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:

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.

Over the past year, I’ve been making the case that the best people – the top-third of your future workforce – won’t look for jobs, nor decide which one to take, based on the primary sourcing processes you now use. Making matters worse, traditional behavioral and competency interviewing are not designed to differentiate between the best and least best of your fully-qualified candidates, even if you can find them. To address these issues, fundamental changes are required to improve the overall talent level of your company as the economy improves.