A structured interview is one of the easiest ways to properly gauge how successful a person could fit into a role when interviewing a candidate for a specific job position.  Many interviewers try to go away from structure at some point in the interview process to see a candidate’s personality.  This could have its benefits, but it is a more valuable interviewer technique to be able to stick with structure.  This interviewer skill usually takes five steps.

Admittedly, the traditional recruiting process is expeditious from a time-to-fulfillment perspective and in the short run is very cost effective. It consists of the following five steps:

1. Review the job description, write an ad specifying the hard-skills of the position, and begin collecting resumes.
2. Select the top 3 to 6 resumes of candidates for face-to-face interviews who on-paper represent the hard-skills, experience, and salary requirements that best match the job.
3. Allow the hiring manager, to whom the open position reports, the freedom to single-handedly implement a free-form personal interview process that unconsciously emphasizes hard-skills, experience, and likability.
4. Check 1 or 2 personal references of the candidates or just accept the letters of recommendation that the candidates bring to the interviews. (This step is often skipped because of time constraints and because the candidate made such a good impression in the interview that he/she couldn’t have any “baggage” that would disqualify him/her.)
5. Make an offer of employment to the candidate who best “sold” him/herself in the interview.

Taking less time, and using less money on hiring employees will certainly benefit any company as long as the success rates stay constant or increase.  By using interviewer skills and techniques that involve keeping structure a priority throughout the interview process, it will be apparent that the benefits of structure certainly outweigh those of an unstructured interview.

Throughout the interview process, it is important to have a confident interviewer with proper interviewer skills and interviewer techniques that qualify them to select a proper candidate for an open position.  Unfortunately, in many instances, some managers or people who are responsible for conducting a structured interview for a company, are overconfident and do not always make proper decisions when interviewing a candidate.

In fact, there is a very small minority of managers and even professional recruiters who have such a natural ability. Everyone else has a self-assumed confidence level that allows them to believe that they are good at selecting employees.

This managerial confidence (or ego) is probably the reason that these managers are successful at what they do. Unfortunately, this confidence level is often supported by erroneous hiring data. Some managers assume a 90%+ hiring success rate because they refuse to count the people who resigned or were fired. They assume that these terminations were either flukes or something wrong with the people, rather than problems with their selection process. The result is that these managers look at a process, such as this Program, that is more systematic, compare this new process to the “success rate” of their own expedient method, and conclude that changing to a new system has no value.

While it may be difficult for a manager to change their interviewing skills and techniques, it can be very beneficial for them to overcome their egos and make the better choice by using a more efficient system for hiring employees.