Another embellished resume survey is out from CareerBuilder. I assumed educational background was the most common lie, but that is not so according to their survey.

Stretched dates to cover up employment gaps is the most commonly-caught resume lie, with nearly one-in-five hiring managers saying they have found this on a candidates application. Other top resume lies include:

Past employers (18%)

Academic degrees and institutions (16%)

Technical skills and certifications (15%)

Accomplishments (8%)

As naive as it sounds, it would be a pleasant surprise to see a downward trend in the percentage of resumes with distortions in them.

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CareerJournal.com has to be one of the best sources for hiring information on the web. Today is no exception as they release this article - Job-Hop to the Top Of the Corporate Ladder.

To cut to the quick of the article:

If you want to make it to the top of the corporate ladder, job-hopping may actually be the only way to get there…

Yup, this is a common strategy amongst the younger generation. We wrote about it in this article from earlier this year. Our perspective focused on the manager’s viewpoint while the CareerJournal article focuses on the employee’s viewpoint.

First, from the CareerJournal article:

Identify what you want to do. Develop a comprehensive personal career plan and review it with your supervisor. Articulate what you want to accomplish and where you want to be.

And from our article:

Gen X and Y candidates are looking for a skills path. They desire to understand what skills are needed to be successful in the position today. The long-term incentive is to understand what skills they will personally develop or acquire within the company. They prefer a horizontal management structure and respond to personal skill development. Titles are out. Responsibilities are in. It is imperative to share with the candidates the responsibilities they will inherit as their skills become more advanced over their tenure with the company.

CareerJournal:

Develop a relationship with your supervisor and his or her boss. “You’re living in the dark if you believe you can advance without your boss,” says Crawford. “People who have high aspirations should not be ashamed to let it be known. Talk to your boss about taking on broader responsibilities, ask how she got where she is and discuss how you can earn the right to move ahead.”

Our article:

Gen X and Y highly value the manager-employee relationship. They view their manager as a guide an experienced Sherpa to make sure they are on the right path.

A job-hopping career path is certainly here to stay and I’m not against it. We screen sales candidates constantly for their short-termed tenures. Sales typically requires a longer commitment since building a territory or customer base takes time. Salespeople who jump every 1 to 2 years with no appreciable path are high risk. The red flag here is that it usually takes 1 to 2 years to get a complete read on a salesperson’s abilities. Salespeople who consistently jump at the 2 year mark may be capable of delivering a strong sales interview but not revenue results.

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Another good article from the new Selling Power newsletter - Open Minds Open Doors. The topic here is Hiring Salespeople From Outside Your Industry. If you follow that link, you will see that this topic is of great importance in our world.

From the article:

“I believe the way the market is today, finding the perfect combination of industry knowledge and sales experience may not be possible for many companies,” says Hardin. “With the unemployment rate at an all-time low, candidates are not as abundant as they were three years ago.

Companies will have the greatest long-term success by hiring candidates who possess the necessary sales skills and then training them about the product and industry. There are a lot of good salespeople out there, and companies are passing them up.”

Amen to that. The rest of the article reads like a commercial, but the above quote is exactly correct. In my post from earlier today, I quoted a stat that 53% of sales hires end up being mishires (bad hires). I bring this up because we see this frequently - hiring managers are mesmerized by experience listed on a resume.

If you are hiring exclusively from your specific industry, you are at great risk for recycling mediocrity. Your company must be in a dominant market position to draw the top talent from your competitors. If you are anything less than dominant, I guarantee a myopic hiring approach is garnering mediocre candidates from the industry.

What if you were to hire candidates with dominant, transferrable sales skills from another industry?

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Selling Power has a fantastic article about hiring salespeople - Avoid Hiring Mistakes. There are many truths in the article so I recommend you read the entire article.

First, some compelling stats:

A recent survey shows that 53 percent of all sales recruiting efforts lead to miss-hires. And according to a Miller Heiman white paper, The Three Top Challenges Facing Sales Leaders Today, only 28 percent of sales leaders believe they have an effective process for recruiting and hiring qualified salespeople.

More than half of all sales recruiting efforts end up in mishires (my preferred spelling). Now try to tabulate the lost revenue in this futile approach and you realize how much money companies are losing in their sales hiring processes. We can help.

Here is the number 2 reason why these companies hire the wrong salesperson:

“Most people hire the person who interviews the best, not necessarily the person who is the most experienced or who can best succeed in their environment,” says Henry Glickel, owner and recruiter of Sales Recruiters, Inc.

The number 1 reason for a mishire is not defining the sale. Again, companies need to know what it takes to successfully close 1 deal. You cannot ask a new salesperson to close 10, 20 50 deals a year if you cannot clearly define what it takes to close 1 deal. This fact is where we start in our process.

Lastly, Mr. Glickel recommends:

“It will take you a lot longer in this economy to find the right person. For this reason, I encourage my clients to have a back-up candidate and to keep the search open. It’s just one more precaution in a tight market.”

Yes, it will take longer and having a second candidate is crucial to a timely hire. Too often, we encounter companies who want to identify the top 3 candidates in a process and then pursue the number 1 candidate. If for some reason they do not hire them, they often want to run another process. In some way, I believe they feel rejected and are not interested in “settling” for their second choice.

Big mistake, especially since the 3 candidates are usually 3 of the best candidates they have ever seen. In fact, all 3 may be better than all but the best of their current sales team.

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Ragan Jones writing about bizarre candidate interviews.

Trust me, a great read to end the work week.

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Just this week I received an all-too-familiar email response to a new ad we just posted. In fact, I originally posted on this strange email dialogue back in May. The hauntingly familiar, mangled syntax message arrived with little regard for my clear ad instructions - all applicants were asked to either email their resume or to call me directly. His one sentence email:

is new business coming from advertising agencies also clients who use your services in the new york city marketplace important to you?

Being a glutton for punishment, I decided to go down this path again. I responded with the exact same email that I sent him earlier this year.

I apologize, I am unclear as to your inquiry. If you are interested in learning more about the position, call me at 123-456-7890 or if you are interested in applying for it, please email your resume to me.

The difference - this time he did not respond whatsoever. Somewhat interesting for someone who claims to be able to get new business in a tough market like New York City.

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Earlier this week we posted on employee turnover via a survey that found 75% of jobseekers believe they will find greater career success elsewhere. As jobs become more plentiful and workers more scarce, employee retention is going to be a top 3 topic for most companies.

Steve Rothberg posts on the CollegeRecruiter.com blog a handful of tips to increase your company’s employee retention rate. Please read them - he is spot on.

The suggestion that stood out to me in terms of the younger generations:

Keep it fresh. Create new ways to ensure your employees continue to learn and grow within their related field and your company.

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If you’ve read The Hire Sense for any length of time, you know one of my favorite pastimes is reading cover letters/emails. There really are some bemusing, befuddling and bewildering approaches. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw this abcnews.com article - ‘Cover Letters from Hell’ Expose Poor Quality of College Grads.

Ok, I’m all over that article and I have found my new hero - Bob Killian. And I thought I had some good examples but this guy is the king. This link takes you directly to the cover letter section of his website. It is excellent and amusing - I even had to subscribe to his newsletter.

His introduction to the collection is worth the visit alone:

Below are a couple dozen examples gleaned from these efforts, to amaze and horrify you. It’s an ever-changing gallery of mangled syntax and/or obtuseness, since a new monstrosity arrives about weekly.

I’m laughing out loud as I write this post. I would copy the web page here but there are probably laws against that move. Please let me indulge you with a couple of my favorites:

“Another reason [you should hire me is] your web site is very unfriendly and may sway some clients into not working with you. People use websites of companies such as yours for research and your website thinks that it is witty, but comes off very dull and cheezy.”

And then there is this beauty:

“… But that’s the past. I’ve given them a year of my life in a minimum security work camp and I’m nearing work release status where I’ll be for the next 15 months or so… I need to connect with open-minded people like myself! My crime was a ‘non-violent, victimless’ one. I’m hoping this letter is reaching people who have or do smoke weed …”

You know, these examples provide the evidence for why our country needs to expand the No Child Left Behind program.

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As you know, we are intrigued by lists and statistics and I came across this article in Sales Vault’s current newsletter. It is a quick read and I recommend that you read all 10 tips. To give you a taste of what you will learn:

5. Schedule your prospecting sessions for 3½ hours. Take a fifteen-minute break between each hour. That is more productive than five prospecting sessions of one hour each.

Very interesting thought. If you are like most salespeople, being able to reduce the amount of time you need to spend on prospecting sounds most appealing.

7. Always be in a “Disqualification” mode. Be determined to spend your selling time only with High Probability Prospects. Disqualify low probability prospects quickly and courteously. Don’t allow desperation or anxiousness to deter you from that mission.

Something we all need to remember - it will help to take the focus off any discomfort one may have in getting “No’s”.

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As I stated in my previous post I would keep you updated as to the effectiveness usefulness of Selling Power’s daily video clip. I have been watching them off and on the past couple of weeks and each time I find a usable tidbit in them.

For instance, today Gerhard Gschwandtner is interviewing John Roberts - CEO Sugar CRM. As you would expect, the interview is on the effectiveness of CRMs. The one point that I pulled out of today’s clip is on what John Roberts sees as the biggest reason for CRM failure is user adoption. His clear point - quality of CRM training drives user adoption up. A point that I will share with our clients as they hire new people and train them on the use of their current CRM software.

As I stated earlier viewing the clips are free for the month of October and I am still waiting to learn what Selling Power is planning to charge for viewing them come November 1st. At that point I will be able to share with you if I see a value in them or not.

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