A structured interview is the best interview method you’ve never heard of.
It’s a more methodological and thorough approach to job interviews with candidates. And the ultimate aim of a structured interview process is to help you more fairly, accurately and consistently assess candidates before you welcome them to your team.
Without further ado, let’s get into it and explore what structured interviews are all about, how they can unlock your hiring success and how to get started conducting structured interviews at your company. 🔓
What is a structured interview?
A structured interview is a precise approach to conducting job interviews where you ask each candidate the same interview questions, with the same standardized scoring system. Most of these interview questions would come from the skills and traits you’ve defined in the job description.
Questions are typically centered around job-related competencies and can be framed through a behavioral or hypothetical lens. So, if you’re hiring a Software Engineer, you can ask specific questions about their past experiences and how they behaved in these scenarios, which help you understand their engineering skillset.
❤️ #1 reason to embrace the structured interview: It’s a reliable and anti-hiring bias interview method. With a standardized interview approach, recruiters and hiring managers can approach candidates more fairly and objectively.
If you ask different candidates different questions, it makes candidate evaluations difficult. It’s like comparing apples to oranges — you want to make sure you’re comparing oranges to oranges. 🍊 It also creates an interview environment where candidates can show-off their knowledge and potential.
📣 How to send an interview invitation to candidates
Structured interviews vs. unstructured interviews
At its core, a structured interview isn’t that dissimilar to an unstructured interview. The job interviewer (that’s you) still asks a job candidate engaging and enlightening questions. And the job candidate still gets to ask their questions.
But the main difference?
The interview preparation and then the execution of the interview itself.
Structured interviews (even semi-structured interviews) need pre-interview planning and commitment to a specific interview process. It creates a standard and repeatable hiring process for hiring managers and recruiters. Hiring teams create a set of structured interview questions to ask each candidate in advance, create a list of traits and skills to look out for and “score” the candidates based on a set of criteria. Structured interviews are suitable for both in-person and virtual interviews, along with a collaborative recruitment process.
Unstructured interviews are more off-the-cuff and free-flowing — they can feel more like conversations. There’s often no roadmap for how the interview can progress. The interviewer may jump from topic to topic, creating more of a back-and-forth. This interview style can help you get to know the candidate. But when it’s time to dig into their job performance, you may not get all the information you need to make a sound hiring decision.
In 30 minutes, we'll cover what you need to know about structured hiring in Homerun.
How to conduct a structured interview and build the process
If you’ve made it this far, you’re sold on why structured interviews are the way to go! Now it’s time to learn how to do it.
To build your structured interview process, here are the steps we’d recommend:
- 🤝 Get support from stakeholders
- 💁 Define the job requirements and job description
- ✍️ Write your set of standardized interview questions
- 💯 Establish your candidate scoring criteria
- 🏋️ Train and educate your interviewers
- 💬 Conduct the structured interview
- 🔍 Investigate the interview results
Now let’s get into the weeds of each step of the process…
1. Get support from stakeholders
A structured interview process is nothing unless you have your team’s support.
Anyone involved in hiring on your team needs to be on board with getting a structured interview process off the ground. Otherwise, you won’t be on the same page with how you make hiring decisions, your recruitment methods and you won’t all be conducting interviews the same way.
Host a meeting with your hiring team to explain the benefits of this interview approach and how you can implement it at your business.
Be sure to share helpful resources, conduct a training session and share your structured interview questions. Make sure your hiring team knows how to use your applicant tracking system (ATS). More on all this later!
Collaborative hiring for the win. 🤝
2. Define the job requirements and the job description
Next, outline the specific skills, qualifications, experience and competencies required for the open position. This will be your foundation for crafting excellent interview questions and evaluating candidates effectively. It may also be helpful to draft an ideal candidate profile during this process. Doing this will keep you focused on uncovering the most relevant information about your job applicant.
To give you a hand with this part of the process, we’ve created job description templates for various job roles. Copy, paste, customize and you’re ready to rock.
3. Write your set of standardized interview questions
Now the most important part of a structured interview: the interview questions.
Create a set of standardized interview questions to assess each key competency and qualification identified in step two (writing the job description). These questions should be clear, specific and written to elicit insightful responses from your candidates.
The goal is to get responses and insight from your candidate that tells you everything you need to know about them — are they the right person for the job?
For the same role, ask candidates the same questions including role-based and skill-specific questions. Just be sure each candidate is asked the same questions as the next so you can objectively assess each person!
Tips on crafting structured interview questions:
✅ Ask open-ended questions - Questions that begin with “what”, “how” and “why” allow them to talk more freely about their experience or knowledge of their craft.
- 👉 Example question: “What experiences of yours are most relevant to this role?”
✅ Embrace behavioral questions - These questions help you understand how your candidate will approach future work situations. Your candidate’s responses will give you a better idea of how they solve problems and use their skills at work. Emotional intelligence interview questions can be a great starting point for this.
- 👉 Example question: “Tell me about a time you got stuck on a problem. How did you react?”
✅ Probe when necessary - Structured interviews don’t mean you can’t ask follow-up questions because you’re limited to just your list of set interview questions. You can (and should) follow up with questions to learn more about a particular point or clarify a candidate’s response.
- 👉 Example question: “Tell us more about that”, “what do you mean by X?”, “Please continue.”
❌ Avoid leading questions - Leading questions usually don’t shed light on who a candidate really is and you’ll typically get the answer you expect.
- 👉 Example question: “You know how to use Photoshop, right?”
❌ Steer clear of double-headed questions - Make sure your structured interview questions are clear and simple. That means, don’t write two questions in one. Allow the interviewee to answer and focus on one response at a time.
- 👉 Example: “Explain your understanding of coding languages and tell me about a project you’ve recently worked on.”
📣 Use these interview question templates to help you write +A structured interview questions
4. Establish your candidate scoring criteria
Structured interview questions, check.
Now it’s time to define a scoring system (or scoring rubric) to evaluate candidate responses.
Scoring criteria AKA interview scorecards will make your hiring teams make fair and informed assessments based on predefined criteria. They bring consistency and objectivity to your interviews.
Before you can start scoring candidates, you’ll need to create your grading criteria. P.S. This is going to vary in some ways from role to role!
- Define key evaluation criteria: Identify the skills and attributes essential for success in the role. Think technical skills, soft skills, relevant experience, value fit and other job-specific requirements.
- Provide guidelines and examples: Offer guidelines and examples to illustrate what constitutes each level of performance. This helps standardize interpretation and ensures consistency among interviewers when assigning scores.
5. Train and educate your interviewers
When you work on a hiring team, it’s super important that you’re all on the same page with how you interview and hire.
That’s why we’d recommend training and educating your interviewers on how to conduct a successful structured interview. After all, it’s not a given that everyone will have experience with this method!
💪 Train them up on:
- how to ask standardized questions
- how to use the scoring criteria/scorecards effectively
- how to maintain professionalism and neutrality throughout the interview
- active listening (more on that in the steps below!)
Whether you plan to embrace structured interviews or not, it’s a good idea to train interviewers on your team. Interviewing is a skill and a big responsibility, so take it seriously.
6. Conduct the structured interview
Now the fun part: conducting the structured interviews!This is where your job description, scoring system, interview questions and interview training all come together.
Roll out the structured interview process and stick to your established guidelines. Use structured interviews for screening, initial interviews and final rounds to maintain uniformity and fairness throughout the hiring process. You can do this in person, over the phone or on a video call — there are no limits.
The most important interview tip we can share is to practice active listening.
Active listening allows you to ask appropriate follow-up questions that dig into each candidate's answer. In short, active listening is all about listening to understand. Instead of thinking about what you’d like to say next when listening to a candidate, truly listen to what they’re saying. Absorb it so you understand exactly what they’re communicating.
In a structured interview process, active listening will help you truly get to know who a candidate is, understand their skills and experience and, ultimately, it’ll help you make smart recruitment decisions.
You’ll find that active listening will not only make you a better interviewer, but it’ll also make you a better colleague. 🏆
7. Investigate the interview results
Finally, it’s time to dissect your interviews.
Meet up with your hiring team — this can be async or in person. Use this time to discuss your interview results. If you’re hiring solo, review your interview notes and scorecard.
Use factual information you gathered in the interview process to decide on who you’ll bring to the next round of hiring yet or even whom you’ll extend the job offer to. 🎉
The limitations of structured interviews
Don’t get us wrong; structured interviews come with some challenges. With any hiring process, it’s not perfect. But we believe the more you know, the better your interviews will be.
- They may be perceived as cold: While not intentional, a structured interview style may be cold and overly methodical for some interviewees (this all depends on how you, the interviewer, conduct the interview!).
- They may lack spontaneity: If the interview isn’t conducted well or if the interviewer isn’t particularly comfortable, a structured interview might not allow for the same spontaneity as an unstructured interview.
Refresh and structure your recruitment process
Structured interviews are not just a buzzword; they’re a powerful tool for unlocking your hiring potential. By adopting a structured approach, you can ensure fairness, accuracy and consistency in your candidate assessments, ultimately leading to better hiring decisions.
As hiring the right talent for your business intensifies (thanks to stiff competition and developments in AI), it’s important that hiring teams adapt. Structured interviews could be the key to unlocking your hiring potential.
FAQs on structured interviews
Bring structure to your candidate interviews with Homerun’s ATS — for every stage of the recruitment process.
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