Lever - Structured Hiring 101 Guide
Lever - Structured Hiring 101 Guide
Lever - Structured Hiring 101 Guide
Structured
Hiring 101
Your hiring team’s ultimate guide
to leveraging structured interviews
Introduction
The first step in hiring the right talent for your organization is
setting your recruiting team up for success with a structured
hiring process. And there’s no better place to start than with your
interview strategy.
It’s easy to see how hiring teams and stakeholders can quickly
become frustrated with the different aspects of recruiting when
no one is truly aligned—and this couldn’t be more true for your
structured interview approach.
Conclusion............................................................................................................ 19
About Lever.......................................................................................................... 19
Let’s cover:
Structured hiring is a strategy that involves clearly defining a role and its
requirements, including the experiences, attributes, and skills a successful
candidate must have, prior to opening the role. This approach to hiring starts
with the role definition and continues through to the hiring and onboarding
of a candidate.
The core benefits of structured hiring include more fair and inclusive hiring
practices, positive candidate experiences, and more objective, effective
hiring decisions.
The business’s objectives and needs define the role and ideal
1
candidate for the role
These values help hiring teams create a structured interview process that
empowers equitable recruiting practices. Bearing that in mind, let’s take
a look at why this approach to hiring is recommended.
• All candidates are asked the same predetermined questions, in the same order
• All candidates’ responses are evaluated using the same criteria or scale
Your hiring team needs to determine what you’re looking for in your ideal
candidate. What core competencies, skills, and experience would they need
to be successful in the role you’re hiring for?
To answer these types of questions, lean on your job descriptions. You’ll have
already outlined the needs and job requirements, which can help you and
your team establish the skills, behaviors, and competencies you’re looking for.
Your team can leverage the rubric you used to consolidate feedback and
review which candidates you’d like to move forward with into the final hiring
stages. Consider having post-interview meetings slated in your team’s
calendars to review feedback or shortlisted candidates.
PART 1
To avoid misalignment among your team during this step of the blueprint, gather your
team for a role kickoff meeting to determine the ideal candidate based on the role.
This kickoff meeting will help you:
Let’s look at an example of how you might outline a role during a kickoff meeting. If
your team was hiring for a Marketing Manager, your team may define the role like this:
Managing a team of marketing Support Marketing and Sales Proven success managing a team
and creative professionals teams in meeting quarterly lead of marketers and external vendors
and revenue goals
Oversee messaging and Optimize demand generation to Track record of increasing public
positioning of the brand drive sales and conversions via relations and communications
marketing activities for the brand
Develop marketing and Work alongside Customer Success Demonstrated ability with
communication strategies teams to support customer improving pipeline of marketing
marketing and retention qualified leads
The interview
• Get buy-in from all stakeholders for your interview and hiring process
Assessing candidates
Just as your job descriptions tie back to the core objectives of each role,
so too should the criteria you use to assess candidates. When the criteria
are clearly defined and align with the business objectives of hiring for a role,
your team is better equipped to predict a good hire.
This is where your rubric or scorecards come into play. Remember, these
tools are meant to help you assess candidates based on:
• Skills and qualities candidates have as they relate to the core objectives of the role
(versus personal preference)
• Asking the same questions and using the same standardized criteria for every candidate
Candidate experience
Earlier on in this blueprint section, we mentioned that you should have a goal or
goals in mind for each interview, and have those goals mapped out beforehand—
and this is especially true when your interview process has multiple steps or tiers.
Let’s dive in.
• How can we assess for the ‘required’ skills or competencies? In other words,
your team may use assignments, test projects, or references to assess
a candidate’s abilities rather than relying strictly on stand-alone interviews.
• Can the right candidate learn a skill on the job? Hiring based on pre-existing
skills alone can narrow your candidate pool and result in your team turning
away talent that could learn or obtain skills on the job.
Regardless of the number of questions your team asks a candidate, each question should
be related to the role and the competencies you’re looking for. In saying that, there are
typically 3 categories or ‘kinds’ of questions interviewers will ask, which include verification,
behavioral, and situational questions. Here are some examples of each.
Do you have experience with Tell me about a time you used How would you measure the success
Adobe Suite and Figma? Adobe InDesign and Photoshop to of a creative campaign?
complete a project?
Have you managed Can you give me an example of How would you manage a direct report
a remote team? how you managed a remote team who has difficulty meeting deadlines?
of copywriters in your past role?
Are you familiar with How did you optimize your team’s If we asked you to make predictions
Salesforce and Pardot? use of Salesforce and reporting in about our pipeline based on the data
your previous role? found in Salesforce, which metrics or
data points would you use, and why?
The goal in asking each type of question is to gain a better understanding of future
job performance and how a candidate would approach or handle different situations.
While these questions can be hyper-specific based on the role type, make sure
everyone involved in asking these questions has a firm understanding of the role to
assess the candidate’s answers objectively.
As a general rule of thumb, standardizing the questions everyone asks is a good start in
ensuring your interview process is fair and objective. Try passing your questions through
a simple checklist like this one:
Situational and behavioral questions can’t be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’
Questions avoid excessive detail and don’t give too much away
Today, many recruiting teams leverage an array of interview types to assist their
team in evaluating candidates for open roles. Depending on the role you’re hiring
for and how familiar you are with a candidate, your interview process could have
a shallow or in-depth flow.
You’ll want to choose the flow of your process based on what your team of
stakeholders needs to effectively assess each candidate.
This flow above, while not the same for every company, shows how a candidate
interviewing for the role of a Content Marketer may speak with several
stakeholders through 1:1 interviews based on who they’d work closely with.
KEY TAKEAWAY
During 1:1 interviews, stakeholders should ask different sets of questions
to ensure candidates are evaluated from a broader perspective. This means
creating pre-determined questions that each stakeholder would use to assess
each candidate independent of what other stakeholders ask. For example,
a Demand Gen Manager would ask different questions than those asked by
a Director of Communications.
Panel interviews have grown in popularity, especially when hiring teams are
looking to assess candidates based on assignments or test projects that
showcase a candidate’s skills, methods, and mindset. However, panel
interviews can quickly become subjective, so ensure that every candidate
is given the same test project or questions to answer.
This way, stakeholders will all hear the same answers and can ask questions
based on a standardized assignment. If your interview flow requires a skills
test or test project, consider:
• Leaving time for questions that stakeholders can ask after the presentation
KEY TAKEAWAY
The main goal or outcome at this stage is to come to a consensus on which
candidate you’d like to make an offer to, but not all stakeholders will be
equally aligned; indeed, it’s rare that everyone involved mutually agrees on one
candidate. So, let’s take a look at a few jobs-to-be-done for your regroup.
However, if you feel at this point that you or your team are still torn between one
or more candidates, don’t offer the role to someone simply to fill it. Instead, go
back to the drawing board and look at 3 key aspects of your hiring process.
2 Unclear or no feedback
If you find your hiring team stuck on a candidate who feels like the right team
and culture add, but they’re hesitant about certain skills or competencies,
have these discussions during your wrap-up or regroup to ensure you can give
candidates a fair opportunity to further showcase their skills. This could mean:
• Meeting as a team to determine the most-valued competencies or skills, and which ones
the hiring team still needs clarity on
• Creating one more round of interviews (such as an additional panel interview) or skills test
• Setting one stakeholder as the ultimate decision-maker (such as the hiring manager)
Keep in mind that candidates will also expect an answer or some level of
insight into whether they’ve gotten the role, successfully answered your
stakeholders’ questions, or need to provide more information.
• Make them aware of hiring objectives by explaining what the business needs are of each role
• Impress upon each stakeholder the importance of feedback and objective assessments
Let’s look at how you can onboard hiring teams to your structured processes.
To train your hiring teams on how to use your process, consider hosting
something like an all-team training session, or recording a tutorial that can be
watched time and again by various stakeholders. While this is a more informal
approach, training or walking people through your process allows you to help
teams better understand the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind structured hiring in
your organization.
For example, some teams may have to create interview questions themselves
or will have niche questions based on an open role and its requirements. If they
know beforehand how to create structured interview questions, and how to
leverage them, they’ll be prepared to effectively interview and assess candidates.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Don’t forget to train hiring teams on assessment criteria in addition to
interview questions. It’s crucial that everyone involved understands how
your rubrics or scorecards work, why they’re important, and how teams
can use these resources to objectively interview candidates. If planned and
executed effectively, training can happen once and be followed consistently.
• Make notetaking mandatory as part of your scorecards or rubric (such each to have mandatory
feedback fields)
• Encourage interviewers to record facts and answers rather than judgments or personal evaluations
• Ask them to take notes during the interview, not just after; interviewers can notify candidates
that they are taking notes
This means that interviewers should focus on recording feedback around important
answers or details a candidate provides, any concerns or unanswered questions they
have, and any odd or extreme behaviors the interviewer notes about the candidate.
There are a few feedback ‘red flags’ you can encourage interviewers to avoid:
• Providing feedback on subjective criteria, such as noting that the interviewer knows the
candidate from a past company
• Any nervousness or anxiety the candidate presented (especially in panel interviews, where
nervousness should not be an indicator of poor performance)
Everyone involved in hiring at your company, whether it’s at the recruitment stage or
the interview one, should understand the impact that hiring has on the organization.
For hiring teams and, more specifically, recruiting and talent acquisition leads,
measuring how effective your hiring process is can help you optimize every aspect
of your recruiting efforts.
Part of measuring the effectiveness of this process is by monitoring key metrics when
looking at your interview and evaluation processes. For instance, metrics can help you
identify how costly your hiring process is, whether your interview process is creating
time waste, and if you’re making the right hires.
• Time-to-hire
• Time-to-fill
• Quality of hire
• Diversity of candidates
As you hire more employees, keep an eye on these metrics and how they
change each quarter. These data can reveal wins and losses in your hiring
process while helping you pinpoint where, exactly, you could be optimizing
your process. This is especially true for structured interviewing, where
metrics like time-to-hire and quality of hire are particularly important!
About Lever
Lever is a leading Talent Acquisition Suite that makes it easy for talent teams
to reach their hiring goals and to connect companies with top talent. Lever is
the only platform that provides all talent acquisition leaders with complete ATS
and robust CRM capabilities in one product, LeverTRM. The Lever Hire and Lever
Nurture features allow leaders to scale and grow their people pipeline, build
authentic and long-lasting relationships, and source the right people to hire.
Lever Analytics provides customized reports with data visualization, see offers
completed and interview feedback, and more, to inform strategic decisions
between hiring managers and executives alike.
Our platform also enables companies to hire with inclusivity in mind, helping
eliminate any hiring bias. Lever supports the hiring needs of 4,000 companies
around the globe including the teams at Netflix, Atlassian, KPMG, and
McGraw-Hill Education. For more information, visit www.lever.co.