HR Basics: Patterned Interviews

HR Basics is a series of short courses, designed to highlight what you need to know about a particular human resource management topic. In today’s HR Basics, we explore patterned interviews by looking at the five elements that all great interviews should include.

A patterned Interview is a structured behavior-based and talent-oriented selection tool. Patterned interviews are planned and structured to ensure consistency among candidate experience and interview results. The three types of interview questions we cover in this presentation make up the core of the patterned interview.

The following is a recommended type of patterned interview (of which there are many). The five elements of a patterned interview include: Opening and Overview, Experience Questions, Self-Evaluation Questions, Behavioral Questions, and Closing Dialog. Let’s take a look at each of these areas in a bit more detail to assist you in patterning your next round of interviews.

When you look at each of our three types of interview questions, each elicits elements of talent in candidate responses: Experience questions ask candidates to tell us what they think about their past experiences and education related to the job. Self-evaluation questions ask candidates to hypothesize on how they think and feel about a particular topic. Behavior based questions ask candidates to describe past behavior in terms of job performance.

A patterned interview asks candidates to discuss how they think, feel and their behave, the very definition of talent.