Choosing the right hires may be the most important decision you face when growing a team. Just like laying a strong foundation, the people you choose to bring on board will shape the stability and future success of your organization. However, finding and recruiting the right individuals can be a challenging process, especially for teams who may not have prior experience in hiring.

There are many things to consider. Where to find great candidates? What does a great candidate even look like? How do you know when to make an offer and when to pass on a candidate who may look like a great fit?

Identifying the right candidate for a role today requires more than reviewing a few resumes and conducting an interview or two. A good candidate will have to "fit" with the company, the product they will be working on, the industry's unique challenges, the team dynamics, and the overarching organizational culture. A great fit not only has the necessary skills and experience but also a real passion for the product, good industry knowledge, great team collaboration skills, and is a perfect match for our company's values and culture. This alignment ensures that your ideal candidate is not only competent and engaged but also a productive and positive member of the team.

As you can imagine, defining all of this and building hiring and training processes to attract these types of candidates consistently over time can be a major endeavor. So, where do we start? The answer is hiring process training for managers.

Many people will tell you this is where you put things like job descriptions and interview frameworks, and we'll talk about those next- but let's start from a different frame of reference; a question. "The Dan Sullivan Question." This one frame will help you remove all the noise around hiring and focus on what counts - the end result. Here's the question: "Imagine this: one year from now, we're discussing how the candidate we hired has absolutely crushed it, exceeding all expectations and surpassing every performance metric. What must that candidate possess to produce these results?"

This question goes beyond the traditional resume and educational requirements and gets down to what matters, the candidate's results. Break their results down into principles, skills, traits, education, and experience to inform your hiring criteria. Once you've answered this question, you can lean on the traditional hiring manager training topics like hiring criteria, job descriptions, ramp times, and interview strategies to create an effective hiring process.

If you're new to hiring and would like access to Pillar's effective hiring processes, interview intelligence software, and other interview strategies to help you identify top talent and make better hiring decisions, chat with someone from our team to learn more.

The Importance Of Training For Hiring Managers

Once you've answered the "Dan Sullivan Question," you'll have a list of criteria to build your hiring process. Let's use an example to give you a detailed look at the hiring process. Imagine that you're hiring an Account Executive (AE), and this AE must be familiar with MarTech (marketing technology-based SaaS products), have sold to agencies and marketing teams, and have hit quotas of over 1M per year in annual sales. These are the candidate qualifications, but they also need to fit the product, team dynamics, and culture.

As a SaaS product, you'll probably have a shorter sales cycle but the need for longer customer retention, meaning your ideal candidate would also need to have excellent customer relationship management skills. In addition, your team may highly value collaboration and creativity, especially when it comes to gathering customer feedback and passing it on to product and engineering - so your ideal candidate would also need to possess these traits.

Now, imagine being a hiring manager with all of this information and no prior training on how to conduct an effective hiring process. Without proper training, you may overlook or undervalue certain skills or characteristics that are essential for the role and company culture. This can result in a poor hiring decision that negatively impacts the team and costs the company thousands, potentially tens of thousands of dollars.

Hiring process training for managers equips the manager with the tools, tactics, and strategies necessary to identify high-performers, and. plug them into a team that's running like a well-oiled machine. Exploring different forms of training for hiring managers will empower them to adapt to the changing marketplace. Whether through workshops, online courses, mentorship programs, or hands-on practice, or utilizing interviewer insights investing in varied training opportunities can profoundly impact the effectiveness of your hiring strategy and the success of your team.

Including specialized training for hiring managers will not only give you a competitive edge when attracting top talent, but it will also make your interview process run smoothly - ensuring you hire someone who not only has the necessary skills but also aligns with your overall goals and values as a company. The importance of training for hiring managers is only truly felt once you've built an effective team.

Interview Skills Training For Hiring Managers

Now that we've covered the impact of equipping your hiring managers let's shift to interview skills training for hiring managers. Like a "domino effect," you can train your hiring managers on interviewing skills and coach your panel interviewers on things like bias, hiring criteria, expectations, timelines, and their roles and responsibilities, but you still have to "win the interview."

"Winning the interview" is fundamentally about making the candidate feel like more than just a number. You've done your research on them, you're familiar with their work, and you've looked at their alma mater and previous experience to see commonalities that you can use to break the ice and build rapport. You're engaged in the process, actively listening, asking great questions, and focused on what they bring to the table and how that fits into the bigger picture within your organization.

These are all huge factors to a candidate who's assessing you as much as you're interviewing them. Although many data sources are reporting on the workforce shortages we face today, here are a couple that I think you should consider building into your interview pieces of training and various hiring processes across departments.

1. According to RSM US, 58% of "respondents (hiring managers, HR, and other recruitment roles), found hiring to be "very" or even "extremely" challenging in today's workforce landscape.
2. According to US Labor Statistics and Manpower Group, companies are experiencing an average of 75% workforce shortages - with 3 out of 4 expressing their inability to find suitable talent for their open roles.
3. According to Forbes, in the current software developer market, there are 5 open and actively hiring roles for each software developer.

Now, you may be wondering, what does all of this have to do with interview training? Competition and confidence. Effective interview training stresses the importance of preparation and confidence, inspiring trust in potential hires. It gets all of your interviewers on the same page with clear timelines, set hiring criteria, and a consistent evaluation process. It boils down to demonstrating to the candidate that your company is well-organized and forward-thinking, fast-acting, and assures them they're joining a team that has a clear mission, goals, direction, and purpose. All this careful planning and follow-through lets the candidate see they can trust where your company is headed and where they fit in.

The best part about all of this is that it's easier than ever with modern technology. We've seen the rise of AI sourcing, digital assistants, interview intelligence platforms, video training platforms, and tools like Google Workspace and Slack that converge to build incredibly powerful hiring ecosystems that automate many of the steps in the process. Today, you can use tools like Loom to create "interview training for hiring manager" videos that can be shared with your entire team in just minutes.

These resources can help you turn your candidate funnel into an engaging and interactive hiring process. You can also use surveying software like Qualtrics or Google Forms to build out a candidate experience survey that addresses any areas in your hiring process that may need improvement, optimizing and improving your candidate engagement and overall success rates.

In closing, imagine what hiring would look like if you had a defined process that you and your team were confident in - one that meets the needs of today's job-seekers, is efficient for your team, and produces quality hires. Achieving this all starts with a top-down approach. Building effective systems at the hiring manager level, and implementing them across departments, will lead to a strong foundation for success in the hiring process.

If you've felt the effects of workforce shortages on your productivity and are looking to revamp your hiring process, book your demo of Pillar today. You'll discover how implementing a strategic approach powered by interview intelligence software can help your organization stay ahead in today's competitive job market.