Recently the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) published a blog post, How To Interview a Job Candidate in a Style Fit for a Content Marketer in which the author advocated for migrating from asking questions in an interview to providing storytelling prompts. 

Great advice for hiring content marketers who should be expert at developing stories which the reader finds compelling and actionable.  Scenario based questions or prompts are recommended.  This approach is the foundation of an interview technique called structured interviews.

Create an Effective Interview Structure for Hiring Top Talent

Just what is a structured interview?  A structured interview is a standardized interview format where each candidate is evaluated using the same questions. These questions are also asked in the same order, which helps reduce the context effect. 

This fixed flow allows each candidate’s response to be compared objectively and scored using a predetermined scale, independent of interviewer.  Structured interviews are used by many large companies to standardize the interview strategy and improve hiring outcomes.  

Interviewing is the most neglected aspect of talent acquisition.  Research from McGill University demonstrates that structured interviews give rise to better hiring decisions.

We assume that hiring teams have the skills, knowledge, and expertise necessary to hire the best candidates even though they’ve been given little training, support, and direction.  As a result, interviewers are often left on an island, utilizing their own interview questions, often in a winged it style, and irrational decision criteria.  

This often results in unconscious bias leading to inconsistent interviews and ultimately, suboptimal hires. Examples of unconscious biases could where the candidate went to school or grew up, what they studied or how they answered a question that challenged the interviewer 20 years ago. These questions lead to decisions based on gut instinct which often result in poor hiring.

In addition to reducing unconscious (and conscious) bias, some of the key benefits of a structured interview approach include:

· Increased reliability

· Improved accuracy

· Skills-based

· Legal compliance

· Better Candidate experience

At FloCareer, we provide an Interview as a Service platform utilizing senior software developers to conduct first-level technical interviews.  We help companies scale their tech teams by following a rigorous hiring process driven by structured interviews integrated into a video platform delivered by freelance technical interviewers.  We do this via an integrated live video and tech assessment platform that:

1. Schedules candidate interviews

2. Utilizes a skills-based, unbiased interview structure pulled from 40,000 skills-focused interview questions used to evaluate all candidates.

3. Provides client with a recommendation, ratings and video clips.

4. Our secret sauce is the usage of 4000+ global senior software developers who perform the interviews 24X7X365 utilizing an Uber model.

This approach has enabled our clients to hire better, faster and more effectively.  But you don’t have to use FloCareer to implement this rigorous, objective hiring strategy. All that you need to do is to follow this 5 step approach:

1. Develop scenario based interview questions that match the required skills for the position similar to the way described by CMI.

2. Use a consistent scoring system to evaluate each candidate against the interview questions.

3. Train the interviewers to use the same questions and scoring system.

4. Conduct each interview based on the above approach.

5. Objectively select and hire the highest scoring candidates.

Additional Resources/ References