 (2014).

7. Campion, M. A., Campion, J. E. & Hudson Jr., J. P. Structured interviewing: A note on incremental validity and alternative question types. Journal of Applied Psychology 79, 998–1002 (1994).

8. Schmidt, F. L. & Hunter, J. E. The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin 124, 262–274 (1998).

9. McCARTHY, J. M., Iddekinge, C. H. V. & Campion, M. A. Are Highly Structured Job Interviews Resistant to Demographic Similarity Effects? Personnel Psychology 63, 325–359 (2010).

10. Campion, M. A., Palmer, D. K. & Campion, J. E. A review of structure in the selection interview. Personnel Psychology 50, 655–702 (1997).