We tend to forget that companies are built by people and made of people, and although some businesses are a one-person show, hiring the best talent—and especially the best talent for your company—is as essential as selling your product to as many people as possible.
This blog post contains a guide for companies looking to develop effective recruitment training for hiring managers. It outlines the key steps and strategies for building a comprehensive training program that equips hiring managers with the competencies to hire and onboard the top talent that most aligns with the company’s culture.
Why hiring training for managers matters
A program of hiring training for managers with talent acquisition responsibilities boosts the recruitment process for many reasons, from fairness to talent retention.
Consistency in the hiring process
Hiring training can ensure consistent hiring practices across your organization. When all recruiters are trained the same, they carry out the hiring process the same way. It doesn’t mean, however, that hiring for specific roles, teams, or departments can’t unfold in specific ways—it can.
A consistent hiring process can vary (to some extent, in some parts). But the majority of the process is the same, so it translates to an equally demanding—thus, fair—experience for every candidate.
Improved candidate experience
Well-trained hiring managers improve the candidate journey, contributing to a positive employer reputation. And that’s a big thing, as employer reputation is a distinctive factor for companies hiring in an employee market where candidates have plenty of employers to choose from.
Hiring training raises awareness of the importance of being as detailed as possible in rejection emails (especially with candidates who moved further in the process), informing candidates of what the process will look like and what will be expected of them at each stage, keeping candidates up to date with timing and delays in the process, and allowing candidates to get in touch with recruiters if they have any questions along the way.
Those are all aspects of the positive candidate journeys that hiring training programs lead to, but the entire candidate journey involves more than participating in interviews. For instance, it also involves the experience of visiting the company’s website and social media and submitting the job application. And hiring manager training raises awareness of those aspects too, enabling companies to improve the full candidate journey.
Reduced employee turnover costs
Hiring training leads to better hiring decisions, which increases employee satisfaction and employee retention levels. As a result, employee turnover costs decrease.
That’s because training recruitment managers to follow your company’s hiring process prepares them to apply techniques and implement strategies to select well-aligned candidates. Those are candidates who fit the role and match with the team’s personalities, mindsets, behaviors, leadership style, and organizational culture.
Key components of an effective recruitment training for hiring managers program
Let’s break down what an effective program of recruitment training for hiring managers must focus on—from goals to content..
Understand recruitment goals. Hiring training must clarify to hiring managers what recruiting is about at your company—the phases it includes, what their role is in each one of those phases, who else they must involve in each phase and at which time, and how to measure the short-term and long-term outcomes of their recruitment processes—per process, per recruiter, and as a whole team.
Develop interviewing skills. One of the critical parts of hiring a new employee is interviewing candidates, and it’s not as straightforward as some might think. Recruiters must notice the words left unsaid, read the non-verbal cues, and go beyond the standard questions to assess the candidate’s alignment with the role, the teammates, and your company. For those reasons, you must include interview training for hiring managers in your hiring training program.
Onboard and integrate. The recruitment process comprises all the actions involved in sourcing talent, screening candidates, interviewing them, selecting new hires, making the new hires feel integrated into the company, and preparing them to be as productive as possible in the first few weeks or months at work. Those are all responsibilities of hiring managers, and your hiring training program must cover all of them—with the specifics of hiring talent for your company.
Related: Best practices for onboarding new employees
Evaluate and choose candidates. As deciding who to hire shouldn’t be based—at least entirely—on gut feelings, defining criteria to select candidates must be mandatory for any recruitment process. So, your hiring manager training must elucidate how to define those criteria and clarify who must make final hiring decisions.
Steps to build a hiring training program
It’s time to walk you through the stages of designing a program of hiring training for managers with recruitment responsibilities.
Step 1: Identify training needs
First, determine where your recruitment and hiring process is falling short. Examples include:
- A hiring process that’s more demanding for some candidates than others
- A candidate journey that falls short of candidates’ expectations
- A negative employer reputation that fails to attract top talent
- New hires who systematically leave the company shortly after being hired because they didn’t deliver what hiring managers thought they could, or they didn’t fit the team, leadership style, or organizational culture
Once you’ve determined the problem you want your training to solve, try to quantify it. That gives you a measurable goal to achieve. For instance, you could set a goal to increase new hire retention by 10%.
You must, then, figure out what the program must contain so that you achieve the desired outcome. Luckily, you can run surveys or focus groups to gather input from hiring managers to find out skill gaps and training preferences.
Step 2: Design customized content
In this step, your goal is to customize the training content to your hiring managers. In other words, you’ll design a learning experience that’s customized to their goals, skills, and needs.
For instance, your hiring managers might need to focus more on growing interviewing skills rather than learning more about sourcing talent. Or they might need to develop more competencies in screening and selecting rather than onboarding.
Whatever your hiring managers need, and despite the customization, don’t leave key hiring training topics out of your program, such as the phases of your recruitment process or the importance of objective selection criteria.
Pro tip: Consider delivering a personalized learning experience to your hiring managers that adapts to their progress and allows them to customize it themselves.
Step 3: Use interactive learning techniques
Interactive training can take different shapes and sizes in hiring training. And dialogue (or role-play) simulations are one of them.
In such simulations, hiring managers play different roles, making decisions and responding in hypothetical recruitment scenarios. They can do it in person or online and with each other, actors, or virtual characters. And if you go the extra mile, they can do it with virtual characters in a virtual reality environment.
Whatever option you choose, you’ll allow hiring managers to apply knowledge in a realistic, yet controlled setting rather than listening to an instructor in a classroom. You’ll also enable them to absorb more information more quickly and retain it for longer periods of time.
Step 4: Implement feedback mechanisms
Use a post-training survey to ask hiring managers for feedback about the training program once they complete it.
If you deliver eLearning modules through a learning management system, you can have the system run the surveys on your behalf. You just need to carefully design the training evaluation questions for the survey and make sure that you collect generic opinions with multiple-choice and multiple-selection questions and detailed opinions with free-text questions.
Step 5: Measure success
If successful recruitment at your company means that your hiring managers follow consistent practices, you must measure how demanding the new hires found the process to be. That’s a metric and a learning outcome you can certainly measure with a survey or interviews. Discrepancies in their opinions might indicate that you didn’t achieve the desired outcome for your hiring manager training.
Other metrics may evaluate the candidate journey or the new hire retention levels. Usung quantifiable metrics for evaluation will help you draw conclusions about how effective your recruitment training for hiring managers was.
Best practices for effective training for hiring managers
Following steps one through five will get you there. But you must take into consideration a few more things when designing a program for managers with talent acquisition responsibilities. Check them out below.
Cover all levels of expertise
If your hiring managers are performing the role for over a year, they probably won’t need to learn the 101 of behavioral or competency-based interviewing, unbiased candidate selection, or legal issues tied to recruiting. But they might need to learn to assess soft skills, leadership style, and fit with the organizational culture.
Briefly refreshing the basics of recruitment is always a good thing. But hiring managers must learn recruitment techniques that actually assist them in predicting the success of candidates in the position they applied for.
Produce high-quality content
If you want your hiring manager training to be credible and engaging, add case studies to the program to tell stories of success or disaster that happened at your company or another.
Also, give plenty of examples of good and bad hiring practices (along with the consequences of both). Talking about other companies will catch your hiring managers’ attention, especially if you hired them recently and they’re still used to recruiting the way they did at another company.
Align with execs on expectations
Gather your executives’ vision for what successful hiring looks like at your company. Clarify what competencies and skills they want for all positions across the company. Then, determine which soft and technical skills should be prioritized for specific positions, roles, or departments.
Building a foundation for hiring success
Investing in hiring manager training is crucial to improving recruitment outcomes and raising employee retention levels. And we’re here to help you design a training program to achieve all that. Drop us a line today, and we’ll go from there.
