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An effective recruitment process is crucial to any organization. Hiring the right person means better retention, more effective training and development, increased productivity, and just overall more cost-efficient. So ensuring that the individual has the job-fit and the org-fit is a crucial collaborative undertaking of both HR and your hiring managers.
 

Not surprisingly, when making our hiring decisions, we put the most weight on how a candidate fares in the interview. However on one-hand, we need to ask ourselves: is there a direct correlation between interview performance and job performance? With numerous assessment tools out there designed to objectify the relatively subjective recruitment process, I ask myself: why do we persist on letting the employment interview trump all other indicators?
 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not opposed to the interview process; in fact, I enjoy it. I enjoy getting to know the candidates and finding out where they’ve been, where they are, and where they see themselves. I’m simply suggesting that we need to evaluate the effectiveness of the interview process to ensure that we select and hire the right candidate. If the employment interview is our preferred tool in our hiring decision, then we should get the most out of it. This is where structured interviewing comes in. 
 

A structured interview involves careful development of questions based on the competencies required for the job. To ensure validity and link to job performance, questions in a structured interview are based on a thorough job analysis. The same questions are asked to all candidates ensuring consistency which should limit or exclude unconscious personal bias. This is unlike an unstructured interview where anything can go—spontaneous questions are asked which are not job-related that can vary from one applicant to the next.

Structured Interview Process

So what if you have a list of qualified candidates who you need to objectively assess? Briefly, here are two important components of a structured interview: job analysis and interview questions.

1. A complete job analysis is the basis for a valid structured interview. It’s important to have a thorough job analysis that documents the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for the job, as well as the job responsibilities and tasks involved. This is a key component in developing interview questions linked to job performance.
    

There are two types of interview questions used to assess a candidate’s fit:  behavioural and situational.

a) Behavioural questions are based on the belief that our past behavior is a good indicator of our future behavior. These type of questions would work if candidates have held a similar position in the past.

b) Situational questions are hypothetical questions based on the belief that our intentions are predictive of our future behaviour. Questions would involve possible scenarios at work where the candidate being interviewed would likely not have encountered in the past.

It’s always a good idea to develop questions that are job-relevant. Job-relevant questions make the interview process focused, efficient and less subjective. It’s also essential to develop a rating scale to objectively assess responses and differentiate between poor, average, and excellent performance.

Since people are any organization’s most important asset, it’s important to develop the right structured interview process to find the right people. Structured interviews can be time-consuming and inconvenient, however, a bad hire is costly, inefficient, and can be damaging to the rest of the workforce. When it comes to recruiting top talent with the right fit, it’s best to leave no stone unturned.

If you’d like to learn more about effective recruitment processes please contact me at: mweyman@meridiarecruitment.ca