Eliminate the Structured Interview

Job interviews have become significantly more formulaic and predictable. Employers seem to increasingly favor standardized or structured interviews, in which each applicant is presented with the same questions in the same order, with no variation permitted.

Over the past few years, I have had almost 20 such interviews for faculty positions, all almost exactly identical, as if the questions were read from a script. I was able to prepare my answers ahead of time just by consulting the ad. After I answered each question, the search committees moved on to the next one, with little or no follow-up. Every interview ended with “do you have any questions for us?” but even then there was no sense of conversational give and take.

There are two main reasons employers use structured interviews. One is that they are supposed to level the playing field between candidates, ensuring fairness. They are considered a best practice for the elimination of unconscious biases in interviewing. The other reason is that unstructured or open interviews are lousy predictors of job performance, as research has repeatedly shown.

But neither of these arguments is convincing. The structured interview is based on a flawed conception of fairness as well as a misguided understanding of what a job is. These flat and dehumanizing conversations are just as pointless as they seem to anyone who has been subjected to one. In the interest of genuine fairness and for the sake of healthy workplaces, the structured interview should be eliminated.

Start with the confusion about fairness. The structured interview rests on the assumption that the elimination of the interviewer’s subjective, individual perspective results in greater objectivity and thus less discrimination. But there’s nothing intrinsically fair about making everyone answer the same questions. On the contrary—making everyone answer the same questions goes against the very idea of equity.

Equity is the idea that individuals start in different places and that adjustments must be made to ensure fairness. It’s a worthy and important principle. In an emergency room, it might dictate that patients be treated based on the severity of their condition rather than on when they arrived. In a workplace, it might dictate that employees with physical disabilities be provided with additional resources to allow them to perform the job.

In the case of interviews, equity requires that employers make the effort to meet candidates where they are, so that each candidate can showcase their unique strengths. If a candidate served in the Iraq War before entering academia, for example, it might make more sense to spend more time discussing that experience than it would discussing previous jobs with a candidate who had worked only in academia.

This kind of imbalance in the interview process would hardly be unfair. Indeed, it would be unfair not to give the Iraq veteran a chance to discuss the relevance of her war experience.

It also makes the candidate feel seen and interesting. My structured interviews were exhausting, not because the questions were difficult, but because they were alienating and depressing. Designed to stifle the candidate’s individuality, structured interviews can end up costing candidates a lot in dignity and self-esteem. They are supposed to eliminate emotions from the hiring process, but in reality the candidate may go through intense negative emotions: In my experience, it felt like running a gantlet, in which questions were not real problems to solve, but a string of reminders that I was just one of many faceless cogs.

This brings us to the argument that unstructured interviews are lousy predictors of job performance. That argument assumes that what counts as “performance” is skills and deliverables, rather than the human element of the workplace. But what is a job, really, apart from working with other people? The structured interview neglects what really impacts job performance: the personal attributes of the individuals involved, their commitment to the work and their ability to work with colleagues. These interviews cannot predict how well my co-workers and I will get along, how long I will stay, how dedicated I will feel over time, how the job will challenge me and build my character—all essential elements of successful performance.

Job interviews are more equitable and more informative about what really matters when they are open-ended conversations. And such conversations let applicants evaluate prospective employers, too: Structured interviews give the candidate very little insight into their potential employer. The perfunctory and dreaded “do you have any questions for us?” tells me nothing about why I should want the job. Open interviews, by contrast, take the candidate seriously, as someone who can accept an offer or walk away.

Having unconscious biases is part of the human condition—everyone has them. We should strive to mitigate them in hiring practices, but not at the cost of the candidates’ self-esteem. What should we talk about in open interviews? The job, of course. But the absence of a formula allows the exchange to center on the people and take place in the moment. Is this not the ultimate goal behind our desire to eliminate unconscious bias—to be able to see people as they truly are?