Interview best practices
Why are structured interviews important?
Structured interviews offer increased validity, reliability, fairness, and efficiency in the hiring process. They help minimize bias and ensure all candidates are evaluated on the same criteria. This leads to a better candidate experience and better hires.
Validity
Validity tells us about whether or not our method or measurement (e.g., interview or assessment) measures what it purports to measure and whether it relates to key outcomes such as job performance. By using the data from the Behavioral and Cognitive assessments, you’re creating a consistent method of interviewing and assessing candidates. The Job Target process helps everyone agree on the requirements of the role and the interview guide produces questions based on the person’s behavioral fit. Validity estimates also have a relationship with fairness (below).
Reliability
Reliability is all about providing more precision and less error. By using the tools in PI Hire, you’re creating a consistent way to interview and assess candidates through an agreed understanding of the job and candidate requirements. You’re also using tools that measure candidates consistently and minimize error. Our reliable tools are likely to consistently capture characteristics of the candidate rather than candidate just at that moment in time.
Fairness
Fairness is all about reducing bias and creating a level playing field. By training your interview teams and creating clear and meaningful rating scales, you’re implementing processes that will ensure everyone is using the same tools to evaluate candidates. Validity estimates for structured interviews are about or over double that of unstructured interviews, which makes them substantially better for fairness as well.
Efficiency
A clean, standardized, repeatable process is a great way to save time. When everyone understands your hiring process and expectations and their role as part of an interview team, you’ll reduce the amount of time spent on interviewing the wrong candidates, asking duplicate questions, and providing unclear feedback.
Structured interviews can be incredibly helpful in understanding past behaviors and experiences of the candidate, peering into their future behavior, and determining how they’ll perform in your organization and within the role. In order for interviews to be most effective, they must include some consistent elements, such as using the same interviewers, asking the same line of questions, and ensuring the interviews are assessed fairly.
Now that we’ve covered the benefits of structured interviews, let’s talk about how to establish them.