Many hiring managers prefer to keep interview conversations free and unplanned, believing this will give them a better sense of a candidate’s potential fit. But according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, structured interviews—i.e., asking candidates the same questions in the same order and evaluating answers according to pre-determined criteria—are more effective. Structured interviews have both more reliability (i.e., different interviewers come to more consistent conclusions using a structured interview) and more validity (structured interviews are better at assessing the actual skills and traits they’re intended to assess, instead of other, less-relevant factors). Structured interviews are also more effective at reducing hiring bias than free-flowing conversations.

For similar reasons, job simulations should play a role in the hiring process. Research has demonstrated that job simulations are more strongly correlated with future job performance than any other type of assessment— including interviews. They also present opportunities for minimizing bias because job simulation products can be evaluated without names attached. (One well-known example of this practice is the way many orchestras have increased the number of female musicians by conducting “blind” auditions in which evaluators can’t see who is playing.) Multiple people should review a job simulation using a standardized rubric, in order to avoid bias. 

If a job simulation isn’t desired,  another option is asking a candidate to submit an example of their previous work that is relevant to the current role. If you go this route, it’s important to clarify what role the candidate had in producing that piece of work. At each step, some members of the hiring team may be tempted to “just speed things up.” But hiring the best talent is too important a task to be rushed. Therefore, you should actively slow down decision-making—and encourage those conducting interviews not to form or voice strong opinions too early, especially before they’ve gone through a structured process to assess each candidate against predetermined criteria.

In a well-structured process, hiring managers still have as much discretion as they need—but not so much wide-ranging and unexamined discretion that their whims, habits, variations in mood from day to day, subconscious biases, and other human idiosyncrasies will prevent them from identifying the candidate best able to fill the role. 

Learn more in our resource, A Guide to Recruiting and Hiring