Structured hiring is a systematic, repeatable recruitment process that spans from job posting to new hire onboarding. It requires an entire team — managers, interviewers, recruiters and HR professionals. It consists of standardized, job-focused questions allowing objective evaluations based on candidate responses rather than the interviewer’s biases and opinions. This approach provides for fair and consistent assessments that are valid, reliable and legally defensible.

Reduces Turnover

High employee turnover hurts business efficiency and costs companies money that could be used for other purposes. It’s also a waste of time as new hires must spend extra time getting up-to-speed on their job. Structured hiring helps reduce new hire turnover by ensuring that candidates are well-informed about the role and what they can expect to do.

This will eliminate confusion and frustration that can make people leave jobs prematurely. Structured interviews conducted with the aid of software offer numerous benefits, including increased consistency and objectivity in the evaluation process. This method improves fairness, lessens biases, and enables companies to hire more intelligently by standardizing questions and scoring criteria and basing hiring decisions on a thorough and consistent evaluation of candidates.

For instance, the Greenhouse hiring process is finely tuned to identify candidates who align with the company’s innovative culture and values. Through skill assessments and purposeful interviews, they aim to build a diverse and talented team contributing to the company’s mission of transforming the hiring process.

By defining the job, creating a representative interview and assessment, training interviewers, using a structured interview format, and implementing a scoring system, companies can elevate their hiring game to a whole new level. This will help them find top talent, reduce bias, improve hiring time and save costs. It will also increase confidence in hiring decisions, resulting in better hires and a happier workforce.

Reduces Bias

Unconscious bias in hiring decisions is a problem because it affects everyone, no matter their experience or intelligence. It can manifest in various ways, from discarding candidates due to a typo on their resume to choosing the candidate that seems most like you or someone you know.

Structured interviews use standardized questions and assessments to eliminate bias in hiring decisions, allowing your team to make more data-driven, intelligent choices that benefit both the candidate and your business.

They also help to optimize interview time, ensuring your team can spend enough quality time evaluating each candidate. Structured interviews also allow for a diverse interview panel to reduce the influence of attribution bias, which often happens when one person on an interview team thinks a candidate is more qualified than another.

Makes Hiring Decisions Easier

A structured interview process gives your hiring team a clear framework to conduct productive, unbiased interviews. This enables them to quickly and efficiently choose the best candidate and extend an offer. Structured interviews focus on job-related questions to measure candidates’ abilities and skills.

These questions are accompanied by criteria used to evaluate each response. A structured interview process also allows you to establish a standard for assessing each candidate. This means that everyone on the interview team will ask the same questions in the same way and will use a consistent rating system to evaluate each candidate’s performance.

This eliminates the need for gut instinct and can help to make better hiring decisions. This also leaves little room for personal preferences and biases to interfere with the selection of new hires.

Improves Time-To-Hire

A structured interview process is a great way to speed up your hiring. When your team is clear on the measurable business goals the new hire will help achieve, they can focus on advancing candidates best suited to the role. Gut instinct can be a trap for the unwary, leading teams to stall their process and waste valuable time.

Indecision is costly, especially for high-growth businesses that need to fill roles quickly. Structured interviews allow candidates to showcase their skills and qualifications without the interference of personal biases. The result is objective assessments that lead to better decisions for the candidate and the organization. Time to hire and time to close are two important metrics that reveal how efficiently your recruitment processes operate.

Reduces Hiring Costs

Structured interviews allow your talent acquisition team to save time by using a standardized approach to interviewing that eliminates inconsistencies. In addition, the structured interview format improves accuracy by ensuring that each candidate is asked the same questions and rated on only job-relevant information.

The cost of a bad hire can be devastating to your business. Beyond the monetary costs of recruiting, training, and benefits, a misfit employee can also create a workplace culture that erodes productivity and morale. Unstructured interviews can also add many intangible costs to your hiring process.

Time spent coaching screeners on outdated interview methods, going back and forth on whether to hire a candidate or even candidate ghosting can add up quickly and take an emotional toll on your talent acquisition team.