Interviewing Skills for Hiring Managers -

Why is interview skills training important for managers?

Bad hires can cost your company a significant amount of money. If you factor in both hard and soft costs, you can spend from 50% - 200% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them, depending on experience level, skill set, scarcity of talent, and other factors.

But it doesn’t just cost money to replace a bad hire, it costs to keep them as well. Hewitt estimates that a dis-engaged employee loses up to 1/3 of their annual salary in productivity.

Bad hiring decisions also affect the stress level, job satisfaction and potential career opportunities of the company’s managers. If the individual is not the right fit they either don’t have the skills to do the job at hand or they are somewhat of a disruptive influence to the team. Either way, you probably have an unproductive employee, a disgruntled team and the manager spends far too much of their time trying to make the employee work out or trying to manage them out.

Conversely, hiring well can create exceptional teams who perform at peak levels. Skilled, cohesive teams are also happier, more productive teams. And a happy, productive team drives company results, increases employee retention and reduces the stress levels for both the team and the manager.

But how do you hire well? The first step is undoubtedly to learn to interview well. Something that, I can safely say based on my past experience and debriefing over 5,000 interviews with hiring managers that not many people do well, simply because they’ve never been trained. Interviewing is one of those skills that managers think should come naturally. But, without proper training it’s really hard to get it right.

As a result, many managers go by “gut feel” or a set of inexact criteria poorly applied to all candidates interviewed. Many times to their detriment.

Even if a manager understands the importance of hiring for a set of values or culture fit and building skill set, they can lack the tools to properly identify these values, culture fit and innate abilities needed to fill the open position.

Most managers also lack the ability to structure questions in such a way as to elicit what the candidate did do in a similar scenario rather than what the candidate would do.

This is critical because, unlike the share market, when it comes to potential job candidates, past performance is indicative of future results.

Learning to interview well is one of the most important things you can do as a manager.

Great hires help you and your team become more productive, save you money, reduce stress levels all around and, last but certainly not least, make your job more enjoyable!

Interview Skills Training Workshop

This half day workshop is designed to help you and your managers gain the skills they need to interview more effectively, make better hiring decisions and start your new employees out on the right foot by properly managing their expectations.

This workshop is typically customized for each client, depending upon their individual needs. However the basic objectives are as follows:

Outcomes:

• To focus managers on the importance of making a good hire and the cost of a bad one
• To reinforce the importance of pre-planning the interview process including determining:
  • Cultural values, team fit, strengths and skills required for each role
  • Venue and type of interview required (formal / informal, individual or panel)
  • Who will interview during second and subsequent interviews, what their
  • When and how the applicant will meet the team
  • Key selling points of the company and the role
• To learn an interview framework that will not only provide an effective screening methodology as well as a structured process, but also serve to interest suitable applicants in the role and the mission, vision and values of the company
• To understand the theory behind behavioral based interviewing and why this style is so effective at eliciting truthful, relevant information from the candidate – that can be verified by reference checks
• To learn how to effectively read a resume and mine for “red flags” to explore during the interview process
• To practice developing specific objective criteria with which to measure potential applicants
• To practice constructing relevant interview questions designed to elicit the candidates suitability to the role, the department and the organization as a whole
• To practice asking “live” interview questions in interactive role plays

This course is very interactive and includes theory, practical exercises and role plays to deepen the learnings.

Suggested class size would be 6 to a maximum of 15 so that groups of 3 may be used during role play exercises. In turn, one participant will “play” the interviewer, one the applicant and 1 the observer to give feedback to the interviewer.