I had a job candidate in my office last week who drove me crazy. Her resume was strong: Ten years of agency experience and a few years on the corporate side. She had worked with several high profile companies and appeared to have generated impressive results. She was pleasant and professional, and the interview was going well.

Then the catastrophe happened. When I asked what her greatest strength was, she replied "crisis management and strategic counseling." My heart began to sink, because I hear this response all too often. But I persevered. I asked for an example of her crisis management skills and she mentioned a high profile issue in Los Angeles that I was intimately aware of. When I asked her to explain her role in managing the crisis, the conversation went something like this:

HER: "Well, we provided message points, and daily media briefings, and we established a war room to monitor and respond to breaking news."

ME: "I understand, but what insight did you and the client discover that ultimately helped mitigate the crisis and change public opinion?"

HER: "We put out instantaneous messages to the media to counter the bad publicity."

ME: "I understand, and that is a good tactic. But how did you actually help the client address the core issue that was causing all of this bad publicity?"

HER: "Oh, we didn't really get involved in that. We came in after the crisis erupted."

For the record, I have nothing against instant response systems, war rooms, or press briefings—they are all perfectly good communications tactics. But when a company needs to manage a crisis, it usually involves emotionally charged discussions over difficult tradeoffs, risk management and a willingness to change behavior or own up to bad behavior. Most corporate crises emanate from man-made disasters—product failures, procedural failures, ethical failures—or from ill-fated responses to natural disasters (think FEMA and Katrina).

When a communications expert is brought in, she often finds herself in a tense, closed door meeting with a group of anxious, worried and very smart people. She has to help these people sort through a great deal of noise and distraction and arrive at the root cause of the controversy, then identify the options for quelling the controversy. This often involves the very difficult challenge of convincing operating managers, technical experts and legal experts that admitting guilt might actually be the right thing to do, or that the benefits of apologizing to customers might outweigh the potential exposure to lawsuits, or that the ceasing of a highly profitable but potentially unethical business practice may actually be the best fiscal course to take in the long run.

None of these decisions are clear cut, easily discerned or simple to execute. They usually involve tense debates between powerful people with firmly rooted positions. They demand critical and monumental judgment calls that must be made without the benefit of solid data, opinion polls or focus groups. Yet it is precisely in these discussions that a great communications professional can add tremendous value and drive the kind of behavioral change that will mitigate a crises and end public controversy.

The best crisis experts are smart, quick, confident and supremely persuasive. They have an ability to take a highly complex scenario and boil it down to a core issue, then dissect that issue from a customer and public perspective in order to arrive at the right course of action. They have the courage of conviction to stand their ground against passionate opposition, and to recommend high-risk solutions to a nervous and fearful client.

This is not easy stuff, and there are just a handful of people in the profession who are truly great at it.

So when a public relations professional tells me that their strongest suit is crisis communications, my antennae go up. I want to hear an engaging, fascinating insight into the nature of a crisis, the wake of its impact and the strategic solution that was not immediately apparent. I want to be riveted by a tale of risk, complexity, opposition and confusion. I want to be in awe.

What I don't want is to hear about daily press briefings or war rooms or consistent messaging—but that's usually what I get.

Maybe it's me?