Structured hiring explained

2 mins, 47 secs read time

Structured hiring is a popular recruitment framework where consistency, fairness and alignment are woven into all stages of the recruitment process. It’s designed to help you effectively assess talent, facilitate hiring team collaboration, improve candidate experience and reduce hiring bias.

Here’s how to create a structured hiring framework that powers your entire candidate recruitment and selection process – helping you achieve the best possible hiring outcomes.

Step 1: Scope the role with intention

The best recruitment process starts with defining the ideal candidate through the business objective of the role. Think about the long-term contribution they will make to your company and map out the core attributes you want to screen for, then define your candidate’s success profile.

Best practices:

• Define your candidate success profile
• Determine qualifications necessary to achieve success in the role
• Stack rank the skills, competencies and experiences needed

Step 2: Prepare for the interview

Now that you’re aligned on core attributes, design an interview process that effectively screens for them. Structured hiring helps you do this efficiently and effectively.

First, populate your interview scorecard with attributes based on the outcomes of the role using an interview scorecard – a key component of this stage of the recruitment process. The interview scorecard communicates which aspects that the hiring team should be looking for, helps them leave feedback and ultimately, make confident hiring decisions using data instead of relying on gut instinct. First time setting up a scorecard? These structured hiring 101 worksheets will help you through the process.

Next, decide what interview questions you will ask to assess soft skills. When it comes to assessing hard skills, consider if you need to add a take-home task stage to the interview plan.

That interview setup will ensure that a deliberate process and consistent rubric is used to assess all candidates fairly and equally.

Best practices:

• Plan less than four interviews total per candidate
• Determine the order of interviews
• Ensure the diversity of your company is reflected in your interview panel
• Choose the right assessment type(s)
• Anonymize any take-home tasks

Step 3: Conduct the interview

Nothing hurts candidate experience faster than an unstructured interview. Structured hiring asks stakeholders to review the plan and ensure everyone is aligned on role requirements, designated focus areas and questions.

Best practices:

• Start by introducing yourself and putting the candidate at ease
• Budget your time well
• Ensure the candidate is speaking 70% of the time
• Consider keeping cameras off to mitigate unconscious bias

Step 4: Make a data-driven hiring decision

Time to review interview feedback and make an informed hiring decision based on data and evidence from your interview process. Your scorecards, take home assessment, interview feedback and other documentation should give you the necessary, unbiased data to identify your superstar candidate.

We highly recommend hosting debriefs with the interview stakeholders at this stage to make a collective hiring decision and identify any nuance with the scorecard feedback.

Best practices:

• Submit interview feedback in a timely manner using interview scorecards
• Ensure candidate feedback is connected to focus areas for the role
• Avoid discussing feedback ahead of submitting a scorecard to avoid hiring bias
• Host debriefs with interview stakeholders to support decision-making

Interested in learning more about how to make confident hiring decisions with structured hiring? Download our guide How to be an effective assessor of talent.

Download our guide