Interviews are important in several aspects of the recruitment process. They not only provide insight and data on the candidate's skills and personality and remove uncertainty to find the right person for the job. Interviews also allow potential candidates (that can become clients, suppliers, or partners) to deep dive into understanding more about the company. Often too little emphasis is put into training, streamlining, and actually practicing how candidates should be interviewed. Would you imagine salespeople not practicing a sales pitch or knowing what products/services they offer?
Interviewing can generally be said to fall into one of two categories. Structured versus unstructured and the usage of structured interviews is important to maximize the actionable data that the interview situation provides all involved parties in the Hiring team. With structured interviews, the interviewers have planned and written a set of standardized questions, the types of answers they’re looking for, and how to rate the responses given by the candidates based on predetermined criteria.
All candidates receive the same set of questions in the same order, with less of an opportunity for the conversation to be spontaneous compared to unstructured interviews. Also, all responses are evaluated using the same criteria or scale.
Even though unstructured interviews are more commonly used across industries, there is a consensus that a standardized process provides higher quality information about the candidate - and therefore more likely to help companies to make better decisions in the recruitment process..
According to research, structured interviews are twice as effective at predicting job performance then unstructured ones, where hiring managers typically follow their gut instinct. Structured interviews help you reduce confirmation bias in your hiring, as each candidate is assessed the same way using the same criteria.
And since all candidates are asked the same set of questions, interviewee responses can be measured against a baseline, checked against the pre-decided criteria, and compared to each other. The problems of comparability and unfairness do not arise
When the recruiter has a complete understanding of the need the business faces and have implemented this knowledge through Talent Strategy, knowing who the right candidates to be engaged are through Pipelining and how the RACI Matrices look, this question is fairly simple to answer.
The number of interviews is not as important as the cadence and clarity of the process in order to manage candidate expectations. A too-quick interview process with too few steps does not create the necessary buy-in from stakeholders or candidates, increasing the risk of failure.
Setting a one-size-fits-all standard for what constitutes a good interview is close to impossible but any good interview should incorporate the following:
<aside> 💡 View our sections on Feedback, Bias Awereness, and Assessment
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