Here's a modified version of an earlier article that's worth considering today more than ever. Over my 25 years of recruiting experience, I've learned a few important principles about how to effectively recruit passive candidates. Most were learned by trial and error, and while they might not all be applicable to your specific situation, collectively they offer a pretty decent road map of what it takes to hire more top passive candidates on a consistent basis. Here are the first five of my favorite ten commandants for recruiting passive candidates. The next five will be covered in next week's Hot Tip article.

Last week I saw the play 12 Angry Men starring Richard Thomas and George Wendt. This is a great play to see if you want to become a better recruiter and be entertained at the same time. From a recruiting perspective, you'll quickly learn what it takes to defend your candidate from dumb decisions. This is very important if your clients or those on the interviewing team have ever made incorrect assessments using superficial information, wrong information, or on the quality of the candidate's interviewing skills.

Before you pick up the phone and start calling potential candidates and referrals, what's your plan? Whom are you calling? Why are you calling? What's in it for the people you are calling? Know the answers to these questions, the approach you want to take, and what you want to achieve with every call, or stay off the phone. There is nothing worse than blowing a call with a great contact because you were not prepared to speak intelligently about your company, client, or the positions you are representing. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

If you want to increase assessment accuracy and save time, conduct more panel interviews. These are much better than an all-day series of one-on-one 45-60-minute interviews. When organized properly, panel interviews help everybody involved learn more about the candidate, even weaker interviewers, if they just observe. Panel interviews also provide a great means for subordinates to get involved in the hiring process. Subordinates should never conduct one-on-one interviews, since they usually are trying to work for someone they like, so they focus on the wrong issues. For another, they're rarely objective, and worse, many of them are weak interviewers. A panel interview overcomes all of these problems. However, I didn't always believe this strongly that panel interviews were that good of an idea.

Life in recruiting used to be simple. Recruiters had exclusive jobs to offer to passive candidates who weren't looking for a job. Recruiters were the only ones who knew about these jobs, which gave them some element of control. The internet didn't exist and passive candidates stayed passive. Today the line between passive candidates and active candidates is crossed regularly.

Last week I traveled to Pennsylvania to conduct a Recruiter Boot Camp training class for a small recruiting firm in the backwoods of the Poconos. When I say the backwoods, I really mean up in the trees, out in the boonies, and completely isolated. I felt a little like I was entering into a real time warp. Just to give you a flavor for the group, it's like one big happy family. Monday nights and Wednesday nights are reserved for their regular pool tournament. They have a company team and some of them are apparently pretty good players. Tuesdays and Fridays are bowling nights. Thursday is of course date night. The CEO and founder graciously skipped her Wednesday evening at the pool table to join me for dinner.

Congratulations! You made it this far without being scared off by the title of this article! You were able to get past your initial feelings of 1) "What am I going to do without my weekly dose of fabulous hiring tips?"; 2) "e-Learning? What does that have to do with my role as a recruiter?" and 3) "Why does Lou keep letting Jason write articles?" and are now ready to learn more about one of the most important aspects of training and development today.

Let me describe the single best interview question of all time: "Can you please describe your most significant accomplishment?" It's a great way to start an interview. I spend about 10 minutes on this question, gaining insight in the results achieved, the environment, and the process used to achieve the results. I then repeat the question to gain broader insight into the trend of team and individual accomplishments and see how they relate to specific job needs.

Over the course of the past 20 years, I've been searching for - among other things - the single best question to ask in an interview. What I wanted to create was a One-Question Interview, a stand-alone query that would pierce through the veneer of generalizations, overcome typical candidate nervousness, minimize the impact of the candidate's personality on the interviewer, eliminate the exaggeration which many candidates adopt as an interviewing ploy and actually determine if the candidate is competent and motivated to do the work required. I also wanted this question to begin the recruiting process, convincing the candidate by the question itself that the person asking it was sophisticated and professional, and that the company involved was a great place to grow a career.