Q: My boss suggested that a group of us need to improve our interviewing skills. During a recent search, one manager had the wrong résumé and another left a candidate alone in the conference room for 20 minutes. As for me, I tend to trust my gut and recommend candidates based on the vibe I get. I think my boss is overreacting — our company runs just fine, so our interviewing skills can’t be that bad.

A: How well you treat candidates in an interview is directly related to your success in bringing talent into your organization. Interviewing skills are recruiting skills, which means that encouraging and enticing people to join the organization is critical. Your boss isn’t seeing highly effective recruiting in your interviewing skills — it’s inappropriate and unprofessional to have the wrong résumé or to leave a candidate alone for 20 minutes. Your boss is seeing behaviors that go against the goal of successfully recruiting the best talent to your organization. These kinds of tactical activities are just as important as other aspects of the interview.

Like you, many people trust their instincts in an interview. You may be highly intuitive, but effective interviewing organizationally isn’t based off one person’s gut feelings. A successful interview process explicitly identifies the qualities, experience, and values that the candidate brings to see how they align with the organization and the position requirements. You need to craft and ask questions that will elicit examples of the candidate’s expertise and provide the information you need to make informed decisions.

If multiple people are part of the interview, coordinate with your coworkers so everyone isn’t asking the same questions over and over. Have a conversation ahead of time to establish a focus area for each interviewer. There should be some overlap to see consistency in the answers and an interest in the questions the candidates ask. For example, the hiring manager might focus her questions on teamwork and problem-solving skills, while a technical expert on the team might concentrate on the candidate’s experience with relevant tools or systems.

There also has to be agreement on rating the candidate. How are you going to grade whether a candidate has what you need? What are the most important qualities or skills for the position? Create a document of these major skills or experiences and have all interviewers rate the candidate on an established scale with examples from the interview as support. Your gut may work in some situations, but having your intuition validated with examples and a rating system will make your evaluation of a candidate more effective.

Interviewing also has many legal components to it, so it’s important to make sure all interviewers know what questions could be considered discriminatory and how to avoid them. Small talk about a candidate’s spouse or children or a question about needing time off for religious purposes could land you in trouble. An interviewer who’s “winging it’’ or who isn’t prepared runs the risk of asking inappropriate question, and that could have serious ramifications for the company.

A negative interviewing experience also threatens your organization’s reputation. The people who were interviewed with the wrong résumé or left waiting in the conference room will tell other people in their profession about how poorly they were treated. You don’t want to gain a bad reputation for something that can be so easily changed.

Your company may run just fine now, but ultimately and over time, you may not be getting the right talent or the best talent. Interviewing is not a time for winging it — this person made an investment to come and meet with you and they should be treated courteously.

Elaine Varelas is managing partner at Keystone Partners, a career management firm in Boston, and serves on the board of Career Partners International.