Hiring • 8 MIN READ
Interview Best Practices: How to Train Your Hiring Managers
JUN 14, 2026
Untrained interviewers make inconsistent decisions and expose the organisation to legal risk. Here is how to build interviewer capability at scale.
Why manager training matters for hiring quality
Research consistently shows that unstructured interviews have low predictive validity: they are barely better than chance at predicting job performance, yet they remain the dominant hiring method. The reason is that unstructured interviews are heavily influenced by first impressions, shared characteristics between interviewer and candidate, and interviewer confidence rather than actual capability. Training hiring managers to conduct structured interviews, with standardised questions and calibrated scoring criteria, is one of the highest-ROI investments an organisation can make in its hiring quality.
What interviewer training should cover
A basic interviewer training programme covers: the legal boundaries of interview questions (what you cannot ask and why), the principles of structured interviewing (consistent questions, behavioural and situational formats, scored response criteria), the most common cognitive biases in hiring (affinity bias, halo effect, confirmation bias) and how to mitigate them, scoring calibration exercises using sample candidate responses, and the logistics of the feedback and decision process. The training should be completed by every interviewer before their first interview and refreshed annually.
