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A RocketLevel guide for restoration owners and the people who interview, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 9-minute read.
Plenty of interviews in this trade go the same way. The candidate shows up, you ask whatever comes to mind, you talk for forty minutes, and you walk out with a feeling. Sometimes the feeling is right. Often it is just whether the person reminded you of someone you liked. Then a month later you are surprised when the friendly hire cannot document a job or shows up late.
The fix is structure. A structured interview means you decide the questions before anyone walks in, ask every candidate for a role the same core questions, and score the answers the same way. Structure makes candidates comparable to each other instead of to your mood, cuts the bias that creeps in when you wing it, and keeps you listening for what the job requires instead of what happens to be charming.
When you ask each candidate different questions, you have nothing to compare. One person got the easy questions, another got grilled, and the decision comes down to who you vibed with. Same questions, scored the same way, turns a hiring decision into something closer to a measurement. You are no longer asking "who did I like more," you are asking "who answered the documentation question better," and that is a question with a real answer.
It also matters if a hire is ever challenged. Consistent, job-related questions asked of every candidate are the practice the EEOC guidance linked below points toward for fair hiring. The moment your questions wander into someone's family, their age, or their church, you have both a legal problem and a worse interview.
Keep it human and conversational, with the same set of questions and the same scoring sheet running underneath for everyone, every time.
The way you phrase a question changes whether the answer tells you anything.
Past-behavior questions beat hypotheticals. "Tell me about a time a homeowner was furious when you arrived" pulls a real story from a real job. "What would you do if a homeowner was furious" pulls a rehearsed answer about what the person thinks you want to hear. People can imagine being great. Past behavior is the closest thing you have to a track record. The phrasing is simple: start with "tell me about a time" or "walk me through a time," not "would you" or "how would you."
Situational questions earn their place for judgment, not history. A pure hypothetical is weak, but a well-built situational question is useful when you want to test judgment on something the candidate may not have hit yet. "You are alone on site, the equipment count does not match the work order, and the customer is asking when you will be done. Walk me through your next moves." It asks them to reason through a real tradeoff out loud, which tells you far more than asking them to imagine being wonderful. Use these to probe how someone thinks, and use past-behavior questions to find out what they have actually done.
Skip the trivia and the riddles. Brain-teasers and gotcha questions measure nothing about restoration work. So does "what is your greatest weakness." Every minute spent on a question that does not tie to a real outcome is a minute you did not spend learning whether the person can do the job.
Every question should map to something you're going to score. If a question doesn't connect to an outcome on your scorecard, cut it.