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The step-by-step playbook from Metaview for building a world-class interviewer training process.

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Angela Miller

Head of Recruiting

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Margaret Buj

Lead Technical Recruiter

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Scott Nelson

Head of Software Recruiting

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Siadhal Magos

CEO & co-founder

Almost every paradigm we knew about hiring has been turned on its head. 
The global talent pool has been split wide open. Average tenure is getting shorter. Time-to-hire is getting longer.
Candidates want more. More global opportunities, flexibility to work where they see fit, and packages that take in their holistic needs between 9–5 and beyond.
Organizations need better. Better ways for navigating changing hiring norms, and processes for identifying the best candidates to give them a competitive edge.
Access to world-class talent has never been easier — but hiring world-class talent is a different story. And in this shifting context for hiring, repeating the same patterns that worked in the past are no longer enough to guarantee that you’ll be able to hire at all, let alone your top choice.
Staying in step with these shifts means companies have to compete on the quality of the employee experience they can offer just as much as they have to compete on compensation. You need to be able to differentiate your culture and build a solid understanding of each candidate if you’re going to stand out.
Creating an efficient, rigorous and repeatable <a href="https://www.metaview.ai/resources/blog/ai-in-the-hiring-process">hiring process</a> that attracts high quality candidates isn’t just important — it’s paramount.
That means that interviews have become your differentiator.
A good interview process showcases your culture, sells your brand, and makes people want to work for you. A good interview process helps you to understand the difference between a candidate that’s ‘great’, and a candidate that’s ‘great for this role and for your organization’.
The quality of your interviews depends on training — however, interviewer training is often overlooked. At fast-growing companies it&#8217;s deprioritized because of limited time and resources, and a need to hire fast. In larger organizations it can become stressed at scale and overly-reliant on the select few interviewers that have graduated from the training program.
But your ability to operate as an organization depends on hiring the best people to do the job. If you can’t evaluate them, identify them, and entice them to come and work for you, then you’re going to get left behind.
That’s why creating a scalable interviewer training process is essential to your success.
Based on thousands of interviews, decades of shared experience hiring talent at organizations including Amazon, Uber, Typeform and Anduril, and empirical research in organizational psychology, we’ve put together a four-step best practice framework to build your own interviewer training process.
In this guide you’ll learn:

The 5 key building blocks of every interviewer training process

… And the steps you need to take to build an interviewer training framework of your own.

In the current market for talent, your interview process could be making you stand out for all the wrong reasons — or all the right ones.
Getting your interview process right depends on equipping your interviewers with the right resources, training, and knowledge to provide a rigorous, consistent and fair process — every time. And when you’re getting that process right, you’ll start to see the payoff in five key areas:

<h2>Better interviews mean faster time-to-hire</h2>
Time is money — and from a hiring perspective, there are few things more frustrating than the candidates that got away.
Acting fast in this market is critical. When top candidates are fielding fistfuls of offers, the organizations that are primed to interview at speed will come out on top. They have the agility to move fast, and the ability to quickly schedule an interview, reach a decision, extend an offer and hire their number one candidate.
This velocity impacts every link in the hiring chain — faster time-to-interview translates directly into a reduced time-to-offer and time-to-hire. Candidates are more likely to have a good experience, and less likely to drop out of your process.
Meanwhile organizations that are struggling with interviewer numbers will experience slower hiring velocity. Candidates are more likely to self-select out of the process. Organizations have more unfilled seats for longer, meaning they’re unable to execute on strategic objectives.
And, as Metaview CEO and co-founder <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/siadhal/?originalSubdomain=uk">Siadhal Magos</a> explains, training new interviewers often compounds the problem — especially when hiring needs outstrip capacity to get new interviewers trained up.

CEO, Metaview

<h2>Better interviews improve candidate acceptance rates</h2>
In the age of social media, candidate experience is everything. And when a candidate has a bad one, they’re far more likely to tell everyone about it and <a href="https://www.thetalentboard.org/benchmark-research/cande-research-reports/">sever their relationship with a brand completely</a>.
Your interview process plays a huge role in creating that first impression. Candidates quit the hiring process for a number of reasons — but a lengthy wait is usually top of the list. Organizations with a slow and inefficient interview process will struggle to hire quickly, but this is magnified by candidates opting out of their process when the wait is too long.
In short, it’s a double jeopardy — and word gets around fast on Glassdoor and Twitter.
But that’s not all. The second biggest reason that candidates are likely to quit an interview process or reject an offer is due to a poor quality interview.
Here’s why:

Let’s focus on that key word — acceptance. As one of the first points of contact in any hiring process, well-trained interviewers can be the difference between a bad experience and a good one. But not only that, they have a direct, positive impact on a candidate’s likelihood of accepting your offer. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelamillerta/">Angela Miller</a>, head of recruiting at Instabase, already knew this critical link — that’s why her interview process was designed to protect candidate experience at all costs.

Head of Recruiting, Instabase

<h2>Better interviews mean better quality hires</h2>
Culture is paramount for talent attraction. It cultivates belonging, forms tight bonds between teams, and outlines shared beliefs, values, and ways of operating. Great ones are linked to improved job satisfaction and increased retention.[1]
But culture is a collective effort. How organizations preserve and nurture it is key to their ongoing success — and part of that comes down to establishing whether a candidate will add to yours, or take away from it. This is down to evaluating organization-employee fit — or culture-add.
Organization-employee fit represents the values, motivations, and attitudes that a candidate or employees bring to your organization.[2] It goes beyond technical skill or ability, and instead focuses on how candidates solve problems, how they interact with team members, or react to simple scenarios, like getting an interview answer wrong. And for many organizations, it’s a central pillar of their hiring process.
Well-trained interviewers know how to pick up on that signal. They’re aligned to your organization’s values, and know how to dig deeper and surface those candidates with the specific combination of skills and cultural alignment that will benefit your organization.
Poorly-trained ones, on the other hand, are more likely to fail to identify the best candidate for the role, resulting in a mishire. We know from research that untrained interviewers are more likely to hire based on gut feel, and demonstrate overconfidence in their ability to evaluate and hire the right candidate.[3]
In the best case scenario, a candidate might just become an underperformer in your team. In the worst case? A slew of poor quality hires might actively dilute your culture, leading to reduced business performance and an inability to achieve your strategic goals.
And then, says <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-nelson-92375447/">Scott Nelson</a>, head of software recruiting at Anduril, the risk is that your culture becomes unrecognizable to those already there. Your existing employees will start to lose trust in you.

Head of Software Recruiting, Anduril

[1] John E Sheridan, ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/256539">Organizational culture and employee retention</a>’, The Academy of Management Journal (1992).
[2] Jennifer Chatman, ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393204">Matching people and organizations: Selection and socialization in public accounting firms</a>’, Administrative Science Quarterly (1991).
[3] Richaurd R Camp, Eric Schulz, Mary E Vielhaber and Fraya Wagner-Marsh, ‘<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23209116?read-now=1&amp;seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents">Human Resource Professionals’ Perception of Interviewer Training</a>’, Journal of Managerial Issues (2011).

<h2>Better interviews reduce the likelihood of bias</h2>
Overconfident, under-trained interviewers represent a definite risk to your culture — but they also open you up to bias and discrimination.
Biases are ingrained at a subconscious level. They’re the reason we might think twice about walking down a poorly-lit path, or pick a particular menu item over and over again. In the real world, they’re sometimes helpful. In the interview process, they’re not — and unconscious bias training can only go so far to mitigate the impact of an untrained interviewer.
Studies show that overconfident interviewers are far more likely to succumb to personal biases, resulting in them taking more hiring risks and ending the interview process before finding the best candidate for the role.[4]
And while your interviewers might not be aware of the biases at play in their decision-making, your candidates can spot it a mile off. In studies, candidates are far more likely to believe they were evaluated fairly if an interviewer sticks to a structured process.[5] Well-trained interviewers are more likely to stick to a structured process than untrained ones.[6]
The bottom line: Well-trained interviewers are more standardized in how they evaluate candidates time after time. They are more consistent in the questions they ask, and ask higher rigor questions overall. Bias is less likely to creep in — paving the way to fairer hiring outcomes and a more heterogeneous organization. 
But when interviewers don’t learn to check their biases, they’re far more likely to hire someone more like themselves, creating a more homogeneous organization. Organizations with high levels of homogeneity are more prone to groupthink. They’re less likely to be <a href="https://hbr.org/2022/03/how-to-steer-clear-of-groupthink">innovative</a>. They also perform worse.[7]
Biased hiring practices have a knock-on impact on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) goals, explains <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretbuj/?originalSubdomain=uk">Margaret Buj</a>, lead technical recruiter at Mixmax, and interview coach who has helped organizations including Typeform scale their interviewer training.

Interview coach and Lead Technical Recruiter, Mixmax

[4]  Edgar E Kausel, Satoris S Culbertson, Hector P Madrid, ‘<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597816304629">Overconfidence in personnel selection: When and why unstructured interview information can hurt hiring decisions</a>’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2016).
[5] Michael A Campion, David K Palmer and James E Campion, ‘<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1997.tb00709.x">A review of structure in the selection interview</a>’, Personnel Psychology (1997).
[6] Derek S Chapman and David I Zweig, ‘<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00516.x">Developing a nomological network for interview structure: Antecedents and consequences of the structured selection interview</a>’, Personnel Psychology (2005).
[7] Naomi Ellemers and Floor Rink, ‘<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X16300744">Diversity in work groups</a>’, Journal of Product Innovation Management (2016).
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<h2>Better interviews improve business velocity</h2>
We know that when organizations don’t have a big enough pool of interviewers to lean on, they reduce their ability to hire quickly, leading to a hiring bottleneck. But there’s also an added operational bottleneck that develops throughout the whole organization as a direct result of systemic inefficiency.
Without enough trained interviewers, organizations are forced to rely on a smaller cohort of certified ones, causing calendar conflicts as interview slots pile up, candidate interviews get pushed further out, and training new interviewers gets deprioritized. There’s also a trickle-down impact on employees. 
A few years ago, when Google evaluated the return on investment they were getting from their famously lengthy 12-round interview process, they realized it was costing them thousands of hours in employee productivity. That’s because every extra hour Google’s employees spent in interviews, they weren’t able to contribute productively to furthering individual, team, or organizational goals. 
Whichever way you slice it, an inefficient interview process means your existing employees are less efficient and productive. When you have too few certified interviewers, your existing ones are tied up in interviews so they can’t contribute to your organization. When your interviews are inconsistent or of varying quality, you’re likely to run more as a result of poor-fit hires.
These estimated costs are only compounded when we factor in employee engagement. Because when employees aren’t able to do the work they joined your organization to do, their engagement and job satisfaction are likely to fall. Each year, lost productivity due to disengagement costs the global economy <a href="https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx">$8.1 trillion</a>.
When organizations have a strong pool of certified, calibrated interviewers, they’re better able to manage these bottlenecks, leading to increased efficiency across the whole company.

Why isn’t everyone doing interviewer training?

<h2>So why isn’t everyone doing interviewer training?</h2>
At this point, you’re probably thinking the same thing we are: Why isn’t interviewer training more common?
In our experience, there are usually two reasons: either organizations have limited time and resources to make interviewer training a priority, or they have a process in place, but are finding their existing systems hard to optimize.
<h3>Organizations with little or no interviewer training often lack the time and resources to make it work.</h3>
If this sounds like you, then there are only so many hours in the day, people on your team, and plates you can spin. And when you’re a small team trying to propel an organization on the proverbial rocketship to growth, competing demands are often going to get in the way.

Often, the long-term value of implementing interviewer training is a tough one to reconcile with the immediate urgency of increasing headcount. This, says Siadhal, is compounded by a lack of understanding on the role interviewer training plays in the ‘human’ part of the interview process.

[8] Camp, 2011.
[9] Campion, 1997.

<h3>Organizations that are doing interviewer training are experiencing challenges at scale.</h3>
You’ve got your training tracks built out, and have a solid process in place that turns out certified interviewers operating at similar levels of consistency. And this was a well-oiled machine when you just needed to train a few hiring managers here and there. But now as scaling ramps up, the wheels are beginning to fall off.

For Angela, these challenges are very familiar. In her previous role at Pure Storage, Angela and her team built a rigorous training framework that established a gold standard for all interviewers at the company. But the breaking point came when hiring needs outstripped interviewer training capacity.

5 fundamental blocks of the interviewer training process

Why interviewer training is so important

Building an interviewer training process that scales successfully is all about the long game.
It’s rooted in creating opportunities for learning that go well beyond a classroom context. It’s about making sure learning and knowledge are sustained over time, rather than forgotten. It’s built on collaborative learning, yet caters for individual development needs. Above all, it’s thoughtfully created, both in content and in structure.
The best interviewer training processes have five key building blocks in common:

Intentional and proactive, not a checkbox exercise

<h2>Intentional and proactive, not a checkbox exercise</h2>
Academic and industry research consistently highlights that interviewer training has a bit of a mistaken identity problem. It’s primarily seen as a way of ensuring hiring managers avoid bias — and a costly lawsuit — while in the interview room. 
But this mindset limits interviewer training to a very narrow scope. It becomes a preventative or even reactive measure for compliance purposes, rather than a proactive one. Building an effective interviewer training process relies on reframing this narrative to one that enables organizations to build a more efficient, consistent, and fair hiring experience — for everyone involved. 
<h3>What this means in practice</h3>
Instead of avoiding discrimination accusations, organizations should target delivering fairer hiring outcomes. Instead of viewing interviewer training as a launchpad to hire more people more quickly, organizations must buy in on how it contributes tangibly to business success beyond the scope of hiring, such as building a better product. Instead of short-term training models that impart limited understanding, organizations must focus on long-term knowledge and skills development.
Interviewer training needs to become embedded as an essential process at an organization-wide level, not just as a hiring add-on. It needs to feed into conversations around your culture and mission, diversity, equity and inclusion goals, and ongoing employee learning and development milestones.

<h2>Ongoing, not one-off</h2>
For time-poor talent teams, one-and-done interviewer training is often a powerful lure. This is because it comes with the unspoken expectation that the moment the training ends, you’ll have a brand new cohort of freshly-trained <a href="https://www.metaview.ai/resources/blog/good-interviewer-bad-interviewer">interviewers</a>, ready to weigh in on hiring decisions.
Schedule the training, line up the calendars, and the hard part’s over — right?
Not exactly. This expectation is not only simplistic, but it also fails to take into account different levels of learning style and ability, and how your trainees retain the information shared in the training session.
<h3>What this means in practice</h3>
Research consistently shows that one-and-done learning models rarely deliver long-term results. It’s why cramming right before a test is a better predictor of your short-term recall skills than how well you’ve internalized the knowledge long after the fact.
Enabling ongoing learning doesn’t mean retraining, or that you need to funnel people back through the exactly the same process they already followed every quarter. This won’t incentivize your trainees to learn how to interview better — at best, they’ll be able to memorize the contents of your presentation, and that’s not an actionable way to ensure quality and consistency at scale.
Instead, organizations need to consider how to extend the impact of their interviewer training to deliver a long-term return on their investment and drive deeper subject matter expertise. On a day-to-day level, this means providing ample access to theoretical and practical resources to supplement this knowledge development, like courses or technology solutions. 
Long-term, this requires a larger shift towards a learning culture, and fostering productive relationships that result in a trickle-down of knowledge.

<h2>Peer-driven and collaborative</h2>
Recruiting and talent teams often find that the success and scalability of their interviewer training program is hampered by their limited capacity. This is when collaborative, peer-driven learning models like mentoring can be immensely powerful.
Peer-driven learning is particularly effective for interviewer training, because it means talent and recruiting teams can share the training load, and quickly expand capacity with limited resources. In short, it can help remove the impact of training bottlenecks by leveraging existing resources.
But it also means that organizations can make sure their quality bar stays high, and that knowledge transfer is more effective. Studies on peer learning in the classroom have shown that it facilitates learning for both the mentor and the mentee — but it also increases confidence and accuracy in decision-making.[10]
<h3>What this means in practice</h3>
To harness the power of peer learning, organizations can foster mentor-mentee relationships between their certified interviewers and their trainees. This relationship will not only help drive critical alignment in what good looks like for your organization and ensure high quality knowledge transfer takes place, but also helps trainees see the skills in action, driving deeper understanding.
The most important part, though, is that it drives shared accountability and buy-in on each participant to hit shared learning goals. Mentors are incentivized to help trainees succeed because it helps them keep building an organization they want to work for, and trainees get focused, one-to-one training that gives them actionable points for development.

[10] Jonathan G Tullis and Robert L Goldstone, ‘Why does peer instruction benefit student learning?’, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (2020).

Personalized and contextual, not one-to-many

<h2>Personalized and contextual, not one-to-many</h2>
Most of us are familiar with the one-to-many context for learning — after all, it was a big part of our school education. In an organizational context, learning has been done in much the same way — give or take a couple of decades and usually, fewer paper airplanes. And that makes sense; it’s a highly successful way of sharing knowledge to large groups more quickly.
While this approach might have helped us through our formative years (not to mention memorizing our multiplication tables), it’s unlikely to be the most effective delivery method for interviewer training.
Research into classroom-based learning gives us a clue as to why. We know from studies that larger class sizes can negatively impact knowledge uptake and transfer, ultimately reducing the amount of information retained.[11] Meanwhile at the top of the class, one-to-many learning formats may also result in instructors altering lesson content for mass delivery rather than learning outcomes, meaning student knowledge development is negatively impacted.[12]
In the classroom, varying learning outcomes typically impact student skills development at an individual level. But in the interview process, they can translate directly into inconsistency, bias, and a poor quality hire down the line. While group-level interviewer training may help interviewers learn the practical skills, it won’t provide a direction of travel for individual development needs.
<h3>What this means in practice</h3>
Learning is personal, but guiding each employee with a personalized development plan isn’t a viable option — not even when organizations have a huge recruitment team at their disposal. Instead, this is the perfect moment for organizations to leverage technology and encourage a more self-directed approach to learning. 
Research shows that training is important for knowledge development, but that the success of training is dependent on how motivated your trainees are to find opportunities to apply, adopt and adapt what they’ve learned to different scenarios.[13] Individual preferences, needs, and situational characteristics — such as how your organization approaches motivating employees to learn — are critical in this regard.
Online courses and instruction are one option, but emerging research on microlearning shows that it could be another helpful tool that better caters for the diversity of learning styles and needs within an organization. 
Microlearning hinges on delivering ‘snackable’, targeted lesson content that is delivered at the point of need, and provides instant feedback.[14] When this approach is combined with tech, it means that trainees have an option for developing their knowledge that is contextual, delivered at point of need, and breaks learning down into smaller pieces that better fit in with the flow of work.

[11] Kevin Belanger, Angela K Dills, Rey Hernández-Julián, Kurt W Rotthoff, ‘<a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2928459">Class size, learning and knowledge decay</a>’, SSRN Electronic Journal (2017).
[12] James Monks and Robert M Schmidt, ‘<a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.2202/1935-1682.2803/html">The impact of class size on outcomes in higher education</a>’, The BE Journal of Economic Analysis &amp; Policy (2011).
[13] Jason L Huang, Brian D Blume, J Kevin Ford and Timothy T Baldwin, ‘<a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-00257-001">A tale of two transfers: Disentangling maximum and typical transfer and their respective predictors</a>’, Journal of Business Psychology (2015).
[14] Isa Jahnke, Yen-Mei Lee, Minh Pham, Hao He and Linda Austin, ‘<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10758-019-09413-w">Unpacking the inherent design principles of microlearning</a>’, Technology, Knowledge and Learning (2020).

Rigorous and credible, not reliant on shortcuts or biases

<h2>Rigorous and credible, not reliant on shortcuts or biases</h2>
As humans, we’re impatient. We like quick fixes, because they’re based on our need for instant gratification. It’s why internet crash courses claiming we can learn a skill in a couple of hours are so compelling, and make us part so easily with our cash.
But the truth is that there’s no quick fix for learning the skills needed to lead a consistent, fair interview process. There’s no crash course for unlearning all the biases your interviewers have collected over the course of their lifetimes, or that bad habit of stacking interview questions they’ve picked up in their last couple of roles. And despite what some online resources might have you believe, there’s no two-day quickstart course that can build long-term knowledge and skills development.
<h3>What this means in practice</h3>
Your interviewer training framework needs to be as credible and rigorous as you expect your interviewers to be once they’re sitting in front of a candidate for real. This means that your training content must be based on best practice and structure that aligns with what good looks like for you.
It means making sure everyone follows the same process and learns the same best practice, whether they’ve never interviewed someone before, or they’ve been interviewing candidates for 20 years. It means everyone must also be held to the same quality bar, and re-evaluated on a regular basis to make sure that standards are upheld.
And it also means that if your interviewers are falling short, you need to be prepared to have some hard conversations to preserve trust and belief in your hiring process. For Angela, this was a no-brainer when she factored in the importance of preserving candidate experience alongside her organization’s hiring bar.

Creating your interviewer training framework

At this point, we’ve told you all the reasons you need to implement an interviewer training framework in your organization. We’ve given you the key building blocks that define a good process. But we’ve not told you how to build that process, and the steps you need to take to start creating or optimizing your training.
Enter our four-step framework to help you do just that. Wherever you are on your interviewer training journey, this framework is designed to do three things:

At the evaluation stage, you’ll take a deeper look at your existing processes, and evaluate what’s working — and what’s not. You’ll define what ‘good’ looks like at your organization, and perform job analyses to help define your question and answer rubrics in step two.
In the knowledge-sharing stage, it’s all about front-loading the resources and information your trainees need to get started. You’ll need to create question and answer rubrics, define your training tracks, and get buy-in across your organization.
Once you’re at the onboarding stage, it’s time to kick off your process. Identify your best interviewers, create peer-driven shadow paths, and track the impact of training.
By the time you reach calibration, you’ll need to think about what defines interviewer training success for your organization. We’ll outline the metrics you can track to keep your process on track. We’ll also outline how to maintain quality and consistency, recalibrate your interviewers, and define cross-functional ownership of your process.
Let’s get started.

<h2>Evaluating your existing processes</h2>
Building a great interviewer training process relies on knowing exactly what your organization is optimizing for. This means evaluating your blind spots, understanding what ‘good’ looks like for you, and outlining the structure of your interview process. To do all of that, you’ll need to take a deep dive into your hiring data.

<h3>Identify blind spots in your hiring funnel</h3>
The best way to get a feel for the success of your interview process is by taking a deep dive into your hiring data. Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative data pulled from your ATS, candidate experience surveys, and social media, to inform your understanding of any snags in your existing process.

If you’re already running interviewer training, you can analyze the amount of time it takes to train one interviewer or schedule training in. You can also ask existing employees for qualitative data on how they feel the training went, and if they felt prepared going into the interview room.
For larger organizations, there may be additional levels of complexity across office locations and geographies or departments, resulting in blind spots across your interview process.

<h3>Define what good looks like for interviewer training</h3>
Good interviewer training looks different for every organization — it’s the reason why a well-trained interviewer at The Walt Disney Company is unlikely to be evaluating candidates the same way as one at Tesla.
When interviewers are coming into your training process with varying levels of experience from different organizations, there’s a very strong chance they won’t be calibrated for what good looks like at yours.
Think of this as defining the common language that everyone entering your training process needs to learn to stay aligned on giving a good interview. So how can you define what you’re optimizing for with your interviewer training process?

<h3>Perform a job analysis</h3>
Multiple studies show that the job analysis is an essential component of a more consistent and fair interview process.[15] This is because having a clear understanding of a role and its purpose gives hiring panels a clear overview of what they need to look for in an interview, reducing the likelihood of discrimination and bias.
Performing a job analysis of each role you plan to hire means you can develop a set of questions that drives consistency in your interview process, as well as whole-team alignment.

[15] Campion, 1997.

<h2>Enable upfront knowledge sharing</h2>
Creating a successful interviewer training process relies on making sure you have a defined structure, roadmap and set of resources before you kick off your training. This will make your process more efficient and provide a clear direction of travel for your trainees.

<h3>Define your training roadmap and resources</h3>
Being strategic about your training structure from the beginning will mean you have a clear roadmap for trainees to follow, and that there will be no room for mistakenly training interviewers on potentially redundant topics. It also means you can set clear expectations for your trainees on how long the process will take, and any milestones that they’re required to hit along the way.
Segment your training process into different training tracks that build specific contextual knowledge, like in our example structure below:

You’ll also need to consider different resource formats and ways of distributing your resources to trainees. We recommend a combination of collaborative and individual learning opportunities as well as a range of formats, including live training, tech-enabled micro-learning or access to learning platforms, and peer-driven training in the form of shadow paths.
<h3>Build question and answer rubrics</h3>
Once you’ve built your roadmap, you’ll need to define your question banks and answer rubrics for each role. This will give your interviewers a clear set of guidelines to follow on what questions to ask, what attributes to look for, and what level of performance is required for each question. Check out our <a href="https://www.metaview.ai/resources/interview-questions">Interview Questions Hub</a> to help you get started. 
Defining this framework will help interviewers stay calibrated at an individual and a group level. It will also provide structure and objectivity to decision-making processes, reducing bias, prejudice and interpretation.
This will depend on the level of structure in your hiring process — but whatever you choose, remember that consistency is key. Trainees and interviewers must apply the same evaluation criteria across different candidates.

<h3>Communicate your ‘why’</h3>
‘Whys’ are important. They help teams connect to a shared purpose, and give them a collective reason to care about its success. In organizations, the ‘why’ connects your team members to your mission — whether that’s to help people belong anywhere (Airbnb), or to enable human life on Mars (SpaceX).
The same goes for your interviewer training process. Your trainees need to be invested in how interviewer training will connect to your organization’s success, and how interviewing well will become their responsibility. That means you need to help them visualize how their training and high-quality interviews will positively impact the product, the people they get to work with, and ultimately, the success of the company. 
You’ll need to communicate this message to both interviewers and senior stakeholders to get buy-in across your organization:

For Angela, getting buy-in to training was paramount — not only for driving understanding in the importance of the process, but also pride at being a part of building a great company.

<h2>Onboarding and training interviewers</h2>
Once you’ve built a process roadmap and structure, it’s time to kick off your training process. Here, you’ll need to create a clear movement path through your process, and enable collaborative learning processes that drive practical knowledge transfer.

<h3>Evaluate your interviewers</h3>
Before you can start training, you’ll need a better overview of your interviewers’ differing levels of ability. You’ll also need to identify the interviewers that best uphold your quality bar, candidate experience and company values, as they will help model your best practice to your trainee population.
You’ll need to split your trainees into three groups:

Not sure where to start? If you don’t have hard data on your interviewers’ performance to hand, Siadhal recommends taking a closer look at your historical hiring data to identify the best interviewers in your existing population.

<h3>Create shadow and reverse-shadow paths</h3>
Research based on social learning theory demonstrates how powerful behavior modeling training can be when it comes to long-term skills development and behavior change.[16] In the interviewer training process, this can be achieved with shadowing and reverse-shadowing techniques.
Shadowing is an observational form of learning, when a trainee interviewer sits on an interview, observing a talented peer in action. In reverse shadowing, the trainee interviewer conducts an interview while an experienced interviewer observes and provides feedback after the interview.
Shadowing is powerful, because it fosters a collaborative, engaged process where trainees are provided with actionable next steps on how to improve their performance, while certified interviewers consistently sharpen their skills.
Creating effective shadow paths relies on five key principles:

[16] Paul J Taylor, Darlene F Russ-Eft and Daniel W L Chan, ‘A meta-analytic review of behavior modeling training’, Journal of Applied Psychology (2005).

For Angela, shadow pairings were a priority for driving collaborative learning and gating the quality of knowledge transfer.

<h3>Schedule and track progress</h3>
Scheduling in shadowing interviews and tracking your trainees’ progress can be one of the more challenging aspects of managing their training — especially when you’re managing multiple processes at once.
However, when you’re rigorous with tracking training progress, it means you have a clear overview of where your trainees are in the process. This means you can reliably maintain your quality bar, and identify any trainees that require additional shadowing sessions or training.
There are a few options for tracking this process:

<h2>Calibrate, track, adjust, repeat</h2>
Once your training process is up and running, it’s going to be pretty gratifying to watch trainees remove the proverbial training wheels and lead interviews with confidence and rigor. It’d be easy to stop here, but we’ve got one more essential step for you: Calibration.
Calibration is the process of developing the skills needed to evaluate and score candidates fairly. It’s essential to making sure your interviewers are evaluating candidates consistently — both at an individual level, and across your organization. It’s an ongoing process, rather than an end point.
By now, you’ll understand why regularly calibrating your interviewers is a key part of building a consistent and efficient interview process. But calibrating your interviewer training process as your organization scales is equally as important.
To do that, you’ll need to continually measure the success of your training, adjust your process, and gather feedback on how it’s working.

<h3>Calibrate your interviewers and training process</h3>
Knowledge is like a muscle — if you’re not using it regularly, then it starts to wither. It’s exactly the same principle with your interviewer training process. When interviewers aren’t calibrated regularly, they could become misaligned with your hiring philosophy, leading to low-rigor interviews and inconsistent decision-making.
Your first step to keep things calibrated is to build a list of all certified interviewers, adding to it as new ones exit your training process. Then, you’ll need to set up a regular cadence for reverse-shadowing.
Reverse-shadowing your certified interviewers is essential for their ongoing learning, and it’s an effective way to keep them in step with the skills and knowledge they need to maintain your hiring bar and candidate experience.
This process can be managed manually using a calendar and spreadsheet. You can also automate this process using an interview analytics platform. Trainees are scheduled automatically based on a set cadence, and can stay calibrated asynchronously by reverse-shadowing existing interview recordings.
Sometimes, your calibration process and interview data may reveal a few blind spots in an individual interviewer’s performance that require more personalized coaching and support. Scott looks for a few red flags when he has a hunch that things aren’t quite on track.

<h3>Define and track key success metrics</h3>
Keeping your interviewers calibrated is one part of ensuring the long-term success of your interviewer training process. The other is keeping your process itself calibrated to your organization’s evolving hiring needs.
This involves defining your metrics for success, and evaluating on a regular basis if your training is still fulfilling your needs for hiring quality, candidate experience, individual skills development, and at an operational level.
Tracking this data long-term means you can adjust training over time, optimize for efficiency and consistency, and ultimately, ensure better outcomes — for both your trainees, your candidate experience, and your quality of hire.
There are five key types of data you can use to inform your decision-making:

<h3>Gather feedback and define ownership</h3>
Historically, ownership of the interviewer training process has fallen firmly to HR, talent, and recruiting teams. That makes logical sense when we consider interviews as solely a talent acquisition process.
But interviewing well impacts everyone at your organization. This is why establishing mutual, cross-functional ownership of your training process is crucial to its long-term success. This group should include your People, talent, and recruiting teams as standard, as well as senior stakeholders, hiring managers, and any other members of your hiring committee.
Scott recommends creating a cross-functional team or committee that meets on a regular basis to discuss progress of training, feedback from candidates and interviewers, and a review of current interviewing trends at your organization.

The future of interviewing is human

By now, you’re invested in the benefits of creating your own interviewer training process, and how implementing one of your own will streamline hiring, improve your interview process, and chart a path to business success through the people you hire.
But there’s one step to the process we haven’t mentioned yet — and that’s how you can use technology to augment your efforts and measure whether or not your investment is paying off.
By design, interviewing is a human process to its core — and that’s a component that we believe needs to stay. But when organizations integrate technology, they get greater ROI and can see the measurable impact of their process on people — whether that’s your candidates or your employees.
Leveraging technology means you can get deeper insight into what’s driving your time-to-hire, and offer acceptance rate trends. You can evaluate scorecard consistency, and follow paper trails to identify the leaks in your hiring process.
You can also measure interview quality. Interview analytics can help you answer questions you weren’t able to before. Questions like:

And then, it can help you surface and proactively address any issues. It can also help you streamline training, scheduling in shadow paths and identifying your most skilled interviewers — meaning everyone learns from the best. It means you can provide direct, actionable feedback when interviewers aren’t quite in step with your organization.
Ultimately, technology can bring the more human, differentiated parts of your hiring process in line with the culture you live and breathe every day — benefiting your candidates, your employees and your business.

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Interviewer training that raises the bar

Featuring expert advice from

Angela Miller

Margaret Buj

Scott Nelson

Siadhal Magos

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