Question

2. Describe how an organization would set up a structured interview system.

Answer 1

During a structured interview, the predetermined questions you ask are all correlated to important job competencies derived from a detailed job description. The questions can be either behavioral or situational. They’re rated with a specific scoring system with a range of acceptable answers. When there is more than one interviewer, the team should reach a consensus on the order of questions and the interpretation of answers.

This process has shown greater reliability and validity than the unstructured interview, reducing the likelihood of a bad hire. It still doesn’t predict future job performance like work samples or cognitive tests do, but it has the added benefit of face-to-face contact. Structured interviews also ensure that you can reduce discrimination issues since all candidates are treated fairly and given the same opportunities to showcase their abilities. Yes, it takes a little more time and expense but its benefits far outweigh its costs.

Step 1: Job analysis

For each position, you have to use job analysis to match skills to job tasks. Information from this process is essential to design a structured interview. It can help you develop a professional and informative job ad, structured interview questions as well as salary ranges. Apart from selection, it can also help towards your training and organizational needs.

Step 2: Define requirements

Now that you have a list of requirements needed for the position, you need to provide a full definition for each one. For example, what are communication skills? We all understand it in the abstract but you need to indicate what this means for a specific role. This will be a great help for later when you’ll have to develop a grading scale or behavioral examples.

Step 3: Develop lead and probing questions

Interview questions should be developed with great care, preferably with the help of an expert. Assuming you’ll have to evaluate around six core attributes, you can develop a set of 12 structured interview questions. The number is largely up to you though, you can ask less or more if you have time.

Both situational and behavioral questions are job-related. You can choose great questions from existing lists and categorize them according to the requirements you want to assess. If you have situations that are expected to happen frequently to a position, you can include them in the process. Take care, though, to link them to specific attributes that have been indicated from the job analysis and have experts test them if possible.

Step 4: Determine grading scale

The presence of a scoring system is very important to ensure objective decisions. You can choose the common scale of five or seven points ranging from low to high.

Step 5: Conduct the interview

Structured interviews may be challenging for an interviewer. It’s best if there’s a guide that hiring managers can use as a reference to understand and follow the process. Some training may be necessary for those unfamiliar with the structured model.