CareerJournal.com offers this quick read – Hiring and Cultivating Employees Who Succeed – which covers the critical topics of hiring and retaining top talent. This opening statement obviously caught my attention:

Business owner Andrew Field says he used to hire based on gut instinct. No longer.

My kind of owner – one who has experienced the debacle of bad hiring decisions made on instinct instead of objective analysis. Their solution has been to use a multiple interviewer process that I would question, but they have lowered their turnover by half. If they were to objectively assess in their process, they could lower that turnover rate even further.

Here is the retention item of note:

New hires receive 14 weeks of training, dubbed “PFL University,” requiring hands-on work, one-on-one coaching and classroom sessions. Mr. Field, 47, teaches two of the classes.

Mr. Field is the owner of the company and he teaches two classes during their onramping program. That approach is quite progressive and one that I am certain has a positive impact on their retention rate. One thing we often see with new sales hires is an overly aggressive revenue expectation with an under-serving training program. I suspect this misalignment is the driving force behind companies desiring to hire salespeople from their competitors. The inaccurate belief is that those salespeople will be quicker to book revenue and will require less training.

Rarely is that true.

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