Most job interviews are conversations that feel productive but produce little useful information. This guide explains how to structure an interview so that you come out of it knowing more about the candidate's actual work behavior — not just their ability to present themselves well.
When an interview has no structure — when you ask whatever comes to mind, follow interesting tangents, and rely on your general impression — what you're actually measuring is how comfortable you feel with the person. That's not the same as how well they'll perform in the role.
Candidates who are articulate, confident and socially skilled tend to do well in unstructured interviews regardless of their actual competence. Candidates who are more reserved, or who have done the work but haven't learned to talk about it smoothly, tend to underperform in the same format.
A structured interview doesn't mean a rigid or cold one. It means that the questions are connected to the role criteria, that you ask the same core questions to each candidate, and that you listen for specific information rather than general impressions.
The goal is to give every candidate the same opportunity to demonstrate their capability — and to give yourself the same basis for comparison across candidates.
Spend the first few minutes explaining the role, the team and what the position involves day-to-day. This gives the candidate the information they need to give you relevant answers — and it signals that this is a professional process. Avoid long social preambles that eat into the time you need for substantive questions.
Questions like "what would you do if..." invite candidates to tell you what they think you want to hear. Questions like "tell me about a time when you..." require them to draw on actual experience. Past behavior is a more reliable indicator of future behavior than hypothetical scenarios. Ask for specific situations, not general descriptions of how they work.
A candidate gives a vague or general answer. Most interviewers move on. Instead, ask a follow-up: "Can you give me a specific example of that?" or "What was your specific role in that situation?" The follow-up question is often where the real information lives. It also signals to the candidate that you're paying close attention.
Candidates will naturally emphasize their best moments. Your job is to listen for patterns across multiple answers: How do they describe their relationships with managers? How do they talk about mistakes? Do they take ownership of outcomes or attribute them to circumstances? Patterns across several answers are more informative than any single response.
What a candidate asks you tells you something about how they think about work. Someone who asks only about salary and hours is giving you different information than someone who asks about the team structure, the current challenges in the role, or what success looks like in the first six months. Both are valid — but both are informative.
Tell the candidate what happens next and when they can expect to hear from you. Vague closings ("we'll be in touch") create uncertainty and reflect poorly on your organization. A clear timeline — even if it's just "we'll let everyone know within two weeks" — is a basic professional courtesy and signals that you run a deliberate process.
"Tell me about a time when you had to manage a project with a tight deadline and limited resources. What did you do and what was the result?" These questions ask for specific past situations and reveal how the person actually behaves — not how they think they should behave.
"If you joined and found that the process for X was significantly different from what you're used to, how would you approach that?" These are more useful than pure hypotheticals because they're grounded in the actual context of the role and reveal the candidate's reasoning process.
"What was your specific contribution to that outcome?" / "What would you do differently?" / "How did your manager react?" Follow-up questions are where you get past the rehearsed narrative and into the actual detail. They also test whether the story is consistent and specific.
Your memory of an interview degrades quickly, especially if you're seeing multiple candidates. Take notes during the interview — not a transcript, but specific observations about what the candidate said in response to each core question.
When comparing candidates, compare them against the role criteria — not against each other. The question isn't "who was the best of the three?" but "which of these candidates meets the criteria we defined for this role?" This distinction matters when the answer is "none of them do."
If multiple people are involved in interviewing, debrief together using the same criteria — not "what did you think of them?" but "how did they respond to the question about X?"
The full training program covers interviewing in depth — including practice with real scenarios and a question framework you can use immediately.
See the ProgramGet in touch if you want to understand how the interviewing session fits into the full hiring training and what format works best for your situation.
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