Adding Structure to Interviews

“Did we just become best friends?”

I recently moved to a new city and I was being introduced to someone at a dinner party. Our mutual friend let us know that we both went to the same college and immediately the conversation started flowing. It was easy to talk to this person because we had something in common. We quickly became friends — but I can’t say I know a lot about this person apart from their college years which was the focus of our conversation.

In this situation, I felt the effects of the “similar to me” bias. The “similar to me” bias is a propensity to favor people with whom you share things in common. While this may help you make friends, it is actually a dangerous bias that affects job interviews. It clouds your judgment and causes you to over-value attributes that you share in common.

To counter this bias and others, I/O psychologists suggest conducting structured interviews. Structured interviews are conversations guided by a pre-determined set of questions that are linked to job-related characteristics. The key is you ask the same set of questions to each candidate in the same order. Best practices also include using a standardized scoring method.

Structured interviews are more effective than unstructured interviews; however, the downside to structured interviews is that they can feel impersonal. This doesn’t mean you have to throw structured interviews out the window. In many cases, as with college recruiting, a blended approach may be applied.

Get together as a staff and come up with a list of questions. Then, create a rubric with acceptable answers to score them. Doing this as a staff will be a powerful exercise to get everyone on the same page. Unlike job interviews, college recruiters can have multiple interactions with prospects and gain information from multiple sources (i.e., coaches, parents). You don’t have to ask every question in one sitting. Be intentional about asking certain questions to help get at those hard to measure “intangibles.” Add some structure to your interviews.

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