# How can you help untrained managers conduct job interviews properly?

> Turn gut feelings into great hires. Learn how to train your managers to conduct professional, bias-free job interviews.

- **Author:** Robin Keyen
- **Category:** rLUUKuIVRGK7Ne9YW3uA
- **Published:** 2026-03-30
- **Language:** en

## Your first-time managers are accidentally breaking labour laws.
Not on purpose. They're not trying to discriminate. They're just doing what feels natural in a conversation: asking about where someone is from, whether they have kids, what their plans are for the next few years. It sounds friendly. In a job interview, it can land you in court.
This is one of the most underestimated legal risks in the modern workplace. And it's not rare. It's happening in companies of every size, every week, because the person who promoted your best salesperson to manager last quarter also handed them an interview schedule — without a structured process, without legal training, and without a script.
The result is a room where gut feeling drives decisions, legally protected questions get asked without anyone realising they're protected, and the company picks up the liability for every conversation.
## What actually happens in an untrained interview
Picture the scene. Your new manager has a candidate in front of them. They're nervous. They want it to go well. So they do what nervous people do in conversations: they fill the silence with small talk.
"So where are you originally from?" "Do you have a long commute? Where do you live?" "Are you planning to start a family any time soon?" "What does your partner do?" "Do you have any health issues we should know about?"
Every one of those questions is either illegal or legally dangerous in Belgium and across the EU. None of them predict job performance. All of them open the door to a discrimination claim.
The manager didn't know. Nobody told them. And that's the problem — not the manager's intentions, but the system that put them in that chair without preparing them for it.
 ⚠️ Warning: Intent is not a legal defence in discrimination cases. Under Belgian anti-discrimination law, a candidate doesn't need to prove you meant to discriminate. They need to show that a protected characteristic played a role in the outcome. A well-meaning manager asking the wrong questions can establish that connection without realising it.
## The legal landscape in Belgium (and why it matters right now)
Belgium has three separate anti-discrimination laws that apply at every stage of the employment process — including recruitment and interviews:
Genderwet (Gender Act): prohibits discrimination based on sex, pregnancy, maternity, gender identity, and gender expression.
Antiracismewet (Anti-Racism Act): covers race, skin colour, descent, national or ethnic origin.
Antidiscriminatiewet (Anti-Discrimination Act): covers age, disability, religion or belief, sexual orientation, political or trade union conviction, and more.
Together, these three laws create a wide net. And when a candidate files a complaint, the burden of proof can shift. Under Belgian law, if a candidate can show facts that suggest discrimination may have occurred, it then falls to the employer to prove it didn't. Your untrained manager just made that much harder.
Unia — Belgium's independent body for equal opportunities — received close to 20 discrimination reports per day in 2024, opening more than 1,800 individual assistance cases. And these figures represent only a fraction of actual incidents. Many people don't know their rights, many more don't dare report. Every one of those files started somewhere — often in an interview room.
 💡 Quick tip: Unia can investigate complaints, mediate disputes, and refer cases to court. They do not require the complainant to pay legal fees. The threshold to open a case is low. The threshold to defend one is high. This asymmetry matters.
## The questions you cannot ask — and why managers ask them anyway
There is no list of banned questions that every manager memorises before they walk into an interview. There should be, but there isn't. So here is a practical version.
Questions that are off-limits in Belgium:
- Age, date of birth, or year of graduation (if used to infer age)

- Country of origin, nationality, or native language (beyond what's relevant to the role)

- Marital status, whether they have children, or plan to have them

- Pregnancy or parental plans

- Religion, including questions about availability on certain days framed around religious observance

- Health status, disabilities, or medical history

- Sexual orientation or gender identity

- Trade union membership or political affiliation


 ⚠️ Warning: Some of these questions are asked innocuously — as small talk or "getting to know you" questions. "Do you have kids?" feels like conversation. In an interview, it's information a manager might consciously or unconsciously use when deciding whether a candidate can "commit to the role." That's where the legal risk lives.
The reason untrained managers ask these questions isn't malice. It's that unstructured interviews have no guardrails. When you don't have a defined set of questions to work through, you improvise — and improvised conversations drift toward personal territory quickly.
 ✅ Best practice: Before any manager conducts an interview, give them a written list of the questions they will ask — not suggestions, a fixed list. Add a one-page reference card with the topic areas that are off-limits. This takes 20 minutes to create and removes a significant legal risk from every subsequent interview.
## The accuracy problem: your interviews are also terrible at predicting performance
Even setting aside the legal risk, there's a performance problem. Unstructured interviews — the kind most untrained managers run — are genuinely bad at finding the right person for the job.
Multiple decades of meta-analysis converge on the same finding: unstructured interviews predict job performance with only 14 to 26% accuracy. That's barely better than a coin flip. You're spending an hour per candidate making a decision that is statistically similar to guessing.
The mechanism is well-understood. In an unstructured interview:
- First impressions dominate. Research shows interviewers form an opinion within the first 10 to 30 seconds and spend the rest of the interview confirming it.

- Affinity bias drives decisions. Interviewers rate candidates higher who are similar to them — same background, same communication style, same social references.

- Irrelevant signals get weighted. Studies show 39% of candidates get rejected based on confidence level, tone of voice, or whether they smiled — none of which reliably predict job performance.


## What structured interviews actually change
A structured interview isn't a formal or cold experience. It's a consistent one. Every candidate gets the same questions, in the same order, scored against the same criteria. That's it.
The impact of making that one change is significant:
- Predictive validity rises from 0.24 to 0.43 — nearly double

- Bias is cut by up to 85% in several controlled studies

- Diversity of final candidates improves because decisions are based on defined criteria, not instinct


 ✅ Best practice: A structured interview doesn't have to be long or rigid. Four to six behaviour-based questions — "Tell me about a time when..." — scored on a 1–5 rubric is enough to dramatically improve both the quality and the legal defensibility of your hiring decisions. The scoring sheet also creates a paper trail that protects you if a decision is ever challenged.
48% of hiring managers admit unconscious bias affects their decisions. Structured interviews don't eliminate unconscious bias entirely, but they reduce the number of unguarded moments in which it can operate. That's the practical value.
 💡 Quick tip: Behavioural interview questions — based on past experience — outperform hypothetical questions ("What would you do if...") because past behaviour is a significantly better predictor of future behaviour. Train your managers on this distinction before they run a single interview.
## The bias sitting in the room
Bias in interviews isn't a character flaw. It's a structural problem. When you give someone an unstructured hour with a candidate and no scoring system, the brain does what it always does: it uses shortcuts.
The shortcuts that affect hiring most are:
Affinity bias — we rate people like us higher, unconsciously. Same school, same accent, same hobby mentioned in passing.
Halo effect — one impressive answer or credential causes the interviewer to rate everything else higher.
Confirmation bias — the impression formed in the first 30 seconds shapes how every subsequent answer is interpreted.
Attribution errors — a nervous candidate is seen as lacking confidence. A confident candidate who gives shallow answers is seen as self-assured. Neither reading is necessarily accurate.
None of this is solved by asking managers to "be aware of their bias." Awareness without structure doesn't change outcomes. The structure has to change first.
## When it goes wrong: the real cost
A failed hire is expensive before you add legal fees. SHRM research shows 75% of employers admit they have hired the wrong person. CareerBuilder's data puts the average cost of a bad hire at over €15,000 — and that's the conservative estimate. HBR research pushes the true cost to five times annual salary once you include lost productivity, team disruption, and rehiring.
Add a discrimination complaint on top of that and the numbers climb fast.
89% of bad hires are preventable through better candidate selection methods — structured interviews, defined criteria, scored assessments (TestPartnership research). The companies that pay the most for bad hires are almost always the ones that invested the least in the interview process that produced them.
 ⚠️ Warning: An untrained manager running an interview isn't just a risk in the room. The decisions they make compound. A bad hire in a key role costs the team, the clients, and the culture. A discrimination complaint from that interview costs the legal budget and the employer brand simultaneously. The two risks often travel together.
## The 2026 AI layer you need to be aware of
Many companies are now using AI tools to screen CVs, schedule interviews, or rank candidates. From 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act classifies any AI system used in recruitment, selection, or promotion decisions as "high risk." This means mandatory human oversight, documentation of how the system works, and bias audits.
Here's the catch: AI tools layered on top of a broken interview process don't fix the process. If your managers are making final calls based on gut feeling after an AI pre-screen, you have two sources of liability instead of one. The EU AI Act is not a reason to slow down automation — it's a reason to get your underlying process right before you add AI to it.
 💡 Quick tip: If your company uses any AI tool to rank, shortlist, or evaluate candidates, get a clear answer from your vendor on how they demonstrate freedom from bias. Under the EU AI Act, "we tested it" is not enough. You need to understand the methodology — because if it's challenged, you're the one who has to explain it to Unia or a tribunal.
## How to actually fix this
The good news: this is one of the most fixable problems in HR. The interventions are not expensive. They're just rarely done systematically.
Step 1: Audit who is currently running interviews. In many companies, the answer is "anyone who has a vacancy." That's the first thing to change. Not everyone needs to be trained to interview — but everyone who does interview needs to be trained.
Step 2: Create a standard interview structure for each role type. Four to six questions, written in advance, consistently used across all candidates for that role. Add a scoring rubric. This takes an afternoon and protects every interview you run afterward.
Step 3: Run a legal training session — not an annual compliance module. The off-limits questions need to be taught with specific examples, real scenarios, and the reasoning behind each prohibition. Abstract legal training doesn't stick. Concrete examples do.
Step 4: Add a debrief protocol. After every interview, the interviewer should write up their assessment before discussing with anyone else. Group debriefs without individual scores first are where bias spreads — strong personalities in a room will pull the group's perception of a candidate toward their own.
Step 5: Keep records. For every candidate interviewed, document the questions asked and the scores given. If a decision is ever challenged, a documented process is your strongest defence. Under Belgian law, the burden of proof can shift to the employer — and "we followed a consistent process" is a much better position than "we just went with our gut."
As the hiring market becomes more transparent — with platforms like Joobs giving candidates clearer signals about how companies operate and treat applicants — employers who run structured, fair processes increasingly attract better candidates. Process quality is becoming part of your employer brand whether you intend it to be or not.
## Belgian and EU legal specifics worth knowing
The burden of proof can shift. Under the Antidiscriminatiewet and Genderwet, a candidate who can present facts suggesting discrimination occurred shifts the burden of proof to the employer. "We didn't intend to discriminate" is not sufficient — you need to demonstrate the decision was based on objective, role-relevant criteria.
Six months' gross salary is the floor. Belgian law allows candidates to claim a flat-rate compensation of six months' gross salary without needing to prove the specific financial damage they suffered. This makes complaints financially accessible — and legally significant — even for lower-wage roles.
Unia has real enforcement power. Unia can conduct investigations, request documents, mediate, and refer cases to the labour tribunal or the Institute for the Equality of Women and Men. They act on their own initiative in cases of sufficient public interest, not only in response to individual complaints.
Recruitment records matter. Under GDPR, data about candidates — including interview notes — must be handled proportionately and with a clear legal basis. Keeping records for legitimate purposes (defence against a discrimination claim) is a valid basis, but those records must be stored securely and not retained longer than necessary. The Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit (Belgian DPA) enforces this.
 ✅ Best practice: In Belgium, the cleanest legal position on interview records is to retain documented interview notes and scoring rubrics for a defined period — most practitioners recommend 12 months post-hire decision. This is long enough to cover the statutory complaint window and short enough to demonstrate proportionate data handling under GDPR.
## FAQ
Does the law apply to informal first-round conversations too?Yes. Belgian anti-discrimination law applies to every stage of the recruitment process — including informal screening calls, coffee conversations, and any interaction in which a hiring decision might be influenced. "It was just an informal chat" is not a legal defence.
What if the manager genuinely didn't know the question was problematic? Intent doesn't remove liability. The law focuses on whether a protected characteristic influenced the outcome, not whether the person asking the question knew it was problematic. This is exactly why training — before interviews happen, not after complaints arrive — is the only real fix.
Can we still ask candidates whether they can work specific hours or travel?Yes — if it's directly relevant to the role and applied consistently to all candidates. "This role requires occasional travel — is that something you're able to do?" is legitimate. "Do you have family commitments that might affect your availability?" is not. The distinction is between role requirements and personal circumstances.
What about personality or assessment tests — are they legal?Yes, when used appropriately. Validated psychometric assessments are legally defensible and predictively stronger than interviews alone. The key is that they must be relevant to the role, consistently applied, and not used as a proxy for protected characteristics. Under the EU AI Act, if the tool uses AI, additional compliance requirements apply from August 2026.
How do we handle a candidate who brings up personal information voluntarily?If a candidate volunteers personal information — "I should mention I have a disability" or "I'm currently pregnant" — do not engage with it in the context of the hiring decision. Acknowledge it neutrally, do not make notes about it in the hiring context, and continue with the structured process. The information cannot be used in either direction.

---
*Source: [Joobs.be](https://joobs.be/en/blog/how-can-you-help-untrained-managers-conduct-job-interviews-properly)*