We always say that interviewing is a two-way street. Both the hiring company and the candidate have to be impressed with each other to continue the process. Either one can terminate the process at any time. That being said, BusinessWeek has an interesting article dedicated to candidates titled Ask The Right Question.

The author provides a strategy to 3 styles of questions all candidates should ask in an interview:

1. Here’s My Brain Working Questions
2. My Turn Questions
3. What Happens Now? Questions

I’ll let the author lay out the strategy for the questions (which is quite well developed). One overly simplistic tip I will share from our experience – candidates should come prepared with questions. I am always amazed at how little preparation some candidates incorporate into the interview process.

This approach is magnified in sales hiring. A sales candidate who asks few questions, or worse – none, is always red flagged. Sales success revolves around qualifying which involves question-asking ability. If a sales candidate does not display any form of that ability, the assumption has to be that their abilities are lacking in this area.

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Sales & Marketing Management has an quick-hitter of a story titled Motivational Forces in the Workplace. I thought we could keep the motivational/rewards riff going from this morning’s post, but this article is a quick rehash of a Monster.com study.

The article is rather unremarkable except for this bullet point:

Work-life balance matters more to women. Forty-one percent of women would refuse a job offer that provided no work hours flexibility. Only 26 percent of men would do the same. Still, once on the job, work-life issues flip-flop across gender lines. Forty percent of men say their current employer is not flexible enough regarding work-family balance, while only 28 percent of women felt the same way.

Isn’t that an interesting perception by both genders? Instantly, I suspected that the women were better at qualifying the job opportunity for a fit to their preferences. It stands to reason, if you place more value in work-life balance when considering an opportunity, chances are you will make a more informed decision.

What would be interesting to know is how these percentages play amongst Generation Y. They place high value on work-life balance so I would expect the gender difference to be less pronounced.

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Speaking Up Helps Keep Star Workers appears in one of our local papers – the Pioneer Press. The article discusses a topic we have addressed before that many employers assume is not active in their company – job hunting.

In case you were in doubt, some stats from the article:

A recent workplace survey of 16,237 workers by Leadership IQ, a leadership training and research firm in Washington, D.C., found that nearly half the people regarded as stellar performers were actively trying to leave their current employers.

That should grab every managers’ attention. 16,237 is a large sample size and 47% are actively looking to leave.

Forty-seven percent of your most productive, most creative, most valuable workers are mailing out résumés, going on job interviews, even contemplating other offers.

We see this fact every day. We source for positions beyond just salespeople and we incorporate many traditional and non-traditional channels to locate top performers. Invariably, we do kick up some lackluster candidates and we quickly screen them out of the process. Yet, it is surprising how many strong candidates we find. As you read further into the article, an interesting trend is noted:

Only 18 percent of “slackers,” the people who spend more time trying to avoid work than actually doing any, are looking around.

The stiffs have landed on your payroll and they know they have a good thing going. In sales, these employees are easier to spot since their sales numbers are simply not there. The survival method they use is to inflate their pipeline with ghost deals that always seem to be 3 months out. Managers and owners have been known to be entranced by the huge opportunities that appear to be just around the corner for this underperforming salesperson. They stretch out the paychecks as long as possible and then land on someone else’s payroll.

We see it every day. Be wary of a salesperson with 2 year employment stints on their resume. That time period is usually the amount of time needed to smoke out a pretender who made it on to the payroll.

Back to the article with an absolute necessity for successful management:

“Fewer than 25 percent of managers actually go out and talk to their employees about what motivates them and what demotivates them,” Murphy said. “This is just a fundamental aspect of being a manager: Figure out who your best people are and what motivates them.”

We can provide managers with their employee’s motivational pattern and reward structure. That provides a manager with a tremendous headstart. In the end, the author is correct – it takes communication to maintain a strong employee.

And don’t assume it’s about money. When someone quits her job, 89 percent of managers assume it was over money, whereas 91 percent of the workers who quit say it was anything but, Murphy said.

Please check out the Rewards section on our website for more information about motivational factors and rewards for employees. You may just save your superstar.

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