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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From top-down to judgment all around: The AI imperative for organizations
Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.
In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.
Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.
Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.
Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.
But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.
Why judgment matters more than ever
Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.
If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.
What organizations must do
To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:
- Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.
- Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.
- Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.
- Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.
What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.
BTS acquires Nexo to strengthen its position in Brazil and Latin America
P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.
Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.
Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.
BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.
“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”
“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.
Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.
The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.
BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.
For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com
Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19
High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.