The Secret to Growing Your Organization Efficiently: Why Structured Interviewer Training is Key

Lydia Han & Melissa Rynning
·
Feb 10, 2023
A dive into how interviewer training processes unify your entire recruiting function.

One of the most critical crossroads a business can arrive at is when it's time to strategically grow their teams.

You might have a great product but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a solid organization. So… where do you start? 

Look no further than your interview team. An interview team is a major piece of the puzzle when it comes to getting growth right and well calibrated interviewers provide a lot of value.

Like - an amazing candidate experience, becoming the ambassadors of your company culture, the ability to balance their day job with recruiting tasks and vetting what your team is looking for in the interview process. 

Candidates' experiences with interviewers are so important that Google’s re:Work Guide on how to train your interviewers says that these interactions are “the top-mentioned factor in candidate feedback -- more important to candidates than the type of work, the benefits, or their interactions with recruiters when assessing the overall hiring experience.”

Ultimately, your interview team should be on the frontlines of preventing mis-hires and a reason that your business is able to win the best candidates.

On the flip side, an interview process that leads to a bad hire can be very costly. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates a bad hire can cost your business at least 30% of that person’s first year earnings! Other HR firms estimate even more than that, with costs from a bad hire potentially creeping up into the six figures 😱(SHRM, Northwestern).

Ultimately, your interview team should be on the frontlines of preventing mis-hires and a reason that your business is able to win the best candidates. Trying to implement structured interview processes to develop a mature interview team, with limited talent resources, is no easy feat though. 

You’re not alone in the struggle. There are some common roadblocks on the journey to building excellent teams. 

You’re likely feeling the friction in your interview process if you’ve ever faced one of these challenges:

❌  Limited recruiting capacity to take on projects outside of their core function - projects like establishing, documenting and maintaining best practices with interviewers. 

😵 Interviewer fatigue, low morale and more frequent than you’d like to admit rescheduling nightmares.

❌ No existing structure or consistency for interviewers to follow in order to evaluate talent across an even bar.

😵 Relying on a few senior interviewers to carry the load with no sustainable plan to train new ones.

❌ Not understanding your growth and being overly cautious when it comes to investing in key tools that simplify hiring and the interview experience.

If you found yourself nodding along, you might be experiencing a few of these common growing pains. The good news, they can be avoided! 

Assess where you’re at right now.

A lot of frustration and burnout can be prevented by understanding your readiness to grow before its time to do the hiring. It's smart to assess both where you are at with your current recruiting capacity as well as the state of your interview processes. 

Ask yourself the following:

❓ Do I have enough trained interviewers who are ready to take on an increased interview load?

❓ The more interviews scheduled, the more interview declines are going to happen - do we have multiple interviewers trained to assess talent across all of our focus areas?

❓ Does my recruiter currently have the capacity to take on projects outside of their critical functions to be able to partner with the interview team & train them?

❓ Are we following best practices and how are we training others on those?

If you answered no or maybe to one or more of these questions, it might be time to implement a solution. 

A metaphorical magic bullet: interviewer training processes! 

As one of the four main components of structured interviewing according to Google’s re:Work Guide on Using Structured Interviewing, interview training gives interviewers confidence and consistency. 

Interviewer training processes unify your recruiting function exactly like how a sauce can make or break an entire dish.

So if the recruitment process is a recipe - resulting in hiring ideal candidates as the main dish, interviewer training is the secret sauce! How? Interviewer training processes unify your recruiting function exactly like how a sauce can make or break an entire dish.

When the hiring heat turns up, don’t burn your secret sauce. Make sure you don’t burn your secret sauce by being proactive. Implement a structured plan to train and equip interviewers, build their confidence and provide consistency before you move to execute on your targets for hiring.

In case you’re not convinced yet...

Structured interviewer training processes will help you implement best practices so you can grow your team efficiently and here are just a few of the benefits:

✅ Reduce unconscious bias and help interviewers make well informed decisions.

✅ Create and maintain a sustainable bar for hiring top notch candidates.

✅ Use a tried and true interview process designed to evaluate candidates that interviewers can easily follow when assessing talent.  

✅ Eliminate one-off interview processes that slow down hiring decisions and create confusion when it comes time to debrief.

✅ Ensure you have a roster of A+ interviewers to spread out the workload.

✅ Empower every interviewer you train to accurately paint the picture of your company culture.

✅ Qualify every interviewer to administer case studies and assess both hard skills and behavioral aspects of every role you’re hiring for. 

We could keep going on.. but you get the point! With a supportive interviewer training program designed to grow your teams as your company grows, you can unlock interviewer efficiency and empower those who are representing your company to candidates. 

And the good news is you don’t have to do this manually! 

You need a simple solution to unlock interviewer capacity. — Meet ModernLoop!

ModernLoop is a force multiplier for recruiting operations. With automated interviewer training processes, your team will be able to efficiently train up an A+ roster of interviewers, effortlessly track progress of trainees and implement a structured process designed to evaluate the best candidates and unlock efficient growth.

ModernLoop is a force multiplier for recruiting operations.

Our platform is a comprehensive solution designed to eliminate the manual tasks that make recruiting ops and interviewer training burdensome and time consuming. Use ModernLoop to automatically build in best practices and give your team more of what matters most; their time. 

ModernLoop helps talent teams and their stakeholders focus on the stuff that matters - like hiring awesome people and creating an amazing interview process.

Next Steps

Work with us. Ready to learn more about how your company can implement ModernLoop to upgrade your hiring processes? 

Speak with a representative today about your hiring goals!