Hiring isn’t an exact science, but it should be. “If you can quickly, predictably bring on the best talent you can solve most business problems. That's basically the best weapon you can have in business," said President and Co-founder of Greenhouse, Jon Stross, in a recent From Day One webinar.

Stross would know. He was once tasked with hiring local editors for Baby Center (a site that reaches over 32 million users per month) in 20 different countries. To do so efficiently and successfully, he and his team perfected a process by which they could “find people, interview them, test their skills and local language, then hire, onboard, and manage them.”

“Hiring is so critical to the success of the business. And yet, [companies] are showing up so poorly in the hiring process. And we said if we could solve that, if we could help companies become great at hiring.”

The interview process in most instances can be messy. Interviewers go in with a résumé and general idea of what they are subjectively looking for but no consistent outline of the ideal employee that fits a certain role. Stross says this often leads to duplicative and biased interview questions and bad candidate experiences.

For structured hiring, Stross says, “the idea that you come up with a shared understanding of what it would take to succeed in this role? What are the characteristics of somebody who will succeed in this role?”

“So you say, okay, we’re going to test these three skills and this one interview, we’re going to test these three behaviors. And so you’re able to come up with a consistent process that every candidate goes through,” Stross said. The idea is to create a consistent, transparent process that the interviewer can repeat with each candidate, and one that the candidate also understands.

To achieve a more ideal hiring experience within the structured hiring model, Greenhouse, Stross's platform, achieves synchronicity between the hiring manager and recruiter by getting them to think about the role they’re filling – job requirements, metrics by which to measure them, people in the company who are already succeeding in the role, and more. Next they develop a "scorecard" to test the candidates capabilities, then structure the stages they'll put the candidates through to test various skills and attributes.

Session moderator Kelly Bourdet, founder of Apparata Media and the former managing editor of CNN Business, pointed out the established culture of hiring and interviewing and how there is some difficulty in navigating that mindset.

“You might have some leader who’s been hiring for 20 years, or somebody who says, 'I have X-ray vision, I can just tell if somebody's good,'” Stross said. To overcome this, they point out the often inordinate amount of time companies spend on recruiting and ask them to spend a little more. “If you’re going to ask for all of your interviewer’s time, asking them to step away from what they’re normally doing, the least you can do is help prepare them.”

He says there’s always resistance to new ideas amongst management but other managers in other departments might be open to it. “Start with the people who go, 'Yeah, this totally makes sense to me,' and you work with them.” Once management sees the benefit, others tend to fall in line.

The other thing that usually helps is when seasoned interviewers see that structured hiring actually makes their job easier. “It’s going to give me exactly what questions to ask? I don’t have to think at all” I can just spend my time focusing on the candidate and not thinking of the next questions?" Stross said.

Though it sounds like a broken record to point out that the professional world is changing, and AI is driving a lot of that change, it remains true. The roles we’re looking for today may last only five years, so the skills and attributes a company is looking for are more along the lines of adaptability – someone who can “roll with the punches.”

Structured hiring can play an important role in shaping the hiring process away from what Stross calls "diffuse, amorphous interviews where people just ask questions about personal tastes." He points to use cases with ChatGPT and other AI, where there are obvious cases, non obvious (but profound) cases, and some "dicey" ones. Given that ChatGPT is adept at writing content, it can be used to write job descriptions, interview questions, and scorecard attributes.

On the bias concern, Stross alludes to the legislation happening in New York and Europe, “You need to be transparent about how you’re making decisions. And the answer is I don’t know, the machine told us. That’s not gonna go over. It's not a great answer, right.”

Stross says that for the most part, when bias slips in it’s not intentional. When making decisions without any sort of criteria, “it’s much easier for the bias to slip in.”

Stross highlights the fact that Greenhouse started with a few hundred employees and now has 10,000, and went from one office to being all over the world. And everywhere you go, he says people invent their own process for everything.

Hiring and managing an office are no different. “What we find is that without structured hiring, things can get messy quickly. And when you get international, each country invents their own thing. Now, obviously, you’re always going to have something unique about each country.” He says that even within Greenhouse their local offices are going to have cultures that are unique to where they are, but there are core values found in every office.

“There is a lot of bedrock that we want to be the same across each place. And so one of the secrets of structured interviewing is that it’s a way to tell your internal employees what you’re all about. What are the values that we care about? You can inculcate the company values in the hiring process.”

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Greenhouse, for sponsoring this webinar.

Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.