Interview Skills Training
Senior managers need to be effective interviewers but few are. This can lead to unnecessary recruitment and training costs, negative effects on colleagues and morale, and the possibility of litigation.
Our approach to interviewing skills is interactive, combining practical tips with live coaching and repeated practice with feedback. Participants leave not only understanding what to do but with more confidence to:
- Construct effective questions;
- Get beneath rehearsed answers;
- Accurately and consistently rate candidates;
- Sell the company;
- Recruit within the law;
- Defend hiring decisions
Built around your needs
Whether you have a detailed competency framework or just headline concepts, we structure programmes to reflect your needs. If needed, we can help define what ‘good’ looks like in candidates.
Practical design, tailored delivery
Our focus is ensuring that participants get the most from our programmes whilst being engaged (even enjoying) with our no-nonsense delivery. Our pragmatic approach means we design each programme around that client’s specific requirements.
We can deliver:
- One-day programmes focusing on practice and feedback
- Two-hour condensed workshops designed for time-pressured senior executives
- Comprehensive two-day development programmes.
To speed learning, participants have the opportunity to observe interviews through web casting or CCTV (in a separate room to the interview).
Who do the participants interview?
We use different types of mock candidates to interview. For example, internal staff reduce costs and enhance relevance whilst graduates from employment agencies increase the interview challenge. MBA students are used in organisations that typically hire MBAs (effectively using real candidates) while actors enhance the coaching element of a workshop. Varied training for interviewing includes:
- Senior managers
- Graduates or MBAs
- Technical specialists
Pragmatic
We recognise that many leaders have interviewed for many years, often with little training or support, and therefore coming from different starting points. We tailor our training to push their skills to the next levels of competence.
Helping you to interview
In addition, we work alongside a number of our clients in live interviews, whether it is as part of a selection process or an element of a development centre.
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley aims to recruit the very best people available. The interview is central to their selection processes, so it is critical that they are consistent, fair, defensible and accurate. To help achieve this, we delivered 3½ hour workshops to over 200 participants but tailored to the specific criteria of the different divisions. Web-casting allowed observers to watch and comment on interviews (without disturbing them) and increased the learning curve within a short time frame.
HSBC
Kiddy developed an ‘experience profile’ for HSBC’s Commercial Management role. We combined this with information about skills and knowledge needed for the role to develop a pragmatic interview guide. We trained the senior UK Commercial team on how to use the guide to reach a closer match between candidates and role.