Structured Interview
An interview format in which all candidates are asked the same pre-defined questions in the same order, and responses are evaluated against a standardised scoring rubric.
A structured interview is designed to make the assessment of candidates as objective and fair as possible. By asking every candidate the same questions and evaluating their answers against the same criteria, structured interviews reduce the influence of interviewer bias, improve consistency, and make it easier to compare candidates meaningfully.
Research consistently shows that structured interviews are significantly more predictive of job performance than unstructured interviews, where interviewers follow their intuition and ask different questions to different candidates. Despite this, many hiring processes remain largely unstructured — driven by the misconception that a "natural" conversation reveals more about a candidate than a scripted one.
For remote hiring, structured interviews are particularly valuable because they are easier to conduct consistently over video than unstructured conversations, and because the lack of in-person dynamics makes standardisation more rather than less important. Interview scorecards documented in an ATS make structured assessment accessible to the entire hiring team regardless of their location.