Types of structured interviews When creating a set of questions that will be used in a structured interview, it is approached to two of the most common formats – situational and behavioral. Both of them have proven to be effective and they lean on the job-related situations in which they can detect the presence of certain qualities.
The situational interview presents a number of situations on the job to the candidates, in which they will describe their behavior and decisions. It is creating a potential future situation and has a goal to project what the applicant might do and so test their knowledge, skills and abilities.
e.g. Your team leader has called in sick, asking you to take charge of the project that is due tomorrow, leaving no precise instructions. Your team is unsure of their tasks and is not taking the situation seriously. What would you do?
Behavioral interview (and the most common one) is focusing on the candidates’ experiences and how they performed in a past situation. This format taps into their past behavior and looks for the competencies they have demonstrated, following a principle that the past behavior is an excellent predictor of the future one.
e.g. Tell us about the situation when you had trouble communicating with your teammates and how you resolved it.

Steps in creating a structured interview Step 1 has to be a job analysis. The gathered information is essential for the rest of the process and can determine its success. Results of a job analysis should give you a very clear image of the position and the team around this position, and so precise expectations from the candidates regarding their expertise, skills, abilities and potentials.

The next step is to define all of the expectations. In order to know what to evaluate and how, you would need to know what that exactly is. This means to determine and describe every criteria. On some occasions, it can be useful to separate competencies by their priority and decide which ones are a must and which ones can be secondary. When we know what we are searching for, we can move on to creating the interview questions. In this step, the goal is to create questions that will provide information about all of the criteria from our list. Both of the formats we have mentioned (situational and behavioral) can be used here and one question can evaluate one or more competencies. You can as well categorize them according to the requirements you are assessing, but what is more important is to create a list, find a position for every question, and stick to the determined flow. Specifying the evaluation criteria is our fourth step. In order to establish a completely objective assessment, it is very important to create a scoring system and your very own grading scale. The scale can be the same for each criteria, or it can vary depending on their compatibility. You just need to have a clear grade for bad, average and outstanding abilities. What might help here is to write down some examples for each grade and so make a distinction between them. The next time you are in doubt whether to give a 7 or an 8, just check your examples. And the last step, preparing for and conducting a structured interview. Every rule, guideline and step should be documented and available during an interview. If there are several people in the interview, all of them should understand the process and follow it. The key is to avoid taking notes on the subjective feeling and assessments of the answers, but rather writing the answer’s main points and facts

Conclusion There are many advantages of using structured interviews, such as effectiveness, consistency, objectiveness, accuracy. The benefits can also reflect the potential disadvantages of the process, if not formed correctly, such as cold and impersonal interviews, different forms of biases, wrong results of the measurement. This is why structured interviews should be, if possible, conducted by an experienced professional, or very carefully and in detail planned and executed.