Interviewer and Hiring Manager Training

virtual or in-person training for teams

Looking for something more than just Basic Behavioral Interviewing 101 with legal dos and don’ts?

Are you…

  • …looking to align your hiring teams on what good looks like, raise the bar, and hire even better talent?
  • …trying to reduce bias and improve diversity hiring results?
  • …seeking a faster process, with better conversion from screen to interview to offer to hire?
  • …looking for ways to differentiate yourself and communicate your strong EVP through a better candidate experience that attracts top talent? 

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

Our custom-built interviewing workshops are designed to teach your interviewers, recruiters, and hiring managers how to hire YOUR way.  We consult with you early on to articulate your hiring principles, your diversity point of view, your critical behaviors/competencies, and your process.  Then, when we collaborate with you to build your training, you get something tailored to your hiring goals.

“This training was excellent – customized to our needs and leadership competency model, and highly rated by our hiring managers.  We are now planning to expand the training across all of Europe.”

Head of Recruiting, Russia – PepsiCo

Download Predicting Success Overview

Typical agendas include a focus on…

  • How to evaluate candidates and make hiring decisions aligned to your company’s hiring bar
  • How to set up a quality interview process and ensure you have the right interviewers, focused on the right criteria
  • How to create and leverage valid and reliable best-practice behavioral, situational, problem-solving, and white-board questions to uncover evidence of skills, behaviors, achievements, and motivators – all required to predict success
  • How to create an interview process that’s inclusive and helps you achieve your diversity goals
  • How to make tradeoffs informed by your unique hiring principles (i.e., does pedigree matter?), so that your hiring teams align on your company’s approach to talent
  • How to create a great candidate experience
  • How to leverage great interviewing to attract and sell candidates

We custom-build the training content to align to 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 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), and candidate experience feedback.  The focus groups include calls with executives, hiring managers, recruiters, HRBPs, recent hires/candidates, and recruiting leaders.  This gives us insights we can use to tailor the training so that your hiring teams work on immediately-actionable challenges, and walk away feeling more skilled, more confident, and more aligned as they work to hire the best talent for your company.

We have also built our custom interviewing workshops focused on just tech hiring, or just director+ level hiring, or just sales hiring, or just university hiring.  Contact us if you have a specific need.

After the training, interviewers and hiring managers head back to their desks with easy-to-use guides to help them better understand “what good looks like,” interview, select, and sell. This is not some academic workshop focused on labeling interviewing techniques or behavioral interviewing 101.  It’s very “how to,” but delivered in a smart way that engages even your experienced interviewers and hiring managers.

  • Custom Hiring Principles, outlining YOUR way of thinking about talent
  • Alignment Guide
  • Phone Screen Guide
  • Interviewing Guide
  • Behavior-based (competency) Interview Question Guides, tailored to your culture
  • Avoiding Bias and Legal Checklist
  • Feedback/Decision-Making Guide
  • Selling Guide

Our focus is on training, sure – but almost more importantly, it’s on driving alignment with your hiring teams. When your interviewers, hiring managers, and recruiters are aligned on your hiring principles, your hiring bar and competencies (aka “what good looks like”), your approach to diversity, and your process, you get high-bar hiring, at scale.

We build interview guides and teach a methodology that goes beyond behavioral interviewing 101, because we know your hiring managers are smart, and often not very tolerant of basic training. Our workshops are credibly led by former, successful corporate recruiting leaders who now consult with many of the top hiring teams in the world, and bring fundamental and advanced best practices to your busy hiring teams.

Exercises?  Of course.  We build in opportunities for interviewers to build real questions and good answer themes for soft skill and technical hiring criteria, to practice interviewing and digging for evidence, to define a great candidate experience, and to apply your hiring principles to imperfect candidates.  Participants get to practice what they’re learning, while they’re learning.

Post-training help?  Yes, your interviewers will receive practical tools and guides designed to help them in their next interview.  These are not 12-page forms – these are short, smart, editable guides designed to reinforce the methodology shared in the workshop.  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, select the right interviewers, facilitate the right hiring decisions, and leverage the right techniques to evaluate and sell top talent – this is part of our “making it stick” process.  Most 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 workshop for their recruiters, to teach them how to drive accountability and lead the interviewing 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 the talent you hire, raise the bar on hiring team effectiveness, and raise the bar on candidate experience.

This custom training is designed for teams of 12+ corporate interviewers, hiring managers, recruiters, and HR reps.

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 interviewers and/or 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 in 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

“Excellent!  This is an important component of our plan to achieve our mission, and I’ll be requiring all of my hiring managers to attend this training.  5/5.”

VP/Hiring Manager, Electronic Arts

Who hires us?

EA Games. PepsiCo. Booking. Starbucks. Target. Dolby. Autodesk. Pinterest. Micron. Leading companies around the world choose Recruiting Toolbox as a partner when they’re looking to interview and select the best talent.

Why choose our custom interview training workshop for your hiring teams?

Great interviewing starts with a deep understanding of “what good looks like.” We help you define your hiring standards, and teach your hiring managers to translate their generic job description language into real hiring criteria, and then interview in a way that gathers evidence of performance, attracts and hires diverse talent, and makes hiring decision tradeoffs that align to your hiring principles.

We know that you need to ensure that you communicate your expectations for a fair process, free from biased hiring decisions and supportive of your goals to diversify your teams.  We help companies embed diversity into every aspect of the training – it’s not just a 20-minute module…it’s part of how we define quality, how we align interviewing teams on what good looks like, how we interview, how we build our candidate experience, how we facilitate hiring decisions, and how we make tradeoffs.  We go beyond basics of unconscious bias to widen the aperture, reframe traditional thinking that pedigree is a proxy for performance, and ensure we move away from bias-filled terms like culture fit and high potential.

We consult with you early on to help build out the right screening, interviewing, decision making, and candidate experience processes you need to select and hire the talent you want.

We consult with you early on, leading focus group conversation across exec, recruiting, HR 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 challenges, and ensure the training is branded and delivered in a way that maps to your culture and existing people programs.

Our focus is on training – but just as importantly, it’s on driving alignment with your hiring teams. When your interviewers, hiring managers and recruiters are aligned on your hiring principles, your hiring bar and behaviors/competencies (aka “what good looks like”), your approach to diversity, and your process, you get high-bar hiring, at scale.

Your interviewers will receive practical guides designed to help them in their next interview. These are not 12-page forms – these are short, smart, editable guides designed to reinforce the methodology shared in the workshop.

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 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.

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 use these new behaviors/competencies and move away from poorly defined terms like “culture fit”, how do we deploy the interview guides so that hiring teams are focused, how do we drive adoption of these new processes?  We can help.

We want to create client independence, not dependence.  So, we 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.  Companies like Booking and EA Games have trained hundreds of interviewers with their own internal trainers after engaging us to train their trainers.

About ½ of our interview training clients hire us to deliver a custom Talent Advisor workshop for their recruiters, to teach them how to drive accountability and lead the interviewing process post-training, so that the lessons learned become the norm.  Learn more here.

“5/5!  We plan to deploy this training to every single interviewer in our tech org.  It really highlighted how much we can improve what we’re doing and helped to get us all aligned on what good looks like.”

Head of Tech Recruiting, Booking.com

“Excellent!  This is an important component of our plan to achieve our mission, and I’ll be requiring all of my hiring managers to attend this training.  5/5.”

VP/Hiring Manager, Electronic Arts

“5/5!  I am recommending this class to all the interviewing members on our team.  Well presented…easy to understand and great training material…great content that I am anxious to apply.”

Hiring Manager, Micron

“Feedback was great – professional, entertaining and respectful of their intelligence and time.”

Recruiting Director, Amazon.com

“5/5! I can leave today and immediately implement these strategies and tools.  Exactly what I needed.  I would definitely recommend this to my peers.”

Tech Hiring Manager, Starbucks

“Their team helped to drive excellence in interviewing, and has made a direct impact on the quality of talent we hire. Even our CEO has commented on the elevation of the talent bar.”

Recruiting Director, Yahoo!

Learn about how we embed diversity into your custom interview training.

Next Steps

Download the Predicting
Success Overview

Download

Download the Interviewing
Diagnostic Tool

Download

Check Out Our Free
Hiring Manager Resources

Explore

Contact Us About Custom
Interviewer Training

Contact Us

Frequently Asked Questions

To be honest, if you’re seeking an inexpensive 1- or 2-hour lunch and learn overview on basic behavioral interviewing techniques, we’re probably not a good match, as you can find free resources online or hire an HR Generalist or general trainer to deliver a quick overview program that teaches people to ask “tell me about a time” questions.

The Predicting Success program leverages behavioral interviewing, for sure, but goes well beyond that to deliver an evidence-based interviewing methodology and tools that teach people how to hire against the skills, behaviors/competencies. achievements, and motivators needed to be a success at YOUR company – not just general one-on-one interviewing techniques/questions, but a program that’s custom-built around your hiring bar and criteria, arms your interviewers with questions and answers to help them evaluate past and present performance, and gives you a valid and reliable interviewing process that not only leads to the right tradeoffs/decisions, but generates more diversity and creates a great candidate experience, as well.

A typical workshop will have up to 20 interviewers and/or hiring managers in each workshop, 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 big 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 $45,000.

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 candidate experience, and driving adoption of new interviewing best practices.

Our founder actually co-built and co-led the Bar Raiser program at Amazon, where he worked as head of tech recruiting.  He also built out Amazon’s Making Great Hiring Decisions interview training.  So, yes, we’re very familiar with that program, and have even helped other organizations implement Bar Raiser-like programs in a way that makes sense for their culture.  We’ve also helped an organization implement Google-style Hiring Committees.  In fact, we’ve presented at conferences on the pros and cons of different interviewing and quality control mechanisms – Bar Raisers, Hiring Committees, and Pipeline/University Interview models. You can watch a recorded webinar where John Vlastelica, our founder, talks through pros and cons of different programs used by the big tech companies to keep the bar high and improve hiring decisions here.

Yes.  We also offer scalable, online video-based training (delivered by John Vlastelica, creator of our program, Predicting Success), with 100+ 3-5 minute episodes covering all things interviewing, complete with quizzes and completion measurement tools. Learn more about our online training, hosted by Social Talent. Companies like IBM, Siemens, GSK, 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.

Behavioral Interview Training Workbook for Hiring Managers and Interviewers

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