Subject won't talk? Use these techniques

Recently I was instructing a group of auditors from an organization at its professional retreat. During my session on interviewing, the counsel for this group asked an excellent question: "What can you do when the person you are interviewing just doesn't want to talk with you - when their answers are short and not to the point?" It was such a good question that I'm using it as the central theme for this column. 

The first thing we need to keep in mind is that there's a reason a person isn't participating at the communication level we want. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Subjects' motivations for not communicating vary widely. On one hand, an interview subject might not be a nice person but he hasn't committed a wrongful act and has no guilty knowledge. At the other extreme, an interview subject has committed a wrongful deed and feels that the more he communicates the more vulnerable he becomes.