Yesterday I posted on a quick story regarding owners who make hiring decisions based on their gut feeling.  I want to follow it up today by clarifying this approach.

The article simply states that the owners made a yes or no hiring decision based on a gut feeling.  It does not state what they did up until their decision and this is the point I want to make.  Unfortunately, many hiring managers run down the same tired path – post an ad (the job description), sort the resume responses, interview the “yes-pile” people, follow their gut on the decision.  Then the bad hire gets through and they attempt to revisit that employee’s specific hiring process like a scent out of CSI.

We deal exclusively in the sales hiring world which means the aforementioned approach spells trouble.  Even bad salespeople can have refined rapport-building abilities that can charm the most astute hiring manager’s gut.  Almost – almost – every prospect and customer we talk to has a sales hiring horror story.  The essence of each story – their gut failed them.

Now to be clear, I am not stating that you need to abandon your intuition.  What I am saying is that you need to lower your reliance upon it.  There are steps in a sales hiring process you can take that will introduce greater objectivity and more checks than the gut-level-only approach.

• Phone screening respondents first shifts your sorting criteria away from the resume and towards the medium by which most salespeople first approach a prospect (you get to hear them in action).
• Online assessments provide an objective measure of the person that an interviewer cannot ascertain.  The focus here is how a person will handle specific aspects of a position – the information is gathered indirectly instead of relying solely upon what the candidate states in an interview.
• Resume importance is reduced in the decision process.  Let’s be honest, resumes are embellishments of possible past successes.  I suspect a hiring manager’s intuition is influenced as much by a resume as it is by the interview.  I say that because we are susceptible to this blind spot ourselves.

Again, our hiring world is limited to the sales arena so perhaps our view on this topic is a bit jaundiced.  We’ve seen too many hiring managers get fooled by a crafty, but incompetent, sales candidate.

Instead, use a process that incorporates the intuitive decision strategically (later in the process).  Assess your candidates and direct your interview based on the results you uncover.  Trust your intuition only after the process has winnowed the field down to candidates who have the right abilities to succeed in the position.

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The above term is from The Herman Group’s weekly newsletter (no link but their website is www.herman.net). I love that phrase – it is quite descriptive. Here is the excerpt that caught my attention:

Fueled by the publicity frenzy the press is enjoying, the current volatility in world financial markets is affecting many people at all levels of our societies.

From the employees’ point of view, this uncertainty engenders insecurity. What will happen to my company? Will it be in business? Will I have a job? The reaction is that they continue “corporate cocooning”, staying in the safety and sanctuary of their corporate jobs, despite their deep dissatisfaction.

A number of studies have confirmed that at least 35 percent of our workforce is unhappy. Thanks to a social network analyst Scott DeGraffenreid, we have a label for it. We call it “Warm Chair Attrition”. The shame is these employees still collect paychecks, take up space, and infect their fellow associates. It would seem to be good news for employers: their workers will not leave. However, bottom line, disaffected employees are not particularly productive.

This topic is always one for debate. I’m not a fan of the Jack Welch theory that you need to be turning over your bottom 10% annually. However, no turnover can be a sign that you have a fair amount of warm chair attrition occurring.

The long-term danger here is that mediocrity can creep in to your culture. At that point “good enough” can become the predominant approach. We’ve encountered companies with this approach and it stands out from those companies where excellence is the expectation. As painful as it is, it is best to upgrade your salesforce if you have a team settling into mediocrity.

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The Twin Cites are a hotbed for medical sales positions so we see many sales ads up here.  One of these ads caught my eye this morning for this bit of clever writing:

…what we do makes a statement about who we are. We are driven by scientific excellence and a commitment to make a difference in the quality of people€™s lives. We believe that investment in and commitment to our employees is key to our success and the achievement of our mission.

I use the word clever in the best possible sense.  We have worked with medical companies in the past in evaluating their sales teams.  Our work has consistently revealed a strong Social motivation tied to a Sense of Mission reward.  The well-written ad plays strongly to that motivation-reward combination.  I suspect this ad will draw in many salespeople with a complementary combination that will match the position’s motivation-reward combination.

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