Kellison Rose has built interviewer enablement at Google, Stripe, Samsara and now Cedar. Her opening point: when recruiting writes the curriculum, interviewers nod along and then go back to what they were doing.
She learned that the hard way. At a previous company, she was asked to fix weak engineering scorecards with a white paper so busy engineers wouldn’t be bothered. Nobody read it.
Start with who’s already good. She asked recruiters which interviewers wrote the best scorecards and showed up best in debriefs, then interviewed 12 of them about how they actually work: setting the tone, taking notes, reading rubrics and probing. AI helped summarize and sort the answers. Recruiters then voted on which practices to endorse.
Build it in their language. 2 engineers on the working group recorded an hour-long mock interview, and clips from it became the core of the training. The training also gave interviewers clear words for help they give mid-interview: a hint, a nudge and 4 kinds of probing, so scorecards show how much help a candidate got.
Drive the discussion. Don’t throw open questions to the room and hope. Plan the dialogue, use short quizzes to check understanding, and have someone in the chat ready to correct bad habits before the room adopts them.
Pilot with a cohort. Only trained interviewers interviewed, so the team could measure whether their behavior changed. 94% rated the training 5 out of 5, and the cohort’s Slack channel is still busy.
Her last piece of advice: embrace micromanagement. Weekly deadlines beat “by end of quarter,” and people find them oddly soothing.
