Structured interview
Also called: structured questioning
Why it works better than the alternative
Decades of research are consistent: structured interviews predict job performance roughly twice as well as unstructured ones. The reason is mostly about comparison — when every candidate gets the same questions, the answers can actually be compared. When questions drift candidate-to-candidate, the interviewer ends up comparing apples to oranges and defaulting to “did I like them.”
What “structured” means in practice
Three components:
- Same questions. Written in advance, tied to the dimensions in the hiring plan.
- Same order. So earlier answers don’t pre-frame later questions differently per candidate.
- Same scoring rubric. Each answer rated against the same 1-5 anchors with concrete examples.
Follow-up questions are allowed and expected. The core questions don’t move.
What it isn’t
Structured ≠ scripted. The interview still feels like a conversation; the structure lives in the planning, not in the candidate-facing tone. Robotic delivery is a separate failure mode.
Where Join fits
Question sets attach to the role in Join. Each interviewer opens their scorecard and sees the questions and rubric they’re supposed to use. See the features page.
