Structured and Unstructured Interviews

Interviewing potential candidates is a beginning of the employee selection process. An interview is a procedure designed to obtain information from a person through oral responses to oral inquiries. There are 3 ways to classify selection interview, which is a selection procedure designed to predict the applicants’ future job performance or capabilities based on applicants' responses to the interviewers’ inquiries; that is the structure of the interview, the contents of the interview and company’s administration of the interview. There are two types of interview structure that is structured interview and unstructured interview. Structured interviews are pre-planned, standardised and, pre-formatted questions to be asked that is relevant or related to the position offered, whilst an unstructured interviews are unplanned, unformatted and versatile questions, that most of the time non-related or relevant to the position, which can be an effective conversation icebreaker. The ways content interviews are designed are to have insights of the candidates as to how they will perform at work, hence the type of interview that will normally be executed are situational, behavioural, job-related and stress interviews. Question asked during a situational interview are describing the candidate’s behaviour and resolution when they encountered a certain situation by giving them a problematic or complex scenario. Behavioural interview differs slightly from situational interview whereby the interviewer questioned the candidate on how the candidate reacted to a certain situation in the past. A job-related question is when the interviewer asks the candidate about relevant past work experiences and job scopes. Some interviewers will do a stress interview on their candidates, whereby the interviewers will aim to make the candidates uncomfortable and occasionally ask non-job related, inappropriate and rude questions in order to find out on the candidates stress tolerance. Lastly is how the company administer the interview, as different companies has different methods of administering the interview; some conduct one-on-one or by a panel of interviewers, sequentially or all at once, phone or computerized interview. A structured interview is more valid than unstructured interview because the contents of the structured interview are more related to the job offered as the interviewers generally ask all candidates the same or similar questions; hence this will cause the interviews to be more consistent, reliable, enhances job relatedness and reduces any bias or discrimination. It can also help those who do not have interviewing experience or who may feel uncomfortable doing interviews to conduct effective interviews.