It seems like you do professional development for your team every year. Why, and more specifically, why  interview training this year?

We find that ongoing training for employees is beneficial to both sides. It’s important for the employee to grow their careers, but also for the company. We’re a lean organization, and we don’t have much over-lap. If someone gains additional skills through a professional development opportunity, and feels empowered to take on more responsibilities, it benefits the company greatly.

We chose the interview process as our professional development topic because we’ve never done any official interview training with our managers, and hadn’t developed a formal interview process. We received feedback on our employee survey that our hiring managers (and future hiring managers) wanted more guidance on how to interview and manage candidates through the process. 

What were you hoping to get from the training?

 As a firm, we wanted to put structure around our hiring process to make it more efficient without losing the end result of hiring good employees, which we have managed to do thus far despite our lack of process. We’ve had too many experiences of losing good candidates to other companies before they reach the offer stage with us, due to our drawn-out interview process. We realized that without a more formalized interview structure, our interviewers didn’t know what steps to take to move candidates through efficiently to an offer-stage.

What was your experience/feedback from managers regarding the interview training?

The feedback was incredibly positive. A number of managers said there were clear takeaways that could be immediately implemented into their process. The managers shared tools like the question bank with other team members who did not attend, and most- if not all- managers have already begun to implement the more formalized structure. Overall, it was a huge success.

How was CFW’s training different from previous professional development providers you’ve worked with?

The training with CFW was more easily implemented than other trainings we’ve done in the past. We’ve done a lot of training on ways to handle different situations (eg., How to Negotiate), but CFW gave us clear tools that we could use immediate, and without too much reorganizing.

In the past, we haven’t always had specific goals for our trainings, but CFW came in, set specific goals, looked at our individual interview process, identified our pain points, and then focused on how we could address those problems. What we did with CFW was able to be implemented across the whole organization, rather than department-specific, allowing us to offer the training to every single manager in the business and thus learn about different processes used across the company.

Would you work with CFW for future professional development opportunities and why?

I would definitely work with CFW for future development opportunities within CFW’s realm of expertise. I’ve had a great experience with CFW across the different areas of their business, both for recruiting and for professional development training. We’ve gotten everything we could have asked for from this experience.