But the best interviewers do! In our society, and perhaps even in earlier ones (I'm not sure if people in the stone age interview his/her neighbours when they wanted to get paintings on cave walls or the wheel fabricated), interview has been used as a basic recruitment and selection tool. No viable substitute has emerged for the eye-to-eye, one-on-one sizing-up of each other, prospective employer to employee. Unfortunately, the basic skills of interviewing have been always taken for granted, and assumed to be something we are all innately capable of doing.

You may ask, 'Can you get a job without being a good "interviewee"?' Yes, but the odds are los. If you are looking for a position in the federal or other levels of government, written tests are frequently the rule, but we cannot think of anywhere else where you can avoid the interview as part of the process. Just as resumes seem to have become one essential job-searching requirement of the nineties, so has the interview --- even if the job the applicant is pursuing does not require oral-presentation or communication skills. It all comes down to, "He/she looks great on paper, let's see what he/she is really like." Don't forget that curiosity is a two-way street --- you should have as much interest in meeting your prospective employer and forming your opinion as they have with regard to you --- but if you want the job, you must become a terrific interviewee --- that's the only way.