How to Analyze Structured Interviews

Following the steps in our post: How to Conduct a Structured Interview will help make analyzing your structured interviews an effective and efficient process. The steps below are additional structured practices that also contribute to an easier analysis of your interviews.

(Click here to read our post: What is a structured interview?)

Step 1: Transcribe your interview to use as evidence when scoring candidates

Creating a record of the interview is important because becomes a helpful resource to reference when evaluating candidates. 

1. Use a high-quality transcription tool that allows you to easily surface candidates’ responses to your predetermined set of questions and also allows you to take notes in real time. 
2. Compare each candidate’s responses to your answer guides, and rate each of them on the scale you have chosen. 
3. Generate a rating for each skill based on your ratings of those skill-specific questions. 

Once all transcripts have been scored, you can directly compare your candidates’ proficiency in those skills to inform your hiring decision. 

Step 2: Submit candidate scores as soon as possible

Best practice: Review your transcripts immediately after your interviews to ensure you minimize any bias in your decisions. When the information is fresh and salient, you are more likely to rely on a candidate’s specific responses to your questions rather than any biases you may have about the candidate. The longer you wait, the more likely your bias will drive your assessments and influence your decision. 

It is also important to refrain from discussing any of your candidates with your team members until all candidates have been evaluated. This prevents any one individual’s opinion of a candidate from influencing others' opinions. Candidates should only be discussed once all candidates have been rated by all relevant members of the hiring team.

Step 3: Debrief with your hiring team and choose the candidate who scored the highest

This practice is called ‘top-down selection.’ 

1. Once all your team members have evaluated candidates, aggregate those scores to generate an overall proficiency score for each skill. 
2. Aggregate those skill scores into an overall score. The candidate who scored the highest overall is the candidate who will be best for your job. 
3. Give the offer to that candidate. 
4. If they decline, move down the list to the next-best candidate.

This practice is the ultimate form of making data-driven decisions. By investing resources in all of the steps above, you generate high-quality data to drive your outcomes. By relying on that data for your decision, you can ensure your hiring outcomes are fair and accurate and benefit from all the advantages of structuring your interviews. 

Create Structured Interviews with Hireguide

Hireguide is the ultimate solution to help you implement all of the goodness of structured interviews without requiring a huge investment of resources. Instead of developing and implementing each of the steps listed above yourself, we’ve done all the work for you: 

• With Hireguide, there’s no need to conduct a job analysis to identify skills because we’ve done the work for you. Simply enter your role to find a list of the top ~20 skills associated with that role (or create your own). 
• Once you choose five to eight skills, instead of writing questions we suggest behavioral and situational questions for you. Each of these questions also has an answer guide and a standardized scoring key, taking all the work in content development off your plate. 
• Save your questions and add our link to your interviews, and we’ll not only present all of the same questions in the same order to your candidates, but we’ll also generate a high-quality transcript of your interviews for you. 
• After your interviews, our natural language processing-enhanced transcripts parse out interviewer questions from candidate responses and allow you to rate each response at the question level. We also aggregate all your ratings for you across skills, making the evaluation process easy and efficient.
• Once you’ve completed all your interviews, follow our debrief experience to efficiently compare candidates. We capture all ratings for you and present that data back to you in a simple and accessible format. Simply use this data to inform your decisions. 

Your decision is only ever as good as the data you rely on to make that decision. Structured interviewing is a collection of practices that helps create a high-quality dataset to be used as evidence for hiring decisions. The result is an interviewing process that is more fair and accurate and a hiring process that is more effective and equitable. Start using Hireguide today to structure your interviews the easy way!