Survey: M.B.A.s Are The Biggest Cheaters. Grad students are quite the cheaters according to this CareerJournal.com article.

More than half (56%) of M.B.A. candidates say they cheated in the past year. For the study, cheating was defined as plagiarizing, copying other students’ work and bringing prohibited materials into exams.

This borders on the absurd:

However, what’s holding many professors back from taking action on cheaters is the fear of litigation.

How pathetic is that? If these students are willing to risk their academic career by cheating, what will they be willing to state on their resume once they join the work world?

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After all of my cover letter enjoyment, CareerJournal.com offers up a short article to assist candidates – Six Tips for Writing A Winning Cover Letter. Thank goodness for CareerJournal.

Their last suggestion (my emphasis):

Proofreading. Double-check the letter before you send it. When you’re applying for multiple jobs, it’s easy to send the wrong cover letter, or not change the company name. Make sure you have addressed the letter to the correct person and have included the correct company name and job position. Check also, of course, for spelling and grammar problems. And if you’re sending your resume via an attachment, don’t forget to attach it before you send it.

Of course. If you don’t check your grammar, you may end up with statements like these.

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I came across this article in Monster’s resource for candidates – Work the Working Interview. The article has three main points: How the working interview helps employers evaluate you, Show your stuff and Ace the working interview. Basically, the article provides tips for candidates on how to perform well in a working interview.

Stephen Morel, President & CEO of Pro Staff, is quoted:

It helps employers evaluate soft skills, like commitment, loyalty and work ethic, plus it shows attitude and abilities in real time,” he explains. Employers can also evaluate whether a candidate’s personality will be a good fit with the staff.

Monster provides a link for candidates to evaluate their soft skills and then gives them resources to improve those skills. I hope that employers put as much into the interview process as candidates do.

It is important to understand what is required of the job and develop interview questions that will provide a picture of the candidate in terms of these requirements. It is just as important to understand what factors are extremely difficult to determine through questioning. For instance, a candidate’s commitment, loyalty or work ethic are difficult to ascertain using just a working interview. However, candidates can be objectively measured through our assessments. May I be so bold as to suggest measuring these specific, job-related skills first and then observing the candidates in a working interview format?

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Monster has some great resources for candidates in preparing, practicing and improving not only their interviewing techniques, but their chances of receiving job offers. Unfortunately, their employer resources are somewhat limited. I did find a good article on hiring – it is a list of 10 simple rules to follow. Rule no. 1 is by far the best and one we preach here at The Hire Sense:

Rule number one is clear, but very counterintuitive: Don’t ever, ever hire somebody just like yourself. Why not? Because from the beginning of time, executives have been unconsciously cloning themselves, stocking the shelves with vanilla young men from impressive schools. And what has happened to executives and companies that did that? As management guru Rosabeth Kanter observed, they often sink into the soft sand of irrelevance as the rough waters of current reality wash over them.

Another good one – Rule 7 – Test Drive the Candidate:

Don’t be satisfied with references. Remember that many of the most glowing references are given for people others are eager to dump. Include day-long simulations as part of your interview process, or invite applicants to provide you with a portfolio of their best work.

I like the idea of “test driving” the candidate. In sales, we would recommend that you have the candidate put together a plan outlining their strategy for selling in the role (we have done this before). What companies/segments/verticals would they target and what kind of support would they need from the company to implement their plan? You learn much about their strategic and tactical thinking abilities.

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From a survey conducted by WetFeet of new graduates – here are the lists of most desirable employers by industry.

Technology
1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Apple
4. IBM
5. Yahoo

Consumer products/pharmaceuticals
1. Johnson & Johnson
2. Procter & Gamble
3. Nike
4. Medtronic
5. Genentech

Financial services
1. Goldman Sachs
2. Morgan Stanley
3. Citigroup
4. Lehman Brothers
5. JP Morgan Chase

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Hopefully you can see a pattern to the Aptitudes we are defining. We have progressed from Self-Starting Ability to Personal Drive to today’s installment – Persistence. Successful selling requires persistence whether it be calling through a list of names for a transactional sale to tracking a prospect over many months for a complex sale. We can measure this aptitude in salespeople.

Persistence
This is a person’s capacity to stay the course in times of difficulty. It is the ability to remain motivated to accomplish goals in the face of adversity or obstacles.

A salesperson with a strong aptitude in this capacity will be able to remain motivated to achieve success through the support of an inner belief that what they are doing is right and important. There exists a drive to complete the task at hand.

A weak aptitude in this area reveals a salesperson who may have difficulty accomplishing goals in difficult situations or when confronted with unforeseen obstacles.

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Base on this subject line, I don’t think this person is lacking confidence:

The god of office administration soon to be in Twin Cities!

And here is an objective to avoid:

My expirience and work ethic make me a great canidate for any opening you may have. I am looking for an opportunity that is full time with benefits.

And a subject line to avoid:

John Doe looking for work

This one almost hurts:

Help change my life. I’ve been stuck in a rut for a few years . . . I need to get a jolt so I can start to live again. Looking for any opportunity to get out.

And from the graphic design world (I must confess, I slightly enjoyed this one):

There you are! I was wondering how long it would take for you to find me! Well, now that you’re here, we can start.

I’m your new graphic designer.

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Desperately Seeking Sales Stars is a long article from Sales & Marketing Management’s online edition. There is much in this article to dissect, but I will focus on some key points.

First, don’t do this:

“There are various [hiring and assessment] tools out there, but I still tend to be a seat-of-my-pants guy,” says Maher, now a speaker and sales consultant based in Helendale, Calif. “I’ve been hiring salespeople for over thirty-five years…and if they can sell me on their skills, that’s perhaps the most impressive thing.”

And that is perhaps the only thing they can sell. These dinosaurs are still amongst us and still believe their intuition is more precise than an objective tool. Typically, when we encounter this approach, the hiring manager has an unconscious bias towards candidate styles that match their own. That bias invariably leads to the question, How many good candidates did you lose due to their differing style? A question he cannot accurately answer.

Here is the epiphany of using a sales hiring process the right way:

“We had based our hiring on selling ourselves to them, instead of making them sell to us,” Budke says. “Now we see what they bring to the table.”

The key here is that the company didn’t have a box of gadgets that they asked the candidates to sell to them. They used the process to observe the candidates’ sales approach and ability. Often, we see companies that do not take advantage of the natural similarities between selling for a company and selling yourself for a position. It is possible to see a salesperson’s abilities in action during the hiring process. Is there any reason why a company wouldn’t want to see those abilities?

Here is some good interviewing advice:

“It’s more about drawing from the candidate’s personal experience,” Hudy says. “I try to stay away from hypotheticals to see what they actually did in the situation.”

Be wary of the sales candidate who speaks only in hypotheticals. We see this often and we also see some hiring managers who get drawn in by it. If you get a hypothetical response, dismiss it and restate your original question. If the candidate does not have an experiential answer, you have learned an important insight.

Lastly, a shocking statistic from the middle of the article:

A DDI survey last year revealed 53 percent of sales vice presidents believed two out of five of their representatives lacked the skills to do their jobs.

More than half of sales VPs believe that almost half of their sales team lacks the skills to do their job. Apparently, a warm body is better than no body. I have a real problem with this Jurassic approach. If half my team was lacking needed abilities, I would drop everything and focus on getting the right skills on the team. Is there anything more important in sales? You only get one shot with some prospects and think of the amount of work that goes in to securing that one shot. Do you want that opportunity to rest on the back of a salesperson who lacks the necessary skills? I will never understand this band-aid thinking.

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I’m a coffee addict and I’m ok with that. I hand craft my own latte every morning to exacting standards. I consider myself a coffee snob.

Until now.

If you visit this page and look halfway down you will find a picture and description of a mobile espresso maker. For your car. I’m not kidding – part of the description:

The heavy-duty plastic coffeemaker plugs into a car’s cigarette lighter and requires no additional cups or spoons. Add water and espresso-grind coffee to the pre-set markings inside the stainless steel inner core, screw on the top cap and plug it in. Six minutes later, two servings of espresso flow into the twist-off plastic cup on the bottom.

I took the liberty to highlight all of the actions required in your car to make the espresso. And you thought drivers talking on their cell phone was a distraction! How would you like to see me brewing an espresso at 70mph?

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Google Adjusts Hiring Process As Need for New Talent Grows provides a glimpse of the extended hiring process of a suddenly large company. When I write suddenly, I mean this:

During the quarter, the company brought in an average of 16 new employees daily, up from 13 the quarter before. Its breakneck hiring has boosted staff from 1,628 at the end of 2003 to 3,021 a year later and 5,680 at the end of 2005.

The article illustrates the hiring challenges that occur when a company experiences explosive growth. The large company effects can be seen in that they have brought in a new, young VP of HR with new initiatives:

One initiative Google has already undertaken is reducing the number of interviews. Mr. Bock says each candidate offered a job by Google went through 5.1 in-person interviews on average in June, down from 6.2 at the beginning of the year. (A veteran tech recruiter says five to eight interviews is probably about average for Silicon Valley.)

6.2 in-person interviews? That is astounding to me. I was unimpressed that it took the Google hiring managers, on average, that many interviews. As you can see, Google still beats the average for that region. Yet, their speed still appears to be quite “corporate” for some candidates:

Recent candidates say the process can still drag on. “The process from a candidate’s perspective is glacial,” says one who was interviewed for a senior nonengineering position this year. After each of two in-person interviews, the candidate went more than a month without hearing from Google and finally accepted a job offer from another company.

Seth Godin’s new book is titled Small Is the New Big:

Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change your business model when your competition changes theirs.

It appears Google is trying to return to its more flexible roots while competing as a large corporation. There is a good lesson here for hiring so I will reference two items from our 10 Commandments of Successful Sales Selection:

5. Do not start the process unless you can hire the right candidate today.

10. Do not assume you are the candidates’ only option.

Stay nimble in your hiring process and attempt to remove as many delays as possible. Today, candidates have opportunities from other companies that may move more quickly through their hiring process than you.

Maybe even Google.

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