Interview Best Practices: How To Train Hiring Managers

At the end of 2024, there were 7.7 million job openings in the US. Making the most of your time and resources is essential for filling these openings with the right people, and following interview best practices can help you do that.

Hiring is a complex process. It involves understanding legal protocol, using the most effective interviewing methods, and providing an excellent candidate experience. Implementing interview skills training for managers can help your organization hire more high-quality candidates faster.

Below, we’ll explore everything from legal requirements to interview best practices, hiring methods, and how to create a great candidate experience. Simplify HR with BambooHR® tools and prioritize hiring the right people for your team.

Understand the Legal Requirements

You should avoid asking candidates about their personal characteristics protected by law under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). ‌It’s not just common courtesy—it’s the law. Protected characteristics include:

• race, color, and national origin
• sex and gender identity
• sexual orientation
• pregnancy
• disability status
• age

Most hiring managers know not to ask questions that might come across as too personal or inappropriate. But what does that actually mean in practice?

While most know better than to ask a candidate, “What’s your religion?” someone may think questions like, “Do you have any kids?” are just friendly small talk. If a candidate chooses to talk about their family and private life, they should do so on their terms. Let them broach the topic themselves if they want, but avoid asking probing questions.

What are legal interview questions?

Hiring managers should absolutely consider job aptitude when developing interview questions, but other areas to consider may include “soft skills” or culture fit. For example, the ideal candidate is someone who has all the skills and qualifications necessary to do the job well, but who also aligns with the company values and will contribute to a positive company culture.

The goal of an interview isn’t to trick candidates, test their knowledge on the spot (unless you’ve disclosed a skills assessment ahead of time!), or choose someone based on a “gut feeling.” Instead, train your hiring managers on interviewing best practices that’ll help them select a great candidate.

You might consider providing a list of approved legal interview questions. ‌You may prefer training hiring managers on a few key areas they should assess in interviews instead of a strict script. However you choose to approach it, be specific and use concrete examples. It’s not enough to rely on “common sense.”

Prioritize Candidate Experience

Creating a consistently excellent candidate experience is crucial for maintaining a strong employer brand. Hiring managers play a pivotal role in shaping this experience. To ensure consistency, it’s essential to outline key areas of focus during interview skills training:

Interview Process Steps

The hiring process can vary significantly depending on the position. For roles with a high volume of applicants, initial video interviews are now the norm, serving as an effective screening tool to filter candidates. More senior or technical positions may require additional assessments, such as skills tests, case studies, or multiple rounds of interviews, but it’s important to maintain a standardized process for all candidates applying for the same position.

While in-person office tours may not be essential for remote roles, virtual tours or detailed company culture videos can provide valuable insights and enhance the candidate experience.

Interview Timelines

In today’s competitive job market, time to hire is a critical factor. In fact, the average time-to-hire (the time from when a job is posted to when a candidate accepts the offer) is 44 days. Delays in the hiring process can lead to top candidates losing interest or accepting offers from other companies.

To address this, work closely with hiring managers to establish clear and realistic interview schedules and timelines. Managers should communicate these timelines transparently to applicants and keep the process moving as efficiently as they can. Regular check-ins and timely feedback are essential to keep candidates engaged and informed.

Candidate-First Approach

A candidate-first approach isn’t just about making applicants feel good; it’s a strategic imperative for building a positive employer brand. A positive experience can lead to referrals and a stronger talent pipeline in the future. We recommend training your hiring managers to:

• Build personal connections. Encourage hiring managers to establish genuine, personal connections with candidates. This can be achieved through thoughtful communication, active listening, and showing genuine interest in the candidate’s background and career goals.
• Maintain transparent communication. Ensure that all touchpoints are clear and transparent. Provide regular updates on the status of the application, and be honest about the next steps in the process. This helps build trust and keeps candidates engaged.
• Offer constructive feedback. Ideally, this applies to all candidates, even those who aren’t selected. This not only helps applicants in their career development but also leaves them with a positive impression of your organization.
• Recognize and mitigate unconscious biases. Promote an inclusive interview process that values diversity and ensures that all candidates are treated fairly and respectfully.
• Engage. For remote or hybrid roles, provide virtual alternatives to traditional in-person interactions. This could include virtual office tours, video introductions to the team, and online Q&A sessions.

By focusing on these areas, hiring managers can create a candidate-first experience that not only attracts top talent but also improves the company’s reputation in the job market.

Take Advantage of Remote Interviews

COVID-19 turned the working landscape upside down. According to McKinsey research, hybrid work is here to stay—and office attendance is still roughly 30% less than pre-pandemic times.

But whether you’re looking to hire in-office or remote employees, you can take advantage of the benefits of remote interviews. Be sure to include remote interview best practices in your hiring manager training.

Here are some considerations to cover in your remote interviewing training:

Use an Appropriate Software

Choose between having the interview over the phone or via video call—on a software like Teams or Zoom. A video interview can offer the benefit of also seeing the candidate’s body language and may allow you a better insight into their personality and inter-personal skills. Whichever you choose, remember that the simpler it is to navigate, the less likely you are to run into technical problems.

Have a Backup Plan

Make sure you have a backup option. Inform your candidate at the start what to expect if something goes wrong. Make sure you have their phone number, so you have the option to continue over a call if the internet unexpectedly cuts out.

Follow Remote Interview Etiquette

Just like with a traditional in-person interview, there’s certain etiquette to follow with remote interviews. Make sure that everyone in the meeting has their phone on silent, you’re in a quiet area away from distractions and your screen has a clear and uncluttered background.

Tailor Your Interview Questions

If you’re hiring for a remote position, you might want to ask whether the candidate has any remote working experience already. Be sure to tailor your interview questions to the specific role. If you’re still looking for inspiration, we’ve gathered the 35 best interview questions to ask candidates.

Interview Tips for Managers

A successful interview involves making the candidate as comfortable as possible. Relaxed candidates usually perform better and may be more honest with their answers. Sometimes interviewers need to prioritize presenting the company in a positive light and ensuring their loyalty—over tough interview questions.

Here are four interviewing tips for managers to remember:

1. Have a thorough understanding of what the organization needs. This will help your manager stay focused and ask the right kinds of questions. While the posted job description will give candidates an idea of the requirements of the role, the hiring manager should have a deeper understanding of the kinds of skills, experience, and work style would benefit the team.
2. Ask the right questions. While we encourage having a natural conversation with your candidate, sometimes having a set of questions can help to keep the interview on track. Advise your hiring manager to ask open-ended questions to try and encourage the interviewee to share more about themselves. Remember, you’ll need different questions based on the scope, seniority, and skills required for the position: questions for intern positions shouldn’t be the same as those for managers. Similarly, some positions might require behavioral-based interview questions.
3. Listen more than speak. In interview training for managers, cover how your hiring manager should listen to the candidates more than they speak to them. The aim of an interview is to learn as much about the interviewee as possible, so they should have the space to elaborate on things further.
4. Be fair to all candidates. It’s essential that your hiring manager is fair to every interviewee and supports inclusive hiring. They must be aware of reducing unconscious bias and treat all candidates equally.

Selecting the Right Candidate: Interview Best Practices

Choosing the right candidate is time-consuming, but it’s so important. When interviews are over and it’s time to assess candidates, your hiring manager should consider these points:

• Pay close attention to interview performance. Observe comprehension, communication, teamwork, empathy, passion, and willingness to learn in interviewees’ responses to your questions.
• Align assessment criteria with job qualifications. Compare candidates to the job description, not just to each other.
• Establish a concrete process for assessment. Follow a consistent, vetted process for all candidates, and stick to it.
• Mitigate bias. If you’ve developed a concrete process for assessment, now is the time to stick to it! Using a standard set of questions, assessment rubrics, and multiple interviewers can help mitigate interviewer bias. ‌Consider including implicit bias training as part of your interview training.
• Balance skills and culture fit. Ensure candidates have both the technical skills to do the job and will add to your company culture. Leaning too heavily on one or the other can lead to dissatisfaction and turnover.
• Pay attention to post-interview communication. ‌Note gratitude, passion, and enthusiasm in follow-up communications.
• Pay attention to candidates who may be a better fit for a different role. A candidate may not be the perfect fit for this job description, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be great at your company. If you think they’d contribute to another department, be sure to keep their resume on file and reach out when an opportunity opens up.

Stay Consistent

It’s essential to make sure all managers are on the same page when it comes to interview steps, timelines, and providing a positive experience. Staying consistent can increase the chances that candidates will have a positive image of your organization. This could be the difference between them choosing your company or a competitor. You want candidates to have an enjoyable experience, so they refer their friends or re-apply in the future if it wasn’t the right fit this time.

Taking the time to provide interview training on how to find and hire employees allows your recruiting teams to delegate parts of the recruitment process. This leaves more time for strategic initiatives, sourcing, and initial screening.

BambooHR can help you ‌measure how well your hiring processes are working. Discover which KPIs you should track and how to find benchmarking data with our checklist.