Structured interviewing is a method of interviewing applicants in which the interviewer asks a predetermined set of job-related questions. It ensures consistency across candidates and avoids risky questions hiring managers may ask when they go off-script. It also reduces unconscious bias and results in better hires for your business.
What is a Structured Interview?
A structured interview is where the same set of questions is asked to each candidate, with little variance except for potentially different follow up questions. A structured interview is helpful in comparing candidates in an apples-to-apples way since you are asking all candidates the same questions.
For example, if there are 4 people interviewing a candidate, all 4 of them should pick questions from a set question list and then ask those exact questions during the interview and to all of the candidates. It is normal for multiple interviewers to ask an overlap of questions. It is even helpful for an especially important area that every interviewer asks the candidate the same question.
Similarly, if there is one interviewer, you can still do a structured interview format by asking all of the candidates the same questions (and, ideally, in the same order). The interviewer(s) should keep the same set of questions for every candidate they interview in order for the results to be more meaningful.
You can also add on a set of “Probing Questions,” which are predetermined follow up questions for each “Lead Question” (main question). The follow-ups are there in case a candidate gives an incomplete answer or if you want to dig deeper into an answer.
Why Would I Want to Do Structured Interviews?
Let’s look at the reasons that you would want to do structured interviews (and then the reasons why you might not).
Top 3 Pros of Structured Interviews
- Candidate Decision Clarity – If every interviewee answers the same questions from the same managers, it will give you an ability to really look at the candidates in an apples to apples way. It should really let 1-2 candidates stand out from the pack.The candidate with the highest score after the interview should get the offer, as long as the scoring is done without bias and that the candidate has good references. No more disagreements or arguments over who gets the offer–the system should make it obvious.
Studies have found that structured interviews are more predictive of job performance than regular interview, meaning that structured interviewing can actually result in a better hire! - Reducing Biases– Research studies have found that people are often unaware of their own biases and how they can affect decisions, especially for hiring. Certain attributes can range from a candidate being physically attractive to you to a candidate has a certain trait (like a name you do not like) to larger issues, like race and gender, that can cause big legal problems for a business owner.
Structured interviews eliminate bias by forcing you (or your team) to stay consistent in the questions asked (and ideally the manner they are asked in), as well as be held accountable to a numbered scoring system with notes. This puts candidates on a level playing field, as well as gives you insight into if/ why you scored a candidate differently so that you can have insight into if you were being biased or if the answer warranted that score. - Legally Defensible – Structured interviews, when documented properly, can provide a legal defense for hiring practices, if you ever need one. They are reliable and valid, which means that, like a scientific experiment, you can replicate it 1000 times and ideally, the result will be the same (as long as interviewers correctly follow the scoring system). Hiring decisions are made based on interview notes and scores, not on other factors like ethnic background or gender which could land the business in legal trouble.
Top 3 Cons of Structured Interviews
- Boredom – The core of a structured interview is asking the same set of questions to eliminate bias. Asking the same thing over and over can be really boring, and it can lead to you “tuning out” what a candidate is saying. Sometimes, it helps to take a break between candidates and focus on each candidate’s fresh perspective on each question.
- Adherence – Being told what to do isn’t always a fun thing for people, especially managers who are used to managing a team and doing things their way. Get everyone on the bus by thoroughly explaining why you want to do a structured interview for the open role. If it’s just you, then you need to control your own compliance and remind yourself how important it is for all the interviews to be done the same way.
- Confining – A structured interview can be confining, which can be a good thing if you have a loose cannon manager, but it also can confine you or your team members from asking something that is important to them. Make sure that you develop the right list of questions in advance (we’ll help you with that below) and that follow up questions are encouraged by including them in your template.
Free Structured Interview Template
Below is a template that you can adapt for your business and for the role you’re hiring for. We will show you how to pick your own questions below the template.
ABC Company Marketing Client Manager Structured Interview
Candidate name: _______________________________________________________
Date of Interview: _______________________________________________________
Interviewer name: _______________________________________________________
Pick 8-10 of the below questions to ask the candidate.
Introduction: Remember to greet the candidate and offer water and a bathroom break.
Begin with an ice breaker such as:
- Ask the candidate to walk you through his/her resume
- If you have something in common with the candidate (past company, same university), start with that to begin to build rapport and ease nerves
***Avoid bringing up current events like sports teams or politics.***
Question 1: Tell me about why you are interested in being a Client Manager at ABC Company. What about the role and the company really makes you excited?
Competency/Category: Attention to detail; professional
Potential Follow Up/Probing Questions:
- Do you agree with our company’s motto? Why?
- What did you read about our company online?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 2: What is the largest project you have ever managed? Walk me through it step by step.
Competency/Category: Project management
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- What was the project’s outcome and would you change anything?
- What did you learn from this project?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 3: What project management tools and philosophies have you used in the past?
Competency/Category: Project management knowledge, professional development
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- Which ones did you like or not like? Why?
- If given a choice, which one would you always pick to work with?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 4: Have you ever worked on a project team where there was a conflict, either with the client or internally? What did you do to solve the issue and what did you learn from it?
Competency/Category: Interpersonal skills, project management, emotional intelligence
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- If you had been the manager of the team, what would you have changed?
- If you could have started the project over, what would you have done differently?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 5: Have you managed both designers and developers before? How do you communicate project goals and deadlines across an organization where each team has different competencies and different personalities? If you have an example from your work, that would be great here.
Competency/Category: Project management, technical knowledge
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- Are you able to talk tech-speak with technical people?
- What about freelance designers and developers? Do you have experience managing them?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 6: What was your most successful social media campaign like? What were the analytics behind it and how did you measure the success?
Competency/Category: Marketing experience
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- Tell me specifically about a campaign with Facebook.
- Where do you see social media advertising going in the future?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 7: What is your experience in direct marketing? Provide me a high level overview of your experience and then tell me about a notable client experience.
Competency/Category: Marketing experience
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- Do you think direct mail marketing will be eliminated within 10 years? Why or why not?
- What direct marketing techniques do you think are most relevant for our product?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 8: Tell me about your philosophy behind client management. What do you think are the top 3 things that matter in a relationship between a vendor and a client?
Competency/Category: Client services
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- If I called a client of yours right now, how would they describe you?
- Are you mostly familiar with working with clients in-person, via telephone, or online?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 9: Tell me about a time in your professional career where you failed. What did you learn, and what would you do differently if you could do it over?
Competency/Category: Emotional intelligence, ability to cope with stress
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- Do you think your manager could have done more to help you? Why or why not?
- What would you do if you saw someone on your team going through something similar?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 10: Do you consider yourself a technically savvy person? Why or why not?
Competency/Category: Technical knowledge
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- When was the last time you updated your computer?
- If your phone crashed, would you be able to recover everything? How?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 11: What do you think is the most difficult part of the Client Manager role here at ABC Company?
Competency/Category: Understanding of position
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- How many clients have you managed simultaneously in the past?
- What is your experience with upselling to clients?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 12: What in your life are you most proud of achieving so far? Why?
Competency/Category: Organizational fit, emotional intelligence
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- Where do you see yourself going in your career?
- What do you see as your next big challenge in your career?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 13: Pretend I am a client and my project is running 2 weeks behind schedule due to unforeseen issues with quality assurance. Explain the delay to me, your client.
Competency/Category: Client service, ability to cope with stress, problem solving
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- If you were the business owner, how would you compensate the client for the lost time or is it just a part of business?
- Have you ever had this happen with a real client? What happened?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 14: What do you do when you are overwhelmed at work with too much to do?
Competency/Category: Organizational fit, ability to cope with stress, emotional intelligence
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- How do you cope with stress?
- What are your hobbies outside of work?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Question 15: What is your ideal manager like and why?
Competency/Category: Organizational fit
Potential Follow Up Questions:
- Who was your favorite manager from your professional experience and why?
- Who was your least favorite manager from your past and why?
Notes:
Score:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
What Should I Ask at My Structured Interview?
Below is a list of 15 suggested structured interview questions. Most of them are relevant to any role, and you can then create follow up questions that are specific to your role or company. Read on to see how you should come up with questions specific to the position you’re hiring for.
- Describe a situation in which you dealt with individuals, teammates, customers, or a manager who was difficult or even hostile.
- Give an example of a time when you had come to a decision ASAP. What was your process for making the decision you did? Would you change something?
- Tell me about a time when you had to verbally get a point across that was important to you. How did you make your point? Were you successful?
- Tell me about a specific occasion when you had to support a policy you did not agree with.
- Describe the most significant work project that you’ve completed.
- Tell me about a time when you made a suggestion to improve the quality of the work done on your team.
- What did you do in your last role to contribute toward a teamwork environment? Be specific.
- Give me an example of a problem situation or client you faced at your last job and tell me how you solved it.
- Describe a situation in which others within your organization depended on you
- Your coworker has a habit of interrupting you at staff meetings. You often leave staff meetings feeling frustrated because you weren’t able to finish your point. What do you do to resolve this?
- Describe the worst misunderstanding you were involved in in the workplace. What was the situation and what happened as a result? What did you learn?
- Tell me about a time when you had to practice confidentiality.
- Describe the last thing you did for self-improvement either in or out of the workplace?
- What was the mission of the last company you worked for? Did you support that mission and why or why not?
- How would you explain (insert complex concept, i.e. EBITDA, affiliate marketing) to a person not from our field?
How Many Questions Should I Ask?
How many questions you want to pick really depends on:
- The role you are looking for and how important of a position it is
- How much time you want to spend interviewing
For example, if you are looking for a new manager for the team, which is very important, you will want to spend an hour with a candidate during their in-person interview, so you will want at least 10 questions, if not more.
On the other hand, if you are looking for a new entry level account executive who will be joining a team of 20 other ones, you might only spend 30-45 minutes with a candidate for their interview, and you might need only 8 questions.
How Do I Come Up with My Question List?
Structured interviewing is a standardized way of assessing a person’s fit for the job and for your company so you need a set of questions that gives you that insight. Think about the 5 or 6 things you want the individual to have (e.g. skill set, personality, experience, etc.) and use that as a starting point for coming up with questions for your interview. (Here are 120 of the best interview questions to give you some ideas, along with some of the worst, and those that are illegal — so you can avoid asking them.)
There are 5 key steps you’ll want to take to come up with your question list for a structured interview:
Step 1: Create a solid, accurate job description.
To start, you will want a detailed job description that outlines the duties & responsibilities, the desired personality traits, the office environment, the team that the person will be joining, and the experience required. Want some help writing one? Check out this article.
After that, it should be fairly easy to pull questions from a good job description with good details.
For example, if your job description is for a Social Media Manager, and it says, “Must have 3+ years experience with social media campaign management,” you might then want to put in the structured interview the following questions:
- “Explain running a Facebook ad campaign from start to finish for me.”
- “Why do you think Twitter has had so much trouble monetizing? How have you used Twitter in past social media campaigns?”
Step 2: Think about: If the role has existed in the past, what went wrong/right with the former person?
If the individual who formerly filled the role was a good employee, think about what qualities or skills they exhibited that are important for the new hire to have. Put questions designed to gauge those qualities and skills in the structured interview.
If the individual who formerly filled the role did a poor job, think about why. What went wrong with the last person in the role?
- There was a skill deficiency – what was it and why? Was it missed during interviewing?
- There was a personality issue – what was it? What works best with this team and this manager?
- Is there anything else that you learned from the past person or, past people, in the role?
Then, take what you have learned and put it in the structured interview.
For example, let’s say the last person quit because they couldn’t handle the pressure from the role. How will you find out about stress management since that isn’t on a resume?
- “Tell me about a time when you were under the most stress or had to meet multiple deadlines. What did you do to cope with it and what happened?”
- “What would you do if you were overwhelmed at work? Would you tell your manager? Work longer hours? How would you make sure everything got done? If you have had this happen in the past, tell me the story.”
Step 3: Think about: If the role has never existed, what can the ideal person do and what is the ideal personality?
Take a moment to think about what you are looking for that’s not on the job description. Maybe there is a certain kind of team member missing from the current team.
For example, if you really need a cheerleader type on your team, you might want to ask the following:
- “What role do you typically take on a team and why if your choices are Leader, Follower, Cheerleader, or Scribe/ Task Master?”
- “If your team was struggling with a project and might not meet the deadline, what would you do and why?”
Step 4: Draft your main question list, aiming for 10-15 questions.
Write out the list of questions you now have from steps 1-3. If you haven’t already, you might ask the other interviewers/managers to provide input on the question list. They may see a gap that you don’t as the business owner.
Step 5: Draft your “Probing Questions” (i.e. your follow up questions for each question from your main list).
1-3 follow up questions per main question is usually plenty. If you have managers that will be interviewing the candidate, you can ask them to come with follow up questions.
How Does the Structured Interview Work?
The point of doing structured interviewing is just that — to keep it structured. The interviewer should print out their structured interview questions and bring the paperwork into the room to take notes on. One way to do this is to use a interview evaluation scorecard. Let’s go through each part of the structured interview now, from taking notes to documenting your process.
How to Take Notes during a Structured Interview
Keep the notes focused on the specifics of what the candidate said in order to remain objective. Remember, there is no need to comment on the candidate’s personal appearance or any other sort of discriminatory status (i.e. gender, religion, etc…).
Notes should be specific and descriptive of the candidate’s answer and avoid personal ad libs. In fact, your notes should be so good that you could defend why you scored a candidate a certain way!
Examples of good structured interview notes:
- “Couldn’t provide details on project management techniques or experience. Asked a follow up and still could not explain”
- “Excellent verbal communication skills, articulate, outgoing, would be great with our clients”
- “No experience with Facebook campaigns”
- “Great insight into past failure with a client, learns from mistakes”
Examples of notes to avoid:
- “Looks nervous”- This comment lacks any factual basis. A better note might read, “Her voice is shaky, made small talk and candidate calmed down – concern about first impression to clients”.
- “Seems rude”- Similar to above. Provide the reasoning for the comment. A better note might read, “Joe seems rude to me- no handshake, no eye contact, cell phone out.”
- “Great candidate”- When the time comes to discuss the candidate with your team, details will be needed. Elaborate with specific details. A better note might read, “Great candidate – friendly, answered questions thoroughly, asked solid questions about the org, had good ideas that relate to our clients.”
How to Score Candidates
It is best to not score the candidate until after the interview and once the candidate has left. Scoring should be done immediately after the interview ends and without dialogue with the other interviewers to avoid any biases.
You should try to make a guideline on how to score a candidate on each question. Think about what a “1” answer looks like versus a “10”. What main points for each question are you hoping a candidate hits on during their answer? Knowing what you are looking for prior to asking the question can really help in scoring a candidate.
Then, you will want to add up the total points a candidate scored for the structured interview. So take the numbers from the set of questions and add them up to get a final score for each candidate. For example, if your interview had 10 questions and each question is scored from 1-10, the highest score would be 100 points.
Post-Interview Meetings (if you are not the only interviewer)
Once everyone has interviewed the candidate and scored them, the hiring managers should meet right after and compare notes. This can open up some great dialogue and provide some insights into the candidate and the interview process.
Ideally, the candidate with the highest total score from you or, if you have multiple interviewers, all the interviewers should get the job offer (as long as other things, like references, check out). And if that candidate says no, you can make an offer to the second highest score, and so on.
Documenting Your Structured Interview Process
Finally, once all is said and done, scanning and saving the structured interview notes is a good idea. If someone ever came back and claimed that your hiring practices were unfair, you would have all the documented evidence to show your processes for interviewing. If you use an Applicant Tracking System, you could also attach the notes to a candidate’s profile.
How Do I Train My Managers to Do Structured Interviews?
If you have managers and other people doing interviewing, you’ll want to make sure your structured interviewing can be successful. Even if you have a great question list, you still need to train your managers in structured interviewing and how you want the process and scoring to work.
Call a meeting with your management team where everyone can attend.
Then, at the meeting:
- Thoroughly explain the structured interview process and its benefits to your managers. Tell them why you think it will benefit the company.
- Come prepared to the training meeting with a question list you’ve created for an open role to give them an idea. Perhaps let them give feedback or construct their own in comparison to yours to then discuss.
- Go through some role playing or sample interview questions to also help them practice note-taking. Go over what are good notes and bad notes. Also, you will want to determine what makes an answer a “1” versus a “5” or “10” for each question.
The US government also has a great resource on structured interviews, with both a video and a number of downloads through their Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The most famous example of an organization that does structured interviewing is the US Postal Service, and the OPM has a number of free resources on its website on this topic.
The Bottom Line
Structured interviewing is a great system to put into place when there is a role open that has several people interviewing the candidates. It also provides some science into the art that is recruiting and helps to streamline hiring processes, saving you time and money and getting you the right candidates–a triple win!
