Interviewer and Hiring Manager Training

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.

• 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.

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.