Few activities are more common or more central to the hiring process than the interview. Hiring managers usually believe they know which questions to ask and how to evaluate responses to determine which candidates will be the best fit for the open position. Effective interviewers have been trained to interview well.

Unfortunately, most interviews are poorly planned. Perhaps the interviewer jots down a few questions or takes some notes on the candidate’s resume, but there’s typically little effort put into thinking through questions ahead of time or ensuring that they are consistent across each interview for the same position. Evaluation of candidates’ answers is usually just as haphazard, with hiring managers relying more often than not on gut feeling to come to a conclusion.

Poorly planned and executed interviews aren’t just useless; they can be harmful. A study published in 2023 showed that interviewers came away thinking that typical, unstructured interviews were helpful and predictive even when candidates gave random, nonsensical responses.

However, these findings don’t mean that all interviews are useless — only unstructured ones. When interviews are well structured and executed in a rigorous, disciplined manner, a large study shows that these are no. 1 in terms of predictive power among hiring practices.

So, given how central interviews are to the hiring process, human resources (HR) and learning and development (L&D) should train hiring managers on effective techniques and processes for conducting structured interviews that make a positive difference and truly help identify candidates who will perform well on the job.

Interview Best Practices for Hiring Managers

Everyone thinks they know how to conduct an interview, because almost everyone has participated in one, but this isn’t the case. Interviewing has a specific goal in mind — to determine whether the candidate will perform well in the job the organization is trying to fill — and obtaining this information requires more training and structure than simply knowing how to ask a simple question.

Common mistakes in interviews.

Unstructured interviews with hiring managers must have consisten questions for all candidates, otherwise this can lead to apples-to-oranges comparisons, making it difficult to accurately evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each person on a level playing field. Additionally, implicit biases are far more likely to creep into a hiring interview when there’s no structure to follow. Hiring managers may be more likely to prefer candidates who are like them — if the candidate attended the same school or even has the same taste in fashion, these similarities can cloud an interviewer’s judgment.

Then, there’s the halo effect, when a single positive or negative answer or impression clouds the entire interview. Just because a candidate gives a less than cogent answer to a single question doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re unqualified. They may have simply misunderstood the question, for example, and if the interview is unstructured, it’s a strong possibility that the question wasn’t well formed in the first place.

Interview guide for hiring managers.

Interviewers who aren’t trained are least likely to know how to execute a structured interview. Asking good follow-up questions, for instance, is a learned skill, as is applying evaluation criteria accurately and effectively. L&D and HR professionals must share interview best practices and deliver timely training, to ensure hiring managers select the right candidates.

Here are some of the key components that all structured interviews should include. In a training program for hiring managers, learning content should include:

• Consistent, predetermined questions for all candidates: Each candidate should be asked the same questions. This doesn’t mean that interviewers can’t ask follow-up questions to get more information — in fact, follow-up questions are critical — but consistency in the questions asked for a given job opening can enable evaluators to better compare answers on an apples-to-apples basis.
• Questions should be focused on past experience that demonstrates how candidates applied relevant skills: In this way, interview questions are grounded in what the candidate has actually done in the past rather than how they might act in a hypothetical situation. Also, avoid closed-ended questions as they provide little useful information for distinguishing between candidates.
• Probe for specific situations, actions taken and outcomes: The goal is to obtain complete information on how candidates have applied job-relevant skills in the past, so an interviewer needs to understand exactly what the individual did or did not do, rather than what others contributed. It’s also important to focus on the outcome candidates were responsible for creating, and make sure to understand the impact or consequences of their behavior.
• Use independent ratings against standardized criteria by a panel of evaluators: It’s not always possible to have multiple evaluators, but the more one can adhere to this best practice, the better the interview can be. Once evaluators have assigned scores to each candidate, best practice is to employ a consensus process to determine final interview scores.

Closing

Implementing structured interviews requires an investment up-front to construct questions and train interviewers on effective interview techniques. And once all hiring managers have been trained, L&D and HR managers will need to monitor adherence to structured interview best practices over time to ensure hiring managers aren’t reverting to their prior, unstructured ways.

However, the payoff is well worth the effort. Organizations that use structured interviews as part of their hiring process can not only differentiate between candidates that will perform best, but also provide potential employees with a fairer and more positive hiring experience.