Unstructured interviews reward the loudest candidate and the loudest panelist. This guide gives hiring managers a fixed structure: panel roles and a RACI, shared definitions for competencies and scoring anchors, a page for evidence notes, and a debrief with a recommendation and a sponsor decision box, so every candidate meets the same questions and the same scale.

The sample is a hiring round for a quality assurance lead at Glenmoor Foods, a fictional company: three panelists, five competencies, a 1 to 5 scale and a one-point score gap that triggers discussion. Replace the role criteria and questions, rewrite the anchors with observable behavior, and set the rule that scores are submitted before the debrief.