How many interviews do candidates undergo at your organization? Is it two, four, or even more? When you’ve entered the territory of five or more interviews to make a hire, you can expect to start losing out on great candidates. Nothing expresses distrust in candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers more than an absurd number of interviews. You may as well hand candidates a flyer that says, “We’re not skilled interviewers, so we’re going to keep doing interviews in the hopes that something shakes loose.”
I understand that hiring is hard, especially when the company wants someone who fits its unique culture. You’ve undoubtedly seen the Hiring For Attitude research showing that not only do 46% of newly hired employees fail within 18 months, but 89% of those hiring failures are the result of attitudes and not a lack of technical skills. Softer issues like attitude, culture fit, and interpersonal skills are significantly more difficult to assess than cut-and-dry technical competencies.
Of course, inconsistency is a large part of the problem. A Leadership IQ study revealed that 62% of HR executives believe their company’s hiring managers are inconsistent in how they interview candidates.
Inconsistency in hiring is one of the biggest culprits behind extended interview processes. When every hiring manager has a different approach, evaluation method, or criteria for making a decision, the result is chaos. One manager might be focused on technical skills, another might care more about personality, while another is worried about “culture fit.” Without alignment, companies resort to endless interviews to gather more data, hoping that the right decision will emerge amidst all the mixed messages.
This lack of consistency leads to two major problems: losing top talent and introducing bias.
First, companies risk losing the best candidates. When candidates have to go through five or more interviews, they question the company’s efficiency and decision-making abilities. High-caliber candidates, especially in competitive markets, have options and don’t want to waste time with organizations that can’t make timely decisions. By the time a company makes an offer, the top candidates may have moved on, leaving the organization with second-tier options.
Second, inconsistency opens the door to unconscious biases. When hiring managers don’t use a structured, consistent approach, they may rely too heavily on gut feelings, first impressions, or subjective interpretations of a candidate’s “fit.” This can lead to poor hiring decisions and even perpetuate systemic biases. The inconsistency also makes it difficult to track and improve the hiring process because there’s no standard baseline to measure performance.
Consistency in the hiring process starts with defining clear criteria for success in the role. Every hiring manager should have a unified understanding of the job requirements and the attitudes, behaviors, and skills necessary to succeed in the company’s culture. It’s not enough to vaguely reference “culture fit”—companies need to break down what that actually means in measurable, observable behaviors.
Structured interviews are one of the best tools for driving consistency. In a structured interview, candidates are asked the same predefined questions, and their responses are evaluated against standardized criteria. This reduces the subjectivity that often creeps into the process and ensures that each candidate is assessed on the same factors. Structured interviews also improve the candidate experience by making the process feel more streamlined and professional.
Another way to ensure consistency is to train hiring managers. While many hiring managers are experts in their fields, they may not be skilled interviewers. Providing training on interviewing techniques, bias reduction, and evaluation methods can help ensure that every candidate is evaluated consistently across the board. This might seem simple, but a report on behavioral interview questions discovered that four out of five hiring managers don’t even notice significant flaws in their interview questions.
It’s also crucial to create feedback loops. After each hire, assess how well the process worked. Did the candidate turn out to be a good fit? What could have been done differently? Companies can build a system that improves over time and produces more consistent, high-quality hires by continually refining the hiring process based on real-world outcomes.
Hiring doesn’t have to be a marathon of endless interviews. Companies can make confident decisions faster and more effectively when they build consistency into their hiring process through structured interviews, clear criteria, and ongoing training. This improves the quality of hires and helps retain top talent by showing candidates that the company values their time and trusts its own ability to make great hiring decisions.
A longtime ERE contributor, Mark Murphy, will speak at the ERE Recruiting Conference on November 13-14, 2024, in Anaheim, CA. His session will focus on how talent acquisition professionals can outperform AI in talent evaluation by maintaining the human touch throughout the interview process.
