CareerBuilder.com – Top 10 Recruiting Myths – Busted.

I’ll tease you with my 2 favorites:

2) Good questions reduce hiring errors
Good questions are essential but are fallible. Many hiring managers think that asking good questions will result in good answers and that’s it. Listening, observing and adjusting the interview is as important as a list of good questions. By noting how the candidate reacts to the questions, and listening intently do the details of the answer, the interviewer can learn much more about the individual and reduce hiring errors.

10) The ‘perfect fit’ employee is out there somewhere
All hiring managers would like to think that the ‘perfect fit’ employee is out there somewhere. It is possible, but unlikely that the perfect employee will be found for every open position. When hiring, consider a different approach. Look for a ‘good fit’ employee and allow some flexibility in the job duties, allowing the employee to leverage his or her individual’s strengths as the job evolves. That ‘good fit’ candidate may redefine the job and help take your organization to the next level.

Amen.
Read the whole thing.

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Salary.com has a great article called Wasted Time At Work Still Costing Companies Billions in 2006. From the opening paragraph:

the average worker admits to squandering 1.86 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time

Amazing, but it gets better:

The biggest distraction for respondents was personal Internet use. 52.0% of the 2,700 people polled cited web surfing as their #1 distraction at work. Socializing with co-workers came in second at 26.3%. Conducting personal business, “spacing out,” running errands, and making personal phone calls were the other popular time-wasting activities in the workplace.

I particularly enjoyed the “spacing out” time waster. It came in at 6.6%.

The sum of all this wasted time . . . $544 billion (yes, with a “b”).

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Sales&Marketing Management posts this online article – Iron-Fisted Management – regarding negative motivation. Being a psychology major, I am always drawn to these discussions.

From the article:

Matt McCann, district sales manager at ACSIA, a Darien, Illinois-based long-term insurance agency, agrees. “I think [negative incentives] are counterproductive. You may see short-term success, but I think it builds resentment,” McCann says. When he’s seen or heard about negative motivation, it’s yielded the same result: short-term profits, but an office inferno. Those who are the objects of punishments “start saying they don’t want to bend over backwards. They wash their hands of the situation, look for other jobs, and try to get away with as little as possible.”

Mr. McCann would not be a sales manager for me. I bolded some of his comments to show his perceived over reaction to using negative motivation for correction. Fear is a good motivator when used properly and in small doses.

We recommend using negative motivation – we call it punishment. The proverbial “stick”, if you will. The issue here is that if a manager is unwilling to use negative motivation at any time, they will be unwilling, or unable, to hold their people accountable. In sales, the sales manager who does not hold their salespeople accountable will lose control of the team. Forecasts will be fictional, success will be unpredictable and many of the team’s actions will be detrimental (sounds like Muhammad Ali wrote that sentence).

I believe the incredibly negative connotation that accompanies negative motivation is the thought that the manager only uses that method. I have worked for sales managers like that and they are awful bosses. However, a well-rounded manager incorporates rewards and positive reinforcement (“carrots”) along with negative motivation when appropriate. These leaders are the ones who command the attention and respect of their teams.

Typically, they are the most successful too.

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Blogs are popping up at 1 per second according to the latest Sales&Marketing Management email. Here are some interesting facts regarding developing corporate communications (sorry, no link):

–Just over a quarter of employers have terminated employees for e-mail misuse. Another 2 percent have dismissed workers for inappropriate IM chat. And nearly 2 percent have fired workers for offensive blog content including posts on employees’ personal, home-based blogs.

–While 35 percent of employees use IM at work, only 31 percent of organizations have an IM policy in place, and 13 percent retain IM business records. 50 percent of workplace users are downloading free IM tools from the Internet.

–Blogs are booming at the rate of one new blog per second, but corporate policy is not keeping pace. Eight percent of organizations operate business blogs; 7 percent have policy governing employees’ business blog use and content. Only 9 percent have policy governing the operation of personal blogs on company time and 7 percent have rules governing the content employees may post on their personal home-based blogs. Six percent use policy to control personal postings on corporate blogs; 5 percent have strict antiblog policies banning blog use on company time; and merely 3 percent have blog record retention policies in place.

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The first key is to assess candidates before hiring. We encounter many companies that hire based on their gut feeling about a candidate. I met with a customer last week who has a VP who makes up his mind in a matter of the first 10 minutes of an inperson interview. Some people have strong empathetic abilities and can get a good read on an unknown candidate.

But they make mistakes.

The President of the company explained to me that although this VP was quite intuitive, he still missed on candidates which ended up costing the company.

This meeting brought to my attention the need to explain when to assess a candidate. We use a different approach based on the position. Our bread and butter is sales hiring and assessing. Salespeople need to be assessed early in the process – certainly before the first face-to-face interview.

The reason – salespeople tend to have well developed interpersonal skills. Even bad salespeople can have good rapport-building ability. This ability is dangerous because it is so disarming to an interviewer. Once the interviewer’s guard is down, logic is shelved and emotional decisions ensue. The very rapport-building ability you are searching for can be used against you.

Recently, we have seen ads where companies have taken the assessment piece to the extreme and asked all applicants to complete an expensive assessment before even responding to the ad with a phone call or email. That approach is good for the assessment company, but ludicrous for the hiring company.

Despite the monetary investment, this approach will have a detrimental effect on the number of responses. The best salespeople are motivated by a return on investment. This Utilitarian motivation applies to their time also. A vaguely written sales ad asking for 45 minutes of their time to complete an online assessment is 180 degrees out of phase. Far better to receive a phone call from a respondent who wants to qualify the position for fit before pursing the opportunity. Generally, that is the sign of a strong salesperson.

The best approach is to run a phone screen on the respondents that meet the stated criteria in the ad. If you have read our blog for any amount of time, you have seen our anecdotes from sourcing. It is amazing to see how much you can learn from a simple 10-15 minute phone screen. As we like to say, some times you don’t need an assessment to tell you all you need to know.

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Its Monday and it seems like we need a bit of levity to ease back in to the work week. Nothing like general resume cover letters to lighten the mood. I actually enjoyed this person’s resume – it was eye-catching in its uniqueness.

Then I read this:

If your company isn’t willing to offer a job with a BASE salary of at least $30,000 then please do not consider me a candidate. I searched the job market 2 years ago for a brief time before I began running my own business on a full time basis and discovered there are a lot of “Bull Crap” jobs out there (i.e. selling staplers door to door) so if you have those kinds of jobs, save us both the hassle please… About me: I am who I am, silly and goofy with a ton of energy and smiles to fill a room.

“Bull crap” is a tough sell even for candidates whose smiles fill a room.

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Tory Johnson from abcnews.com has a helpful article titled Turn the Tables in a Job Interview. She discusses what candidates should ask in an interview when the interviewer asks, “What questions do you have?” I’m always perplexed by candidates who simply state “None.” That response is always a red flag.

Volumes of information are readily available with the Internet. Today’s candidate should have a general understanding of the hiring company’s business model, markets and corporate structure (privately held, subsidiary, etc.). Due diligence is easily completed with today’s technological tools.

Back to the article – this question can and should be asked by every serious candidate:

What are the biggest challenges you see in this position?
This shows an interviewer that you’re interested in going beyond the basics and that you are inquisitive and thoughtful. It also shows that you’re not adverse to overcoming challenges and tackling them with gusto.

This question does show a desire to understand the position at a deeper level and implies that the candidate is consciously determining if their skills are enough to overcome the typical challenges in the position.

The question we always like to hear from a strong sales candidate:

What are the next steps in the hiring process?

This question is important for sales candidates since it shows us a qualifying mindset. In our hiring process, we indirectly mimic sales situations as much as possible. We want to see the candidates in action. Sales candidates who attempt to qualify the next step in the process are showing skills (qualifying the decision-making process) that are needed once they are on your payroll and selling your product or service.

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Monster.com has an entertaining article about interviewer styles. We’ve seen this “version” more times than we can count:

The Unskilled Interviewer
Problem: This is an interviewer who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Maybe the person was “roped into being there,” says Meehl. “Maybe they just don’t know what to do.” In a way, it is you who is teaching them how to be an interviewer, she explains.

The article is a quick read and does provide some good pointers to interviewees when trapped in a poor interview.

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I decided to mark these general resume emails as anecdotes also. I found this one entertaining:

I’m looking for work that doesn’t involve customer service. Also work that is relatively healthy in that there are no poisonous gasses or fumes in the workplace … I have had around 30 jobs in the past 10 years. I quit jobs because I either get sick of the people I work with, bored with the job, or a little of both.

I took the liberty of shortening the cover letter – it didn’t change the context. You know, we sometimes harpoon websites that ghost write cover letters and resumes. In this instance, investing in those sites’ services would be wise.

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Friday sourcing anecdote time so let’s go. This one was an email response that I need to give you just a little background information. First, the company we were running this hiring process for had a few open positions on their website. Second, we were in different stages of the hiring process on several positions with several customers. I received this email with “work at home” for a subject:

hi ijohna ilooking to work this at home can you call me asap 4561230978cst
johna@email.com call me monday at 2;00pmcst

I am always baffled by responses like this to employment ads. This guy obviously has some communication issues with email. Yet, this type of response is even worse for a sales role. Is this how he will prospect for new business? Feeble as his approach was, you still have to give him credit for making the approach. Some salespeople won’t even do that!

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