Interview Training
Some business activities thrive on spontaneity and open-ended exploration. Companies like Google and Atlassian have successfully used unstructured time for innovation, whether through hackathons or dedicated invention periods. Both are known for their "20% time", which is a way to articulate that employees can work on problems of their own choosing for one fifth of their work-week. These initiatives work because while they may not have a defined endpoint, they operate with underlying principles and can be evaluated based on business impact.
However, interviewing is not one of these areas. Unlike a hackathon project that can be quickly tested and discarded if unsuccessful, hiring decisions have lasting consequences. Effective interviewing requires thoughtful preparation: a clear understanding of the role, well-defined evaluation criteria, and structured questions that assess both skills and values.
Unprepared interviews often deteriorate into irrelevant questions like "If you were a car, what would you be?" or abstract brain teasers that fail to evaluate job fitness (or much of anything). This approach not only wastes time but also signals disorganization to top candidates.
While "winging it" can spark innovation in certain contexts, interviewing demands careful preparation to be effective. The stakes are too high for improvisation.
It's telling that companies known for taking interviewing seriously – Google, Amazon, Netflix, and McKinsey – are also recognized as difficult to get into and a hotbed of talent. Each developed distinct interviewing practices: Google evaluates candidates against four attributes (Googleyness, role-specific knowledge, cognitive ability, and leadership); Amazon conducts behavioral interviews tied to leadership principles, employing neutral "bar raisers" who can veto risky hires; Netflix emphasizes cultural fit and independence, even interviewing references to validate past working relationships; McKinsey uses case interviews and tests to assess problem-solving capabilities.
While their approaches differ, these companies share a common goal: standardizing their processes to optimize hiring outcomes.
Founders and executives often hold strong convictions about hiring practices, shaped by their intimate understanding of company culture and vision for organizational growth. Many can recount stories of discovering key early employees through unconventional channels or taking chances on non-traditional candidates based on unique interview responses. While highlighting these stories serve as a form of marketing: emphasizing the brilliance of the entrepreneur and their keen sense of talent, it also signals that early-stage organizations have to be creative to compete for employees in the marketplace. In addition, company culture has yet to solidify and hiring so irregular that a strong process will not be beneficial to the organization at this stage.
In a company's early stages, relying on intuition and abstract measures is often necessary to find people capable of shaping organizational direction. This approach reflects both the rare qualities needed in early-stage employees and the limited candidate pool – especially when immediate compensation can't compete with established companies.
As companies scale rapidly, two critical hiring challenges emerge. First, while founders and early employees are uniquely qualified to identify strong candidates due to their deep understanding of what drives company success, they simply cannot interview everyone. They must scale their interview and decisioning frameworks to allow others to make hiring decisions that would emulate their own thinking. This helps newer managers identify and focus on assessing the key attributes needed to be successful at the organization.
Second, company growth fundamentally changes hiring dynamics. Early-stage employees accept higher risk in exchange for significant equity and broad responsibility. As companies mature, they shift toward offering stability and higher salaries, but with limited upside potential beyond career advancement. This transition attracts different types of candidates and creates new risks in the hiring process. Hiring managers may be focused on their own careers and "protecting" their status, rather than making hires that bolster the company's strength. In turn, they may make hires they see as non-threatening to their position, or ones who will enforce the status-quo versus looking for improvement opportunities that may risk the hiring manager's status.
Early-stage wins at the company-level benefit all employees. Every new customer or successful launch means an opportunity to reinvest and make material differences across the company. Growing from ten employees to fifty can feel like a world of difference, but will ten thousand employees to twelve thousand?
At larger firms, there is more machinery in place, making company success feel more abstract to the individual employee. In turn, to motivate employees, reward structures shift to emphasize their individual growth within a large, corporate machine. Without imminent risk to the company, like in smaller organizations, emphasis shifts to how individuals can benefit from past and continued success versus driving net new wins.
To address these challenges, companies need robust mechanisms that both scale the original hiring philosophy and protect against misaligned incentives. Without these safeguards, the attributes that drove early success may be lost as companies scale. While some level of bureaucracy is inevitable (and even necessary, despite its negative connotations), good hiring practices can help stymie the effects dysfunction that can permeate through large organizations and turn away top performers: duplicative departments or unclear responsibilities, unwillingness to change or experiment, and sluggish decision-making by committee on low-risk items.
We can't predict exactly how new hires will impact an organization. While good strategy and planning help, execution ultimately depends on people. Even with good practices, mishires are inevitable: but we can mitigate the volume. Everyone catches the common cold, but there are still things we can do to reduce how often it happens or how hard it hits us when we do succumb to it.
As companies grow, it's important to establish standard procedures and a culture of effective interviewing. These help ensure consistency and reduce the likelihood of mishires. We need to scale leadership by creating systems that support the desired outcomes.
It can be tempting to cut corners and trust on everyone to rely on their instincts. With interviewing, and training interviewers, investing time can feel like a waste. Making a snap hiring decision may seem great in the moment, but it could bear a hefty cost to the organization if you're wrong. Similarly, we must establish criteria to ensure all employees involved in hiring have a strong barometer for quality. Again, this helps avoid mishires.
Building a strong interview process takes time and careful consideration. Hiring is too expensive and risky to not think through critically, even if it may feel like you're moving too slowly, becoming "tree-ish" in decision making. We of course do not want to move as slowly as the ents move in Tolkien's world, but it's important we take time to establish an interview philosophy or methodology and operationalize this throughout the organization.
With that, let's talk about how to train interviewers effectively.
How to Train
Interview training should be a mix of theory and practice. Interviews are expensive, and so it is critical we feel confident that whomever in our organization is interviewing is equipped to handle interviews and represent the business and the team.
Let's talk through what a training plan might look like for interview training.
1. Selection
First, it's selection: Who should be trained to be an interviewer?
Interviewing is a team sport, and it's beneficial to have a deep bench of internal talent ready to go. However, not everyone in the company wants to interview or is well-suited for it. While there is benefit to everyone in the company understanding interview philosophy as it relates to their own performance and how they and their colleagues are evaluated, it is separate from the skill of interviewing itself.
For training interviewers, start with all hiring managers and top performing individual contributors. In most organizations, more senior people are usually involved in interviewing. Selecting up and coming employees that are less experienced is a good way to keep the pipeline of interviewers full and give early and mid career employees opportunities to interview for lower level positions. This provides fresh perspective to the group, while also giving these employees an opportunity to build this skill and foster relationships across the company. Being an interviewer can feel like an exclusive club, and finding ways to get more high-performers, regardless of tenure, title, or years of experience involved, the better chances you have of retaining employees down the line. People invested in the company will want to help take ownership of decisions, and hiring is one of the bigger decisions a company will make.
I recommend training everyone to at least understand the interview process and philosophy, so when last minute changes occur or someone calls out sick, finding a replacement is easy. If you are concerned about training costs or training people who may never actually interview, start with the groups outlined above: hiring managers and senior individual contributors. Look at historical data to see who is involved in interviewing already and ensure they are trained as well. We want compliance at bare minimum, but ideally we're helping them not just avoid what not to say, but building skills as a talent evaluator and interviewer.
2. Theory
From there, we need a way to teach people about the company's interview philosophy, why interviewing is done this way, and how this gets executed. This should also cover legal and compliance items we want interviewers to also be aware of.
Learning objectives for this type of training (or series of trainings) might be something like:
"By the end of this training, you should be able to:
- Articulate the company's interview philosophy
- Recognize roles of an interviewing team and what each is responsible for to evaluate candidates effectively while providing a positive interview experience
- Calibrate what it means for candidates demonstrate company values to evaluate them effectively
- Write clear feedback from interviews
- Participate in a debrief to help make hiring decisions"
This is a lot to cover, and what's most important to you will vary -- but the goal here is to establish what you want to cover in the classroom to get folks ready to interview.
That brings up another point regarding training modality -- I mention classroom above, but you may want to take different approaches pending the team and what you want to cover. For example, you may do this all online through a self-paced e-learning. This would enable the company to train interviewers on demand and at their own pace. You could also explore a hybrid model, where certain concepts are taught in a video or e-learning course, with a live classroom component to do mock interviews and get hands-on practice. In this case, the self-paced and live components are complementary, with the live training reinforcing concepts from the self-paced and giving the team a chance to build this skillset in front of a facilitator (likely recruiting leadership).
My recommendation is to test with a live session for this first, since standing up a classroom is less technically intensive (usually it's a powerpoint and a talk track). As demand increases or the material develops to a point of high quality and effectiveness, look to scale through a self-paced module. This will save facilitation and classroom time in the long run.
How you approach building this training will depend on the level of depth required and how nuanced training is. For example, you may need to do separate sessions focused on technical interviewing for engineering teams or mock sales pitches for sales teams.
Most importantly, you want to spend time teaching them the philosophy and techniques. It's a bit like taking the time to read a tutorial or hear the rules before you start playing a game. You'll learn enough to get started, but need to actually play it to really learn how to do it well. That's where practice comes in.
3. Practice
Once the interviewers demonstrate knowledge of the theory, through some type of short assessment (a quiz is likely sufficient), it's time to practice.
I recommend breaking up practice into two phases. One is "classroom practice", which should be mock interviewing to build specific muscles and techniques. For example, I attended a workshop once where the entire focus was just on getting good at preparing follow up questions to pry out answers from candidates who struggled to articulate themselves. It takes time to build that muscle to think quickly and know how to probe to get the information you're looking for.
Second, is through shadowing real interviews. This can be observational, but more important is the "reverse shadow", where the trainee leads and a seasoned interviewer observes. The seasoned interviewer, like a driving instructor, should take the wheel if absolutely necessary, but otherwise provides feedback at the end and helps the trainee sharpen they skills and articulate their thoughts from the conversation.
Let's start first with classroom practice. Whatever you choose to practice in the classroom should be relevant to the style of interview you are conducting and should provide the trainees with the opportunity to build the muscles they need to interview effectively. Feedback should be provided throughout the session to ensure good practices are reinforced and trainees can recognize what they're doing well, as well as recognize what could be done better.
A simple way to do this would be to have trainees pair up with other. Provide a fictitious scenario for the pair: Have one person role-play as the interviewee and the other as the interviewer. The interviewer should have specific questions in mind, while the interviewee practices answering them and providing insight to the interviewer. Have them swap to get experience on both sides. The benefit is that when they interview, they can also envision themselves in the shoes of the interviewee. Having a trained facilitator who can role-play more difficult scenarios as an interviewee would also be a good way to do this exercise.
From there, have them practice writing feedback. Provide a template to get started. Have a facilitator review their written notes and evaluate the clarity of what's written -- can someone who wasn't in the interview understand what the trainee wrote?
From here, training is complete. Ask your participants to provide feedback on the experience so you can measure the value of the training and gather feedback on what else would be helpful for future iterations. Training needs to be constantly refreshed to main its relevance. A simple survey administered through your learning management system should suffice here.
Shadowing should start as soon as the participant finishes their training. This helps increase the odds they will apply what they learned in the real world and build comfort interviewing. If training is too far removed from application, participants will need to be retrained to be effective. Some rust is natural during slow periods, but ideally the gap between training completion and facilitating interviews should be short so they can practice what they learned.
Your comfort here may vary. I would adjust the approach pending the experience of the person, the urgency of hiring, and overall volume. For example, if you're only doing one interview per month, then you probably don't want to have people shadow a half dozen times. If there is enough volume to support ramping up interviews, then you could consider more shadows. But if interview opportunities are not as frequent, reducing the number of shadows you require could be wise. I'd probably keep a minimum of one observational shadow and one reverse shadow, with a maximum of four each. Again, it really depends on your organization and the needs of the trainee and the company. The purpose here is to build confidence and proficiency -- this is just one way to do that. The participant may not need as much training if they're demonstrating quickly that they know how to do it. Don't hesitate to tailor and make exceptions pending the skill level of the person.
Evaluating performance
Completing the training is just the start -- it's also important to evaluate performance of interviewers and gauge where their talents lie. For example, some team members may be great at assessing for specific attributes or facilitating exercises with candidates. Others may be great at other aspects, like selling the candidate on the company or making them feel welcome. Take note of the unique strengths of your interviewers and ensure they are used appropriately.
Interview data is sensitive, and it can be tempting to use these as success measures. At most, I would look for patterns across broad swaths of interview data to gauge overall effectiveness or bias -- does this person skew towards more "yes" than "no" over a long period of time? These are more interesting facts to consider, but likely will be noise unless you're operating at a massive scale with similar roles over and over.
At most organizations, I'd look at how much time interviewers dedicate to the process and reward them for their involvement. This could be as minor as token recognition of their efforts beyond core job responsibilities, but it should be acknowledged by leadership, in some way, that this person is an active participant in helping the company make great hires.