Interview Training For Hiring Managers

Recruiting Toolbox’s interview training for hiring managers — Predicting Success — is custom built, complete with interview guides, to help your interviewing teams leverage behavioral interviewing and situational interviewing techniques to hire quality, diverse talent, fast.

Hiring managers from these organizations give our workshops rave reviews:

Looking to improve speed, quality, and diversity? We’re here to help.

Since 2005, we’ve built custom behavioral and situational interview training – with interview guides – for hiring managers from startups to global leaders like PepsiCo, Deloitte, Amazon, Autodesk, EA Games, Starbucks, Booking, Nubank, and Pokemon.

Our interviewing workshops are designed to teach your interviewers, recruiters, and hiring managers how to hire YOUR way. This is not a generic, basic behavioral interviewing 101 with legal do’s and don’ts that will bore your smart hiring teams.

Instead, we consult with you early on to help you define your hiring bar, which includes articulating your hiring principles, your diversity point of view, your critical behaviors/competencies, and your process. Then, we collaborate with you to build your training, so we can teach your hiring teams how to hire the right talent for your organization.

Our workshops focus on defining and aligning your hiring teams on your hiring bar, core and advanced candidate evaluation, diversity, interviewing team alignment, legal issues and bias mitigation, quality decision-making, candidate experience, and selling.

What’s covered in Recruiting Toolbox’s Interview Training For Hiring Managers?

Here’s what we typically cover in our 4-8 hour Interview Training for Hiring Managers Workshop:

  • 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 fair 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 make hiring decisions that are aligned to your company’s approach to talent
  • How to create a great candidate experience
  • How to leverage great interviewing and storytelling to attract and sell candidates

A detailed agenda can be accessed in our Interviewer Training For Hiring Managers overview document.

Interviewer / Hiring Manager Training Overview Document Cover

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 one-half to one full day, or virtually, via Zoom, over multiple days, broken into 2.5-hour modules. We also offer asynchronous online hiring manager training courses (with 100+ 3-7 minute pre-recorded videos) that companies like Cisco, Paramount, Upwork, HelloFresh, and IBM have leveraged to upskill their interviewing and hiring teams.

Looking to go beyond core interview training for hiring managers? Check out our License to Hire (How to be a Successful Hiring Manager) Training, our Executive Hiring Manager Training, our Diversity Focused Hiring Manager Training, and our Bar Raisers Training. All of these custom workshops are designed to improve how your hiring teams hire.

Learn more about our Interviewer Training for Hiring Managers.

Our Interviewer Training For Hiring Managers is led by talented former Corporate Recruiting Leaders from companies like Amazon, Expedia, Starbucks, T-Mobile, KPMG, and Marriott. We are experienced consultants and trainers who bring a real-world, practical approach to our clients’ biggest recruiting challenges, and build relationships with clients that last years and years.

Our team has been hired and trusted by world class companies from over 20 countries to train their hiring teams. Learn more about our practitioner background and credibility here.

This custom training is designed for teams of 12+ corporate interviewers and hiring managers.  Recruiters and HR reps are invited to participate, but the primary audience is business leaders who interview.

We conduct focus group calls with your hiring teams before we design your training. This helps us to customize the content to your needs and ensure that the training was practical and actionable.

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 hiring 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.

Download Our Interviewer Training For Hiring Manager Overview

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

  • Live, virtual delivery spread over multiple days in 2.5 hour zooms.
  • In-person live delivery delivered in 1 day or two half days.
  • Online, pre-recorded training delivered in 3-6 minute videos

How do we scale this for larger organizations? If you choose live training, we build a custom train-the-trainer workshop, certify your trainers, and then your internal trainers would deliver ongoing training to help you scale across your org.

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

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

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

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of hiring managers rated the overall
program a 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale
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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. Yahoo. Target. Dolby. Autodesk. Pinterest. Micron. LinkedIn. Bill.com. Deloitte.  Leading companies around the world choose Recruiting Toolbox as a partner when they’re looking to raise the bar on who they hire and how they hire via custom interviewing and hiring manager training.

What can you expect if you engage us?

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.

Our training helps 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 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 the 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 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 your executive team, hiring manager community, recruiting team, diversity team, and HR team so that we 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 goals.

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-hiring bar, 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 embed our hiring principles into our culture and hiring decision making process, 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.

Use our Interviewing Effectiveness Diagnostic Tool to self-evaluate how your hiring teams are interviewing and selecting talent.

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

Companies have moved beyond thinking of diversity as compliance work or just an HR initiative.  Savvy executives and talent leaders want to embed diversity into everything they do, including recruiting.  Our custom interview training covers key issues relating to diverse recruiting practices. Learn more about how these practices are incorporated in this training below:

Would you like to dive deeper into diversity training for your hiring managers? Check out our custom Diversity Hiring Manager Training.

Next Steps

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Interviewer Training

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Diagnostic Tool

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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 $50,000.

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 John Vlastelica 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 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 do! Learn more by downloading our Blended Predicting Success Training Overview PDF 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, Cisco, 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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Interviewer Training for Corporate Recruiters and Hiring Managers
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