Payroll Compliance
The Affordable Housing Levy on Payroll: What Employers Still Get Wrong
The Housing Levy looks like the simplest line on a Kenyan payslip. The mistakes come from its base, its employer match and the way it now interacts with PAYE.
Most interviews are friendly conversations that measure how much the interviewer liked the candidate. A little structure measures whether they can do the job.
By StepUp HR Experts
A typical interview goes like this: the manager reads the CV, asks about the candidate's background, follows whatever topics come up and finishes with a feeling. If the feeling is good, an offer follows.
The trouble is that the feeling mostly measures rapport. Candidates who are confident, share the interviewer's background or happen to interview well score highly. Candidates who are nervous, quieter or different do not, regardless of whether they could do the job.
Each interviewer also asks different questions, so comparing candidates becomes comparing impressions of different conversations.
A structured interview is not a rigid interrogation. It means three things:
The same core questions for every candidate. Based on what the job actually requires, decided before the interviews start.
Questions about evidence, not opinions. "Tell me about a time you had to recover a payment from a difficult client. What did you do?" tells you far more than "How do you handle difficult clients?"
Scoring against agreed criteria. Each answer is scored on a simple scale, with a short note, immediately after the interview, before discussing it with anyone.
Follow-up questions are still allowed and encouraged. The structure is the backbone, not a script.
Before writing questions, write down what success looks like in the role after six months. For a loan officer, that might be building a portfolio, assessing borrowers accurately and keeping arrears low. For a branch supervisor, it might be running rotas, handling customers and keeping attendance accurate.
Then ask: what has a candidate done before that shows they can do this? Those are your questions.
Use a small panel. Two interviewers, scoring independently, catch more than one. Compare scores after both have written theirs down.
Keep notes on the answers, not the person. "Described recovering three overdue accounts by agreeing payment plans" is useful. "Seemed nice" is not.
Add a short practical task where it fits. A short exercise using a real scenario from the role is often more revealing than any question.
Decide on the bar before you meet anyone. Otherwise the bar moves to fit whoever you liked most.
Give every candidate the same time. Running over with candidates you like is a bias in itself.
Structured interviews are consistently better predictors of job performance than unstructured ones. They are also fairer, because every candidate gets the same chance to show what they can do.
And they leave a record. If a hiring decision is ever questioned, scored answers to the same questions are a far better defence than a recollection of a good conversation.
Structure falls apart when interviews are arranged by email, scores live in notebooks and nobody can find last month's shortlist.
StepUp HRM's recruitment module tracks applications, schedules interviews, records each interviewer's scores and notes against the candidate, and hands successful candidates straight into onboarding. The structure becomes the default rather than something each manager has to remember.
The Housing Levy looks like the simplest line on a Kenyan payslip. The mistakes come from its base, its employer match and the way it now interacts with PAYE.
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