You're Hired! How to Structure Your Interviewing Process for Success

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You are hired. How to structure a great interview. The questions to ask to increase the odds of hiring the right person for the job. It's by Zena Wang from the January 2025 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Well, if you're a brand new manager that's not really interviewed that much or a seasoned veteran that has many, many interviews under your belt, I hope this article will shed some light on whether or not you need to look at your process, how you prepare, right, and what questions you ask to increase your chances of selecting the very best person for the position. The article starts off with how to ace the interview process.

The interview is the most critical stage in any hiring process, and it all boils down to being prepared. Asking the wrong questions or not knowing what you want from a candidate can lead to very bad decisions. You might end up hiring and then realize you made the wrong hire and then have to let that person go, someone who doesn't match your needs, and then be forced to waste time and money rehiring. And that's very expensive for organizations.

Not only the time that's invested, but just it's expensive. It's also important to keep in mind that interviewing is a two-way street, right? It's a two-way process, just as you are interviewing the candidate. The candidate's also assessing you. They're assessing the company. They're assessing the underlying values that they feel like you represent coming out of the culture of the company. So they're taking in a lot of things as well, probably more than you are, quite frankly.

So arriving unprepared for an interview can impact how they view your very professionalism. So even if the interviewee is ideal for the role, a poor presentation can deter them from wanting to work for you. All right. So, again, being as prepared as possible. Very, very important. So to avoid these pitfalls, you need to prepare in advance.

That includes getting clear on the role, the responsibilities, and what you're looking for in a candidate, and then crafting very smart questions to ask them, doing your homework, and then doing your homework to be able to answer their questions as well. All right, here's how to get started. Number one, get very clear on the role and responsibilities. It's shocking how many managers are not clear on this going into interviews.

But prepping for an interview starts as early as crafting a very, very good job description. Now, there's many companies that have kind of moved away from the traditional job description. They may list more generic kind of, you know, roles, you know, maybe a roles-based job description, if you will, not very specific on tasks.

But it needs to be as specific as you can about the responsibilities of the role and the skills that are required to perform that role really well, including, and I would put an exclamation point on this, the soft skills that you're hoping that they bring to the team. So you'd start by just writing down the must-haves. You know, these are the things that are kind of non-negotiable. And then going to the nice-to-haves.

And whatever position you're hiring for, this level of detail can give both you and the job applicants more clarity. So once you begin assessing candidates during those interviews, a lot of times you'll learn more about what you're not looking for than what you're looking for, right? So for instance, if you're interviewing for an administrative assistant and you notice a lot of typos in their resume, that level of carelessness may translate into a very less than detail-oriented person.

And that's not a good administrative assistant. So you might learn that. Or you might uncover in the interview that they prefer to work by themselves. And, of course, you're trying to hire someone who is going to be in a very collaborative environment. Well, again, that might be a clue that you need to be careful with this particular candidate. The second thing to get very clear on is creating a clear structure for the interview.

So make sure, whether it's just you in person or if you're on Teams or if there's a panel, whatever it might be, make sure that everyone understands and they follow a structured format. This ensures that every interviewee has consistency in the process, which allows you basically to really root out bias in the process.

If everyone's following the same structure, you ask the questions in the same order, you have the same people perhaps asking the same questions, the interview is going to be much more consistent, much less full of bias, if you will. So as you structure your interview, remember that good questions are open-ended. They require more than a single word response. They encourage elaboration and lots of detail and context, perhaps.

You know, it's the what questions or the how questions or the why questions. They typically elicit much more detail and storytelling, perhaps. And so in what ways would you consider yourself a hard worker versus are you a hard worker? Obviously, you're going to get much more response from them with the previous question. Okay, the article has an interesting format, which I like. It says use the following structures to assess each candidate.

So you start with warm-up questions, then you go to abilities and qualification questions, then behavioral questions, and then workplace alignment questions.

Let's start with the warm-up questions. So you can think that perhaps the interviewee may be a little nervous, a little anxious about the interview. So you might start with just asking everyone, you know, hey, walk me through your background and experience that you feel like is relevant to this particular role that you're interviewing in. And just let them start to talk.

You're going to get a sense of their communication style. You're going to get a sense of how effectively they articulate ideas and, And you'll also see how well they prepared. I mean, this is kind of a, this is pretty much how every interview should start. And so if they haven't prepared for this question, they may not have prepared at all.

So once you do a couple of warm-up questions, then move into the abilities and qualifications questions where they can share what they're great at, what they're so-so at, good at, and then what they need improvement on. So this is kind of the hard skills that they will need to perform well in their particular role.

Now, you can still ask open-ended questions here, but they're going to be focused on their technical abilities and how they've used them in the past to solve problems, perhaps, how they might approach a challenging task in this particular role. You might even have them, you might even ask them about a case study, you know, kind of give them a problem that's a very common problem and just see how they would approach it.

You're kind of analyzing their strategic ability and how they think on their feet, that kind of thing. Sometimes interviews require candidates to actually go out and perform the assessments demonstrating their technical skills. I know that there's a lot of car manufacturers when they hire people to work on a door. Or work on a hood, or work on a tire assembly, they'll actually make you come in and actually do that job, maybe even for a couple of shifts before they'll even hire you.

Again, they're assessing how well you're going to be able to do that technical job when you get hired. Okay, so then you would then move into what's called behavioral questioning. These are essentially role play scenarios, right? They gauge how people will or have to respond in a situation. It's a great way to test soft skills. So we talked about technical skills. This is a good way to test soft skills. So communication or teamwork or adaptability or critical thinking, whatever it might be.

The thing about soft skills that's interesting is that you can't teach them very well. You can teach technical skills, but it's very hard to teach emotional intelligence, for instance. And that's something that I really look for a lot in interviews is emotional intelligence or EQ. So, and as you're listening to their responses, you know, think to yourself, is this someone that I would be comfortable working beside, you know, day in, day out?

Or is this someone that I'm going to dread working for or working with? And if that's someone you're going to dread, then please pass on this particular candidate. Now, behavioral interviews are typically structured in what's called a STAR format, which is S-T-A-R. S and T stands for situation or tactic. The A is action. R is result. So you always ask, what was the situation? What was the action that you took?

And what was the result? So tell me about a time when you've had to collaborate to get a project finished. Tell me what you did specifically, what was the action, and then what was the result. And then you're going to grade them on how well they give you details around that. You can also ask just the opposite. You want to balance the questions. So tell me about a time when you needed to collaborate, but for some reason it didn't work out.

Tell me what you did and what the result of that was. All right, so you can ask them from both perspectives.

And finally, you're going to land on the workplace alignment questions. Essentially, you know, what kind of hire would best complement your team? If you hire someone that has the exact same values with your organization, then you can significantly boost your strategy, your team strategy. You can strengthen employee satisfaction. You reduce turnover, all kinds of benefits from hiring someone that's got a value system that's very analogous to the organization that you work in.

And then finally, to close out a structured interview, keep some time for what they may not have said. So as you wrap up the interview, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would like to mention? Now, this prompt is really the candidate's ultimate blank canvas. They can go anywhere with this. And while this question still falls within a structured interview format, it gives the interview a lot of leeway, a lot of chance to share anything that they want.

So whether you host your interview in person or virtually. Strive for a structured format, peppered with open-ended questions, this will encourage your candidates to share thoughtful responses that will help you gain insights into their skills and their alignment. At the same time, prepare to answer their questions, including the less conventional ones. All right. And so by following this interview framework, you can identify and hopefully onboard the best talent for your team.

I hope that all of you go out and do great interviews from here on out and hire the very best talent you can find. And until next time we meet in the manager lab, do good work.