Whether you're a corporate or external recruiter, there are four things you must be able to do in order to increase your influence with your hiring manager clients:

No matter how good a recruiter you are, your personal success rests on the ability of your hiring manager clients to accurately assess your candidates. How many of us have lost good candidates because somebody on the interviewing team made an incorrect assessment? In this article, I'd like to introduce you to a new way of looking at the interview assessment process.

Everybody wants to hire the perfect candidate. And why not? These are the people who have great track records, great academic backgrounds, great personalities, great experience, and have worked at companies doing just what you want done. Even better, these great people are just like you - smart, savvy, and ready to move ahead.

Over the past years, I've made the case that there are two pervasive problems preventing companies from hiring enough top people.

The interview is a bridge. It's how the hiring team determines whether a candidate is qualified for the job. Less obvious, the interview is how top candidates determine whether they want the job. So if you're only using the interview for assessing candidate quality, you're missing a tremendous recruiting opportunity. Of course, if the hiring team isn't collectively very good at interviewing, you're wasting a lot time doing searches over again and you won't be able to hire too many top people anyway.

Recruiting is like sales and marketing rolled into one. If a company has a great brand, a great job, and a great hiring manager, not too much marketing or recruiting is required. But if your company lacks one or more of these factors - or if you're targeting hard-to-fill positions - then stronger recruiters are required.

If your hiring manager clients are not doing a good job of assessing your candidates, you should review this article with them. No matter how good a recruiter you are, if your clients pass on your good candidates, you're working too hard doing searches over again. The key is just to assess a candidate's motivation to do the work.

Probably everyone knows this already, but it's worth a reminder. There is one competency that overrides all others combined. I call it the master competency. In fact, during an interview you only need to assess a person for this one single competency to determine if the person is a good fit for the job. To make it even easier, you only need to ask one question to determine if the candidate possesses this trait or not.

Consider this: Based on hundreds of observations, about two-thirds of the time hiring errors can be attributed to one of three major interviewing mistakes. They're all easy to correct. It only takes a few simple steps which anyone can learn and use.

[Note: This is a rather technical article on how to improve your interviewing and recruiting skills. This information will be important to recruiters who want to find better people, learn how to recruit and negotiate offers, and increase their influence with their hiring manager clients. Do not read this article if none of these apply. - Lou Adler]