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Here is a small experiment. Ask two partners who just interviewed the same candidate what they thought. One will rave about her poise. The other will worry she talked too much. They watched the same person for forty minutes and walked out with two different people in their heads. That gap is not a personality quirk. It is the predictable result of an unstructured interview, and it is the reason your best hires and your worst hires can feel, at the time, exactly the same.
Most firms hire by conversation. You chat, you get a feeling, you compare notes over lunch. It works often enough that nobody questions it. But "often enough" hides a lot of expensive misses. Structured interviewing is the fix, and it is far less corporate than it sounds. Below are the questions practitioners actually ask about it, with plain answers.
What is a structured interview really
A structured interview means every candidate for a role gets the same core questions, in the same order, evaluated against the same written standard. That is the whole idea. You are not banning follow-up questions or turning the room into an interrogation. You are making sure the assistant you interview at nine and the one you interview at two are measured against each other and not against your mood.
The opposite, the free-flowing chat, feels more human and predicts performance worse. When the questions drift, you end up comparing how much you liked people rather than how well they would do the work. Structure narrows that drift without draining the warmth out of the room.
Tip. Write your questions before you post the job, not the night before the first interview. If you cannot name what good looks like in advance, you will invent it on the fly to match whoever you already liked.
Does this work for a firm of five people
It works better at five than at five hundred. A big firm can absorb a bad hire in a large team. When you are five people, a mismatched legal assistant is a quarter of your support capacity, and the cost of getting it wrong lands on everyone by Friday. You do not have an HR department to catch the error, so the discipline has to live in the process instead.
You also do not need software or a committee. You need one page of questions, a simple way to score, and the willingness to use them the same way twice. If you have thought about what the job post actually promises, you are most of the way to knowing what to test for.
How do we build a scoring guide without HR
Start from the work, not from adjectives. "Detail-oriented" is not measurable. "Catches a wrong limitation date on a draft" is. For each question, write down what a weak answer, an adequate answer, and a strong answer sound like, then score on a short scale.
| Score | What it means | Example for a filing-error question |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weak | Blames others, no method to catch mistakes |
| 2 | Adequate | Names a reasonable step, some ownership |
| 3 | Strong | Concrete example, checks in place, learned from it |
Three levels is plenty. Each interviewer scores independently before anyone speaks, so the loud partner does not anchor the room. Then you compare numbers and talk about the gaps. The conversation you were going to have anyway becomes evidence based instead of vibes based.
Which questions actually predict performance
Two kinds do the heavy lifting. Behavioural questions ask what someone actually did: "Tell me about a time a lawyer gave you an unrealistic deadline. What did you do?" Situational questions pose a scenario from your real work: "A client calls upset that their disbursements are higher than quoted. Walk me through your next ten minutes."
Both beat the tired favourites. "What is your greatest weakness" rewards people who have rehearsed a tidy answer. Give a candidate a small, realistic task instead, a short intake note to summarize or a calendar of court dates to spot the conflict in, and you learn more in five minutes than in an hour of self-description.
Hire for what people can show you, not for how comfortable they make you feel in the room. A working rule for small firms
How do we stay compliant and reduce bias
Human rights law across the provinces limits what you can ask. Questions about age, family plans, religion, disability, or where someone is "originally from" are off the table, however friendly the intent. A shared question sheet protects you here almost automatically: if it is not a question you would ask everyone about the job, it does not go on the page, and it does not get asked.
Structure also blunts the quieter bias, the pull toward the candidate who reminds you of yourself. Independent scoring against a written standard makes it harder to wave someone through on charm or wave someone off on a mismatched hunch. Keep your completed score sheets for a reasonable period. If a hiring decision is ever questioned, a consistent record of job-related questions is the defence you want to have. When you check your provincial obligations, do it against a current source rather than memory, since the rules differ by jurisdiction.
Note. Consistency is not sameness of people. The goal is to give very different candidates a fair, identical shot at showing they can do the job, and then to hire the one who actually can.
Where to start next week
Pick your next open role. Write five questions, two behavioural, two situational, one short task. Sketch the three-level scale for each. Tell every interviewer to score alone before the debrief. That is a structured interview, and you can build it on a single page. If you later want the notes, scores, and job posts to live in one place alongside the rest of your hiring and people work, a system like A1 CMS can hold them, but the discipline is what does the work. The gut feel that split those two partners at the top does not disappear. You just stop letting it decide alone.
