There’s what a residency applicant looks like on paper, and there’s how a resident performs in a clinical setting. The former isn’t always the best indicator of the latter. That’s where residency interviews come in.
For program directors and faculty members, residency interviews offer the chance to evaluate applicant skills that aren’t typically quantifiable, such as teamwork, professionalism and communication. Interview day assessments can carry considerable weight on rank-order decisions.
That influence is reflected in a 2026 survey of residency programs conducted by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). When asked to identify the factors they consider when selecting applicants to rank, the two most-cited factors—interpersonal skills, followed by interactions with faculty during the interview—are directly measured on interview day.
What qualities do residency programs most commonly look for? And how do they try to assess them? Here’s a closer look.
What residency programs assess during interviews
The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) expects residents to obtain competency in six areas throughout training. The list is patient care; medical knowledge; practice-based learning and improvement; interpersonal and communication skills; professionalism; and systems-based practice.
Residency programs are often looking for applicants to demonstrate potential for proficiency in those buckets. To do that, some residency programs use structured interviews that include behavioral questions about past experiences and situational questions that are commonly framed around a hypothetical.
Chad Tracy, MD, is a clinical professor of urology and directs the urology residency program at University of Iowa (UI) Health Care, which is part of the AMA Health System Member Program that provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
In offering an example of how he might consider competencies in the interview process, Dr. Tracy said an interviewer might ask an applicant to describe a mistake they made. In that instance, he said, the way the interviewee describes their response—a potential indicator of professionalism and patient care skills—was likely to carry more weight than the severity of the error.
"One of the most important things as a resident is to be honest and tell everyone what's going on,” Dr. Tracy said. “One of the worst problems you can run into is somebody who's covering up mistakes. We'd rather know about those so we can identify them and make sure they don't happen again."
How residency applicants can demonstrate skills
For applicants, the mechanics of the residency interview may seem complicated. For residency programs, the aims are rather simple.
“The idea is to try to see if past behavior can predict future behavior,” Dr. Tracy said.
In preparing for interviews, Dr. Tracy recommended that applicants identify three to five qualities they want to emphasize on interview day.
"Look at yourself and figure out what your strongest qualities are and then try to convey those somewhere in your interview through your various answers, because you may not be asked directly for those," Dr. Tracy said.
For behavioral interview questions, an interviewer might ask about a time you encountered a setback, contributed to a successful team, or had to communicate something complicated. Applicants should have examples ready, Dr. Tracy said.
“A successful answer is going to include specifics and lessons learned and hopefully how things changed moving forward,” he said.
Residency applicants should look at each question as an opportunity to provide valuable information that isn’t part of their application materials. This often means that candor can be helpful.
“There can be an instinct to give the safest possible answer, but I view that as a missed opportunity to tell us something about you,” he said. “A generic answer is just one people will forget.”
