We’ve been working as or with sales for over 20 years and have to deal with many discussions involving candidate’s resumes.  The bias that occurs is that hiring managers make broad, sweeping generalizations based on what they think they see in the resume.  This anomaly occurs even after we have screened and assessed strong candidates.

After discussing the possibilities of what may be wrong with the candidate, we usually get to a point where the hiring manager agrees to to the interview based on our recommendation.

After the interview, we hear something to this effect:

“He was much better than I expected.”

Strangely, I suspect we will still be hearing that line years from now.  The point is simple, resumes should only be a small part of a hiring decision.  A process-oriented approach to hiring limits generalizations and assumptions.  Gut-level decisions lead to passing on potentially strong sales candidates if they don’t match preconceived assumptions.

We can help turn your sales hiring process into one that limits surprises and reveals strong salespeople.

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As a proud coffee addict, I am please to see this Managesmarter.com article titled Coffee, Please.  For the past 2 days, we’ve been dealing with blizzard conditions, thunder snow (seriously – there is such a thing), well over a foot of snow and closed interstate highways.  Yet it is all quite tolerable as long as I have good coffee.  I think these people share that perspective with me:

What would you give up to hold on to your morning cup of coffee?
* 42 percent would forgo AM radio, television or newspaper.
* One-fifth said they’d be willing to skip lunch.
* 12 percent said they’d trade three hours of sleep.
* 10 percent would give up brushing their teeth.

Ok, that last bullet point is quite disgusting – I hope none of the respondents act out on that survey response.  I don’t know if this is surprising, but the survey found that men drink more coffee than women (1.6 cups per day for men to 1.2 for women).  For me, nothing beats an extra large skim latte with 1 packet of raw sugar.  And if I can have 2 of them in a day, all the better.

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