Interview process: how to design a hiring process that works

It’s not just about advertising a job and setting up interviews. A well-designed hiring process does so much more than that by creating a way to identify the right skills, assessing candidates fairly, making better hiring decisions, and giving potential candidates a clearer experience of the organisation from the outset.

The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show that there were 707,000 vacancies in the UK in the May to July 2026 period, down by 19,000 (2.7%) from a year ago. It also estimated that, “Vacancies decreased in 9 of the 18 industry sectors in the quarter; the largest decreases were in human health and social work activities (down 5,000 vacancies) and education (down 4,000 vacancies).”

For UK employers, this makes it even more important that hiring decisions are structured around what the business actually needs, and not just which candidates interview best on the day.

Therefore a hiring process should be designed as a business process, not just a set of interviews.

The hiring process is the structured sequence that an organisation implements in order to identify the workforce need, attract and assess candidates, make a hiring decision, and onboard the successful candidate to the organisation. The exact process will vary from organisation to organisation and role to role, but it will usually cover workforce planning, definition of the position, advertising for or sourcing candidates, screening applications, assessments, interviews, selection, pre-employment checks, and the final stage of making an offer.

The best processes are designed backwards, so instead of deciding how many interviews to hold or which assessment technology to use, employers need to know what they need the successful person to deliver and how to assess the evidence of those capabilities.

An efficient hiring process matters in a constrained market. Careerminds conducted a 2025 report of 600 HR professionals across the US, finding that 66.7% of employers had implemented hiring freezes, with 22.1% stopping recruitment across all roles and 44.6% limiting freezes to particular departments or positions. While this is US, and not UK data, it does illustrate the wider pressures on organisations to make every external hire count.

An effective hiring process reduces wasted time, improves consistency across staff, and gives decision-makers better evidence on which to base an appointment. The cost of hiring someone who doesn’t gel in the job goes way beyond a recruitment budget, as it can lead to:

• Lost productivity.
• Additional management time.
• Disruption to teams.
• The cost of recruiting again.

On top of that, a poorly designed process can cause strong candidates to drop out before an organisation reaches the decision stage.

Evidence points to the fact that, although the UK labour market is currently less competitive for job seekers, employers are still struggling to find candidates with the right skills and experience. The CIPD’s Spring 2026 Labour Market Outlook found that 33% of UK employers still had hard-to-fill vacancies, while 12% expected significant difficulties filling vacancies over the following 6 months.

The answer isn’t to make the process longer or more sophisticated, but to ensure that every stage has a real purpose to it.

So ask yourself, “What decision does this stage help us make, and what evidence do we need to collect?” If the answer isn’t clear, it might be worth thinking about either removing that particular stage or altering it so it’s more relevant and is there to move the process forward.

In short, the typical hiring process steps are:

• Identify the hiring need.
• Define the role and success criteria.
• Create the job description and candidate proposition.
• Source and attract candidates.
• Screen applications.
• Assess candidates against defined criteria.
• Carry out interviews.
• Compare evidence and make the hiring decision.
• Complete references and pre-employment checks.
• Make the offer.
• Onboard the successful candidate.

These steps probably won’t be the same for every vacancy. For example, a senior executive position will require more involved assessments and multiple stakeholder conversations, while an operational role will need a much shorter process. The aim of the game is to have the right process to make a reliable decision without adding unnecessary stages.

1. Kick off with the business need

Before compiling the job advert, establish why the role exists and what the organisation needs it to achieve.

• What business problems will this person solve?
• What outcomes should they deliver in the first 12 months?
• Which skills are essential?
• Which skills can be developed?

Having real answers to these questions shows what the organisation needs right now and prevents the common mistake of building a hiring process around an old job description.

2. Define the measurable selection criteria

Turn role requirements into assessable criteria, so for example, instead of putting that a candidate must have “excellent communication skills”, define what good communication looks like and how it can be demonstrated. Criteria could include technical capabilities, relevant experience, problem solving, leadership styles, stakeholder management, or specific behavioural competencies.

3. Choose the correct assessment methods

Not every search for a role will require several interviews or countless amounts of stages. So depending on the position, employers could select from the below:

• Application or CV screening.
• Telephone or video screening.
• Structured interviews.
• Work sample exercises.
• Presentations.
• Technical tests.
• Assessment centres.
• Situational judgement tests.
• Psychometric assessments.
• References.

The key here isn’t the number of methods but their relevance to the position. For example, if the job involves analysing data, a data test would give you stronger evidence than any questions on analytical ability. Or if the role involves presenting to clients, a presentation task is far more likely to give you the information you require than just asking if the candidate considers themselves confident at communicating.

4. Use structured and consistent interviews

A structured interview means giving candidates the same core questions and assessing their responses against agreed criteria. This makes comparisons easier and the evaluation consistent while reducing the risk that interviewers make decisions based on personal impressions or how similar candidates are to themselves.

Interviewers should agree in advance:

• Who will ask which questions.
• What each question is designed to assess.
• What strong evidence looks like.
• How answers will be scored.
• How feedback will be recorded.
• Who has the ultimate decision-making responsibility.

5. Reach a conclusion based on evidence

Once all assessments, tasks, and interviews are complete, those chosen to make the decisions should evaluate the evidence against the stated criteria, instead of allowing the conversation to meander towards who they “liked”.

A scoring framework can help, rating candidates against each essential competency, with room for evidence and comments from each interviewer. This also means there is a paper trail, so it’s easier to identify if assessors can’t fully agree on the final candidate.

To design an effective hiring process, start at the end! That’s to say you need to start with what you want the outcome to be at the finish of the process. So define the objective selection criteria and then choose the minimum number of assessment stages needed to get reliable evidence.

These are the 5 principles that employers should apply:

1. Make it role-specific by avoiding a generic process that applies to every vacancy, regardless of seniority, complexity, or risk.
2. Keep it proportionate as every additional interview, test, or assessment adds more time for candidates, hiring managers, and HR.
3. Ensure assessments are consistent with candidates assessed against the same core requirements, rather than changing the criteria from one interview to another.
4. Assign clear ownership by deciding who takes care of the sourcing, screening, interviewing, assessment, and final decision.
5. Measure the process by tracking metrics such as time-to-hire, the time in each stage, offer acceptance rate, candidate drop-out, and quality of hire.

The hiring process should be reviewed periodically to reveal any issues or bottlenecks. So if it transpires that candidates are dropping out after a particular stage, delve into the reasons why. Or if hiring managers regularly override assessment scores, look to see if the criteria or scoring system is working efficiently.

The hiring process is no stranger to AI as it’s increasingly used to source candidates, summarise applications, and support in screening, assessments, and decision-making. AI can swiftly help employers process large volumes of information and automate repetitive administrative tasks, allowing recruiters and hiring managers to spend more time on the more important decisions.

Research from the Institute of Student Employers revealed that 62% of employers expected to use AI during their recruitment processes, while 70% anticipated increasing their use of automation in selection over the next 5 years.

We all know that AI is here to stay, so maximising its usefulness is essential. But it’s worth pointing out that it shouldn’t be used in the hiring process just because it’s there. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has made recruitment automation a specific regulatory focus, with its 2026 findings identifying concerns around transparency, bias, meaningful human involvement, and using solely automated decisions.

For business leaders, that means asking a few questions before introducing AI:

• What issue will the technology solve?
• What data is it using?
• Is the output reliable and relevant to the role?
• Where is human judgement required?
• Could the system disadvantage certain vulnerable groups?
• How will the organisation monitor the system for bias?
• How will candidates be told that AI is being used?
• How will decisions be reviewed or challenged?

The ICO’s guidance states that if AI is helping with recruitment decisions, organisations should maintain meaningful human involvement. The best approach is to use AI to strengthen a well-designed hiring process, not leave AI to conduct the whole process itself.

There are a few sorts of hiring processes, depending on how your organisation recruits and the type of role that needs to be filled.

Internal hiring uses existing employees to fill vacant roles while supporting internal mobility, succession planning, and retention.

External hiring does the opposite by bringing candidates into the organisation from outside and is most appropriate when new skills or different experience are required.

High-volume hiring is designed for recruiting a large amount of people for the same sort of roles. Automation and standardised assessments can be useful here.

Executive hiring usually involves a more extensive assessment of leadership capabilities, strategic thinking, cultural contribution, and stakeholder management.

Specialist or technical hiring requires a deeper assessment of specific expertise, often through work samples, technical tests, or specialist interviews.

Contingent or temporary hiring is used if the business need is immediate or time-limited so requires a faster, more streamlined process.

Map the current process from the moment a hiring manager requests a vacancy to the point where the successful candidate starts work.

For each stage, record its purpose, who owns it, how long it takes, what information is produced, what decisions are made, where candidates commonly drop out, and whether any stage is duplicated.

Then look for friction.

• Are there too many approval stages?
• Are interviews being repeated because nobody agreed what each one should assess?
• Are hiring managers receiving dozens of CVs without clear screening criteria?
• Are candidates waiting days or weeks for feedback?

The objective here is to remove friction without removing rigour. A hiring process which takes half the time, yet produces poor decisions, isn’t efficient. On the same level, a thorough hiring process, where good candidates drop out halfway through, isn’t effective either. The measure of success is the quality of the hiring decision relative to the time, cost, and candidate experience required to reach it.

The strongest hiring processes aren’t necessarily the ones with the most stages, the newest technology, or the fastest time-to-hire. They’re the ones that give decision-makers better evidence to hire someone who’s worthy and a good culture fit, with less wasted effort.

So ask yourself this, before adding another interview, assessment, or AI tool to your hiring process, “If a stage doesn’t improve the evidence behind our hiring decision, why is it there?”

Careerminds offers a range of services for both employers and employees at all levels of the hiring process and beyond. Find out more by contacting us at the earliest opportunity.