Unstructured Interview: Examples, Advantages & Disadvantages

When it comes to interviewing candidates, choosing the right format is crucial.

Unlike structured interviews with predefined questions, unstructured interviews flow more like informal conversations between the interviewer and the interviewee, with no set questions or patterns.

In this article, we’ll explore the unstructured interview format, its advantages and disadvantages, and help you determine whether it’s the right choice for your organization’s recruitment process.

What is an Unstructured Interview?

An unstructured interview is a type of interview where the interviewer does not adhere to a fixed set of questions. Instead, the conversation is flexible and evolves naturally based on the interviewee's responses. This format allows for a more in-depth exploration of topics as they arise during the discussion.

In a typical interview, the interviewer has a list of standard questions. However, in an unstructured interview, there is no such list, which is why it is also called a non-directive interview. The interviewer must be skilled and experienced, capable of formulating questions on the spot and adapting to the interviewee's answers.

The interview flows like a natural conversation and is generally more focused on qualitative analysis of the interviewee. Since the format lacks any pre-decided important questions, this type of interview might end up taking a significant amount of time before gaining a clear quantitative and qualitative insights into the candidate’s skills.

Examples of an Unstructured Interview Format

Following are some of the few types of an unstructured interview format.

Telephonic Interview

It is usually the first interview during the recruitment process. Through a telephonic interview, hiring managers try to get intuitive information about the candidates to see if they can be a potential hire for their vacancy.

If they do manage to impress the interviewer and make them feel that they are a good match for the job role, they get to the next stage of the face-to-face interview.

Face-to-Face Interview

In this setting, the interviewer and the interviewee sit down for a face-to-face discussion. Since it is an unstructured format, the interviewer doesn’t have any pre-decided questions to be asked to the candidate.

Although the interviewer leads the conversation, the questions are mostly based on the interviewee’s responses.

Sequential Interview

It is a type of face-to-face interview in which multiple interviewers converse with the candidate and form their own opinions based on their responses.

However, they all sit with the candidate one by one, collecting their ideas individually. And, in the end, a decision is made with everyone’s consensus.

Panel Interview

This type of arrangement is similar to the sequential interview, with the only difference being that the different interviewers all sit in the same room at the same time and take turns to ask questions from the candidate.

And, just like in the case of a sequential interview, the decision is made with consensus.

👉 Read more: Recruitment Process - Guide To Hiring Top Talent

Examples of Unstructured Interview Questions

As is apparent, there are no definite questions for an unstructured interview. However, there are some open-ended questions that interviewers may ask the candidates to get a brief about them as well as probes for their next questions.

• Tell me something about yourself
• How have you visualized your career path for the next __ years?
• What are your views on _____?
• What do you prefer doing in your free time?

Advantages of Unstructured Interview

An unstructured interview is the best way to research about topics like social science or humanities. It also works great when used to recruit people for job roles that require subjective analysis, such as art or film critics, political analysts, interior designers, brand strategists, etc. Some of the advantages that an unstructured interview offers are -

• They offer the option to dig deeper into a person’s mind and personality through questions that are probed from the interviewee’s responses.
• This format allows interviewers to lead the conversation in the direction they want. They can ask questions in any manner they want to check if a candidate is a good fit for the job.
• An unstructured interview is one of the least stressful interview formats for the interviewee, mainly because it is focused on understanding the candidates, and their strengths and weaknesses in a better way.
• There are fewer chances of any misunderstanding between the interviewer and the interviewee because both have the chance to unveil different layers of a topic of discussion.

Disadvantages of Unstructured Interview

Every interview format has loopholes, and the unstructured interview format is no different. The main problem with this type of format is that it is least useful for recruiting people for technical jobs such as software developers, software testers, data analysts, service engineers, etc.

Such job roles require a lot of hard skills, that cannot be completely analyzed or evaluated through an unstructured interview. Indeed the format is great for hiring people who require the skill of qualitative analysis in performing their jobs. However, these technical jobs need certain skills and expertise that cannot be uncovered through an unstructured interview.

Some of the disadvantages that this format offers are -

• It isn’t an effective way to interview people for job roles that require more hard skills than soft skills.
• To conduct an unstructured interview, an organization requires an interviewer who is well-trained in this format. He or she should be smart enough to pick up the hints from an interviewee’s responses to dig deeper into their personalities and should be able to ask questions on the spot.
• These interviews are generally a lot more time-consuming as compared to other formats. That’s because the ice-breaking step between the two communicators takes a bit longer than normal.
• An interview format that needs more training and time ought to be more expensive than other formats.
• One of the major drawbacks of this format is that it isn’t a satisfactory parameter to compare two candidates interviewed by two different interviewers. Since there are no set questions, there are no set parameters to judge and compare two different candidates for the same job role.

👉 Read more: 10 Effective Ways to Filter Unqualified Candidates

The Solution

In the beginning, we discussed the names of several types of interviews. Apparently, different interview formats are efficient in different scenarios and in recruiting people for different job roles.

However, the best way to go ahead is with a skill assessment test before conducting an actual face-to-face interview. Using an skill assessment tool like WeCP, you can easily shortlist the talented pool of candidates before you proceed to interview them.

These assessment tools also generate a cumulative evaluation report of all the participants, ranking them based on their performances.

After shortlisting the candidates, you can either choose to go ahead with a structured interview format or a semi-structured interview format, based on the specific role, your company policy, and the skills that you want in your employees.

A structured interview format is one where the interviewer has all the questions that he or she wants the candidate to answer. So, it becomes easier to decide which candidate does the best as per their interview performance.

On the other hand, a semi-structured interview is one where the interviewer has a set of questions and parameters to assess the candidates. Additionally, he or she is also free to ask some more questions impromptu, if and when there is a necessity during the process.

Conclusion

For hiring employees in technical roles, unstructured interviews are not efficient. You can instead opt for structured or semi-structured interview formats. However, before going ahead with a face-to-face interview, it is better to evaluate your applicants on their technical skills through a skill assessment test.

At WeCP, we offer the AI Copilot that generates a skill assessment quiz for all your candidates on any technical topic that you want. The Copilot is designed to evaluate all the responses of all the candidates and score them based on their performance in the test. It also generates an evaluation report that comes in handy to decide which candidates need to be shortlisted to proceed with the interviews.

Want to know more on how WeCP can help you out? Try WeCP for free or Schedule a Call with WeCP Team.