💚 The One Thing - Part 1 💚
💚 The One Thing - Part 1 💚
Learning to love structured interviews
Hey everyone, quick logistical note before we get started.
When I started writing this post, I quickly realized that it was going to be a long one. So I’ve split it into three parts: Part 1 is all about the “Why?” and “What?” of structured interviews, next week, in Part 2, I’ll break down the “How?”, and finally in Part 3 we’ll talk about why there’s resistance to using structured interviews and what we can do about it.
The One Thing - Part 1
When someone asks me, “What is the one thing I can do to improve my hiring process?” My answer is always, “Start doing structured interviews and start doing them right now.”
Why we should all love structured interviews
Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of reasons why I’m a fan of the method:
Structured Interviews are twice as good at predicting candidate success 📈
Unstructured interviews have a 14% predictive improvement on job candidate outcomes. At 26%, structured interviews are nearly two times better.
Structured Interviews reduce bias and increase diversity
If you care at all about increasing the diversity of your workforce, you use structured interviews. Why?
Melissa Harrell, Ph.D. and former member of Google’s People Analytics team, put it this way:
...the approach [using structured interviews] is better for diversity because having planned questions and scoring rubrics mitigates our reliance on unconscious biases.1
Great things happen when you start using real data to make hiring decisions 👩🔬 📈
Do you know what traits you need for a great hire? Do you know who is best in your organization at identifying talented people for a particular role? My guess is that you don’t, and even if you do, you wouldn’t be able to prove it with numbers. And you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Structured interviews play a foundational role in creating a data-driven hiring culture. Once you start using data, you can determine who, what, and how your company hires the best people for each role at any given point in time. Candidly, it’s empowering.
It’s also likely that few (if any) of your competitors are using structured interviews. Knowing what you need, how to evaluate people for it, and who best identifies high-performing candidates are a few of the compounding competitive advantages using data gives you.
Over time you’ll be able to source more specifically, evaluate candidates accurately faster, reduce the risk of making bad hires, and provide a better overall candidate experience than your competitors.
Structured and Unstructured Interviews - What’s the difference?
Unstructured interviews are best used when the interviewer probes the interviewee and tries to stay as open as possible to their responses. Simply put, unstructured interviews are essentially free-form conversations with few, or no, prearranged questions. They allow the interviewer to be spontaneous and “go with the flow” of the conversation.
On the other hand, structured interviews follow a set of prearranged questions in the same order and they’re primarily used to assess the interviewee or a situation. For example, when you go through Customs the agents always ask you the same set of questions in the same order. They do this because they’re trying to assess whether or not you’re up to no good, not because they’re particularly interested in your vacation.
When we evaluate candidates for a job we’re assessing their traits, skills, and thought processes, right? So it makes sense that we would apply structured interviews.
Summary
Structured interviews ask the same questions, in the same order, to all interviewees. Ideally, they also include a scoring rubric.
There are many advantages to using structured interviews, including: reducing bias, increasing diversity, and helping you and your organization get better at finding, evaluating, and onboarding talent.
Next week we’ll talk more about the “How” of setting up a structured interview hiring process. (It’s not as hard as you think)
Until then please don’t hesitate to send feedback, comment below, or share this post.
See you next week!
Rubrics are nice to provide a quantifying measure to otherwise hand-wavy evaluations, though consistency across time, both within the same interviewer and across multiple ones is important as well.
For example, there might be factors like Monday Grouch, Friday Outta Here, Hangry Before Lunch, and Food Coma After.
Case study: Judges' parole rate before and after lunch https://www.wired.com/2011/04/judges-mental-fatigue/
Another example TL;DR below...
The Electrical Engineering PhD Qualifying Exam at Stanford feels more like a quiz show than a test to gauge preparedness for research, where in the course of a M-F week, 100+ students have 10-minute one-on-one Q&A sessions with professors, who make up their own questions that could be anything vaguely related to their areas of research.
Aside from the brainteaser nature of this process, the consistency is a major issue. Say a professor thought her question was easy on Monday and graded all Monday students by that level, but by Friday realized it was actually hard. (Less often, vice versa.) All the Monday and Friday scores would need to be adjusted. Not to mention having many of these sessions in a day is rather taxing (both for the profs and students) so there's the "early morning vs. late afternoon" also.
Tangentially, an example of such a quals question would be: You see an opaque box on a table. How would you deduce what's in the box without moving or breaking it, like drilling a hole?