Here are my quick answers regarding the impact Behavioral Event Interviewing (BEI) has on improving quality of hire:

When I started out as a recruiter, some 30 years ago, it was pretty clear that you could make more placements if you were a better interviewer than your hiring manager clients. Not only would all of your candidates be interviewed, but your best ones wouldn’t get tossed under the bus by superficial or narrow assessments, or if they possessed less-than-stellar presentation skills. This led to the development of the one-question performance-based interview.

When you become a really good interviewer, you realize the interview is the best sourcing, recruiting, and closing tool ever invented.

Back in the early ‘80s when I launched my recruiter career, I was filling senior staff positions (engineers, accountants) and mid-level managers, and quickly realized these few common truths about human nature:  

1. Most hiring managers make selection decisions based on limited information and their need to fill the job.   
2. More candidates - even the best ones - make superficial guesses about the job based on limited information and their need to change positions.  
3. Managers don't trust recruiters.
4. Candidates don't trust recruiters.
5. Knowing the job can help create trust.

Part of this difference of opinion was due to a lack of understanding of what the real job entailed, lack of any rigorous assessment process, and a desire for many to take short cuts, waiting for the "perfect" candidate to arrive. In this case, unanimity of perceptions substituted for evidence and logic. In the bargain, many great candidates were excluded for bad reasons.

Several years ago my children introduced me to the Darwin Awards. We've had a lot of fun reading some of the stories of the winners (or should I say "losers"?). These awards go to members of the human race who do something so dumb that they end up removing themselves from the gene pool – hence the name. For instance, take the guy who had a fuse in his car blow out on a long trip. He had the bright idea to use a bullet to replace the fuse. The logic was sound – it's made of metal and conducts electricity, doesn't it? Everything was going fine until the bullet heated up and exploded, leaving a big hole in his chest. As we travel the world talking to recruiters and recruiting organizations, I've become aware of some practices that, while not quite as deadly as the above example, do cause one to wonder what people are thinking. In the interest of brevity, I'm going to list just a few of the more egregious examples. I'll stop short of naming names, but know that every example is real.

You've been working hard to put together a strong slate of candidates for a hard-to-fill position, and through networking and sheer force of personality have assembled three qualified individuals. They each have strengths and weaknesses, but they all have been successful in the past achieving the types of goals and completing the types of tasks that need to be done in this job. Your biggest concern: an unpredictable hiring manager. You're never sure just who is going to hit the mark with this manager because it doesn't follow any pattern that you can see. The manager tends to take immediate likes and dislikes to certain candidates for reasons not based on their backgrounds.