Will Passive Job Seekers Apply to Your Job? from CareerBuilder reads as an infomercial, but there are some usable data points in the first few paragraphs. Active vs. passive candidates is a subject that merits more discussion. The changing landscape of the 21st century is moving all candidates towards the active status. Job search agents, online boards, networking groups – all tools that make it simple for the most passive of candidates to be categorized as “active” in some vain.

You might say that active categorizes someone who wants to make a change. True, but I’ve read articles that state 67% of today’s employees keep an eye on other employment opportunities during the year. The landscape is definitely changing in the information age.

Back to the original article and those two pieces of interesting data:

• 23% of job seekers say they are unlikely to continue applying to a job online if they have to register on the site (CareerBuilder.com never makes job seekers register in order to apply for a job).
• 29% of job seekers say they are unlikely to continue the application process if it requires them to go to another site to complete the application.

Maybe the modern-day “passive” candidate falls within this 23 – 29% group?

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One of the most important responsibilities for any sales manager is holding their salespeople accountable. Some sales manager only truly approach this topic at the end of the commission cycle when the rep is underperforming against quota. This approach is better than nothing (which I have personally experienced).

This article from Selling Power provides a great process for holding salespeople accountable for consistent revenue production. The takeaway quote:

“Just because reps know what they need to do doesn’t mean they’ll do it. It’s like going to the gym €“ you know you should go on your way home, but there are usually myriad reasons for not getting there. Thus once you clearly set goals and expectations, your reps need to commit to achieving them.”

Later in the article, the author mentions that there must be consequences for noncompliance. The sales manager must be prepared to follow through with the consequences which is another discussion in itself. These tips are a good start to turning around an underperforming sales team.

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A cheat sheet from monster.com that is fairly comprehensive. These tips and prep questions are all excellent from the candidate side of the equation. These items become more troublesome when hiring salespeople. Even bad salespeople have some rapport-building ability that they incorporate into the interview process.

There isn’t a hiring manager alive who doesn’t have a sales hiring mistake. We hear story after story about how good a candidate looked in the interview. The story continues with unique stories of different baggage. Some examples:

salesperson wouldn’t make calls in their cubicle – they had to go in the conference room

salesperson thought the support staff was completely dedicated to them

salesperson (in a software sale) did not know how to use any office software products

salesperson spent more money on their expense report than closed sales

You get the idea. Hiring salespeople based on resumes and interviews is like gambling on roulette – the odds are against you. There is a process that allows you to know the candidate better than you know some existing salespeople on your team.

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Any sales candidate could spend a solid day prepping themselves for any in-person interview and come across much stronger than they actually are. Unfortunately, this polished veneer is often good enough to land them on your payroll. The veneer is not peeled back until they have been with your company for a period of time.

Monster.com offers Interview Questions, Part 3 in their effort to assist candidates. I am not against a candidate preparing for an interview, but companies that over rely on the interview for screening end up with flashy veneer, no substance salespeople. We can’t preach this topic enough – it is far more reliable to run a hiring process with objectivity designed into a specific sequence.

Notice that monster even provides the candidates with a context and response structure?

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We have updated the information on our Sales Skills page to be more explicit in describing the abilities we measure with that assessment. Part of our process is to analyze all of the reports in sum to identify what we call “threads” that run through them. The threads reveal call reluctance, hunting vs. farming, discounting and many other pieces of information that differentiate the best salesperson from the best interviewee.

We will be adding a threads page at some point, but for now, check out the expanded detail of the Salles Skills section.

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These articles are all over the web so again, if you are using the in-person interview as step 2 in your sales hiring process please stop. You are giving up information too easily for a savvy candidate. Better to withhold specific information and see what types of skills they have for extracting that information. They may search the web, ping their network or ask you direct questions. You learn far more with this approach.

CareerJournal.com writes about candidates talking too much in an interview. Interviews are strange and stressful events. Most people do not sit in many meetings where they are interrogated and then judged regarding their own personal abilities. The side effect is stress.

This scenario can play out in a biased manner when the interviewer has an introverted style (High S or High C) and the candidate has an extroverted style (High D or High I). Essentially, the extroverted style needs to start talking to formulate their response. This natural approach for them does not lend itself to a succint, direct answer which most introverts value. If too much weight is placed on this style topic from an interview, a good candidate often is discarded. Good point to remember, extroverts need more words to make their point so expect to hear more stemwinders from them.

The author then discusses candidates who appear to be “too rehearsed, too prepped.” Caution here – if you are using a contingent recruiter and you are seeing rehearsed candidates . . . well, put 2 and 2 together. Contingency agreements (recruiter gets paid once you hire a candidate) are riddled with danger.

The contingency agreement incents the recruiter to get their candidate in to your position before another contingent recruiter. Even if it is just one contingent recruiter, they have a monetary interest in making their candidate appear strong enough to get the position. We have heard of recruiters who debrief their candidates by asking what questions were you asked? The recruiters then turn around and feed those questions to their next round of candidates to prep them. An insidious approach for sure.

One last takeaway from the article. The author mentions that 7 days is an acceptable amount of time for a decision on an offer. That seems quite long. If you are running a process with strong qualifying, the offer should be nothing more than a confirmation of agreed upon principles. Just my thought.

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Readers of this blog know that we are suckers for lists. This one popped up today and had to be shared. One thought, the author mentions that the government’s OMB office has split up towns like Raleigh-Durham in to two separate towns. This seems strange – especially living in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul. At any rate, here are the top 10 with links to Forbes’ explanation for their ranking:

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This article is from Salary.com and the title of this post is from them and NOT from me. They came up with $134,121 for stay at home moms and $85,876 for working moms (the “mom” portion of their efforts).

The breakdown of weekly jobs performed by mom are quite entertaining. I enjoyed the 3.5 hours per week of being a psychologist. Clever.

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Good article from vault.com titled Answering the Weaknesses Question. I want to take a different tact on this article’s main point. First, if you are using interviews as a second step qualifier in your hiring process, an article like this one ought to give you pause. The article is a deep analysis of strategies to answering an interview question many companies use today.

But back to the point – Jerry Houser illuminates a great truth which is the title of this post. His further comment is just as insightful, “Strengths and weakness are situational. You have to know how to read your environment and use or moderate your skills in context.”

I want to divert from the gist of the article to apply Mr. Houser’s comments to writing an effective employment ad. More specifically, an effective sales employment ad. We track many ads and consistently see skill descriptions that would take 3 different salespeople to complete.

• Must be a strong cold caller and offer superior customer service
• Outgoing personality with excellent attention to detail
• Driven self-starter with team mentality

None of these examples are egregious errors, but they present both sides of a strength. A strong cold caller tends to be less adept at customer service. Typically an outgoing personality does not have as much focus on details – their focus is on people. You get the point. Ads written in this manner create incredibly difficult hurdles for hiring. Prioritizing the critical needs of the position and then writing the ad allows for a better fit when assessing candidates for the position.

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This article from CareerJournal.com speaks to a common problem – good hires who are a bad fit for the position. There are many variables within a minimally structured hiring process. To simplify the equation, either the position was not clearly defined or, more likely, the employee’s skills, style and motivations were assumed or unknown during the hiring process.

From the article:

“Employers are well-schooled in how to eliminate jobs or fire poor performers. Yet they often don’t know what to do with people who are doing their work passably, or even better, but aren’t suited for the job, for reasons ranging from personal chemistry to mismatched skills.

In that gray area, employers often fumble, either keeping people on because they don’t know what else to do, or seeking evidence of poor performance — even when that isn’t the real issue.”

The real danger here is a subtle lowering of performance standards. This approach leads to accepting mediocrity which can dilute a high performance culture. The best solution is to use a reliable, repeatable hiring process that identifies the position’s needs and the candidate’s abilities.

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