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During the economic downturn of the past two years, numbers of sales executives flushed their least effective salespeople from their teams.
In some industries, things are presently looking up. Many of my clients are hiring again, backfilling those open slots. This time however, they will be hiring differently.
The reason? The demands of today's hypercompetitive, buyers' market has forced sales executives to rethink their approach to hiring. They have learned, all too painfully, that their hiring methods of the past don't apply any longer.
They've learned that a rep with a past record of stellar performance elsewhere will not automatically overachieve for them in the future.
They depend less on a person's resume since resume accuracy is declining.
They've learned that some candidates are talented enough in the interview process to get hired, but are not actually skilled enough to deliver the numbers once they are aboard.
They realize that a misfire in the past--a salesrep who doesn't make it through the first year--has cost them $150k to upwards of $800k including lost business opportunity.
What insightful companies are doing now to assure that they are building a high performing team of winners is applying a process to what they did informally in the past.
The process provides the sales executive with an objective assessment of the candidates. In addition, since a number of people are part of the process, each measuring the candidate's abilities, a much more accurate and unbiased evaluation results.
Here are the key elements of the process that I use with my clients:
1. Multiple stakeholders must agree, prior to the start of interviewing, about the job description and the critical skills, experience, and traits of a successful candidate. For a smaller company, those stakeholders would include, for example, the CEO, VP of Sales, and VP of Marketing. For a larger company, the senior VP of sales, regional sales executive, and sales manager might be included. In addition, stakeholders agree on how the position and the company will be "sold" to the candidate.
2. A benchmark is established against which progress will later be measured. Data points include performance against quota, average tenure, time to first sale, etc.
3. An internal hiring team collaborates on building a profile for each unique sales position, which defines the critical skills and traits required for success. Those skills and traits are prioritized and each is categorized with three levels of candidate compliance. You can imagine that the profile for a sales hunter would be quite different than the profile for a sales farmer.
4. Accurate job descriptions are constructed, which are then provided to recruiters and are used for posting on the web.
5. Recruiters and HR staff are provided with a Resume Screener that will effectively filter out candidates with "fatal flaws." This saves time for the members of the internal hiring team, allowing them to dedicate more time to more qualified candidates.
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