Smart Interview Professional

The solution works best when making candidate selections towards the end of the hiring process.  It helps you run structured interviews to select the right candidates to progress through to the offer stage, and delivers interviewer analytics to continually improve interviewing outcomes. 

If you have a high volume of candidates, and need to create a shortlist to progress further to second-stage interviews, our Smart Interview on Demand solution is ideal.  Candidates record responses to your interview questions at their own convenience, and our solution automates scoring to enable you to review thousands of candidates in minutes.

We recommend structured interviews.  A structured interview is a consistent and standardized process where all candidates are asked the same predetermined questions in the same order. Each candidate’s responses are also scored with the same pre-determined rating scale.  In other words, they have structure built into the way the interview is conduced and the way the candidate is cored.  

By comparison, unstructured interviews are more conversational, where the goal is to get to know the person and ask questions about the role as you go. The questions asked may be tailored to the specific candidate based on their background or experience, and because this style of interview is so relaxed, no two interviews for the same job are the same.

Structured interviews are consistent, repeatable and scalable.  So when they are executed correctly you will reduce bias and improve comparability between candidates.  They are scientifically proven to be one of the most predictive tools for assessing job performance – five times more effective at predicting job performance than unstructured interviews.  They are also considerably more efficient.  Research shows it takes between three and four unstructured interviews to match the accuracy of data from a single structured interview.

An interview guide is a roadmap for you or your team, which contains all the structure and elements of your interview process. The guide keeps on your track during every interview and is essential to running a structured interview.  Without the interview guide it’s easy to lose focus, skip important questions, or spend too much time on less relevant details.  It also keeps the scoring criteria front of mind. 

With Smart Interview Professional, it’s easy to create the interview guide.  We recommend competencies and skills to assess in the interview using just a few pieces of information, such as the job title.  Once you’ve selected the important things to evaluate in the interview, you’re able to select questions to measure these competencies and skills from our library of questions.  We have mapped science-backed interview questions to more than 800 job roles and also have an option to use AI to read a job description and align the appropriate interview questions with that. In addition, you can add questions specific to your company values.   

Within the interview guide, Smart Interview Professional also has a scoring framework and guide for each question, plus the ability to record notes and scores alongside each question.

Structured interviews is among the strongest predictors of future job success, but other objective methods of assessment – like personality, skills and cognitive ability assessments – are still essential to give you additional relevant data to use to find the best candidates in your applicant pool.