The Structured Interview: Method Beats Gut Feeling
Twelve meta-analyses agree: how an interview is structured matters more to its reliability than any other factor. Yet organizations apply, on average, only a fraction of the best practices research has identified.
The job interview has been, for over a century, the most widely used selection tool in the world — and one of the most studied. Twelve separate meta-analyses, spanning more than twenty years of research, converge on the same conclusion: its form, structured or not, makes more of a difference to its reliability than any other factor.
A Synthesis of Two Decades of Research
This is what Julia Levashina, Christopher Hartwell, Frederick Morgeson, and Michael Campion bring together in a landmark review published in Personnel Psychology, synthesizing two decades of work on interview structure (Levashina, Hartwell, Morgeson & Campion, 2014, Personnel Psychology, 67(1), 241-293).
The authors identify up to eighteen possible structuring elements — identical questions for every candidate, a predefined scoring grid, evaluator training, among others — but observe that, in practice, organizations combine on average only about half a dozen of them. The gap between what research recommends and what's actually applied in the field remains, even today, well documented.
Structuring Doesn't Mean Rigidifying
Structuring an interview doesn't mean turning it into a rigid interrogation. It means ensuring every candidate is evaluated on the same dimensions, with the same reference points, so that comparisons between profiles rest on stable criteria rather than an impression formed in the moment.
This consistency is what makes a judgment defensible after the fact — including if a candidate disputes a decision, or when the recruiter revisits their own hiring choice six months later.
Clarentia's Position
A tool that helps prepare and document this structure — the same criteria set at every stage, the same points evaluated for every candidate on a given role — doesn't replace the human interview: it extends its methodological rigor. This is the spirit in which Clarentia designs interview support: the structure stops depending on the recruiter's memory or the mood of the day, while the decision stays theirs.
Cited Source
Levashina, J., Hartwell, C. J., Morgeson, F. P., & Campion, M. A. (2014). The structured employment interview: Narrative and quantitative review of the research literature. Personnel Psychology, 67(1), 241-293.