Every business has their own interview processes and criteria, and there’s an argument for informal and conversational interviews as the way forward for building affinity with candidates throughout the hiring process. Yet often, these unstructured interviews don’t result in the best outcome for hiring managers and HR.

When building your finance team, adopting a structured interview process that focuses on asking questions specific to your requirements and collecting the right data in order to evaluate your candidates, ensures everyone gets the same fair, consistent experience when interacting with your company.

If you’re asking questions randomly, you could start evaluating traits that have nothing to do with the potential performance of your new hires. Structured interviews, on the other hand, deliver several benefits, such as:

·      Better candidate experiences – everyone gets a fair assessment during interviews

·      Easier candidate comparisons – you establish a clear set of criteria to evaluate

·      Reduction in unconscious biases – decisions made based on skills and competencies

·      Faster hiring – the process allows you to make informed decisions more quickly

Creating a structured interview process strategy

Rather than conversing with candidates to determine how they might “fit” with your company culture and goals, structured interviews ask questions designed to reveal your candidates’ competencies in specific areas.

With structured interviews, all candidates are asked questions in the same order and evaluated using the same criteria or scale, which means taking a systematic and consistent approach to how you interview.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1.      Analyse each role and focus on key competencies

When creating a structured interview strategy, start by analysing each financial role you want to fill.

Do this by examining your job descriptions and requirements, which will give you great insight into the key competencies and qualities essential for your new candidates.

Once you have these key competencies and skills to evaluate, you’ll be able to create specific questions that evaluate each of them carefully for you to measure against during the interviews.

2.      Craft insightful questions

Crafting behavioural interview questions, where candidates are asked to explain how they’ve handled challenges and situations in the past, can be very helpful and will give you an insight into your candidate’s problem-solving skills, abilities, teamwork, and even their ability to communicate.

3.      Establish clear evaluation criteria

Once you’ve established the questions you’re going to ask, it’s vital to ensure you’re evaluating your candidates correctly.

This could be done through assigning points to candidates when they mention a specific term or ability in the responses or by using a scale to rate their answers throughout the interview.

4.      Collaborate when evaluating candidates

Involving multiple stakeholders in the interview process isn’t always straightforward, but additional input can help to reduce bias and provide a more holistic insight into which employees are best for your team.

If multiple people can’t be present in the interview process, recording interviews and asking team members to assign scores to answers themselves can help to create a more comprehensive assessment process.

5.      Constantly improve and adapt

It’s important to continuously review and revise your interview process to ensure it’s as effective as it can be.

Gathering feedback, both from HR/hiring manager and candidates, will help you to build a structured interview process that works.

Likewise, analysing your new hires over time, how they’re performing and whether they remain within your organisation is another effective way to track whether your interview process has been a success or not.

By having a consistent, structured interview process which focuses on evaluating the same criteria time and time again, you improve your chances of making the right hires for your business.

And with the shortage of top finance talent in the market and the pressures on HR to hire effectively, having a structured interview to rely on to guide you can be invaluable.