Finding the best person for a role means comparing apples to apples not apples to oranges in your candidates; structured interviews can help you achieve this.
What’s a Structured Interview?
A structured interview, also known as a standardized interview, is a quantitative research method commonly employed in survey research. The aim of this approach is to ensure that each interview is presented with the same questions in the same order and by the same people.
According to Data Driven Recruiting, a LinkedIn eBook, “Data matters for finding talent faster and more efficiently. Talent acquisition teams with mature analytics are two times more likely to improve their recruiting efforts and three times more likely to realize cost reductions and efficiency gains.”
How to Create a Structured Interview:
Here are my 7 tips for establishing a structured interview process:
- Craft a deeply detailed job description that has behavioral components not just skills.
- Create role-specific questions that capture skills and experience.
- Create interview questions that explore interest and culture.
- Choose a rating scale for these questions.
- Train interviewing team. They have to be expert at the questions they are going to ask.
- Conduct the interviews.
- Evaluate candidates based on the rating scale.
The next step is to gather anyone who is a stakeholder for this role.
Who Makes a Great Stakeholder?
You want to have people who really know the role that you are trying to fill. SHRM has many great articles on this, but I especially like this one.
If you do not have 100% agreement on hiring the person, it is best to pass. Why do we need 100% agreement? Because if we hire a person and there is not complete agreement, then over time as this person is in the organization and makes a mistake or isn’t performing, you will have the dissenting person vocalizing “I did not want to hire that person, or I told you so,” or other derogatory remarks. This never works out.
You want each and every stakeholder to be fighting for this person to succeed in their role.
What level of interviewing structure do you have and is it working for you? Please let me know in the comment section below or contact us if you need more support.
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