An essential part of creating a brilliant culture in your company comes down to getting the right people on the bus — building a team of people that align with your Values, are great at what they do, and believe in your mission. A crucial skill required to do that is selecting the right candidates when you interview them.
And therein lies the problem. Most hiring managers aren’t great interviewers, and they’re worse at making good hiring decisions. Even more problematic — the majority of them don’t realise this and think they’re fantastic. It’s like the old study which discovered that 93% of Americans rated themselves as above average drivers, although I expect the statistic for interviewers might be more extreme!
As a result of this belief, many interviews end up being an unstructured, meandering chat, which varies in content from one candidate to the next. Without gathering consistent evidence around predefined criteria, any hiring decision will be challenging.
Structuring interviews
This is why structured interviews are so important to employ as you build your team. In a well-cited Journal of Occupational Psychology study, structured interviews were shown to be twice as accurate in predicting job success. In other words, by using them, you’re twice as likely to hire someone who can deliver what you need in your open role.
Structured interviews have also been shown to reduce bias in hiring processes and are more defensible in court should any claims of discrimination or bias be brought against a company, due to the consistency of questioning and the associated documentation.
So, it’s fair to say that using structured interviews is a good idea. But how, exactly, do they work? In a structured interview, every candidate is asked the same set of pre-defined questions, based on the competencies associated with the role. These can be technical competencies or Values-based competencies — the same approach can be used for either. Candidates are then scored on the quality of their answer, those scores are tallied, and those with the highest score are hired or progressed to the next stage.
Asking the right questions
First, the questions. These should be evidence-based questions, looking for specific examples of the competency they’re associated with. They often start with, “Tell me about a time when….”, or, “Give me an example of….” Follow up questions are fine, and you should use these to seek clarification, detail and nuance, but each candidate is asked the same set of questions by the interviewer.
One criticism of structured interviews is that this approach is too rigid and doesn’t allow for free-flowing conversation. It’s important to understand, though, that these questions should be viewed as a framework, and not a script. You’re allowed to respond, react and discuss the candidate’s answers, as long as you make sure the same questions are asked in the course of your assessment. You can ask them in a different order from one interview to the next if it makes sense to — all that matters is that these same questions are asked to each person you’re considering.
There must be uniformity in the way the answers are assessed, too. This is where scorecards, an essential part of the structured interview toolkit, become critical. A scorecard should contain each question you’ll be asking, space to assign a numerical value to each answer, and room for notes. I’d typically recommend a scoring scale of 1–4 (this prevents interviewers from sitting on the fence), with a score of 1 meaning no evidence of competency, and a score of 4 representing an excellent example. Be sure to make notes on the answer, as you’ll be expected to explain your score later, so it’s important to know why you liked, or didn’t like, what the candidate said.
Making an assessment
Once the interview is completed, you and your hiring team should sit and discuss the scores you’ve given each candidate. If there’s disagreement, this is where you use your notes to defend, or amend, your score. You’ll need to set a bar as to what you consider an “acceptable” score — this will depend on the number of questions, the scale you’re using, and usually the level of the role being hired into. If a candidate’s total score, once the result of each question is totalled, meets that bar, they should progress – if it doesn’t, they shouldn’t. If you’re making a final hiring decision, any candidate who scores highly enough can be considered an acceptable hire, so unless there’s a compelling reason to do otherwise, choose the person with the highest score and make them an offer.
A common debate arises as to whether competencies should be weighted differently. This depends on the specifics of the position — while I’d recommend avoided inconsistent weighting, there are some roles (highly technical ones, for example) where it would make sense to value one competency more highly than the others.
It’s likely to take a bit of practice to get your scoring system right, a little training and coaching to ensure your interviewers are proficient, and good judgement in situations where the decision is tight. With consistency and thoughtfulness however, implementing structured interviews into your hiring process will be a key step in getting the right people on the bus as you create your brilliant company culture.
For more information about how to make good hiring decisions, check out the blog series on Medium from Singular’s Founder and CEO, Tom Froggatt.
