Free Interview Skills Masterclass
Your last bad hire probably had a great interview.
A free 30-minute online masterclass on how the professionals run an interview. It runs every fortnight, you join any session you like, and you can leave whenever you want.
- Free
- 30 minutes, online
- Join any session
- Unsubscribe in one click
New sessions every fortnight
You liked them in the room. A couple of months in, you were wondering what you'd missed.
You read the CV, had a good chat, and went with your gut. It's how almost everyone interviews, because it's how almost everyone was shown.
Then the hire goes sideways, and you replay the interview looking for the warning sign you should have caught.
Every bad hire costs you twice. The months spent finding them, then the months spent replacing them, with the work piling up in between.
Do that a few times and a worse thought creeps in. Maybe I'm just a bad judge of people.
Being a good judge of people is a skill. Almost nobody is taught it.
Interviewing gets handed to you the day someone resigns. You need a ticket to drive a forklift. To decide who goes on the payroll, you get a CV and a spare hour.
So people fill the gap with what's lying around. A list of questions found online. A longer interview. A second chat with someone else in the room.
All of it still runs on an impression of the person. And a confident candidate makes a strong impression whether or not they can do the job.
What the research keeps pointing to is structure. Plan the questions before anyone walks in, ask every candidate the same core set, and score the answers against a standard you set in advance. That's a method, and a method can be learned.
Who's running it
Twenty years of watching how hiring actually gets done.
Alicia Menkveld
Your presenter
Alicia Menkveld presents the masterclass. She has been training professional recruiters for two decades.
She brings 25 years of experience in leadership development and organisational behaviour across Australia, South Africa and the UK.
Anton Menkveld
Co-founder, GrowMyTeam
Anton Menkveld is one of the three founders behind Placement Partner, recruitment software that started as CV Warehouse, a cloud system for recruiters who were keeping candidate files in filing cabinets. Since 2000 it has been used by hundreds of recruitment agencies across two continents.
Two decades inside how agencies screen and interview is what led him to build the structured interview guides in GrowMyTeam, which write a core question set for each role plus questions specific to each candidate. The masterclass teaches the same method by hand, so you can use it with whatever tools you have.
What happens in the session
Thirty minutes on running an interview the way the professionals do.
Live, online, and short enough to fit before your next interview. We work through the method the research rates highest, step by step.
Plan before they walk in
Work out what the role actually needs, then write the questions that test for it.
Same core questions for everyone
Ask every candidate the same set, so you're comparing like with like.
Dig into the person
Add one or two questions of your own, built from the candidate's history, to get to the specifics.
Score against a standard
Decide what a good answer sounds like before they start talking, so the most confident person in the room doesn't win by default.
- Every fortnight
- 30 minutes
- Online
- Join any session
- Live Q&A
After thirty minutes, you'll be able to say:
The evidence
Structure is the strongest tool in the research.
The biggest re-analysis of hiring research, by Sackett and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2022, rated each hiring method on how well it predicts how someone performs in the job. The scale runs from zero, the method tells you nothing, to one, a perfect prediction.
Years of experience, what a CV is built on
0.07
Unstructured interview, the usual chat
0.19
Structured interview, the strongest single method in the study
0.42
Nothing in hiring gets close to one. Structure is the best there is, which is why it's worth learning.
Sackett, Zhang, Berry & Lievens (2022), Journal of Applied Psychology. doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
One client result
A Senior Sales Director role at a national health and fitness group in Cape Town had been open for months. Two weeks after they started using GrowMyTeam's process, it was filled, and the structured interview guides were credited for the final pick.
Track record
Placement Partner has run recruitment for hundreds of agencies across two continents since 2000.
Who should come, and who shouldn't.
Come along if:
- You run your own interviews and there's no HR team behind you.
- You're about to hire for the first time, or the first time in a while.
- You've been handed the hiring as an office manager or HR generalist and want a method instead of a guess.
- You've walked out of an interview certain, and turned out to be wrong.
Probably not for you if:
- You're a job seeker preparing to be interviewed. This is the other side of the desk.
- You're a full-time recruiter already running scored, structured interviews every week. You'll know most of it.
- You want a software demo. That's a different conversation, and this session isn't one.
What you get
A seat at any session, free, for as long as it's useful.
The only thing you risk is half an hour.
It costs nothing. If the first ten minutes aren't useful, close the tab and nobody will chase you. You get an email with each session link and nothing you didn't sign up for, and one click takes you off the list.
Get the link to the next session.
Sessions run every fortnight. Sign up now and the link to the next one arrives as soon as the date is set.