Short answer
HR interviews can support knowledge sharing when they capture a specific work practice, preserve its conditions and exceptions, and send it through expert review before reuse. Build a contributor programme around current job knowledge, not a ranking of employees. Record what may be shared, who approved it, where it applies, and when it needs review.
Give the interview one knowledge job
Annual reviews, onboarding discussions, project retrospectives, and employee conversations contain useful work examples. They also contain material collected for other purposes. Do not treat every conversation as a knowledge library by default.
Start with one question that the business needs to answer, such as:
- How does the late shift hand over a complex exception without losing context?
- What does an experienced adviser check before escalating a billing dispute?
- Which local workaround should be replaced because the official process changed?
- What should a new manager know before running a peak-period briefing?
Name the audience and decision before collection. Explain whether an answer may become a reviewed practice card, who can see source material, and how a contributor can correct or withdraw an attributed contribution under the agreed process. Keep sensitive employee, customer, and case information out of the reusable version.
Choose contributors by current experience
“Champion” can become a popularity label. Use a contribution role instead.
The US Office of Personnel Management definition of a subject matter expert focuses on bona fide, current, thorough knowledge of the job and recommends drawing on multiple expert perspectives. Apply that principle without turning it into an employee ranking.
Use a contributor record:
| Field | What to document |
|---|---|
| Practice scope | The task, customer case, process, or decision the person knows directly |
| Currency | When and where they last performed or supervised it |
| Evidence | Recent example, relevant result, process record, or artefact that can be checked |
| Conditions | Tools, authority, staffing, location, or customer context that shaped the method |
| Exceptions | Cases where the practice should change or not be used |
| Reuse permission | Whether attribution, paraphrase, or an anonymised example is permitted |
| Review role | Who checks accuracy, policy, safety, accessibility, or local fit |
| Review date | When a process owner will confirm that the practice remains current |
A good story can generate a lead. It does not prove that the contributor outperforms colleagues or that the method caused an observed result.
Capture a practice, not a personality
Ask for a recent situation and follow the work:
- What was the task or problem?
- What information was available at the start?
- What did you do first, and why?
- Where did you make a judgement rather than follow a fixed rule?
- What happened next?
- What evidence suggests the approach was useful?
- When would you use a different approach?
- Who else should check this account?
Avoid prompts such as “Why are you the best at this?” They assume a conclusion and encourage a success story. Ask for counterexamples and constraints. A process owner may reveal that the described workaround is no longer approved. A colleague on another shift may identify a missing dependency.
Turn the interview into a practice card
Use a compact card that another person can examine before trying the method.
| Practice-card field | Entry |
|---|---|
| Work question | The recurring situation this card addresses |
| Intended user | Role, experience level, and location |
| Trigger | When the practice may be useful |
| Steps | Observable actions in order |
| Reasoning | Why each decision point matters |
| Evidence | Checked examples and relevant operational information |
| Boundaries | Exceptions, approvals, and escalation route |
| Contributors | People whose current experience informed the card |
| Reviewers | Subject, policy, privacy, accessibility, or local owners |
| Status | Candidate, tested, approved, replaced, or retired |
| Next review | Owner and date or change trigger |
The NASA Lessons Learned system offers a useful governance example: lessons contain a driving event and recommendations, and approved lessons are reviewed, indexed, and managed by named roles. An HR knowledge programme does not need NASA's infrastructure, but it does need review, ownership, retrieval, and retirement.
Respond to a team's knowledge request
Do not broadcast every approved card to everyone. Ask which team has a current need and what it must be able to do.
For each sharing request, record:
- the receiving team and work problem;
- the practice card proposed;
- differences in process, authority, customer, tools, or country;
- the contributor available to answer questions;
- a small application test;
- the evidence the receiving team will bring back;
- who decides to adopt, adapt, or reject the practice.
This creates a network of accountable contributions. It avoids appointing permanent “champions” whose advice is assumed to fit every context.
A fictional field-sharing example
Harbour Support is a fictional UK and US customer-service business. Its US evening team describes a concise handover for unresolved billing cases. The team has fewer reopened cases during one reporting period, but that association does not establish that the handover caused the difference.
The knowledge lead interviews two advisers, their team lead, and a billing specialist. They compare the account with the current escalation policy and sample case records. The review finds that the method is useful only when the customer identity check is already complete. That condition becomes prominent in the practice card.
A UK team asks to test the card. Its process uses a different approval threshold, so the local owner changes the escalation step and records the variation. Two advisers try the adapted method on suitable fictional scenarios before live use. Their questions expose an ambiguous term, which the subject owner rewrites.
The result is an approved, localised practice card with named owners. The business has not identified a superior employee or proved a performance gain. It has made one reviewed method easier to find, question, and update.
Measure the programme without ranking contributors
Track the health of the sharing process:
- candidate practices reviewed, approved, revised, rejected, and retired;
- time from a receiving-team request to an approved answer;
- cards with a current owner and review date;
- receiving teams that tested a practice and returned examples;
- exceptions or local adaptations discovered after sharing;
- duplicate or conflicting cards reconciled;
- contributor and reviewer workload.
Do not convert contribution counts into a talent score. A person may contribute less because their work is sensitive, local, new, or underrepresented in the collection method.
The CDC training needs-analysis guidance asks teams to establish whether training is the right solution and to pilot new collection tools with the intended audience. Some knowledge gaps need a process fix, access change, or clearer decision right rather than training.
For the next step, use the organizational learning guide to turn one verified practice into a learning resource.
Where Lontra fits
If a team needs a structured way to hear work examples, explore Lontra's employee conversations and manager briefs. Conversations can surface candidate practices for human review. Managers receive a brief rather than raw employee conversations.
Lontra does not automatically identify the best employees, prove that a practice caused a result, or make a mobility decision. Subject owners and contributors still check what is accurate, transferable, and appropriate to share.
Frequently asked questions
How can HR interviews support knowledge sharing?
Use a focused interview to capture a recent work situation, action, reasoning, result and exception. A subject owner and other experienced contributors should review the practice before it is shared.
How should an organization choose internal contributors?
Choose people with direct, current experience of the task, include more than one perspective, explain the contribution purpose and ask for consent to reuse approved material. A title or self-reported success is not enough.
Does a strong interview prove someone is a top performer?
No. An interview is one account of work. Check the practice against relevant operational evidence, other contributors, exceptions and the conditions in which it was used before treating it as useful to others.