Why Sales Recruiting Must Be Done Right The First Time

And How Your Sales Headhunters Are Getting It Wrong

Danita Bye

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 sales hiring so regrettably common (and the best way to diminish its impact).

An Interview Means Little When the Sales 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 sales 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 sales 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 10 sales hiring 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.

Sales Assessments Before You Interview will improve your Sales Recruiting

To break this cycle, you need a proven sales 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 micro-climate, 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.

Gain further insight into Sales Recruiting – get Danita’s e-Book called: Measuring Sales DNA

Bio: Danita Bye

Nationally recognized sales management and leadership expert Danita Bye built her reputation on building and inspiring process-oriented, 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 businesses to the next level. Her practical, no-nonsense approach to sales management, combined with her leadership acumen, enables sales leadership to increase sales, creating predictable revenue streams.

As a 10-year veteran of the Xerox Corporation, Danita consistently achieved award winning sales performance before leaving to become an equity partner and national sales manager for a Minneapolis-based medical device company. In this capacity, she increased annual revenues from $300,000 to a run rate of $20 million in just ten years.

Danita has authored numerous articles on sales management and leadership. In addition, she was a featured as a sales development expert on the TV show, “The Ruthless Entrepreneur,” which is currently airing on the Oxygen Network. Leadership Shift, Management Acceleration and a library of eBooks on critical sales management issues are available on the Sales Growth Specialists’ website.

Danita can be reached at Danita@SalesGrowthSpecialists.com, 612-267-3320 or 800-256-2799.

For more insights on Sales Strategy and Sales Process, visit www.SalesGrowthSpecialists.com.