Interview guide: a template for a structured job interview

An interview guide is the plan for a job interview: which questions every candidate gets, and how the answers will be assessed. It makes the interview structured, and structured interviews are among the best tools we have for predicting who will do a job well. In a large 2022 review of the research, they came out on top of all the selection methods compared.

Below is a template you can copy and adapt. It is also available as a PDF, with a scoring sheet.

PDFDownload the interview guideTwo pages: the guide with room for notes, and a scoring sheet

Before the interview: decide what you are looking for

A good guide starts with the criteria, not the questions. Choose four to six things the candidate must be able to do or have done to succeed in the job, and write down what a good answer looks like for each. Every question in the guide should belong to one of the criteria.

The template

The hour, part by part45 to 60 minutes

Opening5 min

Motivation10 min

Competency questions20–25 min

Case10 min

Their questions5–10 min

Closing5 min

Opening5 min

Motivation10 min

Competency questions20–25 min

Case10 min

Their questions5–10 min

Closing5 min

1. Opening (5 minutes)

Introduce yourselves and who is in the interview. Explain how the interview is set up, and that you will take notes as you go.

2. Motivation and background (10 minutes)

• What made you apply for this job?
• Tell me briefly about your current job. What are you most pleased with there?
• What are you looking for in your next job that you miss today?

3. Competency questions (20 to 25 minutes)

One main question per criterion, with follow-up questions. Ask for concrete examples of things the candidate has done before. See examples further down.

4. Practical task or case (10 minutes, optional)

A short task taken from everyday work in the job, for example a problem you have had yourselves. Give every candidate the same task.

5. The candidate's questions (5 to 10 minutes)

The questions a candidate asks often say a lot about what matters to them.

6. Closing (5 minutes)

Explain what happens next, and when the candidate will hear from you. Keep that promise.

Competency-based questions, with examples

A competency-based question asks the candidate to describe a situation they have been in. The answers get more concrete and easier to compare. Many follow up with the STAR model: situation, task, action and result.

Example main questions:

• Collaboration: "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague about how to solve something. What did you do?"
• Delivery: "Tell me about a project that was about to go wrong. What did you do to get it over the line?"
• Customer focus: "Tell me about a customer who was unhappy. How did you handle it?"
• Problem solving: "Describe a problem where you did not know the answer in advance. How did you go about it?"
• Leadership: "Tell me about a time you had to give someone on your team feedback that was hard to hear."
• Learning: "What have you learned in the past year, and how did you go about it?"

Good follow-up questions:

• What was your role?
• What exactly did you do?
• What was the result?
• What would you do differently today?

Questions for common roles

The competencies above fit most jobs. Here are main questions for some roles many companies hire for.

Manager

• "Tell me about a time you took over a team that was not delivering. What did you do first?"
• "How have you followed up someone on your team who underperformed over time?"
• "What unpopular decision have you made, and how did you explain it?"

Salesperson

• "Which deal are you most proud of, and what did you do to win it?"
• "Tell me about a sale you lost. What did you learn from it?"
• "How do you build a pipeline from nothing in a new market?"

Customer service and retail

• "Tell me about a customer you turned from unhappy to happy."
• "What do you do when the queue is long and one customer needs a lot of time?"
• "Tell me about a time you did more for a customer than was expected."

Developer

• "Tell me about a production bug you helped fix. How did you find the cause?"
• "How did you go about it the last time you had to get into a codebase you did not know?"
• "Tell me about a technical disagreement in the team. How did it end?"

Rate the answers on a scale

Use a scale from 1 to 5 for each criterion, and write down in advance what it takes to score 1, 3 and 5. For collaboration, it could look like this:

Collaboration

1

No concrete examples, or examples where the candidate puts the blame on others.

3

One concrete example where their own role is clear and the outcome reasonable.

5

Several concrete examples. The candidate takes responsibility for resolving disagreement and can say what they learned.

Score separately right after the interview, before you talk it over. Otherwise whoever speaks first easily sets the tone for the rest.

What you cannot ask in Norway

Section 30 of the Norwegian Equality and Anti-Discrimination Act says an employer may not obtain information about an applicant's

• pregnancy, adoption or plans to have children
• religion or belief
• ethnicity
• disability
• sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression

The ban also applies in the interview. The Working Environment Act also limits questions about health (section 9-3), and bans questions about political views and trade union membership (section 13-4). There are narrow exceptions, for example when the information is decisive for doing the job. If in doubt, do not ask.

How Vouch writes the interview guide

In Vouch, the interview guide is written from the job's brief and criteria. For each stage of the process, you get three to five key questions and what to look for in the answers. When you book an interview with a candidate in that stage, the guide becomes the meeting notes. The criteria are also rated before the first candidate is read, so you can see where they are too vague. How Vouch sets up the job

Questions and answers

How many questions should an interview guide have?

One main question per criterion, so four to six, plus follow-ups. That fills 20 to 25 minutes. More questions mean shorter answers and less to assess.

What is the difference between a structured and a semi-structured interview?

In a structured interview, everyone gets the same questions in the same order and is rated on the same scale. In a semi-structured interview, the topics are fixed but the interviewer follows the conversation more freely. The template above is structured, with room for follow-up questions.

Should every candidate get the same questions?

Yes. Only then can the answers be compared, and the process becomes fairer for the candidates.

Sources

• Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens (2022): "Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection", Journal of Applied Psychology 107(11). doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
• Equality and Anti-Discrimination Act, section 30, on Lovdata (in Norwegian)
• Working Environment Act, section 13-4, on Lovdata (in Norwegian)

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