I was watching Selling Power Daily Report and today’s video interview is with Dan Seidman of Sales Autopsy. Dan is a sales trainer who has written a book by the same title which is a collection of sales horror stories.

In today’s video he recalled a horror story that happened to a salesperson who was trying to build rapport with a new prospect who was the President of a company. The salesperson took 6 months trying to set up this meeting with this prospect through phone calls, snail mail and messages with the gatekeeper. Finally, he landed a face-to-face meeting:

He was led into the President’s office which was very expensively decorated and he became somewhat intimidated. Knowing what to do, the salesperson looked for the fish on the wall or the golf trophy to make a little small talk. There it was on the desk – a photograph of this president with John Madden. So the salesperson asked how he had gotten his picture taken with his arm around John Madden.

The president glared back at him and said, “That’s not John Madden, that’s my wife.”

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Most peole do not put much thought into daylight saving time, until it is time to adjust your clocks. In SHRM’s recent newsletter, they offered a short article that got me thinking that there is more to it than this. A quick Google search revealed there are over 500,000 articles that come up when you search on daylight saving time.

I had forgotten that the law was actually passed back in 2005 and at the time I was amazed as to why they were not going to implement the change until 2007. For decades, candy manufacturers have lobbied for a daylight saving time extension through Halloween. What is interesting about this is last week before moving our clocks back, my teenage kids told me that this is the reason for moving the dates. Most people remember the mild debate in our nation around these changes – it is actually a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

One article I found provides several reasons behind the opposition to the bill. Some of the reasons:

• School Children – will possibly wait in the pitch dark for the school bus.
• Business – the airline industry claims it will cost millions of dollars to adjust schedules.
• Computers, Clocks and Gadgets – many electronic devices automatically adjust for daylight saving time. Some of these devices will show incorrect times. Some computer software will have to be reprogrammed.

The last one surprised me. You mean that my cell phone, computer,TV and etc. don’t change automatically? These are things that I really didn’t think about and have taken for granted. So I looked at a few more articles about these technology issues – here are some interesting points:

Cisco Systems’ technical support has pages of detailed technical information on solving DST problems afflicting its servers and routers. Oracle’s online discussion forum is filled with posts from developers seeking help handling esoteric DST challenges.

Many of us have a Microsoft operating system we use on our computers, which maintain an accurate clock. Peter Houston, Microsoft’s senior director of servicing strategy, had this to say about the upcoming change, “We’re aware of the upcoming change, and will make sure that Windows handles the transition smoothly.”

I learned that “smoothly” doesn’t necessarily translate to “flawlessly.” Microsoft’s support Web site contains dozens of articles related to DST hiccups, varying from broad problems — some multiprocessor computers running Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4 or 5 have trouble adjusting to DST — to minor oddities. In Windows Millennium Edition, the operating systems’ DST adjustment accidentally reset HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) wallpaper background images to a bitmap file.

I learned that my Sprint phone didn’t make the change until I turned it off and back on again. Okay, this is not as big of an issue as Y2K was, but it has created a variety of issues for technologists. Come next spring when the daylight saving changes go into effect, know that much programming had to occur for such a simplistic change.

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Most hiring managers believe they are accurate assessors of talent. Even when confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they still trust their hiring ability over someone else’s. Why is this disconnect so prevalent?

I believe it comes down simply to gut-level hiring. If you rely on your gut to tell you if a candidate is strong, there is no appreciable way to outsource your decision to another. You can’t place your feelings into an HR person, an external recruiter or a different process. You simply have to meet candidates face-to-face and hope you aren’t being snowed over by a disingenuous salesperson.

Sounds high risk, doesn’t it? Yet it permeates hiring decisions to this day. What we attempt to do with our customers is move them away from emotional, subjective decisions and towards informational, objective decisions. This approach is best served by keeping the subjective decisions to a minimum, or at least to a later stage in the hiring process. If the objective filtering can occur before the final subjective decision, the over-reliance upon gut-level decisions is greatly neutralized.

The gut will always play a key role in successful hiring and we are not suggesting it be abandoned. However, this subjective manner for hiring is a tremendous hindrance when it comprises the majority of the input in a hiring decision.

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Well, the latest unemployment numbers are in and they indicate that, as a nation, we are basically at full employment. The new unemployement number is 4.4% – a drop of .2% from last month and a 5-year low. Sourcing is going to be even more of an issue for companies. We are seeing this in our business as we have extended our sourcing times while doubling our efforts. If you aren’t using multiple channels for sourcing, you are going to find long lead times on strong candidates.

The second part of the equation is compensation:

Workers’ average hourly earnings climbed to $16.91 in October, a sizable 0.4 percent increase from September. That increase was bigger than the 0.3 percent rise economists were expecting. Over the last 12 months, wages grew by 3.9 percent.

We have experienced this fact also as candidate compensation expectations are on the rise. There are many good jobs available with strong compensation packages. As you go to market to hire, expect a strong demand from candidates in regards to overall packages.

You know, for all the dire predictions I keep reading about the economy, it certainly seems to be cruising along at a strong clip.

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