Interviewing 101 for hiring managers
Author: IntaPeople | Date published: 27/04/21
Some hiring managers will have been with you for years and years, and some may be newer to the game. However, the world of work is a very different landscape than it was 12 months ago, let alone 12 years ago! Even the most experienced hiring managers could benefit from updated interview training as there have been many recent changes in:
- How interviews are conducted
- What interview techniques have the best results
- What they’re trying to draw out
- How important candidate experience is
- How unconscious bias and behaviours can impact candidate perception
That’s why we’ve put together a brief run down of how to conduct your own interview training for your hiring managers.
How to conduct online or in-person interviewing training:
One of the most important parts of conducting interview training with your hiring managers is convincing them of the benefits of doing so. This could require talking to them about their current techniques and practices and identifying any areas that need improvement or updating to combat what we now understand about bias, body language and candidate experience.
From there, aim to set up a group meeting either in-person or through conferencing technology remotely, to go over a revised best practice for interviewing, or an interviewing 101 with your hiring managers. Topics to cover include:
- What you’re trying to achieve in your interviews
Interviewing can be a challenging and up-hill task for hiring managers, and sometimes the sheer volume of applicants they’ve reviewed and interviewed can mean they can’t see the wood for the trees anymore! They can easily lose sight of wider company recruitment initiatives like diversity and inclusion, hiring for cultural fit, etc.
Taking the time to remind them of the workforce you’re trying to build and the culture you’re trying to create will help them prioritise the additional factors they should bear in mind whilst interviewing.
- Types of interview techniques
There are many different types of interview techniques currently being used, which one you choose will depend on your candidates and the roles you’re trying to fill. Some popular ones you may want to provide some training or best practice guidelines on include:
- Structured interviews
Structured interviews are very common as they are legally defensible by offering everyone a fair chance at the same formatted interview and questions.
- Behavioural interviews
Behaviour-based interviewing (BBI) is used to assess how a candidate has handled specific scenarios or situations in their working lives, it allows you to assess their problem-solving skills and reactions to stress or pressure.
- Case interviews
Case study-based interviews require a candidate to demonstrate how they would handle a specific business problem.
- Video, phone or remote interviews
Video, phone and remote interviews allow the interviewer to speak with a candidate without meeting face to face. This became very popular during the pandemic and is unlikely to decrease in prevalence any time soon.
- Tackling unconscious bias in hiring practices
Providing proper, ongoing education and training about unconscious and conscious biases about race, gender, religion, etc., for your hiring team will help to widen your candidate pool with different experiences and perspectives and ensure all of your candidates have a fair chance at every role.
This also includes reviewing how your hiring managers put together job descriptions and adverts. Unconsciously, gendered language can slip in when writing job descriptions which can deter applicants from applying and affect the diversity of your candidate pool.
We conducted our own research into gendered language in our report, The Great Gender Rebalance: Increasing gender diversity in STEM businesses, and found that many job descriptions contain very gendered language. Try to stay clear of particularly feminine-coded words that might be considered nurturing, caring and collaborative, for example: ‘support/ing’, ‘together’, ‘connect/ing’ and masculine-coded words that are more assertive, individualistic and ambitious, for example: ‘challenge’, ‘autonomy’, ‘confident’.
Examine the core needs of the role and use the simplest language to describe it, if you’re concerned about any of your job descriptions, check out our Gender Decoder tool, which can review your wording for masculine or feminine-coded language.
- How to improve candidate experience
The importance of candidate experience cannot be underestimated and should be made clear to your hiring managers, as according to G2:
- 63% of job seekers will likely reject a job offer because of a bad candidate experience
- 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity
- Companies lose as many as 89% of potential candidates due to a prolonged screening process
Putting together a process for candidate updates on the status of their application and providing feedback even when they are not successful will go a long way in improving the candidate experience.
Engaging a specialist recruiter, like IntaPeople, can help you at every stage when creating interviewing training for your hiring managers. We are knowledgeable in creating inclusive hiring strategies and are educated in bias and unconscious bias and can help put these at the heart of your recruitment processes. We can also help you recognise where in your recruitment strategy you may be creating barriers between your company and diverse applicants, from the job description to where and how you market your role.