Part of the hr playbooks cluster. This is educational, operational guidance that connects to the wider site — the employee lifecycle, employer operations, metrics and templates.
Adapt the criteria and questions to each role.
Why it matters
Structured interviews are fairer and more predictive, and they make decisions defensible. A shared play means every interviewer assesses the same things the same way.
It directly supports quality of hire and candidate experience.
Key concepts
- Role-relevant, structured questions.
- Scorecards and defined criteria.
- Evidence over impression.
- A consistent decision step.
Operational framework
- Agree criteria and questions before interviews.
- Brief interviewers on structure and relevance.
- Run the interview and score against criteria.
- Capture evidence for each rating.
- Decide from the documented evidence.
Common challenges
- Unstructured, interviewer-dependent interviews.
- Scoring from memory.
- Drifting off role-relevant topics.
- Deciding on impression.
Best practices
- Standardise questions and scoring per role.
- Document evidence at the time.
- Keep questions role-relevant.
- Discuss split or close decisions.
Common mistakes
- Every interviewer freestyling.
- No evidence behind scores.
- Letting one answer decide.
- Inconsistent criteria.
Measure this with the quality of hire metric, put it into practice with the interview evaluation template, and run it as a system via hiring forecasting.
Export, edit and share documents
The documents, policies and templates this involves can be exported, edited, signed, stored and shared as PDFs with the HELPERG PDF Editor.
Free, printable HR resources
Practical, ungated resources to put this into action — no signup.