Panel Interview

A panel interview involves multiple interviewers — typically 2 to 5 — simultaneously interviewing one candidate, with each panelist responsible for assessing a specific competency or bringing a specific stakeholder perspective. Its primary advantage over sequential individual interviews is efficiency: the candidate's responses to each question are heard by all panelists simultaneously, enabling immediate shared observation rather than requiring each interviewer to reconstruct their impression from separate interviews with potentially different questions. The most important panel interview design element is panelist preparation: panelists who have not reviewed the candidate's background, have not been assigned specific competencies to assess, and have not agreed on shared scoring criteria default to redundant questioning and impressionistic scoring — producing a panel that takes more of the candidate's time without improving assessment quality.