Interview Training for Hiring Managers

Interview training lays the foundation for effective and equitable interviews. HR teams can dramatically improve hiring practices across their organizations by teaching interviewers best practices and proven techniques, how to follow a structured interview process, and topics to avoid. 

While organizations should invest in interview training to provide interviewers from every department, job level, and demographic with the tools and skills necessary to conduct effective and efficient interviews, hiring managers represent a critical audience.

This article explores what interview training for hiring managers entails, why it’s important, and how to develop and deliver interviewer training focused on fairness, compliance, and better hiring outcomes.

What is Interview Training for Hiring Managers?

Interview training for hiring managers is designed to equip supervisors with the skills needed to conduct fair and effective interviews. Often part of a larger recruiter training program that includes courses on creating job descriptions and other steps in the hiring process, interview training focuses on topics like how to structure an interview, the types of questions to ask and avoid, and how to evaluate candidates.

A well-designed program encourages hiring managers to adopt best practices for interviews, which can enhance the candidate experience, improve the quality of hires, reduce the time to hire, and lower hiring costs.

Why Interview Training for Hiring Managers is Essential

Hiring managers directly impact an organization’s recruitment outcomes in many ways, including interviews, and there’s a lot at stake if they get the interview process wrong. 

Bad Hiring Decisions

Consider this. It costs up to 40% of an employee’s base salary to hire someone new and provide them with benefits (Zippia). To put this in perspective, if the employee makes $30,000, it will cost approximately $12,000.

Empowering hiring managers with interview best practices reduces expenses related to hiring and costly turnover if the wrong candidate is selected.

Risk of Bias and Compliance Issues

In a Harris survey of 2,100 hiring managers, 1 in 5 admitted to asking an illegal interview question before they knew better. If a poor interview results in a lawsuit, it can cost the company financially and reputationally.

The best way to support legal defensibility and increase your success ratio is through interview training.

Consider including DEI training in your training program because it gives hiring managers the necessary skills and knowledge to interview properly and reduce the potential for bias. Unfortunately, it often gets skipped.

Who Needs Interview Training (and When)?

Organizations launching a brand new recruiter training program may initially need to provide a mix of courses to various audiences, such as recruiters, hiring managers, and other employees who might be part of a hiring committee, to get everyone up to speed.

Ongoing interview training should include:

• New managers: Most people promoted to management roles have never received interview skills training. Their only experience comes from interviewing for roles themselves.
• Managers hiring for new roles: Even experienced hiring managers can struggle with how to find and evaluate the best candidate for a new role.
• Recalibration after poor hires: HR should analyze situations where the wrong candidate was hired to identify needs for individual or group training to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

How To Design Effective  Interview Training for Managers

Every interview training program is unique because every organization has unique processes, considerations, and policies. The basic goal of interview skills training is to provide interviewers with the information they need to lead or participate in the interview process successfully.

Who’s the Target Audience for Interview Training?

Your answers to these four questions will help you structure interview training for hiring managers or other audiences:

1. What role does the interviewer play in the interview process, and what are they responsible for?

Creating checklists and explaining relevant policies is hard without knowing what you need them to do.

2. What do you want your interviewers to be able to execute independently, correctly, and consistently after interview training?

This might include logistical tasks, such as completing a digital interview scorecard or communicating decisions with candidates.

3. What core topics do you want interviewers to understand the importance of after training?

Foundational topics include candidate experience, hiring bias, structured interviewing, and legal considerations.

4. What interview best practices and techniques do you want to teach your interviewers?

Key concepts might include how to:

• Prepare for an interview
• Build rapport
• Offer different types of accessibility accommodations
• Manage tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language
• Take proper notes
• Manage time
• Listen and rate decisively
• Answer frequently asked questions

What’s the Best Format for Interview Training?

Part of designing interview training for hiring managers and rolling it out across your organization involves determining the best way to deliver the content.

The delivery method of your interviewer training will depend on various factors, including the size and location of your audience, as well as the topics covered. Common approaches to consider include:

• Online, On-Demand Modules: A scalable format that works well for covering the basics, especially when paired with feedback loops to reinforce content.
• Live Training (Virtual or In-Person): An ideal format for discussing more complex topics that require instructor-trainee interaction.
• Simulation-Based Training: Mock interviews and role-playing exercises are great ways to reinforce concepts learned in the classroom.
• Shadowing: This learning-by-observation technique allows a trainee interviewer to observe how a senior or experienced interviewer conducts an interview, with pre- and post-interview discussions.

Regardless of the method, the best recruiter training programs utilize feedback to improve continually. Send a survey after training to collect feedback and determine how often you will update the program (e.g., quarterly, annually).

Reviewing hiring managers’ interview performance can be another way to determine if your interview training is effective. Performance can be measured using interview intelligence tools, or you can monitor other metrics like candidate feedback scores, pass rates, Glassdoor reviews, and quality of hire.

What To Cover in Interview Training

Your interview training program should be unique to your organization and training goals. Here’s a list of things to consider covering in interview training, as well as some ideas on how to deliver this information in the interview training.

Pre and Post-Interview Responsibilities

What is the hiring manager expected to do before and after the interview? Cover tasks in training they may have to complete. Include the directions and details elsewhere (in a training guide) so they can revisit if needed.

For example, a hiring manager may need to be involved in interview scheduling, or a job analysis might need to be done before the interview if it’s a unique position, but after the interview, there’s less work because someone else takes care of notifying the candidates, negotiation, and onboarding. The expectations will differ depending on the role and your organization’s interview process.

How to Conduct Structured Interviews

Since unstructured and semi-structured interviewing is common, most interviewers are used to having a lot of flexibility in interviews, so switching to structured interviewing might be a bigger challenge than they realize.

You’ll have to help interviewers unlearn their habits as they learn how to conduct structured interviews, where they’ll closely follow a pre-determined course of action. Standardization may feel counterintuitive because interviewers can no longer go with the flow and rely on their instincts like they used to, but it will improve hiring outcomes (Forbes).

Whether your organization already conducts structured interviews and you’re providing formal training for the first time, or you’re providing training as part of transitioning from unstructured to structured interviewing, you’ll want to start by emphasizing the ‘why.’ Show participants stats like these to get buy-in:

Provide hiring managers with a sample rating and interview guide, and describe how they will use each in detail. Once they understand the principles, mock interviews are a great tool to practice this interview format.

How to Combat Hiring Bias

Interview skills training for hiring managers should also provide them with strategies to avoid unintentional discrimination in the hiring process.

One approach is to make DEI training mandatory, either in addition to interview training or as part of it. DEI training teaches interviewers about a range of personal biases and how to avoid common pitfalls like making judgments based on intuition or selecting people based on cultural fit (which is a myth, according to TalentRise).

Following a structured interview process closely is also a reliable way for interviewers to treat everyone the same way and assess based on job-relevant competencies.

How To Create a Positive Candidate Experience

Hiring managers play a pivotal part throughout the hiring process, so recruitment training should also cover candidate experience. Explain why it is so important and share tips they can use to make candidates more comfortable while staying within the bounds of the interview process.

Illegal Interview Questions and Practices

Illegal interview questions can land your organization in hot water. Often, they are asked innocently to try to put the candidate at ease, but there are better ways to create a positive candidate experience.

Teach interviewers what to avoid asking or talking about and how to conduct structured interviews.

Structured interviewing is less risky than unstructured interviewing because the questions are all approved in advance and based on core competencies identified in the job analysis. The interview should not be discriminatory if the interviewer follows the guide closely.

Below are some illegal interview topics to highlight in interviewer training, along with some tactics to support interviewers with legal compliance.

How To Evaluate Candidates and Take Notes

A critical component of interview skills training for hiring managers is teaching them best practices for capturing and sharing their opinions about candidates. Poor interview documentation can create issues, especially if someone files a complaint and there are no notes or records of their interview.

Ensure that managers receive training on how to evaluate applicants fairly and consistently. Interview scorecards enable interviewers to objectively assess candidates’ suitability for a position based on predetermined criteria and competencies. 

Additionally, if you don’t already have one, create a policy around interview documentation to outline rules around taking notes, remind interviewers they are discoverable, and prevent people from capturing irrelevant information. Quiz hiring managers on this policy after training them on it.

How To Use the Interview Platform

Give hiring managers all the training and support they need to effectively use your organization’s chosen hiring platform for interviewing. If necessary, illustrate how it integrates with your organization’s applicant tracking system.

Get them comfortable with the digital version of your interview workflow, and make sure they know how to navigate the digital interview guide and how to fill out and submit a candidate scorecard.

There could be a steep learning curve, especially for interviewers uncomfortable with technology. See if the vendor can support you by offering interview platform training or training guides to your hiring managers.

What Is DEI Training?

According to the Association for Talent Development, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training helps “workplaces become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, particularly for employees from underrepresented or historically marginalized communities.”

There are subtypes of DEI training that educate employees in different ways and influence how they behave, including a type specifically focused on hiring and interviewing. This type of DEI training benefits all staff involved in hiring.

In DEI training for hiring, participants learn a variety of things, including (but not limited to):

• All about hiring biases: how we develop them and how they impact hiring decisions
• Where and how different biases can creep into the hiring process
• Interview strategies and techniques to disrupt bias and avoid common mistakes
• How to define success and assess your organization’s hiring practices

DEI training is important for interviewers because it minimizes the impact of hiring biases on ratings, helps prevent unintentional discrimination, and supports greater organizational efforts to prioritize DEI.

How Can a Hiring Platform Reinforce Interviewer Training?

Hiring platforms, specifically those equipped with interview intelligence, increase transparency and provide AI insights about interviewer performance within the video interviewing platform.

Here are some ways you can leverage this technology to elevate interviewer training and performance.