A Look Into the Benefits of Standardized Interview Processes

Standardized interview processes are key to improving hiring equity. Through standardized questions, you can reduce unconscious biases while identifying the strongest candidate—not just the one most similar to the interviewer. But there are additional benefits, like relieving hiring teams from inventing hiring processes and ensuring legal compliance while improving the candidate experience. 

Read on to discover how standardized interview processes can benefit your team.

What is a Standardized Interview Process?

During a standardized interview, an interviewer asks a pre-approved set of questions in a specific order. This allows the interviewer to gather and evaluate similar types of information from job candidates consistently. 

Studies have shown that interviews with a higher degree of standardization or structure yield greater results when it comes to reliability and validity. Additionally, structured interviews create less of an adverse impact on the job candidate, meaning that the interview structure did not “work to the disadvantage of members of any race, sex, or ethnic group.”

3 Benefits of the Standardized Interview Process

1. Reduce Hiring Bias

Implementing a standardized interview process minimizes the biases that influence an interviewer’s decision. For example, suppose one job candidate graduated from the same alma mater as you. In that case, you may positively respond to that candidate, intentionally or not, whether or not the candidate is qualified for the open position.

By having applicants respond to standardized interview questions during their interviews, and evaluating them on a pre-approved scale, you allow for objectivity. Your pre-approved questions may differ for each role. But your goal here is consistency.

One way to develop your standardized interview questions is to base them on the job description—asking questions about the needed and nice-to-have skills. Another way is to align your questions with skills tests, creating a mix of behavioral and situational questions to identify the candidate’s required hard and soft skills. By fully understanding what’s needed in the role, you can hire the strongest candidate through thoughtful, predetermined questions.

2. Make Consistent Decisions Faster

Speaking of consistency, not only are you reducing hiring biases with standardized interview processes, but you’re also creating a faster decision-making process, helping you to get jobs filled sooner rather than later. 

By standardizing your interview process, you can improve a critical HR metric—time to hire. Based on recent studies, the global average time to hire for the hospitality industry was 46 days, whereas retail was 25 days. As time to hire is a critical recruiting metric, knowing where to add efficiencies without sacrificing quality can put you ahead of your competition in this job seeker-centric environment.

3. Improve the Candidate’s Experience

Standardizing interview questions also improves the candidate’s experience. By conducting structured interviews, job candidates can feel confident knowing that they were given the same opportunity to showcase themselves as other candidates.

Structured interviews also create more transparency around your hiring processes, especially if you describe your interview process on your website. This can help earn your candidates’ trust early on, motivating applicants to apply again if they didn’t get a particular job while also boosting your organization’s reputation. 

As you review your hiring processes, consider giving yourself a competitive edge by adopting a standardized interview process. Find out how Cangrade’s Structured Interview Guides can help.