Using structured interviewing, hiring managers follow a standardized procedure before shortlisting candidates. This reduces bias and allows them to make faster, more informed decisions.
A structured interview process also helps a team avoid legal issues and make data-driven decisions. The best way to leverage structured interviews and skills tests for your business is to start with a thorough job analysis.
Improved Hiring Efficiency
Many hiring processes are informal, free-form, and need more structure. This can make it difficult to assess candidates based on standardized criteria and creates a bias in hiring decisions.
The best way to eliminate this bias is to bring all interviewers together for structured interviews. This will help you evaluate each candidate similarly, eliminating bias and allowing you to compare them objectively.
However, implementing a structured interview process is a team effort and requires leadership support and buy-in from the CEO and executive team to ensure success. A well-defined and scalable structured hiring strategy will lead to better decision-making, an exceptional candidate experience, lower hiring time, reduced hiring cost, and improved productivity. The ROI is enormous.
Better Decision-Making
Structured interviews involve a set of questions that are relevant to the open role and job requirements. This helps you avoid asking prohibited questions and stay compliant with the law.
Moreover, a structured interview process helps you make data-driven hiring decisions instead of emotionally driven ones. This enables your team to eliminate confirmation bias, assess candidates on equal criteria, optimize interview time, and more.
Unstructured interviews often lead to recruiters making gut-instinct hiring decisions. This type of hiring could be more efficient and invites bias. Experts said, “Unstructured job interviews are bad at predicting future on-the-job performance.” Structured interviews allow you to evaluate candidate responses objectively and based on the role requirements. They also help you identify incompatible candidates quickly.
Reduced Bias
A structured hiring process is instrumental in reducing common biases. It ensures that the candidate you hire possesses all the qualities your company seeks. It also avoids over-assessing candidates, as this can exhaust them. Experts say traditional job interviews are “pretty bad at predicting how well someone will do on the job.”
Structured interviews use standardized questions that allow interviewers to objectively compare and contrast candidate responses. This helps mitigate interviewer bias and allows the team to make more informed hiring decisions that are statistically more likely to be accurate. In addition, it can help you protect your organization from legal problems by demonstrating that the interviewers made an unbiased decision.
Reduced Time to Hire
While it’s essential to take the time to evaluate and select top talent, prolonged hiring timelines can have negative impacts on your organization. For one, they can lead to losing a great candidate or an unnecessary delay in business operations.
Using structured interviews helps to reduce the length of your interview process. It also provides a way to assess candidates objectively since each candidate answers the same questions, eliminating bias and allowing for a fair evaluation of the attributes that matter most for success in a role.
The structure of structured interviews also makes it easier to comply with laws that govern hiring. This is because your questions are pre-determined, which helps avoid asking prohibited questions that could lead to legal problems.
Increased Employee Engagement
Engaged employees deliver higher quality work, contribute new ideas, and are committed to the company. This increased performance has a positive impact on the organization’s financial results.
Structured hiring involves a standardized, repeatable process from when a job candidate applies to the role through their start date. This includes job description development, passive sourcing and recruitment, candidate screening, interview questions, technical screens, referencing checks, debriefs, final panel interviews, and the offer and onboarding process.
It also reduces bias by following a straightforward, standardized procedure before shortlisting candidates. This eliminates the subjective assessments based on gut instinct and bias, ensuring fair comparisons and a more diverse pool of qualified candidates. This allows for better business decisions and a more efficient recruitment process.
