10 rules to ace the interview—as the interviewer
Job interviews aren’t just high-stakes for candidates, they’re high-stakes for organizations as well: research indicates that a bad hire can cost an organization twice their annual salary or more.
Because interviews often play a critical role in the final hiring decision, it’s important to follow a few simple, easy-to-implement rules that will ensure your interviewing process is highly effective, unbiased, and legally defensible—before, during, and after the actual conversation with a candidate. At a time when interviews are primarily conducted via video or telephone rather than in-person, the time is right for organizations to review their interviewing practices and procedures to maximize their utility. Even if interviews are not always conducted in person, the fundamental approach—and, therefore, best practices—remain the same.
Before the interview
A successful interview process begins long before the candidate and interviewer meet. Executing effective and legally defensible interviews requires a high level of preparation for organizations and interviewers.
- Establish essential skills and behaviors for successful job performance. Focus on the role’s key responsibilities, and then determine the knowledge, skills, competencies, and behaviors required to perform those activities effectively.
- Build a structured interview guide with questions focused on these essential skills and behaviors. It’s important that every candidate is asked a standardized set of questions to ensure the interviewer covers all necessary topics and obtains consistent information from which to base their hiring decision.
- Create evaluation standards or guidelines. These direct the interviewer’s attention to the relevant information in candidates’ responses. (More on this later!)
- Train your interviewers. The person conducting the interview should be properly trained in effective interviewing techniques—not only to select the most qualified candidate, but to do so in a fair, unbiased, and legally defensible manner.
During the interview
Keeping preparation top of mind during the interview will help interviewers ensure that they remain aligned with the organization’s evaluation objectives. Interviewers should capitalize on the below methods to maximize the yield from their time and efforts.
- Follow the interview guide closely. The above preparation helps facilitate a useful conversation during the interview, but the interviewer must follow the interview guide closely to ensure all candidates respond to the same information. Allowing the candidate to steer the conversation can derail the quality of the information collected and potentially allow the candidate to misrepresent their capabilities, a costly mistake for the organization down the road.
- Ask behaviorally-based past approach questions. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, so very specific questions such as, “Please describe a time when you had to work closely with someone you did not particularly like to accomplish an important objective,” yield the most accurate representation of a candidate’s tendencies and performance. For less experienced candidates, reframing the question as a hypothetical situation may be more appropriate and easier for the candidate to answer. For example, rephrasing the question as “Imagine that you have to work closely with someone you do not particularly like to accomplish an important objective. How would you handle this situation?” (not “how should you handle this situation?”).
- Ask probing questions. Open-ended questions elicit the most possible information from the candidate, so interviewers should always start with these. Then, they’ll likely need to dig deeper to obtain enough information to make a more informed evaluation. Probing follow-up questions help interviewers gather more detail about the context, the people involved, the candidate’s actions and reasoning, and the outcomes.
- Consider using a role play. Don’t just take the candidate’s word for it—use a behavioral role-play to give candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities. Role plays engage candidates in business challenges (e.g., customer interaction) like those faced on the job. Not only do role-plays give organizations more confidence in their hiring choices, but they also enhance the candidate experience—candidates perceive the assessment as fair, whether they’re offered the job or not.
After the interview
You’ve prepared extensively. You’ve conducted the interviews. Now what?
- Use the pre-established rating scale to score the candidate’s response. Remember those evaluation rules from “before the interview”? This is where they come into play. A clear rating system is essential to a fair assessment of each candidate. This evaluation becomes relatively straightforward with a pre-established evaluation scale. The most effective evaluation scales clearly define what constitutes a good response using behavioral examples, leaving less room for bias and error when assigning ratings to candidates. One type of rating scale, behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS), gives examples of behaviors paired with corresponding numbers to indicate high, moderate, or low levels of proficiency. Using this method allows for consistency in assigning concrete numbers to types of responses. Other rating scales only give examples of highly effective responses with which to compare a candidate’s answer. Whichever scale you choose, the key to objective evaluation is consistency and plenty of behavioral examples.
- Document your process and decisions. It’s critical to document the supporting evidence for your evaluation and decisions for each candidate. Should the interview process be challenged in a legal setting, the organization will be better able to defend its hiring decisions.
Practice
Finally, practice is critical for learning and honing any skill. Without the opportunity to practice, the learning becomes stale and is forgotten. Practice may be as simple as conducting an interview with a more experienced interviewer, or as complex as a simulation that affords managers the opportunity to “interview,” rate, and make selection decisions in a low-stakes, fictitious setting.
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Context is everything. When you’re swimming in the ocean and see a fin sticking out of the water, your brain concludes: "It's a shark, get out of the water!" But if you're in a pool, you think: "It's a kid with a swim toy that looks like a shark fin." In both situations, the context leads you to reach two very different conclusions and behavioral responses.
How people behave in any given situation is a function of both who they are as individuals (e.g., their personality, skills, past experiences) and the context in which the behavior takes place (e.g., the situation itself). In other words, context matters, and it is difficult to interpret an individual’s behavior without an understanding of the context they faced.
When it comes to using assessments during the hiring process, organizations have a vested interest in making certain that these assessments reflect the organization and job – the context. Doing so helps jumpstart onboarding by ensuring that candidates' assumptions about the organization, the job, and their suitability for both – that they invariably make during the recruiting process – are rooted in reality.
But assessments modeled after the organization and job are superior for another reason: They are generally stronger than generic assessments that cut across job type, level, organization, industry, etc.
- More predictive. First and foremost, the closer the alignment between the assessment and the specific context in which the individual will ultimately perform (i.e., the job at the organization), the better the assessment will do in predicting future job performance. In fact, research demonstrates that highly contextualized assessments have incremental predictive validity beyond situational judgment and job knowledge assessments. This means that even after measuring candidates' job-relevant knowledge and how they would handle particular situations, highly contextualized assessments still reveal candidates' ability to perform the job that we don’t otherwise know from these other tools.
Why is this true? Because the best predictor of future behavior is past performance. For many years, this adage has been dubbed "the Golden Rule of selection." Think about it: What's the best way to predict whether an individual will be a good salesperson at your organization in the future? Answer: Observe them in the job of salesperson at your organization. The only problem in the pre-employment context, however, is that you cannot observe a candidate perform a job they do not have… Or can you?
Assessments designed to reflect the realities of an organization and job often take the form of a simulation – sometimes completely automated; other times involving role plays conducted by trained assessors. In essence, these assessments let candidates "try the job on for size" – explore the situations and challenges faced, engage in dealing with the situations, etc. Such work samples provide the opportunity to, in essence, perform a job that candidates do not yet have, thus enabling conclusions about how they would perform the job if hired.
- Less adverse impact. Not only are highly contextualized assessments, such as simulations, highly predictive of future job success, but they also have lower risk of adverse impact. In fact, a seminal meta-analytic research study – looking across many years of other research studies – found that simulations comprising role-plays or presentations have about 50 percent less risk of adverse impact (i.e., sub-group differences) compared to other assessment tools. This decreased risk of adverse impact translates into a more diverse group of candidates deemed qualified for the job, ultimately leading to a more diverse workforce.
- Higher face validity. Finally, because highly contextualized assessments look like the job, candidates see the relevance of these assessments for the job to which they've applied. Candidates understand why you are asking them to perform some task or answer particular questions because the assessments make sense in their minds given what they know about the job. This is known as face validity, which highly benefits the organization. This underlying concept can decrease the risk of candidates challenging the results of an assessment, improve perceptions and impressions of the employing organization, and increase job offers acceptance rates.
All three areas of highly contextualized assessments are paramount on their own, and together highlight the importance of tailoring pre-employment assessments to the organization and job. They serve the dual purpose of teaching candidates about the job, while also assessing their capabilities and alignment with the organization's needs.
The employment decision is important for both the candidate and the employer, and it benefits both parties to ensure that candidates are assessed in an accurate and authentic manner to make the best, most informed decisions possible.
The conversation around mobile learning has changed in recent years. Once viewed as merely a technical consideration (i.e., making sure training “works” on mobile devices), organizations now recognize mobile learning’s unique potential. The cadence of mobile learning is perfectly aligned with contemporary learners’ needs, and whether the method used is microlearning, spaced learning, learning journeys, continuous learning cultures, or personalized learning, organizations are delivering more value.However, in the new era of mobile learning, many organizations struggle with where to start. Best-in-class organizations use a shift to mobile as a way to rethink their learning strategy, rather than simply update a mode of delivery. Here are a few real-life examples.
- Onboarding
Mobile learning proves particularly effective as an onboarding tool in deskless environments such as retail, in-field technical support, and safety. For example, one global coffee retailer, challenged with rapid scalability in emerging markets, uses mobile deployment to streamline competency formation for its newly hired baristas, ensuring a consistent brand experience.Additionally, mobile learning promotes a more journey-driven approach to onboarding, taking the pressure off single-event training. Employees now have a tool in their pocket that provides gradual reinforcement, helping them recall hundreds of espresso drink combinations in the moment.Adaptive retrieval practices also help support the onboarding journey in the initial phases of the baristas’ tenure. Push notifications remind baristas to continue working on their skills, while weekly challenges, mini-games, and leaderboards help sustain engagement. Flashcards (featuring information such as the right syrup ratios for customized drinks), are self-paced reference tools, which they can use in the moment of need.
- Upskilling
A Canadian financial services advisory organization required a radical approach to reach its unique target audience: entrepreneurs. Familiar with entrepreneurs’ resistance to standard training modalities, the organization created a mobile solution with a new learning cadence customized for its ever-distracted, highly-resistant learners, replacing large-format, single-event courseware with quick lessons (of no more than five minutes each), ongoing knowledge checks, personalized learning paths, and a strong resource library for ongoing performance support. The organization can now meet its entrepreneurial customers’ individual learning needs
- Sales
Mobile learning is proving to be a differentiator for delivering content to sales teams. For a major global automotive company, mobile learning enables its salespeople on the floor to keep up with sophisticated customers who walk into showrooms fluent in specific car models, pricing, and competitive offerings. Mobile learning helps the salespeople stay agile, providing product information updates and timely needs-based support through an adaptive learning engine.Even augmented reality plays a role in creating intuitive and quick access to content within a high-context environment: sales reps can point their phone to a new model on the showroom floor and immediately see information on specific aspects of the car. Off the floor, they can refresh their knowledge by completing retrieval practices, reviewing key selling scenarios through immersive interactive challenges, and consulting with mobile-friendly job aids prior to their next customer interaction. For this organization’s salespeople, mobile learning is indispensable when it comes to keeping up with customers.
Mobile learning is an effective training delivery platform in these examples and beyond. Successful organizations see the potential for mobile as a platform, rather than as a technology wrapper, and take a unique approach to its design. If you’re looking to make a bold statement and revolutionize training, leverage mobile learning as the catalyst.
Early this year, 35 Fortune 500 companies joined forces to create an initiative called OneTen, which aims to hire, upskill, and promote one million Black Americans over the next 10 years. OneTen comprises leaders across a variety of industries and organizations including Merck, Nike, IBM, and Amgen. If your organization has joined this coalition, or is otherwise committed to recruiting and hiring more diverse talent, what steps are you taking to onboard and consistently engage these individuals?There is an important link between talent-acquisition and employee-onboarding processes. Because candidates form assumptions about working life at an organization very early in the application process, often even before deciding to apply, organizations should ensure that any messaging conveyed during this critical time be on-brand.In the context of attracting, selecting, onboarding, and retaining underrepresented employees during the early days of their tenure, what does this mean? Here are four things to keep in mind.
Be visible
For companies committed to recruiting diverse talent: start with visibility. How can potential applicants apply to opportunities of which they’re not aware? Are your talent acquisition teams cultivating meaningful partnerships with organizations dedicated to diversity? Organizations that excel at recruiting and hiring diverse talent understand that the recruiting process begins long before the manifestation of a vacancy. They collaborate with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), as well as student groups such as the National Black Student Union (NBSU), National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), Black Business Student Association, and the National Pan-Hellenic Council to reach diverse talent.
Be committed
As you engage prospective underrepresented candidates, ask yourself:
- Does your interview process reflect a commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIB)?
- Does the interview panel reflect the communities you serve, or vary in work experience and background? After all, it can be challenging for an organization to tout its commitment to DIB if candidates are interviewed by a uniform panel of managers.
- Are your mid-level managers held accountable for assembling diverse interview panels, or recruiting diverse talent?
- Are you infusing your interview guides with questions that elevate inclusion and diversity?
Some organizations are investing in diversity and inclusion to the point of standing up DIB functions devoted to unearthing the biases, both conscious and not, that influence the interview process. These efforts are attractive to candidates and valuable for employees.
Be engaging
According to a 2019 study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago entitled Being Black in Corporate America: An Intersectional Exploration, 38% of Black millennials responded that they are considering leaving their jobs to start their own company, and 65% percent of Black professionals responded that it’s harder for Black employees to advance. Companies committed to recruiting diverse candidates must learn to retain such talent. Knowing the many reasons for attrition, what causes for departure are within companies’ control?One strategy for preventing attrition is hosting events to improve employee engagement. For example, one organization holds an annual event called the African American Forum which gives Black employees the chance to hear from and network with senior leaders. This forum provides an opportunity for the company to invest in the development of its underserved communities and for the communities to gain direct access to leaders via workshops and panel discussions. Other ways to engage, develop, and promote underrepresented talent may include involvement in employee resource groups, formal mentoring programs, and more opportunities for senior leaders to hear the voices of their diverse staff.
Be accountable
Working with the facts is the best place to start. It’s impossible to solve a problem without fully understanding or acknowledging the depth of the issue, and this is doubly true for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations. One approach is full transparency, as exemplified by a group of leaders who decided to courageously share their company’s diversity metrics at a recent senior leadership meeting, acknowledging the lack of diversity and need for change. This approach, just one of many, is especially effective in maintaining accountability.As the fight for social justice continues, many organizations have renewed their commitment to attracting, selecting, onboarding, and retaining more diverse talent, and companies such as those part of the OneTen initiative are leading the way. However, just because your company isn’t part of OneTen doesn’t mean it can’t take steps towards improving diversity. We can do this. We should do this.
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There’s a specific kind of strategy meeting getting scheduled right now, in nice hotels with bad coffee: the AI reset off-site.
And for good reason. In a 2026 WRITER survey, 48% of leaders described their AI rollout as, in their own words, a "massive disappointment." That's nearly half the room.
What that number really measures is the distance between what these tools can do and what people are doing with them. In our experience, that distance is almost entirely human.
Which is why the off-site is the right instinct. Making the most of that time is the harder part.
What separates an AI reset that actually changes the game from an expensive two-day conversation? In our experience, it comes down to avoiding four common design mistakes.
Mistake 1
Blaming the bots
The gap between AI investment and real adoption is almost always about people, not technology. And when adoption stalls, we usually find it's one of four things.
- They don't think it will help them
- Nobody around them is using it
- They don't feel capable
- Or they don't have real access to the tools they were promised
Four different problems, and four completely different fixes.
That's why diagnosis comes first. If you don't know which barrier you're dealing with, every intervention becomes an educated guess. And you cannot tell which one you have by staring at a dashboard. A belief gap and a skill gap look identical in a status report and need opposite interventions. Show up guessing, and you'll spend real money teaching people to use a tool they simply don't trust yet. Congratulations - you've just catered the wrong conversation.
Mistake 2
Letting leaders off the hook
One of the biggest predictors of whether change sticks is also one of the most overlooked: leadership.
If your executives show up as observers, nodding along and quietly answering email under the table, your people clock it in about four minutes.
That doesn't mean your CEO has to emcee the thing. It means they use the tools in front of everyone, participate in the conversation, and make it clear this isn't someone else's initiative.
Recently we’ve been working with a Fortune 200 global professional services firm who’s top 120 leaders were at very different points with AI. Some were redesigning entire processes. Others were using it to summarize emails, or not at all. Rather than focus on the technology, the four-hour session focused on what leaders could do with AI, applying it to a live strategic challenge and ending with a personal commitment to lead differently. The response was strong enough that the organization is now cascading the experience globally.
The lesson is simple: when leaders experience AI as a strategic capability, they're better equipped to model the behavior that makes adoption stick. Nothing you build during those two days survives without that entire chain of leadership doing its part.
Mistake 3
Chasing the wrong outcome
Without a behavioral baseline, you have no way to prove anything actually moved. No baseline, no ROI. You're just hoping the energy in the room was good, which is a wonderful feeling and a terrible metric to bring to your CFO.
But the baseline isn't just about proving the off-site worked. It's about understanding where you're starting in the first place. And you'll want that clarity, because the quiet resistance is real. In that same 2026 research, nearly a third of employees admitted to actively working around their company's AI strategy. If you don't win their belief in the room, some of them will keep politely ignoring the whole thing from their desks. You can't measure your way out of that. You have to earn your way out of it.
Which brings us to the biggest reframe of all.
Mistake 4
Leaving follow-through to chance
We've been working with a Fortune 100 medical device company on their AI strategy for three years. It started with their leadership team, a three-hour session built around what those leaders would do differently, and it landed. What became clear afterward was that the same experience needed to happen everywhere else. So, it expanded: 90-minute activations for 15,000 people, and this year intact teams redesigning their own workflows.
Three years in, that first session is the smallest part of the story.
Your event is where momentum gets created. What happens at 30, 60, and 90 days is where results get made.
If you're planning one of these and want to change what happens on Monday, not just how everyone feels on Friday, that the work we do.
We'd be glad to help you design it.
Candidates now arrive at interviews pre-coached by AI, with their resumes optimized to pass every checkpoint. Polish has stopped being a signal. The traditional hiring process was built to read exactly the cues that AI is now best at producing, and the signals hiring managers once relied on have weakened as a result. And for roles where the wrong hire carries real business consequences, losing the ability to tell who will actually perform is not a minor inconvenience. It is a material risk, and it exposes the business to unnecessary turnover, reduced performance, and heavier investment for talent growth and development.
So how do you observe the behaviors that matter most, before someone is in the role?
Not by asking better questions, but rather by putting candidates in situations designed to elicit that behavior.
The limits of predicting from paper
Credentials tell you what someone has done. Structured interviews tell you what someone says they would do. Neither lets you observe what they actually do in the moments that count.
This distinction matters most in client-facing, relationship-driven roles, where the performance gap between a strong hire and a weak one plays out in real business outcomes (revenue, retention, client growth). Organizations that hire at scale in these roles carry that gap across hundreds of decisions at a time.
The better approach is to watch candidates do the work before you hire them. Put them in simulated, role-relevant scenarios, and pair the simulation with a second, different kind of measure so no single method carries the whole decision. That combination is what lets you evaluate real performance before anyone is in the role. Organization-specific simulations provide a clear read on who is ready and capable of performing on day one. In a world of AI-supported candidate signals, the use of simulations makes the process harder to prep for. It is harder to fake. And, when designed well, it is substantially more predictive than other hiring methods.
What counts as evidence
Claims about predictive power are easy to make. Evidence for them is rarer than you would expect.
A predictive validity study, the kind that links pre-hire assessment scores to how someone actually performs once hired, is some of the hardest evidence to produce and the rarest to see. Many assessments are validated against proxies: another test, or a theoretical model of the role, rather than real results on the job. Connecting scores to concrete business outcomes and doing the statistical work to show the link holds, takes years of shared data and a level of commitment from both the assessment provider and the client that most partnerships never reach. That is precisely why it is worth asking for. A provider who can show how assessment scores track to training completion, retention, and first-year output is offering something categorically different from one who can only show a correlation with another test.
Why simulation holds up where other methods do not
When a candidate sits across from a trained assessor (someone playing the client or prospect on the other side of the conversation) and has to work through a real situation, they cannot rely on a rehearsed answer. The scenario is specific. The stakes feel real. What you see is close to what you would get on the job.
That is the value of simulation-based assessment: it does not test what candidates know about the role.
It shows how they use what they know when a real person is on the other side of the conversation, before the stakes are real.
For roles that carry significant business responsibility, this distinction is the whole game. The cost of the wrong hire in a high-stakes client-facing role is not just a missed quota for a quarter - It plays out in relationships that do not develop, clients who leave, and productivity losses that compound over time. Getting those hiring decisions right, at scale, with consistency, requires methods that are built for predictive accuracy, not just candidate experience or hiring speed.
What this means for how organizations think about hiring
Most organizations are still optimizing the wrong things in their hiring process. They invest heavily in employer branding, application flow, and interview structure, all of which matter, but less in the core question: does our hiring process actually predict who will succeed in this role?
AI has sharpened the stakes here. If every candidate can present as polished and prepared, screening based on presentation becomes less useful. What holds up is direct observation of the behaviors that the job requires.
A few principles worth building from:
- Measure what the job requires, not what is easy to measure. Cognitive tests and personality questionnaires have their place, but they do not look much like the job. The closer the assessment is to the actual work, the better it predicts performance in it.
- Ask what your assessment predicts. Training completion? Retention? First-year output? Most organizations cannot answer that question today, largely because providers have rarely been asked to prove it. It is a fair thing to ask for.
- Take the human element seriously. In a simulation, a candidate is having a real conversation, responding in real time, navigating a situation that requires judgment. Even with the help of AI, that is hard to game. And it remains one of the strongest predictors of on-the-job performance available.
The data exists to make hiring decisions more accurate, fairer, and more directly tied to business outcomes. For organizations operating in high-stakes roles at scale, there is too much on the line to rely on methods that cannot hold up to that standard.
You may be interested in BTS’ thought leadership in the five talent shifts AI is forcing now.
La IA ya forma parte del día a día de las ventas. Hoy cualquier asesor puede llegar a una reunión con datos, tendencias e insights generados en segundos. Sin embargo, disponer de más información no garantiza conversaciones de mayor valor.
A través de una experiencia real con un consultor comercial, este artículo explica por qué la inteligencia artificial funciona como un GPS: ayuda a interpretar el entorno, pero no conduce la conversación ni entiende las prioridades del cliente.
En este artículo descubrirás:
- Por qué el acceso a la información ya no supone una ventaja competitiva.
- La importancia del business acumen para interpretar los datos con criterio.
- Cómo hablar el lenguaje del cliente genera credibilidad y diferenciación.
- Por qué las relaciones B2B evolucionan hacia relaciones P2P basadas en la confianza.
- Qué capacidades consultivas seguirán siendo exclusivamente humanas incluso en la era de la IA.
La tecnología seguirá evolucionando, pero la ventaja competitiva estará en quienes sean capaces de combinar inteligencia artificial con conversaciones centradas en el cliente, pensamiento estratégico y relaciones de largo plazo.