Structured Interviews: Process, Examples and Best Practice

Structured interviews from among the different types of interviews are traditional and widely used by many organisations. It requires the recruitment team to develop a clearly defined purpose for each interview being conducted. So, every candidate is asked the same set of questions, and responses will be assessed using the same criteria. This blog talks about everything you need to know about structured interviews. So, let’s start!

What is a Structured Interview

A structured interview is an interview in which every candidate answers the same predetermined, job-related questions in the same order, and the interviewer scores each answer against a fixed rating scale. It is also called a standardised interview. Neutral prompts, such as asking a candidate to clarify an answer, are acceptable in most designs. Free follow-up questioning moves the interview towards semi-structured.

The questions asked are in a sequence, and no other questions are added to the interview except the ones listed. The meaning of a structured interview lies in its name. It means that the interview questions are organised and structured. With a list of questions, you, as an interviewer, would not lose track of the purpose of the interview and would remain consistent with your queries.

Pro Tip: Google’s re: Work guidance reports that using pre-made, high-quality questions, guides and rubrics saves interviewers 40 minutes per interview on average.

Structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews

Interviews can be conducted in different ways depending on the organisation's hiring needs. The three common types are structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews, each differing in flexibility, question format, and evaluation methods.

Each interview type serves a different purpose. Structured interviews ensure consistency, semi-structured interviews balance flexibility and structure, while unstructured interviews encourage open conversation.

Types of Question formats in a structured interview

The types of structured interviews depend on your job role, position, and the type of knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviours, and other attributes required for the job. Structured interview examples include behavioural and situational interviews. A structured interview contains two types of questions in itself. These types are as follows.

1. Open-Ended questions

In this form of an interview, the questions remain sequential. However, the answers need to be elaborative. The candidate can continue answering until they believe it is all that they want to say for the question asked. The interview allows the candidate to carry on and get to the depth of their answers. If you are looking for a detailed answer, you can ask open-ended questions during the process. 

Example: "Tell me about a time you managed a project with competing deadlines. How did you prioritise your work?"

2. Close-Ended questions

In this form of a structured interview, you ask ‘yes or no’ questions to the candidates. These are point-to-point questions where you do not require elaborative answers from your candidates. 

For instance, you might confirm whether a candidate has the right to work in the country where the role is based.

Example: "Do you hold a valid project management certification?" or "Are you authorised to work in this country?"

These questions save time and keep early-stage screening focused. However, they reveal little about capability or fit on their own.

3. Combination of the two types of structured interviews

Your structured interview is a combination of both open-ended and closed-ended questions. An interview is not based only on closed-ended questions but rather requires more insight about the candidate. Interviewers do not only ask questions but also observe the candidates when they answer the questions. 

Things that they notice include their tone, body language, and confidence. You need to prepare a suitable questionnaire for a structured interview with the right proportions of open-ended and closed-ended questions.

How to Conduct a Structured Interview: Step-by-Step

A structured interview needs preparation for you to carry it out. It is not only a list of questions but is backed by many other processes. Next, we will tell you about the steps that will prepare you for carrying out a structured interview. 

Tip: Make a list of predetermined questions that you can upload or paste into your Applicant Tracking System. It will eventually help you track the questions you ask. 

Step 1: Conduct a Job Analysis

A job analysis consists of a job description and a job specification. In a job analysis, you need to thoroughly study the job post, its requirements, and its processes. You also need to identify the type of candidates suitable for the job. This should include the candidate's knowledge, skills, abilities, and other attributes required to perform the job. Once you know who and for what you are looking for, go to the next step. 

Step 2: Define Your Requirements

Once you know the qualifications and skills of the candidates, along with the job duties they need to perform, jot them down. It will help you match the job and candidate to one another, and it will help you design your interview questions. Moreover, if you get clarity of your requirements, you can prepare job ads accordingly. By writing down the requirements, you can also analyse the behaviours, emotional intelligence, and attitudes required for the job.

Step 3: Create Interview Questions

Design questions while keeping in mind the situational and behavioural assessments of the candidates, too, along with assessing their knowledge and smartness. This will help you add the right amount of probing and competency questions. If you want to test different competencies in the interview, add questions for each competency. 

You can add as many or as few questions as you like. It depends on your requirements and the duration of your interviews, and the number of questions that you would want to add that fulfil your criteria for the structured interview. 

Make sure to get an expert on board who has the knowledge, experience, and skills related to the field of the job. This will help you analyse and evaluate the candidates with greater specificity.

Step 4: Prepare a grading scale

Write the rating scale before the first interview. A five-point scale is a common choice. Describe each point in terms of observable behaviour rather than impressions. This approach is often called a behaviourally anchored rating scale. For each question, describe what a weak, adequate and strong answer looks like. Ask every interviewer to score independently before the panel compares notes. This helps reduce bias in hiring, and you can easily figure out the best candidates based on their scores.

Step 5: Conduct the structured interview

Recruiters need to use online talent acquisition tools such as an Applicant Tracking System, which comes with automated features like interview scheduling that automates the manual scheduling process and sends emails to the candidates, saving valuable time for recruiters. 

Once you're done with the scheduling, carry out the interview and grade the candidates. It is difficult to resist asking random questions but train yourself. Also, get an expert on board to help you understand the answers better. Also, take notes of the main pointers to remember the candidate's answers for later reference. 

Make sure that you do not hurry the process and provide a warm welcome to the candidate so they feel at ease. Train yourself on the attributes you need to possess to carry out an effective interview process.

Structured Interview Example

The following incident illustrates how the structured interview process is executed and the type of questions that might be asked during the interview process: 

Rachel is the hiring manager in an IT startup, and she is looking for the most suitable candidates to fill the marketing position within the organisation. So, prior to conducting the interview forum with the interviewees, Rachel decided to ask specific questions to candidates. 

She decided on the meeting location and scheduled the interviews. Basically, Rachel prepared both kinds of questions, open-ended questions and closed-ended questions, to obtain knowledge about the candidate’s technical skills, experience, and personality. The questions she prepared followed a certain order: 

• "How did you first learn about this opportunity, and what about the role made you want to apply?"
• "Tell me about a marketing campaign you led from brief to launch. What was your process, and what were the results?"
• "How do you use data to inform your marketing decisions? Give me a specific example."
• "Describe a time you had to adapt a campaign strategy mid-execution. What triggered the change and what did you do?"
• "If you discovered that a planned campaign was unlikely to hit its objectives three weeks before launch, what steps would you take?"

Once Rachel was done interviewing the candidates with the same standardised format, she analysed and compared the candidates’ responses to find out the most suitable applicant for the open role.  Eventually, she can choose and hire the right-fit candidate and make the job offer. 

Benefits of a Structured Interview

Structured interviews are more reliable compared to unstructured interviews. There are many benefits of carrying out a structured interview. These benefits are as follows.

1. Reduce bias 

A structured interview is a great way to reduce bias during an interview. Oftentimes, a candidate is a great speaker or looks good. It fascinates the interviewer, and irrespective of many red flags, they hire them. A structured interview provides direction and specifies the questions and their answers. It is easier to choose a candidate based on relevant questions than to get off-track and bring bad hires on board.

2. Higher Credibility 

Structured interviews are more credible and reliable than unstructured interviews. Oftentimes the purpose of the interview is lost during an unstructured interview, and the interviewers can have a random conversation. 

Think, for example, if a candidate you interview has a similar interest in swimming as you do. During the interview, you read out his swimming interview from his resume and then discuss his coach, the club that he goes to, etc. till now, you have gone in the wrong direction, and on the basis of that discussion, you make a hiring decision. 

This not only creates bias but is also less credible. You may not be analysing or evaluating the candidates correctly, but with structured interviews, you have a scoring guide, and you can easily evaluate the candidate's performance by referring to their scores.

3. Encourages diversity 

As we discussed, structured interviews are less biased. This means when you interview candidates from different backgrounds, you can easily pick any candidate with the help of structured interviews. So, if you plan to perform better, a structured interview is your building block.

4. Fits skills-based hiring

Structured interviews suit skills-based hiring because they assess demonstrated ability consistently across many candidates. NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 survey of employers hiring new graduates found that 70﹪ use skills-based hiring and that 87﹪ of those employers apply it at the interview stage. A shared question set and scoring guide also make results easier to compare when several people interview.

Structured Interviews VS Unstructured Interviews

Unstructured interviews have a place. They can put a candidate at ease and show how someone communicates in conversation. As a primary selection tool, however, the research favours structure. A 2022 re-analysis of personnel selection research by Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, ranked structured interviews first among the selection methods examined, with a mean validity of 42 for predicting job performance.

Validity here means the correlation between interview scores and later job performance. The same research shows that validity varies between studies, which is why the design of the questions and the scoring guide matters.

A practical approach is to use a structured interview as the core evaluation and keep unstructured conversation for later stages, such as giving a shortlisted candidate a sense of the team and the role.

Structured Interviews and Technology in 2026

Technology has made it significantly easier to implement and scale structured interviews without increasing recruiter workload.

Applicant Tracking Systems allow recruiters to upload standardised question sets, automate interview scheduling, assign scorecards digitally, and track evaluation data across multiple interviewers. This removes the administrative friction that historically made structured interviews feel labour-intensive.

Use of AI in interviews is growing. A Resume Builder survey of 948 business leaders, conducted in October 2024, found that 24﹪ of companies already had AI conduct the entire interview process. Automated scoring should be audited for bias and reviewed by a person.

The principle remains the same: technology should reduce manual effort and support consistency. Human judgement, guided by a strong rubric, remains at the centre of every good hiring decision.

Conclusion

Structured interviews give hiring teams a repeatable way to compare candidates on the same job-related criteria. The process is straightforward: analyse the job, define what good performance looks like, write questions that test the right competencies, build a scoring guide and run every interview consistently.

Research ranks well-designed structured interviews among the strongest predictors of job performance, although results depend on the quality of the design and the training of interviewers. A documented process also gives organisations a clear record of how each decision was reached, which supports fair and consistent hiring.