[vasco]

Good interviewers have the candidate feel like it's open ended by asking open ended questions that still tick the boxes they need to tick. Meaning the interviewer has a structure and a series of things to make sure to get information about, but to a casual listener of 3 different interviews, they might not even be able to piece out what those questions are, because you can make it fully contextual to the person.

With a bit of luck and skill you can get through a whole interview and take all your notes and the candidate doesn't even feel when you switch from one question to the other. Start open ended, make sure you can tick the boxes you have to tick from your questionnaire and dig in the threads you need to dig. Some people aren't good at doing this and they need to be more led by the interviewer, in those cases you can easily "adjust down" and be more explicit, but this way you get the best of both worlds.

Standardized notes with specific topics as well as the opportunity for people to tell you about what _they_ think was interesting about those situations, which is hard to predict from just a questionnaire.