Want better candidates? Use structured interviews

Quality-of-hire is commonly known as the Holy Grail metric of recruitment. It's obvious why: Everyone likes a single, easy number that indexes the success of an entire strategy. If your candidates are passing probation more than they're not, and contributing high-quality work in an ever-shortening time frame, you're doing things right.

Problem is, of course, that quality-of-hire is difficult to determine. It is a single value judgment, but it is subject to a litany of confounding variables. That's why many companies reverse-engineer a franken-metric from associated datapoints, such as employee engagement, turnover, job performance, what have you. No traditional method of measurement, however, seems to cut the mustard.

Losing before we begin: F2F Interviews

We tend to look at quality-of-hire retrospectively, and fair enough. But if your inputs are broken, your outputs will produce false or misleading information, and it will always be difficult to identify where things are going wrong. Garbage in, garbage out, do the best you can, repeat. That's all we're doing in recruitment, right now: The best we can. We can do better.

Consider the face-to-face interview: A single hiring manager, relying on their gut and their experiences and their best and most-well intentioned assessment of a given candidate. Yes, they may make a good decision, a quality hire, but more often, they'll:

• Inject their own biases into the decision (e.g. this person is like me, so I'm more likely to hire them)
• Take too long to make a decision or interview candidates, potentially losing the best ones (generally through no fault of their own, but due to the glacial pace at which interview processes run)
• Hire the wrong candidates, due to the fact that it's impossible to accurately gauge role suitability and soft skills from an unstructured interview or a CV

The point is this: What good is it attempting to track quality-of-hire if your quality of recruitment process is lacking? How do you control all the variables, and arrive at a single metric that proves, reliably and repeatably, that you're getting the best people for the job?

Structured interviews are the only answer

Aptitude Research has just released a new report on Key Interviewing Trends –?sponsored by Sapia – which compiles research from more than 300 HR and TA leaders. Their (and our) recommendation? A total paradigm shift. Prioritize structured interviews, period.

Why? Just look at the first metric, pictured below: With the structured interview, you're much more likely to improve quality-of-hire. Not only that, you greatly improve the experience your hiring managers have; you get better data from the process; and you give candidates the experience they expect. It's no longer a case of garbage in, garbage out – you've standardized everything, minimized variables, and made life easier for all involved.

"A structured interview standardizes the interview process," the report reads. "The interviewer collects the responses of the candidate and grades them against a scoring system. Asking the same questions in the same order helps interviewers collect similar types of information delivered in a uniform context from interviewees. Candidates are receiving a fair and equitable experience when there is standardization around the process. Companies that use structured interviews are more likely to improve quality of hire, consistency around data, and experiences."

The need for an Ai Smart Interviewer has never been clearer

Frankly, we're astounded by the rate of companies who insist on struggling on with face-to-face interviews, in spite of the overwhelming evidence proving that they just don't work. I/O psychologists have been saying it for years. We get that it's hard to break from the status quo, but there's no question that it's worth it.

After adopting our Smart Interviewer to conduct automated structured interviews:

• Qantas achieved a completion rate of 93%, and more than 90% of its candidates rated the feedback they received post-interview as 'helpful' and 'accurate'
• Wolt saved 800 recruitment hours, interviewed 2,000 candidates, hired 200 team members, and achieved a +51 NPS score from rejected candidates –?all within the first three months
• Woodie's, a hardware store chain in Ireland, increased their ethnic minority hires by 300%, women hires by 150%, and LGBTQI+ hires by 200%

Hard to argue with those numbers. And better still, because their inputs are optimized, each of these companies have a solid and ever-improving idea of their hiring quality.

We'll leave you with Figure 11 from the Key Interviewing Trends report, and a single question: Are you merely doing the best you can?