How to build a great interviewing team and culture

I wrote my earlier posts on how to conduct effective interviews as an interviewer. This article is more from the view of a hiring manager / leader. A hiring manager cannot conduct all interviews themselves, so they need to make sure that all interviewers in the team are trained, calibrated and deliver a great candidate experience to all candidates they interview. Percolating the culture within the entire team is not easy — but can be solved to a large extent by laying out processes that inculcates the guidelines and impact.

Why is this important ?

78% companies believe that the top reason for bad hires is poorly designed interview process

Structured interviews can be 2x more effective in predicting future job performance.

40% of hiring time is spent due to scheduling & poor interviewer utilization

Scheduling inefficiencies can add around 7 days of delay/hire.

40% candidates turn down job offers after a bad experience

65% of the candidates loose interest in a company after bad interview experience

Building a structured process and culture

Craft the interview process

The first step is to decide the interview process for each role. This includes defining the types of interviews, the number of interviews to be conducted for each role and the signals to be evaluated in each interview type. A few key considerations to be made here are:

1. Online assessments are fast to evaluate candidates, but might not provide the best candidate experience.
2. Minimize elimination rounds as it increases the chances of bias.
3. Rounds with multiple interviewers can be great at eliminating bias, but also require more resources and can be overwhelming for the candidate.

Layout an interviewer training process

A well-structured interviewer training process can help avoid a lot of pitfalls and set a foundation to scale a world-class interviewing team as the organization scales. A good approach to this can be:

1. Define interview types and let employees be trained for each interview type.
2. Have resources to read / videos to watch for onboarding interviewers.