Building a strong, effective team begins with good hiring decisions. These important choices are based on job interviews, and equipping hiring managers with the right skills to navigate them to the best possible advantage is a step that organizations frequently overlook. According to published research, fewer than 5% of hiring managers receive any form of professional interview training.  

This article examines how HR leaders can train hiring managers to conduct effective interviews that lead to better hiring decisions, outlines the key skills hiring managers should develop, and highlights the pitfalls you may encounter along the way. 

Why Train Hiring Managers on Interview Skills?

Embarking on an employment relationship is a big step, and interviews are often the deciding factor. With limited time to form the impressions that lead to a hire, managers must be mindful of both candidate merit and their own thoughts, attitudes, and biases. 

Structured interviews, in which each candidate answers the same carefully formulated questions, are helpful, but evaluating their answers should never come down to gut feel. Interestingly, a survey found that 82% of hiring managers believe that unconscious bias affects their impressions and decisions. Your challenge is to change that.

Interview training for hiring managers focuses on a key outcome: choosing the best candidate for a position, rather than picking a person who “looks” or “feels” right for the role. Since hiring decisions impact organizational success, hiring managers need a framework for effectively assessing candidates’ skills and potential, and the skill to implement it. 

How to Train Hiring Managers to Interview Effectively

HR professionals work with hiring managers whenever a round of recruiting begins. Making it a process of give-and-take, in which they tell you what they’re looking for, and you show them how the interview is structured to address these points and how they may evaluate answers effectively. 

Use a Candidate Profile to Capture the Ideal Candidate’s Attributes

Evaluation is based on an ideal candidate profile that you’ll create in consultation with the relevant hiring manager. It’s a list of must-haves that you’ll need before you begin recruiting and may include things like:

• Hard skills: what they need to know and do in their role, for example, accounting skills
• Soft skills: for example, the ability to collaborate and solve problems
• Qualifications or experience: sticking to the essentials rather than “nice to haves”
• Organizational fit: factors like candidate expectations, goals, and motivation

Once you have an applicant pool, this list helps you formulate the right interview questions, show hiring managers the purpose of each question, and explain how to evaluate answers against the ideal candidate profile. 

Prepare Hiring Managers to Deliver a Positive Candidate Experience

HR handles many aspects of the candidate experience, but the interview itself is among the most powerful contributors. Positive candidate experiences will contribute to new hires’ motivation, while keeping talent you didn’t recruit this time around engaged. 

Mock interview roleplays help hiring managers practice evaluating candidates and refine their interviewing style. When working with a group, allow hiring managers to interview and evaluate each other. That way, they gain insights from both the interviewer’s and interviewee’s perspectives.

Unconscious Bias Training For Hiring Managers

No matter how fair we think we are, our brains are wired for bias. When something is unexpected, for instance, when a candidate doesn’t fit the mental image of who typically performs a role, it’s easy to sense that something is ‘off’ and mistake that discomfort for a valid concern. Train them to be aware of this pitfall so that they can consciously evaluate candidates on their suitability for a position rather than superficial traits.

Talk About Body Language

In some contexts, both the interviewer’s and interviewee’s body language can be very telling. However, it’s important to be aware of the limitations of this rather inexact science. For example, a nervous candidate who fidgets may be interpreted as lying, even though they are telling the truth, or a disabled candidate may not be able to send “positive”  body language signals. 

At the same time, candidates will develop an impression from interviewers’ body language, and hiring managers should send positive signals, such as making eye contact, to help candidates feel recognized, listened to, and encouraged to speak. 

Helping Managers Prepare For Interviews

No hiring manager should go into an interview unprepared. A briefing helps HR professionals with hiring manager interview training that addresses specifics. Use this briefing to:

• Review the job description
• Analyze how interview questions address hiring goals
• Examine example answers and what they say about candidates
• Explain the interview scorecard and how scores should be allocated
• Give note-taking tips

This briefing prepares the hiring manager, helping them to understand the strategic thinking that goes into a fair interview assessment and hiring decision. 

Tools and Techniques Hiring Managers Should Know

Faced with a succession of interviews, hiring managers often default to vague impressions rather than objective criteria. Training should introduce practical techniques such as:

• The STAR (situation, task, action, result) method for evaluating answers to interview questions
• Anchoring answers addressing specific competencies to the candidate profile
• Using scoring rubrics consistently 

These learned techniques help train hiring managers to evaluate candidates based on ability rather than individual impressions.

Prepare Hiring Managers Across Interview Formats

Interviews aren’t limited to face-to-face conversation. Hiring managers should be trained to conduct structured panel interviews, remote interviews via video, and practical assessments or work-sample tests. Each format has nuances, and hiring managers must create a consistent experience that gives everyone a fair chance.

Train Hiring Managers to Know the Legal Boundaries

A well-structured interview will avoid areas that may cross the line, but compliance remains an important consideration when training hiring managers. Without compliance training, they may drop in a well-intentioned comment or question that strays into a protected area like family plans or religious beliefs. 

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission specifically stipulates that interviewers should avoid any question related to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, or age. Doing so will lead to negative candidate experiences and may result in legal action. 

Address the Balance Between Structure and Humanity

It’s normal to start interviews with a little small talk to break the ice, but once the interview begins in earnest, managers must stick to the structure, avoiding tangents. Structured interviews help to reduce unconscious bias or the element of chance that may lead to certain candidates being given opportunities to demonstrate their skills that others aren’t. 

It’s equally important to close interviews effectively. Hiring managers should give candidates an opportunity to ask their own questions about the role and let them know what happens next and when they can expect feedback. Throughout, the candidate should feel that their time is valued and they are respected. 

Common Mistakes in Interview Training For Hiring Managers

Interview skills training for hiring managers can help you improve hiring outcomes. However, there are pitfalls. These include:

• Treating training as a once-off initiative, allowing hiring managers to fall into old habits that negatively affect quality. 
• Focusing too heavily on the mechanics of interviews without clarifying the purpose behind interview design. Hiring managers must know both the “why” and the “what.”
• Failing to address cognitive bias meaningfully is a major pitfall. Since it is unconscious, awareness is not enough. Tackle the problem by showing hiring managers how factors like evidence-based scoring contribute to fair decisions.

Training hiring managers to interview should be part of every recruitment process. Most managers don’t use these skills often enough for them to be embedded. Once the fundamentals are in place, this could be a simple prompt or reminder, but without it, it becomes easy to revert to gut-feel that may not reflect a candidate’s suitability for a role. 

How HR Professionals Lay the Groundwork For Merit-Based Hiring

Hiring managers usually conduct interviews after HR has laid the all-important groundwork. Before interviewing begins, HR professionals place job ads, screen applicants, and build a shortlist that reflects the skills, experience, and attributes required for the role. A strong shortlist gives hiring managers a foundation for objective, merit-based decisions.

Tools such as those offered by Broadbean and its partners support this process by helping HR teams reduce bias earlier in the pipeline, attracting and shortlisting candidates whose qualifications align with the role. Coupled with interview training for hiring managers, your tech-assisted recruitment process contributes to merit-based hiring outcomes. To learn more about how Broadbean can support your recruitment workflow, feel free to contact us.