Recap: in part one of this series, the two-question performance-based interview was introduced. The first question involves asking candidates to describe some of their most significant business accomplishments in great detail.

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:

From my observations, hiring manager interviewing mistakes fall into these big buckets:

A few in the I/O psychology scientific community have lambasted me on these pages for suggesting that behavioral event interviewing (BEI) might not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Their comments seem akin to climatologists who discredit anyone who suggests an alternate cause of global warming.

John Sullivan wrote a great piece on ERE a few months ago, titled Five Ugly Numbers You Can’t Ignore. John’s article pointed out public research indicating fundamental flaws with the interviewing and assessment process used by most companies.

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.

When I started out in the search business, it became quickly apparent that most managers weren't great at interviewing. For one thing, I always thought my candidates were great, and they didn't.