I just reviewed a sales management resume I received from a gentleman. The resume contains a handful of spelling and grammatical errors which is a concern. But this is what caught my eye, for the past 10 years, he has changed companies every 2 years.

This employment pattern is always a red flag for us. Sales is a difficult position to successfully hire as most people know. A main problem is that bad salespeople often use their good rapport-building skills to subtlely, but emotionally, persuade a hiring manager to hire them. We refer to these types as schmoozers. They look like John Wayne in the interview and perform like Elmer Fudd on the job.

2 years is just about the right amount of time to flush out a schmoozer. They use their tools to delay the inevitable as long as possible. Their preferred tactic is an inflated pipeline of prospects that somehow always seem to be just on the verge of closing, but never quite do. Managers become reluctant to fire the schmoozer immediately. Instead, they prefer to hang on to the false hope that the schmoozer may just close one or two deals. That would be one or two deals they probably wouldn’t land if the position was not filled.

Rarely do those deals appear. In fact, the better question is what was the opportunity cost in terms of prospects that went to the competition? What did the schmoozer cost in terms of deals in their territory that they never discovered?

I don’t know if this gentleman is a schmoozer or not. He may have legitimate explanations for 5 different employers in the past 10 years (soon to be 6 if he lands a new job). I’ll let him share those explanations with someone else.

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We’re sourcing for an outside sales position in a sunny climate (not here in Minnesota) and had a candidate respond to an ad. He has tremendous industry experience and was good on the phone screen. He was quite inquisitive and asked strong questions about our customer and their market position. He did his due diligence in researching the company which led to his questions. As is our process, we asked him to complete the online assessments as the next step.

The candidate paused. He did not complete them. Instead, he decided to research sales assessments and then contacted us to run through his questions on this topic. We answered some of the questions but not all of them since they may have influenced his answers.

We asked him again to complete the assessments. He said he would get to them that day. 2 days later he finally completed them. By this point, we had moved on to other stronger candidates. Unfortunately for him, this position requires a strong business development ability. There is research to be done in targeting accounts, but there is also a pressing need to simply contact the accounts. Before even assessing this candidate, we knew this area would be a struggle for him. You can research a topic forever. At some point you have to pick up the phone and contact them.

His assessments revealed extreme weakness in 3 aptitudes that revealed this weakness – sense of timing, initiative and self-starting ability. 3 strikes – he’s out.

Some times you don’t need an online assessment and that is precisely why we use phone and email screens. Even if you are not using an assessment tool today (you should be), the screen will still reveal specific sales traits of an external candidate. That information alone may spare you the lost dollars of hiring the wrong salesperson.

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I just read a detailed employment ad for a sales position that made me cringe. The ad has 34 bullet points describing everything from the company culture to job responsibilities to candidate qualifications. Too much, too long, to detailed. I read it and thought how will they be able to tell if a sales candidate can qualify? Every possible piece of information is in the ad.

Then I read the last sentence of the ad:

No calls please.

Those 3 words should never appear in a sales employment ad.

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