Interview Styles
There are a number of distinct interview styles commonly used to assess candidates. Most
effective interviewers actually structure their interviews using a combination of these in order to
obtain a broad range of information about a candidate’s past work experience as well as insight
into elements such as their approach to decision-making, their goals and motivations.
The Interview Guides provided in this section for the positions contained in the National
Occupational Standards section of the website utilize a mix of styles.
Regardless of the style being followed and the specific questions being asked, it is important to
remember that a candidate’s culture and where they have been working could impact their
answers and interview performance in a way that may mislead you into dismissing them from
consideration when in fact they could be the best candidate for the job. The Cross Cultural
Interviewing guide in the Document Manager will provide you insight into this interviewing
challenge and assist you in better assessing candidates who come from other countries or
cultures.
The Unstructured Interview
An unstructured interview generally uses very few pre-planned questions and often takes the
form of a conversation more than a structured interview, with the interviewer asking very broad
questions. The objective is to put the candidate at ease and get them talking freely. The key to
using this style is to ensure that you do more listening than talking, which can be a challenge for
inexperienced interviewers. This structure tends to be used more for non-technical positions
where the interviewer does not need to focus on specific technical experience or competencies,
but can focus on getting to know the candidate in a more general way. By allowing candidates
to speak freely within a very general framework, it can provide great insight into what they feel
are the most important elements of their background and what they think is important to the
interviewer / organization.
A common question for opening an interview comes from this interview style. Interviews often
start with the interview asking the candidate to “Tell me a bit more about yourself” or “Please
take the next 5 minutes or so to walk me through your resume and for each job highlighting your
key accomplishments, what you learned and why you left”.
Regardless of the overall interview style being used, this opening to the interview should provide
the interviewer with a number of opportunities to ask follow-up questions and probe deeper into
aspects of a candidate’s background. It is important to make a note of the specific things you
want to question further and wait until the candidate has finished their response. Interrupting
with more questions will sidetrack the first answer and disrupt the flow of the interview, often
resulting in the candidate never completing the ‘resume walk through’.
The main draw back of only following an unstructured interview format is that depending where
the conversation goes, the scheduled interview time may run out with key areas of the
candidate’s background being overlooked or discussed in insufficient detail to make a confident
decision about their suitability for the position. The use of this style exclusively will also lead to
most candidates being asked completely different sets of questions, providing little common
data to use to compare their suitability.
The Structured Interview
A structured interview features a pre-set list of questions that are usually asked of every
candidate in the same order, often in a checklist format. This method increases the consistency
of interviews when a number of candidates are being interviewed. If the structure is very rigid, it
often does not allow the interviewer to ask follow-up or probing questions, potentially resulting in
valuable information or insight being missed.
When an interviewer is using a checklist of questions and clearly is sticking to the script and not
asking any follow-up or probing questions, it can often leave the candidate feeling very
uninspired by the interview and that they are going through a mechanical process to evaluate
only specific experiences, not one where the interviewer / company is actually interested in
them as a person as well.
Most effective interviews follow a structured approach, but include the flexibility for the
interviewer to ask follow-up questions and explore further interesting elements of a candidate’s
answers. The interview will also feature a mix of question types, including conventional
questions such as “what would you say are your 3 main strengths?” and “what is the one
weakness you are working on the hardest to improve?” and behavioural and situational
questions, as described below.
Behavioural Focused Interview
A behavioural focused interview is based on the premise that past performance is the best
predictor of future performance and is designed to solicit specific examples from a candidate’s
experience related to the types of tasks and responsibilities that they will face in the position
they are being interviewed for.
The behavioural focused interview can cover a broad range of topics ranging from familiarity
and experience with various machines and tools to interpersonal and supervisory skills. The
common feature of a behavioural interview question is that it begins with phrases such as “Tell
me about a time when you….”, “Give me an example of….” and “Have you ever had to deal
with….”.
The goal of each question is to have the candidate provide specific examples of their
performance in previous positions in order for the interviewer to determine whether the
performance would be suitable in the position being interviewed for and the organization in
general.
The behavioural focused interview often includes non-behavioural follow-up questions designed
to further explore an answer, such as “Why did you do it that way?” or “Why did you follow those
steps?”. These follow-up questions can be very important if the answer demonstrated a
behaviour or approach that is not consistent with how employees are expected to perform in
your organization. The follow-up will either reinforce that the lack of fit or may provide
clarification that the employee was directed to do it that way but easily could be directed to
perform similar tasks differently in your organization.
The Creating Behavioural Focused Interview Questions guide in the Document Manager will
assist you in developing behavioural focused questions for use in your interviews.
Situational Interviews
Unlike behavioural interviews, which focus on past performance for clues as to how a candidate
will perform in the future, a situational interview relies on a candidate’s intentions as the
predictor of performance.
A situational interview is comprised of hypothetical situations that are very similar to the type of
challenges that a candidate will face if hired for the job they are being interviewed for. The key
component in structuring an effective situational interview is to ensure that the interviewer does
not provide clues into the type of answer that is being sought.
The risk associated with this interview style is that the candidate may know how situations
should be handled based on courses attended or books and articles that have been read. Just
because a candidate can describe how they would handle a situation does not mean that they
have the actual ability to execute the response that they described.
While this insight into a candidate can be very useful, the risks again reinforce the benefit of an
interview format combining the styles described here.
Panel Interviews
A panel interview features multiple interviewers meeting with the candidate at the same time.
Panel interviews are not a common format used in the private sector, but can offer an efficiency
for organizations where there is a desire to have multiple inputs into the hiring decision but a
lack of availability of time to have a candidate have one-on-one interviews with each person.
A typical panel interview follows a fairly structured format with each panel member having predetermined questions to ask. Follow-up questions can be challenging, as panel members may
all want to ask different questions. There is a danger of panel members competing to ask their
follow-up questions and presenting a disorganized or less than professional image of the
company. Panel interviewers need to organized and disciplined to ensure a smooth and
effective interview.
The panel interview can also be a very intimidating situation for a candidate, often leading to
poor interview performance. Unless the job will involve working in similar situations (i.e.
presenting to management committee, supervising a team of employees) where the panel
situation could be valuable, the efficiency achieved through the panel interview may be
eliminated by the reduced insight gained into candidates.