Term Paper Undergraduate 1,457 words

Interviewing Skills Training Program for Technical Supervisors

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Abstract

This paper presents a three-hour interviewing skills training program designed for technical supervisors who participate in employee recruitment alongside HR personnel. The program addresses a common organizational gap: technically skilled professionals often lack the interpersonal and managerial competencies needed to evaluate job candidates effectively. Drawing on andragogy principles, the training incorporates two core activities — mock interviews and video analysis — to deliver practical, experience-based learning. The paper outlines the program's objectives, activity structure, participant evaluation methodology, and associated costs, arguing that blending technical expertise with interviewing competence strengthens an organization's overall recruitment and talent selection function.

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What makes this paper effective

The paper clearly identifies a real organizational problem — technically skilled supervisors lacking interviewing competence — and builds the entire training rationale around solving it.
Activity design is directly justified by learning theory: the author explicitly invokes andragogy principles to explain why experiential methods like mock interviews are appropriate for adult professional learners.
The inclusion of practical details such as activity duration, role rotation between interviewers and observers, and a cost breakdown gives the program outline operational credibility beyond abstract planning.

Key academic technique demonstrated

The paper demonstrates applied instructional design thinking by connecting training objectives to specific activities, then linking those activities to measurable evaluation criteria. Rather than simply listing what the training covers, the author justifies each component — explaining why mock interviews and video analysis were selected and how each advances the stated learning goals. This cause-and-effect reasoning is a hallmark of professional training program documentation.

Structure breakdown

The paper follows a standard training program report format: it opens with an organizational context and need, states objectives, details activities with rationale, addresses evaluation, justifies activity selection, and closes with a cost overview. This logical progression mirrors real-world HR training documentation and makes the argument easy to follow from problem identification through to implementation planning.

Introduction to Training and Development

Human resource management is an integral department in all business organizations (Naik, 2009), serving industries of the 21st century. The importance of the human resource management department can be understood through the fact that its presence is one of the regulatory requirements for company registration. This is because the modern world considers employees the most valuable assets of an organization, and their development is one of the essential goals of corporate organizations.

One of the functions of the human resource management department is to hire the right employees for the roles performed within the organization. Since these roles can belong to technical and specialized domains, it may not always be possible for HR personnel to judge the potential of candidates applying for announced vacancies. In order to hire the best talent, having a representative from the technical department on the interview panel is essential. However, technical experts are often entirely unaware of the managerial skills involved in evaluating a candidate's potential. It is therefore important that technical staff be trained in interviewing skills so that they can play an effective role in conducting interviews.

This paper describes a training session on interviewing skills arranged primarily for supervisors. The training session is three hours long, and its contents are focused on transferring the highest quality of information to participants within that time.

The program consists of an interactive session in which an HR consultant delivers a presentation while the audience listens and is encouraged to ask questions and discuss any ambiguities or concerns. The training session is not a conventional classroom session in which theoretical knowledge is simply imparted to attendees. It is a professional training program designed for supervisors and uses techniques specifically suited to transferring practical knowledge. The outline of the training program is as follows:

Program Outline and Training Objectives

There are two main objectives of the training program:

Both objectives are important from an organizational perspective. It is frequently observed that people serving in technical departments gradually become experts in their technical fields but remain underdeveloped in interpersonal skills. As they advance in their careers, they acquire juniors and subordinates whom they must manage. Because they lack communication and interpersonal skills, they often do not perform to the expected standard. It is therefore important that they receive training in these areas, enabling the organization to enjoy a blend of technically and interpersonally skilled professionals who are dynamic and can serve in multiple capacities.

Since the training activity is conducted for adults, the selected techniques and activities should follow the principles of andragogy so that the maximum learning objectives can be achieved in the minimum possible time (Wang and King, 2009).

Training Techniques and Activities

This activity is designed to impart critical interviewing skills by allowing participants to practically experience the interviewing environment. All participants will be required to prepare their questions for the interviews in advance. Participants will then be divided into two groups: interviewers and observers. The interviewers will participate in the mock interviews while the observers watch the session.

Upon conclusion of each mock interview, observers will provide ratings and comments to the interviewers, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Participants will then swap roles — those who were observers will become interviewers in a subsequent session, with the same rating and feedback process applied.

This activity allows all participants to both observe and practically experience the process of conducting interviews. As adults, they benefit significantly from practical and mutual learning. By identifying the strengths and weaknesses of others, they come to recognize the key weaknesses they themselves need to overcome and the key strengths they need to develop in order to conduct successful interviews. Preparing questions in advance also highlights to participants the importance of thorough preparation before an interview — a discipline equally relevant to both interviewer and interviewee. Each mock interview will take at least ten minutes.

The second activity will take comparatively less time, as it is not interactive. The total duration of this activity is approximately fifteen minutes. Participants will be shown a collection of videos of real interviews, including both successful and unsuccessful examples. They will be required to critically evaluate and comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the interviewers in those videos, as well as on the strong and weak aspects of each interview as a whole. Participants will also be asked to explain how the strengths and weaknesses they identify contributed to the success or failure of each interview.

In addition to watching and evaluating the videos, participants will be asked to recall their own past interviews and share observed shortcomings with the group, along with suggestions for improvement.

This activity is included for the following reasons:

2 Locked Sections · 295 words remaining

Participant Evaluation Criteria and Methodology · 110 words

"How participant learning is measured and assessed"

Importance of Selected Activities and Training Costs · 185 words

"Rationale for activities and program cost breakdown"

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Key Concepts in This Paper

Interviewing Skills Andragogy Mock Interview Technical Supervisors HR Training Recruitment Video Analysis Training Objectives Employee Selection Learning Evaluation