Three Common Sense Secrets to Hiring Outstanding Sales People

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:41:02 -0800

Over the years, we've helped many companies apply the principles of Performance-based Hiring^sm to find talented and productive sales people. When we first engage with these companies their conversations often begin with similar words… "Help me find sales people who are aggressive, multitaskers, closers who don't take ‘No' for an answer. It would be great if they came from our competitors and brought with them a few clients, contacts, or knowledge that will help them hit the ground running. And oh, by the way, I need them NOW." At this point in the conversation we have to intervene and help our clients think differently about the process of consistently hiring outstanding sales professionals. Below are three common sense secrets for doing just that:

A Dozen or So Different Ways to Ask the One-Question Interview

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:59:11 -0800

Early in my search career I realized that many of my clients weren’t very good at evaluating candidates. This made me have to find more candidates than necessary to complete most searches. To minimize this wasted effort, I created the one-question Performance-based Hiring^SM interview, primarily to better defend my candidates from weak interviewers. Once I became proficient with the technique, I started training my clients how to use it. This helped prevent good candidates from being excluded due to bad interviewing, and required fewer candidates to be seen on each assignment. Here’s how the process works:

How to Interview Top Performers

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:00:00 -0800

Top people cannot be interviewed the same way as everyone else. Although most recruiters and hiring managers know this, few know how to do it. It's not about selling the job, charming the person, and over-talking. It's about using the interview to get the candidate to sell you.

Great Active Candidate Sourcing Ideas

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:22:30 -0800

There are some top-notch, fully-employed people who sometimes voluntarily seek out new career opportunities. Since they’re fully-employed and top-notch they don’t expend too much effort in looking for something else. When they get itchy or at the first hint of trouble they’ll first start networking with friends and former associates. Then they’ll contact a recruiter or two. Then they’ll probably Google for jobs (e.g., searching on the job title and a location) and check out some specialty or niche job boards. If nothing develops from these sources, they’ll probably look at the career websites of some highly regarded companies. As a last resort, they’ll check out the major boards.

Inside the Mind of the Top Performer - Part I

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:11:06 -0800

Top performers are different than average performers both on the job and how they look for a new one. Simply defined, a top performer is a person who consistently exceeds expectations. While you might be able to determine a person's potential to be a top performer in 30 days or so, it takes at least a few months to determine if a person is a top performer. This has to do with motivation, team skills, and the consistent achievement of results. For a variety of reasons, just because a person can do the work, it doesn't mean the person will do the work. Generally speaking, if a top person takes a great job that perfectly fits his or her needs and aspirations, it's unlikely the person would even consider changing jobs in the first year or so. The person is typically on a steep learning curve, making an impact, and highly satisfied with the current work and the potential future opportunities.

Defend Your Candidate from the Competition and Superficial Assessments

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:40:01 -0800

I wrote a version of this article for ERE in April 2007. It seemed worthy of repeating as a year-end reminder of the critical role that recruiters need to play to ensure that bad decisions don't preclude the best person from getting hired. As you'll find out, the key point of the article is that good candidates, who we spent a great deal of time developing, can often be lost for easily preventable reasons. Setting up some process or check-point can prevent the problem from arising in the first place. If this isn't possible, you need to have some counter-measures ready to employ to mitigate any problems that do arise.

12 Great Sourcing Gifts for the Holiday Season

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 06:10:51 -0800

If you want to generate one great candidate day after day after day, follow my 12 golden rules for sourcing the best. These are this year's stocking stuffers whether you're hiring active or passive candidates.

10 Steps to Increase Interviewing Accuracy into the 90% Range

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:00:00 -0800

There are two huge problems when hiring is viewed as an end-to-end process. The first one involves sourcing. Most companies are terrible when it comes to advertising, recruiting, and attracting the best. Of course, as a recruiter, how I make my money is by finding top people that others can't. And, in today's Internet age, this is actually quite easy. However, this is a big waste of time if you or your hiring managers don't know how to accurately assess candidate competency.

The One Question Interview Challenge

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 08:06:26 -0800

Two months ago I gave a presentation to a room full of HR managers and executives from an engineering company in Omaha, Nebraska. After the presentation I had several conversations about their hiring challenges with individual managers. I ended up giving three people copies of the audio CD, "The One Question Interview," with the challenge that they use this approach on their next big hire and report back on their results. Last Thursday I received the following voice message from John Martin of Cascade Engineering. Here's what he had to say:

The Secrets of Top Recruiters Finally Revealed

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:06:19 -0800

I'm very proud of the fact that I've helped hundreds (maybe thousands) of recruiters in the U.S. and around the world increase their monthly placement rate by 50-100% and in some cases much more. As part of our planning for our 2008 "The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent" tour, I've put together my list of "recruiter essentials" we'll cover during the workshop. These are the secrets that every top recruiter follows in order to maximize their placement rate. [FYI: We've incorporated these same points into our final Recruiter Boot Camp Online program for this year (the four-part course starts Nov. 2, 2007) and our San Jose LIVE: Performance-based Hiring Tour 2007 event on December 5, 2007.] While there are about 20 key techniques we teach during the workshop, in my opinion the following 10 techniques represent the difference between average and great recruiter performance:

Compared to What?

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 10:50:52 -0800

I spent the first half of the '90s working at GE. This was in Jack Welch's heyday: best practices, work-out, and management course from Harvard professors at the training center at Croton-on-Hudson (affectionately referred to as Camp GE.) It was a great experience, but there were a few things about GE's personnel policies that didn't really make sense. One of these was what we called the 10-80-10 policy.

Are You Masking Your Hiring Process Problems with the Wrong Solutions?

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:58:20 -0800

Just about every corporate recruiter has too many requisitions to handle as effectively as possible. The problem is magnified when good candidates get excluded for dumb and preventable reasons, generally weak interviewing skills on the part of the hiring manager or a candidate who wasn't at his or her best. Sometimes good candidates are excluded before they're even seen because they don't have exactly the right background. Sometimes good candidates pull themselves out to of the process because the job doesn't seem interesting or the candidate didn't like the hiring manager. Few companies address these problems directly--instead they avoid them, focusing most of their energy and resources on hiring more recruiters or developing new sourcing ideas. This is comparable to buying more raw materials than necessary for a factory that has an excessive scrap rate rather than fixing the scrap problem.

Unmasking the Well-Prepared Candidate

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:05:00 -0800

It's back-to-school week here in Colorado, so my eight children are beginning yet another year of school. It's always interesting to me to gauge their reactions to their new teachers. They form their impressions very early, and some of those impressions are negative. Last night my son told me about his new sixth grade math teacher from you-know-where. "Oh dad, she is absolutely awful! She's extremely strict, she doesn't allow talking in class, and home work has to be in on time. If it's a minute late you get zero credit. She's way too serious, no fun, and she's the hardest, worst teacher in the school. Can you help me transfer out of her class?" We've all had teachers like this one, but what's interesting to me is that as you go through this process over and over with so many kids, you realize that the first day of school is very much contrived. It's a huge multi-act play. Every teacher has on his/her game face. Some try to scare the kids into submission while others try to win the students over by being open and friendly. Each has their own strategy and it's all carefully orchestrated to set the stage for the coming year. In two or three weeks once the impact of the teachers' "first day of school" speeches wear off, I'll start to get the "real" scoop. Sometimes the toughest teacher becomes my child's favorite. What I really care about is simply their ability to teach my children their subjects well.

Using the Panel Interview to Save Time and Increase Accuracy

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:40:57 -0800

If you want to increase assessment accuracy and save time, conduct more panel interviews. These are much better than an all-day series of one-on-one 45-60-minute interviews. When organized properly, panel interviews help everybody involved learn more about the candidate, even weaker interviewers, if they just observe. Panel interviews also provide a great means for subordinates to get involved in the hiring process. Subordinates should never conduct one-on-one interviews, since they usually are trying to work for someone they like, so they focus on the wrong issues. For another, they're rarely objective, and worse, many of them are weak interviewers. A panel interview overcomes all of these problems. However, I didn't always believe this strongly that panel interviews were that good of an idea.

Being a Good Interviewer is More About Recruiting than Selection

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:00:00 -0800

I learned to become a better interviewer than my clients for only one reason: to prevent good candidates from being excluded for bad reasons. Too many of my clients were assessing candidates improperly, either overvaluing first impressions or using some narrow range of skills to determine competency.