How about this thought – many bad salespeople are good interviews because they have much practice. We have seen many salespeople do well on the phone but once we dig into their history, we find a consistent pattern of 2 year stints.
But man do they say the right things on the phone.
For this reason, we tend to run a difficult phone screen to weed out the pretenders. In fact, just this week we received a resume from a candidate with whom we are familiar. He worked for one of our customers 3 years ago and displayed flamboyant incompetence. As they say in the Wall Street Journal, it wasn’t long before he was “free to pursue other opportunities.”
The interesting point here is that this guy’s recent approach to us was notably strong. We were impressed, but his name was naggingly familiar. We dug through our files and, sure enough, found his information from 3 years ago. Yet, one thing was very different.
His resume.
He had omitted some positions and glossed over his time at our customer. I should say he glossed it over by taking his previous job and doubling his tenure there to twice what it actually was. Instead of being at the previous employer for 2 years, he simply made it 4 years as to hide a large gap in his employment record.
Remember, this guy sounds quite impressive on his approach. According to our customer he interviewed well, too. They finally flushed him out when they ran a background check/employment verification. Yes, after he was on the payroll which is another post for another day. His employment history on his resume was a complete fabrication.
This candidate was basically a con man who used an elaborate scheme to secure a sales job and then hang on as long as he could. He was a bad salesperson who had mastered the art of interviewing well.