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.