Inteviewing Skills Training

Course details

Let’s face it--great leaders are great because they surround themselves with fantastic, talented people. Here is a little-known secret: most leaders are not very skilled at interviewing. Making poor hiring decisions (and keeping bad hires) based on deficient interviewing skills costs companies millions of dollars every year. This program helps leaders develop the proven skill sets to interview and find the best candidate every time.

Program Objectives:

At the program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

• Understand the impact of interviewing and hiring the best applicants.
• Learn six laws of interviewing for finding the right people.
• Identify and use the tools and techniques for interviewing effectively and finding talent.
• Use the right kinds of questions to uncover what they are looking for.
• Learn and use a specific step-by-step process for interviewing that eliminates mistakes
• Develop an action plan for their growth and development as interviewers.

The following outline highlights the course’s key learning points. As part of your training, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of participant materials prior to the session(s).

Course Outline:

Before We Begin: The Six Unbreakable Laws of Interviewing

In this introductory lesson, participants will learn the six unbreakable laws of interviewing. If they apply them, they will have quality hires that will make great contributions to their organization.

Think It Through: Knowing What You Want 

The biggest mistake that leaders make is not taking the time to identify and focus  on the specific qualities they are looking for in the ideal candidate. In this section, leaders learn how to “target” a candidate on skills, expertise, and cultural fit and then to identify which ones are most important. 

Star Search: Nine Techniques for Finding Talent 

Leaders often look for talent in the wrong places and at the wrong times. This component covers nine specific creative techniques for finding talent. It also includes some that most leaders never use or even consider.

How to Get Started: Ten Guidelines for Conducting Successful Interviews

In this portion of the training, the instructor will give participants specific guidelines for interviewing, including what they should always do  and what they should never do. They will also learn how to spot problems of exclusion versus inclusion on resumes and how to react or not react to a candidate’s responses.

Who Was That Masked Candidate?: How to Get to the Truth   

In this segment, participants will learn an almost foolproof, step-by-step procedure designed to ferret out candidates who have read interviewing books for the purpose of saying what they think the interviewer wants to hear. The instructor will show participants how to use the procedure to discover the “real” person beneath the pat responses. They will also learn what should be covered in the first and subsequent interviews and who should be conducting each.

It’s All in the Questions: Interview Questions that Get Results

Simply put, the key to effective interviewing is preparing and asking the right questions, but many interviewers don’t. At this point in the training, participants will learn how to ask in-depth questions that generate truthful and substantive responses and get away from those that are predictable and receive equally predictable answers.

Let Me Put It Another Way: Incredible Interview Tactics

Great interviewers use tactics that are so subtle that the people being interviewed don’t even know they have been questioned. In this final lesson, participants will learn 11 effective interview strategies ranging from the use of silence to not accepting vague answers.

By the end of this program, participants will understand the procedure for  finding qualified candidates. They will know how to interview skillfully, detect rehearsed responses, and use strategies that will lead to hiring the best person for the position.