Why hiring & interviewing training is for everyone, not just managers

Early in my career as a talent professional, I admit I underestimated the intricacies that go into interviewing and hiring. I learned quickly that a company has to work the muscle of interviewing and even more importantly ensure their entire company has the ability to do so.

Every employee, not just recruiting teams and hiring managers, benefit from learning the ins and outs of a great interviewing and hiring process.

This doesn’t just mean you just toss anyone into the interviewing ring. Training and education on best practices are more vital than you might imagine. You may be wondering why you would want to spend the time, resources, and money on this training, and maybe you think your current interview/hiring process is working just fine. Let’s walk through the major benefits of including everyone – not just your hiring team – in quality hiring and interviewing training:

It may not seem broken, but you might still need to fix it

Throughout my career, I have seen just about every type of interview process. I’ve seen companies get pretty darn close to perfecting their interview and hiring process, and I’ve seen others neglect it and adopt an attitude of “not fixing what ain’t broke.” This isn’t to say a perfect hiring process exists, but if your company isn’t already factoring in training and education on best practices for interviewing and hiring, it could have serious detrimental effects on candidates, recruiting teams, and even your entire organization.

Hiring outcomes improve when you involve everyone

Your hiring process should not solely rely on your recruiters. Different viewpoints of feedback and perspectives are necessary to make the best hiring decisions. You’ll want non-hiring manager team members to interview the candidates they’ll be teammates with and team members who will be on a different, but maybe cross-functional team.

You also want to give candidates the time to meet with a mix of future teammates during their interview process to learn the most about your company from a variety of perspectives. When candidates are able to see themselves reflected in the company, they can join your team feeling like they belong already, making them more confident and excited.

Empowering team members to make an impact outside of their role will have a lasting positive effect

Employees can sometimes feel they don’t have an impact outside of their role. Involving someone in the hiring process creates the opportunity for them to have that extra impact. Everyone appreciates when their voice is heard and even more when their voice is valued and requested.

Allowing all, particularly team members across levels within departments, to interview shows team members that their viewpoints matter.

Everyone is responsible for diversity, equity, & inclusion, and for whom their peers are

If only a fraction of your team is trained to interview and make hiring decisions, chances are you will end up with a lot of people who are very alike. Doing the work to ensure you have a hiring atmosphere that’s inclusive and equitable means you will be able to:

• Navigate and avoid blind spots, allowing your team to grow wider and have more diverse perspectives and experiences which will only enhance your team.
• Give your company the best chance of consistently bringing in top-tier talent.
• Actively grow a diverse team where you support your employees and their professional and personal growth, opening up new avenues for development and upskilling for them that maybe didn’t exist before.

Hiring and interviewing training provides valuable, transferable skills

Everyone on your team can leverage these skills in their day-to-day, even if they won’t necessarily lead an interview right away. When you train everyone to be a hiring and interviewing pro, your team will naturally grow stronger in:

• Asking better questions, ie. when working on projects or with stakeholders
• Uncovering biases that may exist in other processes
• Being a strategic thinker, thinking about assessing a situation or challenging current processes with better footing, which results in wiser decisions

Creating an inclusive and well-thought-out interview and hiring process won’t solve everything, but providing the education and resources needed for your team to succeed is a really good start. And, since there’s a lot that goes into interviewing and hiring well at scale, we’ve specifically created training that is holistic and specific so every team member, whether they are a manager or non-manager, will learn and hone the art of interviewing and hiring.

Ethena is a compliance training platform with intuitive and powerful admin tools, built to make training easy, engaging, and effective.

Interested in exploring Ethena’s training solution? Read more and sample our Hiring & Interviewing course, or talk to a member of our team.