In a recent survey of 3,000 workers and hiring managers by Robert Half and CareerBuilder, almost 50% of the hiring managers think higher energy prices will hamper their ability to recruit skilled workers in the next year.

It is very common for hiring managers to be very focused in finding candidates who are extremely local, said Rosemary Haefner, CarererBuilder.coms Vice President of Human Resources. Job seekers are being a lot more selective now of opportunities that are closer to home or can take advantage of mass transit, she said, so they can have a better work/life balance.

Now this article takes this information a little far in attempting to paint a somewhat bleak picture in that the commute distances will affect hiring and retention negatively over the unforeseeable future. Am I telling you that the commute has no bearing on hiring and retention? No. What I am trying to say is look at everyone as an individual.

If you are in the process of recruiting new staff, talk to the candidate about the commute. Will the commute be shorter or longer than they are used to? How far have they commuted in previous jobs? Will they have to be in the office every day? Do they enjoy or look forward to the commute? These are just a few of many questions you can ask the candidate when it comes to commuting. The commuting issue should be a small part of the whole hiring process.

We have had numerous experiences with our clients when it comes to candidates and commuting. We had one client that excluded a very good candidate from a first interview based solely on her commuting distance. Even though the candidate would have been about 25 miles away, her commute time would have been significantly reduced because she would have been going against rush hour traffic. What we learned was this hiring manager hated his own commute of over 30 miles (which was with the flow of the rush hour). He had one employee quit because of her commute became longer once she moved to a new community. His bias was projected onto any new candidates who did not live within a handful of miles of their office.

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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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Emailing from work is a high risk endeavor especially now that company’s are required to store all company emails. Right on cue, CareerBuilder.com offers Netiquette: The Niceties Of Workplace Email Use. They quote a survey with a rather small sample size, but there is a surprising statistic:

A 2006 survey of 416 companies by the ePolicy Institute in Columbus, Ohio, concludes that 26% of them have fired employees for inappropriate email conduct. That’s up from 21% in 2001.

I have seen some egregious emails come from corporate email accounts. I have also dealt with many candidates who use their company email to converse with me regarding a job opportunity. I am surprised everytime that happens.

At any rate, there are some good tips in the short article. First, something I subscribe to wholeheartedly:

Be professional. You are not a teenager — avoid the little smiley face “emoticons,” abbreviations, or too many exclamation marks, etc. Keep your tone respectful and friendly.

I truly despise those emoticon things – leave them for the teenagers using instant messaging.

Second:

Don’t let email become a substitute for face-to-face communications. Sometimes an in-person or phone talk is more fruitful than an endless chain of emails.

That topic is one we addressed in this post from last week. I am an avid fan of email, but many times a phone conversation or face-to-face meeting is far more effective.

This topic is quite timely – I am writing this post while sitting in a video conference room of one of our customers. We have a break in our meetings and one of the offhand topics that came up was employee emails. They have been working with their salespeople to ensure that they send out professional, properly-worded emails to their customers. Their experience has been simple – poorly-worded emails cast their company in a bad light. A bad light that their customers have graciously shared with them.

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I’ve been reading up on articles that are discussing how to use email for prospecting as opposed to the traditional cold call. The process has some merit since email has become so ubiquitous and accessible(BlackBerries, PDA cell phones, etc.). The cold call is an interruption in the prospect’s day no matter what time you reach them. Caller ID tied to voicemail provides a great screening tool for prospects.

Email has a unique property to it – people do not view it as an interruption since they can check it at times that are convenient for them. Also, most people still enjoy receiving emails. I know spam is an issue, but there are plenty of tools to filter most of those messages.

So this gradual transformation for prospecting provides a new twist when sourcing salespeople. First off, I doubt there will ever be a time when the phone screen becomes extinct. The ability to hear a candidate on the phone and observe their communication abilities in real time is too valuable to ignore. A question and answer phone screen does not allow the candidate to research the web and formulate strategic answers. They have to respond at the pace of the discussion.

Yet we have now incorporated email into our screening process. As important as the phone screen is, email screening has become a close secondary screen. The candidate’s written words reveal their level of communication proficiency in the second most important media for customer interactions.

How to screen writing ability:

1. Email Cover Letters. I make a stink about this topic all the time but it is the first glimpse of the candidate’s writing ability. I viewed one email cover this morning where the candidate did not capitalize their sentences. Seriously – looked like this:
   

   i am interested in an outside sales position. i have been working….

   I read it and immediately envisioned a 12 year old typing at a keyboard. Can you imagine if that went out to a customer? Observe their writing when they send in their resume.

2. Electronic Dialogue. We have yet to source a sales candidate where email was not involved. At some point in the screening process, you will dialogue with them via email. I like to critique these interactions closely. Sentence structure, verb tense, punctuation, even spelling (heaven forbid there are many errors) are all revealed. I also pay attention to how formal vs. casual they appear in their message. Email is a relatively casual medium but job hunting is formal – watch for their ability to balance these polar opposites.
3. Written Screening Questions. For some positions, we email out a handful of questions and ask candidates to respond to them. They know it is a written screen, but we still get some interesting responses. We purposely keep the questions broadly stated so that we can see how the candidate approaches the topic and boils it down to their “thesis.” I have literally read some responses where I could not track their thought process . . . at all. Most candidates get in trouble here because they attempt to dial up their vocabulary. Their use of clearly unfamiliar words wreaks havoc on their ability to communicate ideas.
4. Inperson Writing Assessments. We have a couple of customers who have candidates sit at a PC in their conference room and write a response to a couple of, for lack of a better word, essay questions. I like this approach because it is proctored so you know the candidate is the author. Second, there is pressure added to this format. Candidates who excel in this situation normally have excellent writing ability.

If you complete some or all of these steps, the candidate’s writing ability will be clearly defined. As email becomes more prevalent than telephone calls, the written screening process will become integral to any repeatably successful hiring process.

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…is to hear what isn’t being said.
-Peter Drucker

We have assessed hundreds if not thousands of salespeople and the vast majority of them are extroverted in some form (High I being the most common). We have also assessed a handful of purchasing/financial employees who tend to have introverted tendencies (High S or High C being the most common).

I mention this because selling, at its most basic level, involves good communication. Yet there is a natural problem that surfaces when a High I salesperson attempts to sell a High C purchasing/financial/operations person — their 2 styles are the worst possible communication match there is.

The High I salesperson wants to build rapport, be personal and discuss business at some point. The High C buyer wants to jump straight into business, gather volumes of data and go through an extended question and answer session (they question, salesperson answers).

The High I salesperson is trusting and can be emotional. The High C buyer is skeptical and remains analytical.

I could go on, but you get the point. This example provides an extreme mismatch of styles, but each style has its own selling triggers that the salesperson can incorporate into their sales process to clarify their communication. Clearer communication leads to better qualifying and, typically, shorter sales cycles.

As part of our evaluation process, we provide your salespeople with a 1 page Selling Style sheet to assist them in reading and adjusting their style to their prospect’s preferred method of communicating.

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BusinessWeek.com with an article written for me – How to Write an E-Mail Cover Letter. If you have read The Hire Sense for some time, you know I have a weakness for poorly-worded cover letters. This quick Q&A article provides a good intro answer:

Skip the cover-letter attachment, and turn your e-mail message into a cover letter. A great cover letter shares a bit of your background but mostly talks about the company’s need (for a marketing research manager, an actuary, or whatever) and describes why your experience is perfectly suited to the opportunity. One paragraph is the perfect length.

I couldn’t agree more with that advice. However elementary this sounds, checking for spelling errors and proof-reading the text is critical.

To see what happens when those two items are ignored click here.

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Starbucks card brings sales reward caught my eye first because I have a tremendous coffee addiction and read almost any article I find regarding coffee shops. Second, there is an amazing statistic inside of the article:

Most major retailers have been offering gift and loyalty cards for years, but industry observers say few have seen so many of their customers hang on to them as long, use them as often and reload them as regularly as they do at Starbucks.

Almost one in eight customers pays with a Starbucks card these days, Stark noted. About 96 million Starbucks cards have been activated in the United States and Canada since November 2001, and customers have reloaded their cards about 38.6 million times, bringing in $2.17 billion in revenue.

1 in 8 customers use a loyalty card at Starbucks. Now that is customer loyalty. The stat would not be as notable except that the company has brought in over $2 BILLION in sales in the past 5 years through this payment option. $4 lattes certainly help reach that statistic, but the program is an obvious success.

When we define a sale in our hiring process, one of the key pieces of information we collect is expected customer retention rate. Obviously, most companies target 100% retention, but that is rarely the case. Understanding the retention rate is only the first step in understanding the company’s customer focus.

The second step is to understand if the salesperson is responsible for the daily/monthly/yearly interactions with the customer to maintain the account. No salesperson can walk away from any customer they close, but their level of interaction with the account clarifies the amount of time they can spend chasing new prospects vs. servicing existing customers. If the customer is handed over to an inside team, their abilities to maintain and expand a customer account must also be considered.

Customer retention is a multifaceted, complex aspect of any business. Starbucks employs a wildly successful program to retain their valued customers in a highly competitive market. What programs, teams or strategies does your company employ in not only keeping, but expanding your existing customer revenue stream?

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New Rules Make Firms Track E-Mails, Instant Messages for Federal Trials. I just caught up to this story and it has distinct repercussions for most businesses.

According to legal experts, the rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require American companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce “electronically stored information” as part of the discovery process, when evidence is shared by both sides before a trial.The change makes it more important for companies to know what electronic information they have and where.

Most companies do have this type of monitoring in place today, but ones that don’t will have to make some fast changes. This law went into effect yesterday.

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