I can’t begin to estimate the amount of nonsense used to select salespeople: show me your wage reports; sell me the pencil; what animal best describes you; what is your greatest strength; describe your weakness; show me the fire in your belly …
It’s junk. All junk. Sales managers know it. And management knows it. If it was any good, 90% of all salespeople would be problem-free.
Reality Check
But first, let’s do a reality check. If most of your salespeople are meeting expectations, or achieving a reasonable quota, then whatever process you are using to hire, keep it up. Nothing else will make a difference. But, if you are among the majority of sales managers who just can’t seem to build a sales force of top producers, then keep reading.
Swing … and a Miss!
Sales is a tough profession. It requires more and better skills than most jobs. I know because I have been assessing and training salespeople and sales managers for an embarrassingly long time. And, aside from changes in the type and nature of the product or service, I’ve discovered all salespeople need the same five KSA’s (some KSA’s more than others). Unfortunately, when I assess them, the majority of salespeople only display two of them. keep reading…
As the new fall television shows are starting to air, viewers across the U.S. are deciding which shows they want to check out. This sort of judgment process is nothing new to recruiters. In fact, the recruiting process is much like getting a new TV show on the air. Television is broken down into three primary areas: the pitch, the pilot shoot, and the acquisition of viewers, all of which contain valuable lessons that recruiters can learn from.
The Pitch
Writers get at most 10 minutes to convince a network executive that their ideas are worth pursuing. A good pitch is a lot like a good job description: dynamic but concise; intriguing but clear; persuasive but direct. Here’s how to pitch a position: keep reading…
Today, talent-focused big data comes to small business. While in France, big data comes to big employers.
Both developments involve Monster’s cloud-based semantic search, SeeMore. Both are big news for the company, representing in the first instance a market push into the long tail of employers, while in the second, a broadening of its service offerings into non-English speaking Europe. But otherwise, the developments are unconnected.
Somewhat more than a year after Monster first launched SeeMore, Monster is now offering the service to companies with as few as 50 workers. It’s not a stripped down version, Javid Muhammedali, Monster’s director, Product Management, assured me. “We didn’t slim down the feature set.”
What the developers did do was to make some adjustments so employers without a technical staff could begin to use SeeMore right after they sign up. For instance, instead of using APIs, the SMB version of SeeMore is email-based. Send one resume, or Zip up hundreds. keep reading…
When you are battling for talent in a highly competitive environment, you are likely to encounter more than your share of failures. In fact, because underperformance in recruiting is so common, I am constantly surprised when corporate recruiting leaders have no formal process for identifying specifically why their current recruiting efforts don’t produce their desired level of results. The formal method for identifying the factors that cause a process to fail is known as “failure analysis.” But unfortunately, even though it is used throughout business, failure analysis is seldom applied to the recruiting process.
I was recently reminded of the need for failure analysis while researching the extensive recruiting problems of oil and gas firms in the booming area around Alberta, Canada. I’ll be presenting my recruiting solutions at the Talent Hub Conference, Metropolitan Centre in Calgary, on Wednesday, September 19, 2012. But if you’re not involved in the petroleum industry, don’t worry because the same failure identification and prospect research processes can and should be used in any industry. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “prospect research” it is a form of market research which involves the use of surveys and interviews to identify what worked and what didn’t work during the recruiting process and precisely what factors attract and turn off top prospects.
Prospect Market Research Is Required keep reading…
Violence is as American as apple pie. –Eldridge Cleaver
Todd Raphael just did a piece on Facebook as it relates to a conversation he had with Steven Rothberg, and that piece really hit a nerve for me.
As you might know, Facebook does not come with a user’s manual. Devoid of these instructions for use, it is open season to make use of Facebook in all ways that fit with your beliefs, lifestyle, and purpose. This might be good if there actually was a separation between our personal lives and our professional lives, but that line seems to be disappearing. I for one do not see this as a good thing for the world of recruiting in general and I certainly see Facebook as being far more of a problem then a solution.
I am not sure where Facebook is as it relates to contemporary society and its place therewith, but it has become monstrously big in the lives of many. I often wonder what we did in the days before it came into prominence, and I for one intend to find out as I scale back big time and only check in two or three times a week for a few moments. I need to do this and to regain control. I have said some pretty unpleasant things to those who disagree with my politics and I will not do that again. My new watchword is unfriend and/or ignore.
As far as Facebook and recruiting, I have grave concerns for the benefits to be gained, as these two entities might very well turn out to be a very deadly combination. Facebook is, among many other things, an ongoing real-time conversation, and this might be good in some areas but it is not good in others. Let me tell you three reasons why: keep reading…
Those bitter Facebook battles over gay marriage, Planned Parenthood, and all else have taken a toll on a few friendships. Perhaps then, they are having some affect on employment relationships — recruiters connected with candidates over Facebook.
This is, after all, part of what social media’s supposed to be about for recruiting — building relationships over time, ones that could someday end up in a hire. And, on Facebook, in some cases these rough-and-tumble political fights are stopping some hires before they start.
CollegeRecruiter.com’s Steven Rothberg and I talk about this for about 13 minutes, below. keep reading…
Here are some basic truths about people regarding hiring and getting hired:
- There are very few people who have an economic need to look for another job, are willing to take a lateral transfer, and are high achievers. Yet most companies spend most of their time and resources looking for these kinds of people. For proof, look at any 20 job postings on Dice, Simplyhired.com, LinkedIn, or Indeed.com and see who they’re trying to attract.
- The military has a tough screening process for selecting officers. But once selected — and with no experience — they are given some serious training and responsibilities far in excess of their current ability and asked to deliver extraordinary results. Most of them succeed. Yet these same people when they leave the military aren’t given a fair chance because they don’t have the “right” experience. keep reading…
Having worked in executive search for more than 10 years, I have had great success in finding candidates but have encountered many obstacles in trying to place those candidates because often many hiring managers mismanage the hiring process. Below are five issues hiring managers must consider when trying to fill their open positions with superstar candidates. keep reading…
It’s a common mistake. Promote your best salesperson, gain a bad manager, and lose both. Why does this keep happening? Sales were great and his/her top performance attracted attention, but nothing prepared you for the bad manager part. Well, there are some very clear reasons. keep reading…
HireVue, the interviewing company that has grown from about five employees to about 60 employees in three years, is buying CodeEval.
I covered CodeEval’s launch as a testing company for technical employees in January 2011. Later, its screening tool, not its sourcing tool, became a free product.
HireVue expects to integrate the CodeEval testing tool so you can create “challenges” during the interviewing/assessment process. It’s probably going to take about three months to integrate the technology into HireVue.
Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure; Married in haste, we may repent at leisure. –William Congreve, 1693
If you work from a job description only to find it does not correctly define candidate requirements; if you send multiple candidates to the hiring manager only to him/her complain about wrong-skilled people; if turnover stubbornly stays high; if too many people fail training programs; if newly promoted managers fail on the job; if 80% of salespeople produce only 20% of sales, or if half the people you hire tend to sink to the bottom of the pool, then William Congreve defined your problem over 300 years ago.
Put another way, any organization that uses poor or inaccurate hiring processes is doomed to suffer the long-term consequences of poor employee and manager performance.
Cost
What would you do with a department whose decisions resulted in a 10-50% annual defect rate? That’s the estimated cost of turnover; job mistakes; too many people doing too little work; quality defects; poor customer service; barely acceptable productivity; low sales; and, so forth that came from using typical hiring practices.
While you pray your line managers aren’t reading this article, consider the following. keep reading…
The Summer Olympics start soon and most will be focused on the athletic achievements, but the Olympics can provide many valuable lessons for recruiters. Recruiting leaders often say that they’re looking for “outside-the-box” approaches and it’s hard to argue against the fact that the Olympic recruiting approach differs significantly from the corporate recruiting model.
London 2012
What better example to emulate is there than a system that motivates and convinces thousands of individuals to make extraordinary sacrifices and to develop themselves beyond the capabilities of the athletes who preceded them? This Olympic people-management model routinely brings out world-record-breaking human performances.
So, while you’re watching the events, think about the powerful way that Olympic teams recruit and how their strategy and methods differ from the traditional and more conservative corporate approach.
Top Recruiting Lessons That Should be Learned From the Olympics keep reading…
A new testing company, a new way to keep candidates up to date with their applications, and more, today in our short look at some new recruiting services.
I have three big recruiting rules I suggest every external and corporate recruiter follow if they want to make more placements with better candidates.
Adler’s first rule of recruiting: don’t do searches over again. Once is enough. If you’ve presented a slate of 3-4 strong candidates for the position one of them should get hired. If not, you have a problem. Here’s a recent ERE article describing how to minimize this problem.
Adler’s second rule of recruiting: if you present more than 3-4 candidates to a hiring manager on any search and one of them doesn’t get hired: STOP! Don’t send any more candidates to be interviewed. Something’s wrong. Figure out what it is and correct it before you waste your time on a fool’s errand.
Adler third rule of recruiting: when you first meet a person, wait 30 minutes before making any yes or no decision. If you and your hiring managers put your emotions in the parking lot for these first 30 minutes, you’ll cut the number of times you need to follow rules one and two by 50%.
Over the past 12 years I’ve written over a thousand articles, multiple books, and spoke at hundreds of conferences and training sessions on this and related topics. Here are the top five things that are the typical reasons for “too many candidates before one is hired” syndrome: keep reading…
Every once in a while I take notice of a new company that seems to be flying under the radar. Smarterer is one such company I believe it is quietly going about the business of changing the testing industry as we know it.
From what I’ve seen over the past 15 years, working with recruiting teams around the world, it’s apparent that too much time is spent on doing searches over again. This is a huge productivity drain, with recruiters having do the same search over and over again. Worse, most recruiting leaders don’t even measure it, control it, or try to fix it. If you need to send more than 3-4 candidates to the hiring manager, and the manager can’t decide, and wants to see more candidates, you’ve experienced the problem first hand. Solving this problem will allow you to make 50-200% more placements per month. keep reading…
Video screening; the most-preferred employers for MBAs; training new hires; thoughts on the labor market; and screening with social media. And, of course, Wowzer. All in the roundup, below.
Bullhorn says recruiters post more jobs on LinkedIn through its freemium Reach service than any other social media site.
Just out, Bullhorn’s Social Recruiting in the U.S. report says 77 percent of the postings that go through Bullhorn Reach go to LinkedIn. Twitter gets 54 percent, with Facebook far down the posting popularity list. Only 25 percent of the jobs get posted there.
You can put your hands down. We know that adds up to more than 100; some ads (34 percent) get posted to two sites, while 21 percent get posted to all three sites. And 21 percent get posted to no social network. (You in the front row. How many get posted to only one site? Answer: 24 percent.)
The report is drawn from the more than 300,000 jobs posted by the 77,500 recruiters using Bullhorn Reach to manage their social media services and job postings. The report shows heavy usage of social media in the Northeast, which may have something to do with Boston being home to the recruitment technology company. But we admit to a bit of befuddlement over Mississippi and Alabama making Bullhorn’s top 10 social posters list.
Still, it’s kind of interesting to see that restaurant industry recruiters make the most use of social media for recruiting, Probably makes sense, considering the industry hires huge numbers of kids who are all (or mostly all, anyway) on Facebook and Twitter. But LinkedIn? Mining and security recruiters also made the top 10 Facebook user list, which, at least when it comes to security, make us worry a little.
Last Week Dan Loeb of Third Point Capital sent a letter to the board of directors of Yahoo asserting that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson actually did not have a degree in degree in computer science as his executive biography indicated. Yahoo replied that this was an “inadvertent error.” Mr. Loeb wrote a response to the board demanding his removal for cause by noon on Monday.
Stories are being written by Kara Swisher, Michael Arrington, and many others about the incident. Most articles discuss the integrity of Thompson or the board of directors itself. Some might ask the legitimate question of whether an executive of a technology company even needs a computer science degree. Answer: They don’t. After all, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner did an amazing job turning around in the 1990s after initially turning down the job because he didn’t consider himself a technology guy. It makes the actions of Thompson all the more puzzling.
Ultimately this begs the following question, “How in the world did a Fortune 500 company recruit and hire a CEO with inaccurate statements in his biography?” This might indicate symptoms of a more broad and disturbing problem, such as lack of proper recruiting budget investment, formal process, and execution of proper human capital processes. To view this as a Yahoo problem and move on would be missing a rare opportunity to drive positive change. keep reading…
I recently read an article suggesting that recruiters only spend six seconds reviewing a resume to determine whether or not a candidate was a fit to the job they were attempting to fill.
6 Seconds?!
My initial thought was, “How can a recruiter get enough information to determine whether or not a candidate is worth talking to in such a sparse amount of time?” keep reading…
Employers of hourly labor in industries including fast-food dining, retail, and contact centers often struggle with high turnover, and the associated costs of constantly hiring and training new employees. A common screening technique used by recruiters is to weed out “job hoppers” — those candidates who have held many short-term jobs. But a recent study by Evolv’s analytics team found that work history is a poor predictor of future job tenure.
The study analyzed applicant data and employment outcomes from more than 21,000 call center agents drawn from five major contact centers to determine the relationship between previous work experience and future employment outcomes. The results show zero correlation between the number of positions employees have had in the recent past and how long they’ll last on their next job. A candidate who’s had five jobs in five years is no more likely to quit than someone who’s had one job for five years. In addition, the study reports people who are unemployed when they apply for a job also have the same expected tenure as any other candidate.
Job-hoppers and the “Perpetually Unemployed” keep reading…
