Employers often get caught up with how and where to find candidates. It’s important to be strategic about sourcing, but finding candidates is just the first step. What about the next phase of the recruitment process?

Why Effective Interviewing is Crucial

Once you connect with an applicant, every interaction is important. Source candidates effectively, create a positive candidate experience, and then continue being strategic during the interview process.

Hiring managers who are unprepared, ask inappropriate (or even illegal) questions, and disrespect candidates are an embarrassment to your organization. A bad interview wastes your organization’s time and money and can even lead frustrated candidates to spread the word about their negative experience with you. You’ve come this far—you don’t want to lose your top-performing candidates now.

Building a Better Interview Process

Especially in companies with decentralized hiring where branch managers, regional managers, or field managers are hiring, it’s important to do the following:

• Create SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) regarding the interview process
• Conduct interview training as a part of your broader employee development strategy or as a yearly training program
• Create an interview guide with questions targeted for each role
• Create a process for evaluating candidates objectively (like a scorecard)
• Discuss how to create a positive candidate experience

The Benefits of Interview Training

Providing interview training for anyone involved in the hiring process can help to ensure a positive candidate experience. Candidates who have great interview experiences feel that they’ve been challenged, properly vetted, and given an opportunity to showcase their skills. They have an opportunity to meet several people, make connections, and get a feel for the culture. They get their questions answered and have a good understanding of the timeline for receiving an offer.

What to Include in Interview Training

Interview training should teach hiring managers:

• To ask open-ended questions that reveal critical job-related information, not leading questions that tell the candidate what we want to hear
• How the past behavior that a candidate reveals in their responses can predict future behavior
• About the biases that we all have (some are as simple as recency bias, where we like the most recent person we interviewed)
• How to give a realistic preview of the job
• How to sell the job and be a brand ambassador for the organization
• Who should be in the interview
• How to structure the interview
• How making hiring decisions based on the “beer test” (where interviewers choose candidates they think would be fun to have a beer with) is a recipe for failure

These types of training courses for employees equip hiring managers with the skills they need to interview effectively and consistently.

What’s the cost of hiring one bad employee who can bring down team morale or create problems with a client? What’s the cost of a social media post about a bad interview experience? What’s the cost of a charge of illegal questions or discrimination? Creating a solid interview process and providing training is a great investment and part of your risk management plan.

Interested in offering interview training to your team? Click here to learn more about our training services, or send us a message here, and we’ll guide you to the right path.