There is a playbook most enterprises follow while interviewing candidates.
It starts with recruiters and managers asking formal, job-related questions, and soon veers into completely different, irrelevant territory.
Questions shift from understanding the candidate’s professional background to prodding them about their personal lives. This creates discomfort among candidates, and they end up giving false or half-baked information.
According to a survey by Naukri.com, one in two women avoid sharing details about their marriage and maternity plans during interviews due to the fear of bias.
Similarly, candidates are put through stressful, hypothetical situations that leave them extremely uncomfortable.
Enterprises believe that unscripted interviews or putting candidates in stressful and uncomfortable situations could help them identify the right candidate. They believe it will reveal the candidate’s resilience and true character, enabling them to decide whether the candidate is the right cultural fit.
However, that exposes the enterprise to inconsistent evaluations, biased decisions, and a poor candidate experience.
Evaluating the candidate against the same criteria can become challenging. What began as an attempt to bring authenticity to hiring decisions quickly escalates into making biased hiring decisions. What’s more, it exposes the enterprise to legal, compliance, and reputational risks.
Let’s understand how unstructured interviews create chaos for enterprises and how they can address it with more structure and standardization.
What is an Unstructured Interview and Why Does it Create Chaos in Enterprises
An unstructured interview is a type of interview that has no standardized or predefined questions, scoring method, or evaluation criteria. In this form of interview, candidates are asked questions ranging from professional ones, such as what value they added to their previous organization, to personal ones, such as “What’s your age?” or “Are you planning to start a family?”
While enterprises consider them innocent conversation starters, seeking such information could make candidates feel uncomfortable and also lead to various repercussions. Let’s look at some of them.
- Bias and discrimination claims: There is a risk of unconscious bias and discrimination creeping in when enterprises use an unstructured interview format. This could lead enterprises to make a wrong hiring decision, but more importantly, it could expose them to discrimination claims from candidates. In many countries, such as the US, seeking information protected under employment discrimination laws could result in legal action against the enterprise. It could also give talented candidates the impression that the enterprise lacks a fair way to assess them.
- Unfair hiring decisions: Lack of standardized questions leads to inconsistent evaluation standards. The assessment becomes subjective. When instinct precedes data, enterprises may end up making wrong decisions. To add to the woes, the recruiters and hiring managers fail to document or report their observations. This creates a major compliance failure, especially when enterprises have to justify their hiring decisions during reviews or legal disputes.
- Losing potential top talent: When highly qualified candidates find the interview process disorganized or unfair, they turn down the job offer and prefer joining competitors. The enterprise loses a good candidate who could add value to the business.
How Structured Interviews Can Solve the Interview Chaos
Unlike unstructured interviews, structured ones use a predefined set of questions and standardized evaluation reports to assess the candidates and make a hiring decision objectively. Everything from questions to the evaluation process is standardized and fixed to prevent deviance. The candidates are asked the same questions in the same order and are evaluated based on the same evaluation criteria.
A well-structured interview helps enterprises:
- Standardize the interview process: In a structured interview format, every candidate is asked the same role-specific questions and evaluated using predetermined evaluation criteria. This helps interviewers avoid veering into personal conversations and makes it easier for them to evaluate candidates.
- Reduce bias and maintain compliance: Since there is no room to ask personal or inconvenient questions or to judge candidates on intuition, enterprises reduce the risk of biased decisions and thereby protect themselves from legal or compliance risks.
- Maintain objectivity during evaluation: Structured interviews ensure candidates are evaluated on the same parameters. This makes it easier for interviewers to compare the candidates and choose the right one. It also enables them to document the observations with a stronger rationale, making it easier to demonstrate fairness during disputes and reviews.
- Improve candidate experience: When the process is transparent and consistent, candidates are assured of fairness and professionalism. It reinforces the enterprise’s credibility. This enables enterprises to get the right candidate before the competitor does.
By replacing intuition-based interviews with evidence-based ones, enterprises can make better, fair, and less chaotic hiring decisions.
How InterviewNinja Brings Structure to Interviews
Transitioning from unstructured to structured interviews is not simple. Enterprises have to standardize the questions, vet them by experts, predefine evaluation criteria, and encourage interviewers to document their observations and generate evaluation reports to make better hiring decisions.
That’s exactly what Wissen Tech’s InterviewNinja does.
InterviewNinja is an interview platform that offers:
- Expert-designed interview templates that ensure every candidate is evaluated on the same questions.
- Predefined question banks ensure that interviewers stick to relevant questions and avoid meandering into personal or uncomfortable territory.
- Custom questions with competency-based ratings ensure the interviews are tailored to specific roles and business needs.
- Structured evaluation scorecards eliminate subjectivity and bias and maintain standardization throughout the evaluation process.
- Standardized evaluation reports generate candidate reports, making it easier for interviewers to eliminate guesswork and compare candidates based on predefined criteria.
- Candidate performance tracking enables the hiring teams to collaborate and share their feedback about the candidate across different interview rounds.
- Role-based access control ensures that interview data is protected and that only approved stakeholders have access to it.
To know more about InterviewNinja and how it can reduce interview chaos, contact us.
FAQs
Q. What is a structured and an unstructured interview?
A structured interview is an interview format in which enterprises use a predefined set of questions and a standardized evaluation report to assess candidates. Unstructured interviews, on the other hand, have no pre-decided questions or evaluation format. This leads to inconsistency and bias in evaluation.
Q. Why are unstructured interviews considered a compliance risk?
When questions are not predefined, interviewers could end up asking personal questions and making decisions based on that. Many countries consider such questions and decisions unfair and biased, thereby exposing them to compliance risk.
Q. How do structured interviews address compliance and legal risks?
Since every candidate is evaluated based on the same questions and scorecards, there is little scope for interviewers to ask uncomfortable questions or make biased hiring decisions. Candidates also don’t feel discriminated against. This helps enterprises reduce compliance and legal risks.
Q. How does InterviewNinja facilitate compliant and structured hiring?
Wissen Tech’s InterviewNinja is a platform that offers expert-designed templates, predefined questions, and structured evaluation reports that enable recruiters and hiring managers to make consistent and transparent hiring decisions.
