A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post on Interview Dos: A Business Leadership Skill to Acquire. You can go to the post to see the comments from others. One comment that repeatedly came up was if you aren't going to hire the candidate, tell them what they need to work on to be successful or what skills they need to acquire to make them more valuable. From my perspective, that would be a good practice. Candidates rarely know if they bombed an interview or were simply lacking the right skills.

Hundreds of people provided their insights as to what to look for in prospective candidates, and I wanted to share the list with you. They don't address how to conduct interviews as that's what my post did, but they offered additional views that I thought you'd find interesting. I am not providing specifics on how to measure these skills as the comments did not include that, nor am I endorsing any as 'the' skill to look for in interviews. The list is provided simply as a guide to what others thought were critical.

Learning how to assess for these skills is a different business leadership skill that I think I'll address in a future post.

· Intelligence

· Integrity

· Technical ability

· Professionalism

· Customer-focused

· Creativity

· Passion

· Adaptability

· Drive

· Goal orientation

· Humbleness

· Team player

· Good soul

· Quality-oriented

· Ability to deal with the unknown

I'm sure you all have many others, and I'd love to hear what you think are the critical skills for candidates to have. Watch for one of my upcoming posts on how one acquires the business leadership skill of assessing for these skills in the interview itself. In the meantime, I'm open to all your ideas on this topic.