Honestly, that is the number of online job boards according to Peter Weddle in this Wall Street Journal article.  I had no idea.  Some perspective from the article:

About 2,000 new job boards have launched annually since 2000, and there are currently about 50,000, says Peter Weddle, chief executive officer of Weddle’s, a publisher of guides to job boards. Of these, about 30% are general job sites while 70% specialize in a particular niche, he adds.

And the two big boards:

Still, the nation’s largest job boards saw fluctuations in traffic over the past year. For example, Monster.com had 11,317,000 unique visitors last month, about 9% less than for the same month a year earlier, according to comScore Inc., an Internet-research firm. And that’s down more than 7% from 12,219,000 in July 2007. CareerBuilder.com had 24,752,000 unique visitors last month, about 17% more than for the same month the year before. But the site saw a 14% increase from July 2007 when it had 21,723,000 visitors.

That sounds like competitive pressure affecting Monster and CareerBuilder.  Lastly, this trend is one we are most supportive of (and involved in):

Once you get from the job ad into the application process, more employers are adding assessments — a form of candidate screening previously reserved for the interview stage, says John Hancock, managing director of recruiting services at Capital H Group, a human-resources consulting firm. The idea is to learn about candidates’ intangible qualities, like leadership skills, work ethic and business acumen, he explains.

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Selling Style is one area we assess in our process.  Some people refer to it as personality which I don’t believe is particularly accurate.  Nonetheless, style is an important assessment for managing the salesperson but too many hiring managers assume certain skills based on a candidate’s style.

When we refer to “gut-level decisions,” often those decisions are made based upon a candidate’s style.  That method leads to hiring mistakes.

One of our newer customers offered an interesting take on this style issue yesterday after a couple of candidate interviews.  The candidates were markedly different in their styles, but their aptitudes, skills and motivations were relatively similar.

Our customer’s comment:  “I’m surprised the candidates are so different.  I would have thought you would pursue similar profiles.”

Lee walked him through our graphic on this page and explained the greater importance of selecting salespeople based off the deeper-seated data and, more importantly, which specific abilities are needed for the position.  This approach is what differentiates repeatable, successful sales hiring as opposed to best guesses.

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Seems like our small-sized companies are catching on to the telecommuting option this year which is a bit of a change.  I think a good post would be one that lays out a salesperson’s tools of the trade for today.

Included in that list would be a web-based CRM and a VPN connection for telecommuting.  No?  Check these stats out from a recent Wall Street Journal article (h/t to Lee):

Seventy percent of Cisco Systems employees regularly work from home at least 20% of the time. So do 34% of workers at Booz Allen Hamilton and 32% at S.C. Johnson & Sons. Those stats, from a recent Fortune companies survey say a lot about flexible work these days. It’s becoming a way of working that benefits both the employee and employer, says Nicole Saulnier, a human resource manager for Rothstein Kass, an accounting firm in Roseland, N.J., that also believes in flexibility. “Happy employees are more productive,” she says. “If a flexible work arrangement will help them reach their full potential, we want to foster that.”

Salespeople have always been telecommuters to some extent, but today there are tools available to make their offices completely remote…and fully functional.

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