What Is An Interview Guide?

An interview guide is a document that contains the information and best practices interviewers need to conduct successful hiring interviews. It should cover every part of the interview process, including the questions, rating-specific criteria, and details about the interview workflow. Interview guides are typically developed as part of a structured interview process. 

Learn what an interviewing guide looks like, who uses them, why they’re beneficial, and how to build an interview guide. If you want to see an example, we’ve included an interview guide sample at the end to help get you started.

What Are Interview Guides?

According to Monster, an interview guide saves employers money in the interview process by finding the right candidates faster and easier and improves interview skills by minimizing the amount of decisions that are based on unconscious bias (i.e. gut feelings, first impressions, etc.). 

Typically, they are created by the HR or hiring team and provided to interviewers as part of the interview training process.

An interview guide can also be referred to as an interviewing guide, interviewing guidelines, or an interviewer guide.

Interview guides are the roadmap to ensure every interview conducted for a particular position is consistent and focused. It goes beyond outlining the interview questions — it should cover rules and policies, evaluation, and much more. Interview guides also document the process and give interviewers something to stay accountable to.

Why Are Interview Guides Important

There are multiple benefits to using an interview guide versus a traditional interview approach:

What Are the Components of an Interview Guide?

In a structured interview process, an interview guide is created after the required skills and competencies are identified using a job analysis, the question set is created and evaluated, the rating guide, selection, and assessment criteria are confirmed, and the interview format and workflow are planned. This is because the information from all these components is included in the interview guide.

Every interview guide is unique. The complete interview guide will depend on your organization and position. It can include any or all of the following details:

• Interview type (panel, one-on-one, etc.)
• Interview format (hybrid, in-person, remote, etc.)
• Interviewers and their roles 
• Structured interview guidelines
• Organizational policies
• Note-taking and documentation
• Job description
  
  • Core competencies
  • Organizational context
• Interview logistics
  • Candidate communication
  • Interview scheduling protocols 
  • Interview workflow
• Accessibility accommodations when applicable
• Interview questions (including probing or follow-up questions)
• Interview rubric or rating scorecard
• Timelimits and interview parameters
• Introduction and conclusion checklists

This list may seem like a lot, but being precise is beneficial when it comes to interview guides. The more information you provide interviewers in writing, the less ambiguity there will be.

What Makes a Good Interview Guide?

The best interview guide would provide a framework for interviewers to conduct effective structured interviews. It should serve as a tool to facilitate productive conversations and help interviewers gather valuable data to make merit-based hiring decisions. 

Here are some key elements that make a good interview guide.

Provides clear directions and objectives 

Everyone knows what they are doing, what their specific role is, and what the desired outcome of the interview is.

Sets interviewers up to offer a positive candidate experience

It should set the tone about how candidates are to be treated and ensure every candidate is comfortable and has an adequate opportunity to showcase themselves.

Captures legal and ethical considerations

Interviewers should be able to read the guide, know the rules around ethical guidelines, and understand the repercussions if they don’t follow the standardized process.

Makes it easier to conduct structured interviews

An interview guide only works if people use it. If it’s not easy for interviewers to follow, standardization can suffer. This is where digital interview guides can be especially helpful.

How To Create an Interview Guide - 10 Key Steps

Before you start designing an interview guide, revisit the job requisition to ensure everything you’re doing is aligned. Once you’ve created a guide for a position in a certain department, developing an interview guide for other roles in that department will be easier.

Here’s how to make an interview guide.

Pre-Interview Planning

In order to put this document together, your team has to do some of the groundwork of planning and organizing a structured interview process. Even if you try to create a draft interview guide, you won’t get far without the information from a job analysis.

This involves: 

• Conducting a job analysis
• Confirming the skills and competencies
• Writing the job description
• Selecting, testing, and confirming questions
• Developing associated rating and evaluation guides
• Choosing the interview format and interviewers
• Panel planning
• Interview workflow

Working collaboratively with an Industrial and Organizational (I/O) psychologist while you conduct the job analysis can help you identify the key competencies required for the position. I/O psychologists study and assess dynamics in the workplace and apply that research to identify solutions to problems that improve the well-being and performance of organizations and their employees (American Psychological Association).

In addition to creating the interview questions themselves, you’ll also need to anticipate and develop probing and follow-up questions and include them in the interview guide so they can be made available to all candidates in the process.

All these elements ensure candidates undergo an accurate and identical assessment. After finalizing as many items in the above list as possible, move to the next step.

2. Define the Role and Core Competencies

First, review the job description and identify the essential skills, knowledge, and behavioral traits you believe new hires will need to succeed in the role. Collaborate closely with hiring managers and team leads to confirm which competencies they value most from new hires. These will form the foundation of the interview questions in your guide. 

3. Determine the Interview Format

Decide whether the interview will be conducted in person, virtually, asynchronously, or as part of a panel. The format you choose will determine the flow of questions and who asks them.

4. Write Standardized, Job-Relevant Questions

Create high-quality, open-ended questions that directly evaluate the core competencies. Collaborate with team leads to determine what interview questions to ask for each unique job posting. While questions should be specific to the type of job, there are some that may be relevant to multiple roles, or any role within your company.

Examples:

• “Tell me about a time you had to deliver a project under a tight deadline. What did you prioritize?”
• “How do you handle disagreements with a team member over how to approach a task?”

5. Establish a Consistent Scoring Rubric

Create a clear and objective rating scale (1 to 5 being the most common) for each question. Provide interviewers using the rubric with sample responses or benchmarks for what “poor,” “average,” and “excellent” answers might look or sound like. This strategy enhances rating consistency and reliability while reducing subjective biases.

6. Add Instructions and Evaluation Guidelines

Include a brief but detailed introduction at the top of the guide for interviews that contains the following elements:

Include space for notes and final impressions to help streamline the post-interview debrief.

7. Assembling the Interview Guide

Put all the elements in the order they will be used. The interview guide introduction should start with the basic information: details related to the job and the interview logistics itself (who, where, when, what to say before and after, etc.). Then include the questions — in the correct order — and the evaluation details. Finally, it’s the interview checklist and any relevant organizational policies.

8. Training and Distribution

Once the interview guide is complete, before you use it you should have it validated by an I/O psychologist. They will tell you if your interview guide is effective and in line with best practices, and help mitigate the impact of bias in your interviews.

Here’s what I/O psychologists look for in your interview guides.

Once their feedback is incorporated, gather your interviewers for training and interview practice. Distribute the interview guide and allow interviewers to go through and ask follow-up questions. Don’t skip this step! Training interviewers on using the interview guide is equally as important as creating the guide.

Often, interviewers will receive a training guide alongside their interview guide. According to Document 360, having training manuals, like interview guides or training guides, can also, “prevents employees from churning, which means you don’t have to bear the cost of hiring lots of new employees and bringing them up to speed.”

9. Pilot the Guide and Make Revisions

Test your interview guide format before standardizing it across your hiring process. Deploy is with a small group of candidates, then collect and review feedback from interviewers about flow, clarity, and effectiveness. Then, iterate the process.

10. Track Data to Determine Operational Impact

Because structured interview guides are designed to improve your hiring processes, you should see impacts across your organization. Once your interview guide is in use, start tracking how it influences broader hiring and organizational outcomes. Review candidate and interviewer-level data to identify trends, bottlenecks, or inconsistencies. 

Key metrics you may want to monitor include:

• Pass/fail rates per question or competency (for scales, this may mean assigning a minimum score)
• Reliability of ratings across interviewers
• Time-to-hire improvements after implementing the guide
• Quality-of-hire indicators, such as onboarding success, retention rates, promotion rates, and and employee performance reviews

Example: If candidates who score highly in soft-skill categories like team work capabilities perform well post-hire, you may want to adjust your scoring weights in your interview guide’s rubric to reflect its importance.