Hiring Manager Diversity Training

virtual or in-person training for teams

Looking to take your hiring managers from supporters to champions of diversity when recruiting talent for your company?

We’re here to help. Since 2005, we’ve been building custom hiring manager training for startups and leading companies around the world.

Our custom-built workshops are designed to build skills and confidence in your hiring managers, so that they see recruiting top talent and improving diversity as part of their day jobs, not a favor they do for HR or a compliance requirement.  We begin every training project with focus groups so that we better understand your unique opportunities and challenges, build content that aligns to your goals and role expectations for hiring managers in your recruiting process, and ensure our workshop exercises – small group discussions, paired practice – keep it all super actionable.

Note: We also build complementary interview training and strategic diversity recruiter training for companies.

“Adidas partnered with Recruiting Toolbox to build an innovative program that embeds highly trained interviewers into the hiring process to create a more fair and equitable experience. John V and Carmen H were absolutely amazing thought partners in the journey. So far, we have seen a reduction in our time to fill and an increase in our candidate and hiring manager satisfaction scores. We couldn’t be happier with our selection of Recruiting Toolbox!”

– Director of Talent Acquisition, Adidas

Download Hiring Manager Diversity Overview

Typical agendas include a focus on…

  • What is the diversity opportunity at your company?
  • Your role as a hiring leader in creating a culture around diversity recruiting
    • How to embed D&I in your culture, with a focus on hiring manager leadership in the recruiting process – planning, attracting, interviewing, selection
    • Leveraging the Hiring Manager Maturity Model to assess where you are on the journey to talent champion
  • How to attract, interview, and select the right talent for your company
    • Widening the traditional target candidate profiles to help with diversity
    • Moving from culture-fit to culture-add – and a review of your values and behaviors
    • Moving from pedigree preferences to skills, “distance traveled” and learning agility
    • Mitigating common biases and a refresh on legal dos and don’ts
    • Talking through perceived tradeoffs between diversity, speed, and quality – addressing a preference for “safety” and speed
    • Your role in proactive farming and active hunting for top talent from under-represented groups
    • Taking the right kind of bets on candidates, living your company’s hiring principles
    • Interviewing for inclusion – especially for management-level candidates – and a review of your behavior interview guides
    • Role modeling good hiring decision-making for your team of interviewers
  • Why many D&I recruiting strategies fail, and how you can play a leadership role in supporting and championing diversity at your company
    • Effectively partnering with your recruiter to bring top talent from diverse communities to your company
    • Common signals/metrics that show progress in diversity recruiting

We custom-build the training content to align with your goals, your culture, and development opportunities.  We can deliver the training in-person in your offices over ¾ to 1 full day, or virtually, via a tool like Zoom, over multiple days, broken into 2.5-hour modules.

Our training workshop includes presentation, paired practice, small group question exercises, and small group discussions, all credibly delivered by one of our Senior Consultants, who each have 12+ years of experience in corporate recruiting. We kick off the engagement to build your training with focus groups to learn more about your current state, internal recruiting, interviewing and selection challenges, existing internal best practices, hiring principles and philosophy, “what good looks like” definitions that hold true across all roles (usually, core competencies or behaviors based on your values), diversity challenges, opportunities, and progress. The focus groups include calls with executives, hiring managers, recruiters, diversity leaders, and recruiting leaders. This gives us insights we can use to tailor the training so that your hiring managers work on immediately-actionable challenges, and walk away feeling more skilled, more confident, and more aligned as they work to hire the best talent – while championing diversity – for your company.

  • Hiring Manager Maturity Model with Culture of Recruiting Recommendations
  • Interview guide to evaluate inclusion in leader-level candidates
  • Hiring debrief facilitation questions

Our focus is on training to build skills and confidence, for sure – but almost as importantly, it’s on driving alignment with your hiring managers. When they are aligned on your hiring principles and approach to diversity, your expectations of them as hiring managers, the WHY behind your recruiting process’s focus on fairness, you get quality hiring and more diversity.

Exercises? Of course. We build in opportunities for hiring managers to work in small groups to address common blockers to diversity hiring ROI, to practice new, advanced interview techniques that help to create more fairness for candidates who aren’t a perfect match for an “ideal candidate profile”, to practice changing language used to interrupt biases and generalizations that lead to false-negative hiring decisions in debrief meetings, and more. Participants get to practice what they’re learning, while they’re learning.

Post-training help? Yes, your hiring managers will receive practical tools and guides designed to help them champion diversity. Additionally, we work closely with the HR/recruiting leadership team to recommend post-workshop process changes, including helping recruiters partner better with hiring managers to set up the right interviewing process and facilitate the right hiring decisions – this is part of our “making it stick” process. Some of our clients also want a train-the-trainer session, so that they can deliver more sessions with their own internal trainers. And about ½ hire us to deliver a custom Talent Advisor/Strategic Diversity workshop for their recruiters, to teach them how to drive accountability and lead the recruiting process post-training, so that the lessons learned become the norm.

We’re all about helping you make this more than just a training event…we want this to be part of your overall strategy to raise the bar on hiring team effectiveness and improve diversity recruiting ROI.

This custom training is designed for teams of 12+ corporate hiring managers.  We conduct focus group calls with your hiring teams before we design your training. This helps us to customize the content to your needs.  We get feedback from new hiring managers and very experienced hiring managers that the training was practical, highly relevant, and credibly delivered.

A typical workshop will have up to 20 hiring managers in each workshop, so that we can keep everyone engaged, and keep small-group discussions and exercises small enough so that everyone feels like they’re contributing to your in-person or virtual training.  If you have a team larger than 20 people, we’d deliver multiple sessions.

This training is built for corporate recruiting teams only.  If you work for an agency or RPO firm and you like our approach, or if you’re looking for individual training, you can check out our resources for solo recruiters, agencies, and small teams here.

0%
of hiring managers rated the overall
program a 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale
0%
of hiring managers would recommend
it to their peers

Who hires us?

We’ve built custom hiring manager training for all kinds of companies. EA Games. PepsiCo. Booking. Starbucks. Target. Dolby. Autodesk. Pinterest. Micron. And for diversity-specific hiring manager training, companies like Adidas and Nubank (Brazil) have engaged us.

“I look forward to putting what I learned into practice. Excellent content, flow, and discussion.”

– Hiring Manager, Adidas

“I learned how to apply what I learned in my day to day practices, to make us more inclusive and diverse. And Matt and Annie were well-prepared experts who made space for us all to share and learn in a safe environment.  5/5!”

– Hiring Manager, Nubank

Why choose our custom hiring manager diversity training workshop for your hiring teams?

We consult with you early on, leading focus group conversations across exec, recruiting, HR, diversity, and hiring teams, so that we can custom-build what you need; you guide us as we co-build the training agenda. We directly address your biggest diversity recruiting challenges, and ensure the training is branded and delivered in a way that maps to your culture and diversity goals. We like to begin each training with a framing that shows exactly how this training we’re delivering ties to your overall company and people goals. Some of our clients even include a video from their CEO or CHRO or CDO to explain the WHY for this big investment in manager development.

Our training programs are credibly delivered by former corporate Recruiting Leaders, not generic trainers. We have experience as recruiters, as trainers, as hiring managers, and as HR professionals who understand how to engage smart hiring teams in training, and ensure what we deliver is actionable and tailored to their needs. Learn more about our team.

What good is training if no one adopts the best practice techniques and processes? You need a plan to “make it stick.” And we’re here to help. After the training has been delivered, we work closely with the HR/recruiting leadership team to recommend changes to ensure the best practices stick. How do we get recruiters and hiring managers to move away from poorly defined terms like “culture fit,” how do we move away from this notion of an ideal candidate profile, how do we drive adoption of these processes? We can help.

We want to create client independence, not dependence.  So, we can build out a trainer’s guide and lead a train-the-trainer session to build your team’s capabilities to redeliver this program across your organization for years to come.

It’s great that you’re making this big investment in your hiring managers.  And of course, your recruiters are welcome to attend this training, as well.  But if you’re looking to make the training stick – and become the new normal across your org – it’s critical that you have accountability mechanisms in place to ensure your hiring managers are leveraging what they learn in the training.  That’s why we also offer a custom 1-2 day strategy diversity recruiting workshop for recruiting teams, as well.  Companies like Louis Vuitton and Hulu leverage us to build out this kind of training.  Learn more here.

Our training delivery options allow you to choose the format that works best for your team:

  • Live, virtual delivery

  • In-person delivery

  • Online, pre-recorded training

  • Train-the-trainer delivery to help you scale internally

Download a PDF of our Training Delivery Overview document to learn more about each of these options.

Download Training Delivery Overview

Hear John Vlastelica explain how we help larger organizations scale training through our Train-the-Trainer program.

Next Steps

Download the
Overview

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Download the Hiring
Manager Maturity Model

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Contact Us About Custom
Diversity Training

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Frequently Asked Questions

Yes.  We spend some time on biases, but focus the majority of our time on helping your hiring managers find, engage, interview, and select talent from under-represented groups.  To be honest, if you’re seeking an inexpensive 1-hour unconscious bias training, we’re not a good match.  If you need a deeper focus on interviewing, however, check out our custom interview training or our online interview training programs.

A typical workshop will have up to 20 hiring managers so that we can keep everyone engaged, and keep small-group scenario groups small enough where everyone feels like they’re contributing in your in-person or virtual training.  If you have a team larger than 20 people, we’d deliver multiple sessions.  If you have a really large team, we’d build a train-the-trainer program, and help you scale delivery with your internal trainers.

We really want and need a team of at least 12 to make this workshop engaging and – frankly – for you to be able to justify the investment you’d make in time and money to work with us to build the custom workshop for you.

Yes, we work with global companies like EA Games, Autodesk, Booking, Micron, and PepsiCo – they all needed us to deliver multiple sessions to hiring teams in offices in different countries.  Sometimes clients will fly their hiring teams into their regional hubs, and our consultants will travel there to deliver the training in-person over 1-2 days.  Sometimes we’ll build out the training for virtual delivery, leveraging a tool like Zoom with virtual breakout rooms, and deliver sessions as modules of 2.5 hours each over several days and time zones.

Sorry, it’s not.  This training is built for corporate hiring manager teams only.  If you like our approach, you can check out some of our free interviewing resources here.

It depends on the scope, but fees start at about $30,000.

Our workshop facilitators are former corporate recruiting leaders who bring real practitioner credibility to the training. We’ve all started out as hands-on recruiters, and have applied the techniques and best practices shared in this workshop to earn the right to be a Talent Advisor to the hiring managers and execs we’ve supported.  Your hiring managers will know – right away – that our team has walked the talk. We’ll bring the confidence – and humility (no big egos here!) – that comes from years of working to improve bad interviewing processes, coaching interviewers, evaluating and improving diversity ROI, and driving adoption of new interviewing best practices.

Yes.  We also offer scalable, online video-based training (delivered by John Vlastelica, creator of our program), with 3-5 minute episodes covering diversity and interviewing for hiring managers, complete with quizzes and completion measurement tools. Learn more about our online training, hosted by Social Talent. Companies like IBM, Cisco, Zalando, and Ferrero have leveraged our online training to upskill their hiring managers.

Sorry, we’re not set up to offer 1:1 training.  We build custom training for teams of 12+ people.  However, you’re welcome to check out some of our free resources – including training-quality recorded webinars, best practice articles, and expert pages.

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