Why Sales Talent Recruiting Must Be Done Right The First Time

Danita Bye

And How Your Headhunters Are Getting It Wrong

According to a 2006 article in Business Credit, a widely held rule of thumb asserts that hiring the wrong person is like throwing three times their yearly salary right out the window, not to mention forgone opportunities and hard-to-get-out bad blood spilled all over your sales department. Oh, and don’t forget the lost customers. From McKinsey Quarterly: “Customers are 70% less likely to remain committed to the firm after a negative experience with entry-level and frontline employees.”

I could go on – and on – but I think you get the point: Hiring the wrong people costs a business big. That’s a problem in any economic climate, let alone this one. So let’s get to the root of the problem by looking into the single biggest contributor to making bad hires so regrettably common (and the best way to diminish its impact).

An Interview Means Little When the Recruiting Process is Fundamentally Flawed

To my mind, it seems that the core of the problem is the erroneous idea that the interview is where the real business of recruiting takes place. The fact is that interviews – and the resumes that prompt them – just aren’t as important as most managers and CEOs think they are. According to Dave Kurlan of Objective Management Group, real-world experience and research indicate that of his five steps of the recruiting process, resumes come in fourth and interviews are dead last. ADP Screening and Selection Services figured in 2007 that 41 percent of resume fact-checks turn up discrepancies (read: falsehoods, or, if you’re charitable, read: fortuitous but innocent omissions and errors of fact). Worse, a Michigan State University study estimates that nine out of 10hiring decisions are made based on interviews – which are often based on almost solely on resumes.

So here you are, grilling and serving a candidate based on a resume that’s got a great chance of being at least partly fictitious and maybe an interview rapport that doesn’t mean a thing when it comes to actually selling anything beyond the interviewee. The result is a bad hire, which drains resources you need to properly hire in the first place, which means further bad hires. And around and around it goes.

Hire Better People by Assessing Before You Interview

To break this cycle, you need a proven assessment system – and trained assessors – to get past self-reported resume data and interview glad-handing to see what really makes a candidate tick. I like the S.E.A.R.C.H. Matrix, part of the Positionalysis™ process from Midwest Assessments Inc. of Kansas City, though there are others I use in my consulting work to measure the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and other traits your hires will need to succeed in your organization.

And what are the characteristics that make up an ideal salesperson for your team? It’s different for every organization, depending on your offerings, your culture, your business microclimate, and other variables. That alone is a big subject, one that I’ve dealt with in past articles and will again, but nearly every organization will see big returns from an investment in objective assessment. Think of it this way: If a bad hire costs three times his annual salary, and you spend 10% of a single year’s pay to hire the right salesperson in the first place, how far will you be ahead at the end of three years? Five years? Ten years?

As Jim Collins puts it in Good to Great, “People aren’t your most important asset; the right people are!” And recruiting the right people means using the right tools to get the right information before the interview – and before all you have left is a sales team that’s utterly wrong for your organization.

Bio: Danita Bye

Nationally recognized sales management and leadership expert Danita Bye has built her reputation on building and inspiring intentional, no excuse, high-performance sales teams that deliver bottom line results. With her unique Fortune-100 turned-entrepreneur perspective, Danita helps CEOs and company presidents take their national and international businesses to the next level. Her excuse-free approach to sales management, combined with her leadership acumen, enables sales staff and sales management to increase sales, boost profitability and create predictable revenue streams, all while reducing sales costs.

As a 10-year veteran of the Xerox Corporation, Danita consistently achieved award winning sales performance before leaving Xerox to become an equity partner and national sales manager for Minneapolis-based Micro-Tech Hearing Instruments, where she increased annual revenues from $300,000 to $10 million in just seven years. Danita has authored articles in Upsize Magazine, The Hearing Review, the Star Tribune, and Business Journal, where she was recently honored as one of the its Top 25 Women to Watch. Danita also featured as a guest on “The Ruthless Entrepreneur television show” which will begin airing on Oxogen Network in 2010. Her new book, Sales Management in the No Excuse Zone, is due for release in 2010.

Danita can be contacted at Danita@SalesGrowthSpecialists.com or 612-267-3320