Good Interview Structure

Interview Structure

In today’s hiring world, many people often think that you can just turn up in the interview and start asking the questions and then wrap up at the end.

Doing this will have an impact on the candidate experience as well as impact the overall ability to assess the candidate correctly. Interviews can be a strange thing for candidates and how you interact and set up the interview impacts the candidates response.

In a recent research paper titled Interpersonal Perceptions and Interviewer Effects in Face-to-Face Surveys" by Simon Kühne (2023) found that that the warmth, professionalism and engagement has an impact on the candidates responses but also on the candidates quality of responses.

From this data hopefully you can see that how you come across within the interview impacts your ability to assess candidates, if you, as the interviewer, enter the interview and don’t set out and conduct this in the right way, you may well have just lost out on a really strong candidate.

What are some good structures?

The structure I outline can be edited and played to best suit you and your company but a really good outline is:

1. Welcome & Introductions: Use this space to cover your role within the company, the outline of the interview and what to expect

2. Introductory Question: Candidates need to ease into the interview, your role should be to remove and reduce the nerves enabling you to understand the candidates skills in more detail. To do this start with an easy question that they can answer easily and quickly this could be about their background or how they come to this opportunity.

3. Question 1: Start off with your first interview question and ensure you are actively listening and engaging with the response.

   1. Make sure that you are also asking follow up questions to gather more information and insights.

4. Question 2: Follow up with your second interview question

   1. As above ensure that you are asking follow up questions to gather all the insights

5. Candidates Questions: Allow sufficient time within the interview for the candidate to be able to ask their questions, answer these honestly and share as much information as possible.

6. Wrap up and next steps: Close out the interview and ensure you conclude with the timeline for the next steps in interview process.

People like clarity or an understanding of what is be expected, when it is unknown nerves kick in and there is a high chance that you won’t get the best out of people.

By following the above structure this will help you build out a smooth interview enabling you to really understand the candidate better, which allows you to assess candidates for the role you are interviewing them for.

Hope this helps you really define and improve your interviewing experience.

Enjoyed this content? Why not check out some of my other content:

• Interviewer Training Course: Looking to up skill your interview team or companies ability to hire better? Then you should come and look at my interviewer training.

• Need some content for interviewing including question banks check out my content here

• Need Interview Scorecards or a playbook for interviewing download these here

• Hiring SDRs and not sure where to advertise, post your roles here