We seem to have a theme today regarding underhanded hiring schemes. Now CareerJournal offers this beauty – When They Don’t Hire You, But Steal Your Ideas. Clearly this article focuses on marketing positions, but it does have a sales side to it also.

Why in the world would you do this?:

While jobless in spring 2004, the Cleveland resident pursued a middle-management position at an Ohio insurer. The concern asked him to create a marketing strategy focused on its independent field agents. He spent about 50 hours drafting a 25-page plan, then presented his detailed proposal to 20 officials over two days.He didn’t get the job. Mr. Gaglione soon found out the insurer was test marketing a key piece of his plan, even using the name he had given it. He left angry messages for two executives there. “I didn’t appreciate you guys taking up my time and taking my work,” his voicemail said. They never called back.

25 pages and two days of meetings? I think I understand what happened here – the candidate never qualified what happens next in the hiring process. Big oversight on his part.

We see this behavior in poorly-trained sales reps also. Many times they believe their job is to “show up and throw up.” They skip the most important sales step – qualifying – and leap directly into the demonstration. Their demonstration usually includes solutions for the prospect’s pressing business problems.

We subscribe to an old sales saying – Don’t spill your candy in the lobby. It’s true. If salespeople provide all of their solutions without first qualifying the prospect’s needs, timing, budget, decision process, competitors and deal-breakers, they run a good chance of becoming the worst-paying form of salespeople in the market.

Free consultants.

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Victims Still Falling Prey to Nigerian E-Mail Scam.

Is it me, or is this story almost unbelievable? I use that hoax as a punchline not as a storyline. To show you how out of touch I am:

The number of people falling for the scam is steadily increasing, with 55,419 lodging complaints in 2005 of at least receiving an e-mail that appeared to be a scam, according to the Federal Trade Commission. That’s almost three times the amount received in 2002, which was 21,616.

It gets worse:

But Audri Lanford, co-director of Scambusters.org, a service that helps fight Internet fraud, estimates that $200 million a year is lost to the Nigerian e-mail scam or variations of it.

So now you know, as do I, how big this scam is and how prevalent it is becoming. If you continue reading the story, you come to a paragraph that fits right in to this hoax.

Another trend involves classified ads. Scammers will post fake job ads, and interested parties are asked to fill out an application, complete with personal information that includes date of birth and Social Security number – everything the scammer needs to swindle the victim.

Pathetic really. I can see where the fake application would fool many people and lead to identity theft.

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I am an email junkie so I wasn’t aware of any “problems” until I read this BusinessWeek article – *!#@ The E-Mail. Can We Talk?

The problem isn’t the distraction of spam or stuffed inboxes. Nor is it the potential for legal liability. The concern, say academics and management thinkers, is misinterpreted messages, as well as the degree to which e-mail has become a substitute for the nuanced conversations that are critical in the workplace.

I think almost all of us have experienced the misinterpreted email issue. I have sent them and ignited a thermonuclear response and I have received what was supposed to be an innocuous email and found myself hunting down the sender.

There are many studies that discuss how words are actually only 10% or so of communication. Tonality, inflection, gestures and other nonverbal cues make up the vast majority of how we communicate. Obviously, those cues do not travel with an email. Of course, video email seems to be gathering some steam and may become more prominent in the near future.

But there is a potential problem with the non-email approach:

Clients are so impressed that they have started to visit and call his staffers more often, too. The biggest peril now? Getting trapped in telephone tag.

Remember the days before the internet when the phone was king? I was a salesperson in a national territory and the phone was the only method for reaching a remote prospect. Telephone tag became a tedious task, along with gatekeepers, voicemails (if they had it) and snail mail letters.

Writing that last sentence makes me feel old.

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