Most candidates — even high-level executives — need to be prepped before the interview. The reason for this is obvious: they all think they’re great interviewees. Most aren’t. Making matters worse, the hiring managers they’ll be meeting think they’re endowed with some special instinct that allows them to accurately assess candidate competency. Most aren’t.

We all know that most hiring managers don't conduct broad-based, evidence-based interviews. Many base their judgments about candidate competency on some narrow combination of first impressions, technical knowledge, academics, and smarts. One sure way to improve your interview-to-hire ratio is to prep your candidates to cope with whatever questions or circumstances arise. If you handle the candidate prep well enough, you can also prep your clients without them even knowing it. (Note: here’s a preview of the video version of this prep. The full version is part of our Recruiter’s eLearning center.)

Following are some key points you should cover when prepping your candidates:

If job descriptions aren’t illegal, they should be.

Let’s hold a mock trial. You’re one of the jurors. We don’t need unanimity here, a mere super majority will do. Here’s a link to the public survey so you can be involved and register your verdict, and see the results. But before you vote, you must hear all of the evidence.

Let’s make the assumption that the best passive candidates are only interested in discussing possible career moves. This is a pretty safe assumption, and one that will never lead you astray when recruiting passive candidates. The key to recruiting passive candidates is to get them to see your opportunity as a career move in the first few minutes of your initial conversation. Pulling this off involves four critical steps:

In a recent article on Recruiting Passive Candidates I made the point that you must not take “No” for an answer on first contact. Passive candidates say this often when you call and ask them if they’d be interested in some job, somewhere, for some company. If you don’t push back, all you’ll be doing is spinning the roulette wheel hoping someone finds your winning number right up their alley. At our Recruiter Boot Camp Online training we describe the science of recruiting passive candidates. In this article I’ll provide a sense of this by describing what you need to do when someone reacts to your offer with one of these two objections:

Without question, having a large LinkedIn network is a competitive advantage for any recruiter working on hard-to-fill positions and hard-to-find candidates. This advantage is lessened dramatically with LinkedIn Recruiter, since it includes complete visibility to the 70mm+ people in their network. Since this full-visibility product is off-limits to TPRs it levels the playing field somewhat for corporate recruiters. But this is not as significant a disadvantage as it would seem to those of us who have to find top candidates the old-fashioned way – networking. Getting pre-qualified referrals from people who will call you back is the real secret of recruiting passive candidates. With this in mind, I’d like to offer a few of my favorite passive candidate recruiting secrets.

I’ve just written a recent companion piece on ERE (July 30, 2010) on my top ten favorite networking techniques for recruiting passive candidates. There were actually more than 20, but here are the next five. Caution: there are two prerequisites when using any of these techniques. First, you must get the candidate to agree to enter into an exploratory career discussion as a condition for beginning the conversation. Second, with this permission granted, give no more than a 20-second overview of the position, and then immediately ask the prospect to provide some preliminary background information. (We cover exactly how to do this in our Recruiter Boot Camp training.)

Something is fundamentally wrong with the hiring process used by most companies in the U.S. We tend to hire too many people who are willing to take a job until something better comes along.