How to be a Successful Hiring Manager

How do you ensure your hiring managers are hiring with a company-first lens, aiming high, championing your diversity goals, and role modeling good hiring decisions for your interviewers? 

Recruiting Toolbox’s License to hire training for hiring managers is custom built to focus on certifying your hiring managers so they hire the right talent for your organization and live up to the high expectations you have of them as leaders and team builders.

It’s designed to go beyond interview training to focus on how to be a great, successful hiring manager at your company.  Our content is focused on how hiring managers can and should play a leadership role around recruiting–role modeling good top of funnel networking, leading mid-funnel interviewing process and hiring decisions, championing diversity, and helping to close top talent.

Is it time we required a license to hire?  Yes!  Read more about this idea on LinkedIn’s Talent Blog.

How to be a Successful Hiring Manager

How do you ensure your hiring managers are hiring with a company-first lens, aiming high, championing your diversity goals, and role modeling good hiring decisions for your interviewers? 

Recruiting Toolbox’s License to hire training for hiring managers is custom built to focus on certifying your hiring managers so they hire the right talent for your organization and live up to the high expectations you have of them as leaders and team builders.

It’s designed to go beyond interview training to focus on how to be a great, successful hiring manager at your company.  Our content is focused on how hiring managers can and should play a leadership role around recruiting–role modeling good top of funnel networking, leading mid-funnel interviewing process and hiring decisions, championing diversity, and helping to close top talent.

License to Hire Training For Hiring Managers

“Engaging, relevant, with real life scenarios.  5/5!”

Hiring Manager who attended our License to Hire Workshop for LinkedIn

Speed

Quality

Diversity

Looking to improve speed, quality, and diversity?
Your Hiring Managers must be great.

Since 2005, we’ve built custom training for 10,000+ hiring managers from leading companies around the world. While our regular interview training includes advanced interviewing techniques, we recognized a need for a 2.0 training specific to hiring managers, focused more on how to be a successful hiring manager at your company. This training is perfect for companies that have either already hired us to deliver core interview training, or who already have internal interviewing training, and want to raise the bar on hiring manager capabilities.

New People Hiring New People: Hiring managers getting hired and then quickly being asked to hire for their new teams at your company, before they’re even acclimated to your approach to diversity, the role of the hiring manager as leader and partner, the kinds of trade-offs you want them to make – or not make – when leading hiring decisions.

Onboarding New Hiring Managers: To learn your company’s specific hiring principles, competency model, interview process, and more, so that they don’t just copy/paste what they did at their last company when hiring for your teams.

What’s covered in Recruiting Toolbox’s
License to Hire For Hiring Managers?

Typical agenda for our live, custom built, 6-9 hour License to Hire Training for Hiring Managers Workshop:

Note: This agenda assumes all hiring managers have already completed a core behavioral interviewing, legal dos and don’ts, bias, and process training.
  • What makes a great hiring manager great at our company? How can I be great? 🙂
  • How can I be a talent magnet to attract and engage top talent?
  • What are the root issues that lead my teams to make false positive and false negative hiring decisions, and how can I avoid those?
  • How can I ensure we hire based on evidence, not biases and proxies for quality? What is our hiring criteria framework, and how do I translate traditional job description language into, fair, objective interview-ready hiring criteria?
  • How can I ensure fair, equitable assessment practices and champion diversity when setting up my interview process, selecting my interview team, and making my hiring decisions?
  • How can I drive alignment on what good looks like with my recruiting partner and my interviewing team?
  • How can I ensure our hiring teams make quality, long-term hiring decisions that are aligned to our company’s hiring principles?
  • How do I leverage great interviewing and storytelling to attract and sell candidates?
  • Where do I need to lead to help us embed a culture of recruiting into our company, where everyone plays a role in getting great talent into our company? How can I be a role model leader around all things talent?

A detailed agenda can be accessed in our License to Hire overview document.

Interviewer / Hiring Manager Training Overview Document Cover
Group of people in a work meeting

Custom Training starts with consulting work.

  • Assume your participants already know the basics of behavioral interviewing, legal dos and don’ts, biases, and process. This workshop is a 2.0 workshop, designed to elevate your hiring manager capabilities and improve speed, quality, and diversity outcomes. So, we start our projects with focus groups and surveys to help identify what expectations we should have of hiring managers as partners to talent acquisition and as talent champions. We also learn about your current process, role expectations, hiring challenges, and leadership opportunities. Then, we collaborate with you to build a License to Hire training agenda that aligns to your talent goals and priorities.
  • We also consult with you early in the project 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. That way, we can be prescriptive in the training, and teach your company-specific approach to hiring, not just generic best practices. Your hiring managers leave the training knowing what’s expected of them and how they can help the company grow with the right talent.

Assess your hiring managers using our Hiring Manager Maturity Model.

Maturity Model Cover

Why invest in License to Hire Training?

  • Because top talent demands great hiring managers.
  • Because great hiring managers get speed, quality, and diversity.
  • Because there’s great risk to your culture and hiring bar if hiring managers don’t  align their approach to hiring to your company-wide hiring philosophy.
  • Because great hiring managers set the bar high and role model great hiring for the rest of your organization.
People Slide-Top Talent

Learn more about our License to Hire Training for Hiring Managers.

Our License to Hire Training for Hiring Managers is led by talented former Corporate Recruiting Leaders from companies like Amazon, Expedia, Starbucks, Yahoo, Disney, 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 thousands of hiring managers. Learn more about our practitioner background and credibility here.

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

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 is practical and actionable.

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 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 License to Hire 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. Usually 6-9 hours of total content.
  • In-person live delivery delivered in 1 day or two half days.
  • Online, pre-recorded training delivered in 3-6 minute videos. Companies like Cisco, HelloFresh, and Booking certify their hiring managers with our online training.

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. This is what LinkedIn hired us to do, for example – we trained an initial batch of hiring managers, and then built a train-the-trainer program to certify their internal trainers, so that they can deliver our License to Hire workshop to their hiring managers going forward.

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

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

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?

LinkedIn. EA Games. PepsiCo. Booking. Starbucks. Yahoo. Target. Dolby. Autodesk. Pinterest. Micron. Bill.com. Deloitte. Culture Amp.  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 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 principles, and teach your hiring managers to translate their generic job description language into real hiring criteria, and then hire in a way that aligns 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 trade-offs.  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, 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 manager teams on roles, expectations, and process. When your 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.

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.

We custom build a custom quiz based on the training content and expectations of their role as leaders to certify your hiring managers with their license to hire.

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 hiring managers to embed our hiring principles into our culture and hiring decision making process, how do we deploy the best practices shared, how do we get them to live the role expectations we have of them, and 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 hiring manager training clients hire us to deliver a custom Talent Advisor workshop for their recruiters, to teach them how to drive accountability and lead the hiring process, so that the lessons learned become the norm.  Learn more here. 

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

Next Steps

Contact Us About License to Hire Training

Contact Us

Download The License to Hire Workshop Overview

Download

Download the Hiring Manager Maturity Model

Download

Frequently Asked Questions

No.  In fact, this isn’t behavioral interview training at all.  We assume your hiring managers are already good at basic interviewing for this workshop.  If interview training is 1.0, this License to Hire workshop is 2.0

A typical workshop will have up to 20 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 most organizations invest over $100,000 in the consulting and training work required to define your hiring bar, build the custom training content, and deliver the training to your teams of hiring managers.

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 hiring managers, evaluating and improving candidate experience, and driving adoption of new hiring 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 on our Bar Raisers resource page here.

Yes.  We also offer scalable, online video-based training (delivered by John Vlastelica, creator of our program), 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.

Related Training

Recruiting Toolbox builds top-rated training to help you and your hiring teams get the speed, quality, diversity, and candidate experience you seek.   

Interviewer Training for Corporate Recruiters and Hiring Managers
Leadership Training for Recruiting Leaders
Diversity Training for Corporate Recruiters
Talent Advisor Training for Corporate Recruiters
Leadership Training for Recruiting Leaders
Diversity Training for Corporate Recruiters