Interviews are a staple of the recruitment process in software engineering. I’ve yet to be recruited for a new job without going through one or, in turn, hire a new member of the team without making sure they’re interviewed by at least one or two future colleagues.

Nonetheless, there seems to be little understanding of how interviews can and should be structured in order to gain the maximum benefit from them.

At the end of the day, we want to select the best candidate i.e. the one who will perform the best on the job. A lot of research has gone into studying interviews and how to best organize them in order for that aim to be achieved. The basic distinction is between structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews. The former follow a fixed script, while the latter are usually free-flowing affairs which can often become just informal chats with no clear guidelines or direction. As can be imagined, the variations in these can lead to dramatically varying outcomes!

As Campion et al., well-known researchers in the field, emphasize in their seminal research which we’ll discuss below, “in the 80-year history of published research on employment interviewing […] few conclusions have been more widely supported than the idea that structuring the interview enhances reliability and validity”. I’ve listed below the 15 points which academic research indicates should be put in place to maximize the utility of interviews.

1. Base the questions on a job analysis
2. Ask the exact same questions of each candidate
3. Limit prompting, follow-up questioning, and elaboration on questions
4. Use better types of questions
5. Use longer interview or larger number of questions
6. Control ancillary information
7. Do not allow questions from the candidate until after the interview
8. Rate each answer or use multiple scales
9. Use detailed anchored rating scales
10. Take detailed notes
11. Use multiple interviewers
12. Use the same interviewer(s) across all candidates
13. Do not discuss candidates or answers between interviews
14. Provide extensive interviewing training
15. Use statistical rather than clinical prediction

That’s quite a long list! I’ll need a few more posts in order to go through them and explain the motivation and research evidence for each, but if you’re impatient to get started a great read would be “A Review of Structure in the Selection Interview” by M. Campion, D. Palmer and J. Campion in Personnel Psychology, 1997. Stay tuned for the next edition — and more importantly, let me know whether you’re interested in a further installment in this series!