Structured interview
A structured interview is a hiring conversation where every candidate is asked the same job-relevant questions in the same order and is scored on the same predefined criteria, producing a more comparable signal than an unstructured chat.
Direct answer
A structured interview is the opposite of "just have a chat and see how it goes." The questions are written in advance, every candidate hears the same set, and the scoring rubric is agreed on before the first interview happens. It matters because decades of industrial-organizational psychology research show structured interviews predict job performance about twice as well as unstructured ones, and they produce a more defensible record when a hiring decision is challenged. Who needs it: anyone hiring more than a handful of people per quarter and anyone screening candidates for a regulated role.
In detail
The mechanism
Structured interviews work because they remove three kinds of noise: (1) which questions got asked, (2) what order they were asked in, and (3) how each answer was rated. The recruiter still does the interviewing, but the variance that comes from "I just forgot to ask the experience question" or "I scored her a 4 because she reminded me of a strong hire" gets damped out. Behaviour-anchored rating scales (BARS) — where each rubric criterion has explicit example answers per score band — are the strongest version of the pattern.
When it applies
Structured interviews are most valuable when (a) the role has clear, repeatable criteria, (b) multiple candidates will be compared, and (c) a written audit of the process matters. They are less valuable for one-off senior hires where the "rubric" really is "does the CEO trust this person." Even then a written rubric helps the CEO articulate the answer.
Common misconceptions
A structured interview is not a robotic Q&A — follow-up questions are not only allowed, they are encouraged, as long as the planned questions all get asked. It is also not the same as a scripted interview where the recruiter reads from a card; the structure lives in the rubric and the question list, not in word-for-word delivery. And structure does not eliminate bias on its own — it reduces process variance, but the question choices and rubric weights themselves still carry whatever judgement went into writing them.
Related concepts
A structured interview is the conceptual parent of the AI first-round interview — an AI agent enforces the structure mechanically. The scoring half of the structure is rubric scoring. The conversation surface (when a voice agent runs it) is voice AI screening. And a structured interview is the defensible substrate underneath any regulator-ready process.
How Vettika handles it
Vettika is structured by construction: the recruiter writes the question list and the rubric, then every candidate gets the same questions plus adaptive follow-ups. The audit log records what was asked, what was answered, and the per-criterion score with a justification quote. See the voice agent page for the question + rubric editor.
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