Lee sent this short article to me – Paying Recruits to Interview?  I’m woefully out of touch on this one:

Notching Interviews: Why would corporate recruiters pay candidates to interview for jobs? To Los Gatos Hills, California-based Notchup.com, the answer is simple: Companies ideally will find top candidates, so the money will be well spent. The startup job board adds a twist to the traditional online job search by enabling job-seeking professionals to name their price at which they will agree to interview with prospective employers. Notchup.com says employers benefit by being able to target passive candidates. The company says its tools include optional background checks on candidates and a money-back guarantee on all interviews.

I wonder if this is a natural outcropping of the impending labor shortage.  Imagine demand for candidates is so great that companies will pay for an interview!  The day may be closer at hand than you think.

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There is an effect we have noticed when recruiting salespeople from larger companies that seems to be consistent across markets.  Some salespeople, maybe many, lose their edge when it comes to prospecting when they land a large customer.  I see this effect happening in larger companies, for some reason, more than smaller companies.

I bring this up because I read an employment ad for a large company that we used to work with in a previous life.  This company has an unbelievably strong customer service orientation.  I mean that in a negative way.  Their “hunter” salespeople believe they can service their way to a sale.  This approach is reinforced by a team of customer service people assigned to every account.

Recently, this company has seen it’s long-standing market share evaporate under pressure from an aggressive, sales-oriented competitor.  The competitor is taking this company out in their strongest regions.

The main thrust behind the competitor’s success is the sales team’s inability to close new customers in a competitive situation.  This company has a well-established name that has allowed it to hide the gross inadequacies that have solidified within their sales department.  In essence, the long-tenured sales team’s skills have been dulled by success.

I’ve seen this phenomenon in other large companies also.  I don’t have any market research to prove this effect – my thesis is purely anecdotal.  The salespeople become complacent with their existing customers and compensation and ratchet down the prospecting.  Once an aggressive competitor emerges, the salespeople are almost helpless to react.

Be wary when talking to sales candidates from these companies.  Ask them about recent customers they have closed and look for complacency in their business development.

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Being in the final stages of strategic planning right now with my company (following the establishment of a Vision statement last year) I just can’t leave Derrick’s post alone.

He is absolutely correct with his assumption that many “visioning” exercises are empty of real meaning or impact. As any good business consultant will tell you, execution of the vision and the strategy is a lot harder than crafting the words. Most companies do not follow through and get any real value. It sounds like that’s what Derrick experienced (as I have in several previous lives).

But, for a company like ours that is transitioning from a manufacturing mentality to become a “custom solution provider”, the ‘vision thing’ and the subsequent strategic planning has shown value already. Creating the statement was a company wide activity, and we got input from every level (a first). We are now working to help employees ‘connect’ with that vision – what does it mean for you? what does it mean for your function and area?

Simultaneously, the leadership team is working through a sometimes painful strategic planning session to align the company’s structure, resources and efforts towards achieving that vision. One approach is more organic, grassroots, the other provides focus for our management efforts. If nothing else, it got us out of our status quo, made us ask ourselves the tough questions and gave us a process to do some worthwhile planning (the strategic planning process includes setting specific action plans and measuring results, so it’s designed to lead to real changes).

Could a strong charismatic leader do the same without the hokey “OD” work? Sure. Many do. My suspicion is, those types of leaders use the same tools in a different way – they help people see the vision they articulate (even if its not developed by the employees), they reinforce and direct efforts that lead to that vision, and they make sure their organization supports it with its actions and behaviors.

Will our effort be a guaranteed success and is it worth it?  That’s up to us…and how well we execute.

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From Yahoo News today:

It lived up to its name: The temperature in International Falls fell to 40 below zero Monday, just a few days after the northern Minnesota town won a federal trademark making it officially the “Icebox of the Nation.”

The previous record low for Feb. 11 in International Falls was 37 below, set in 1967, said meteorologist Mike Stewart at the weather service in Duluth.

The temperature also fell to 40 below in Embarrass, 80 miles southeast of International Falls. That’s just one degree above the all-time record in Minneapolis, 250 miles to the south, that was set in January 1888, the weather service said.

I can tell you that stories like this one do make it difficult to recruit out-of-state salespeople to transfer up here to our customers.

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More stories are appearing that address “recession-proof jobs” in response to our slowing economy.  Timely titles for sure, but one position is always recession-proof and that is sales; specifically successful sales.

Case in point, Job Hunting in a Recession from The Wall Street Journal:

Target critical posts. “The safest jobs are the ones selling to or servicing customers,” says Gary Rich, president of Rich Leadership, an executive advisory firm in Pound Ridge, N.Y. “When things get tight, it’s all about who’s going to drive the top line and who’s going to service that.” Less durable jobs are those in human resources, public relations, finance, strategic planning and other nonvital business functions, he says.

It should always be “about who’s going to drive the top line.”  I’m not sure the customer service side is as safe in a slow economy.  Many companies cut customer service positions and ask the remaining CSR’s to take on more customers.

Nonetheless, sales positions are probably more valuable in a slow economy.  A strong economy can often hide weak salespeople.  The weak salespeople can still close enough deals to survive.  However, once the economy slows down and prospects are more difficult to locate and close, the weaker salespeople often get flushed out quickly.

The slow economy requires salespeople with sales skills to locate the right prospects and close them.  The one thing to remember is that even in a recession business is still occurring.  Sales are still being closed.  The media’s perpetual doomsday reporting had a tendency to anesthetize our common sense.  Deals are still available to the strong salespeople who know how to find them.

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Color me skeptical, but I am just not a fan of vision statements, mission statements, company statements and whatever else is the latest iteration.  I prefer P&L statements.  I could be wrong on this so I’ll provide an article from BusinessWeek.com titled Vision Decisions.

The opening graph:

Feeling the pressure to prove they have what former President George H. W. Bush famously termed “the vision thing,” they drag their staffs through formal visioning sessions. The resulting empty exercises yield “vision statements” to which employees periodically genuflect, but they have no operative meaning. The net result is anti-inspirational.

The purpose of vision, after all, is to inspire: vision provides motivation through inspiration. As discussed in a previous post, inspiration is one key element of the “why should people get excited about this” dimension of establishing strategic direction (the other is incentives). An effective statement of vision provides an inspiring portrait of what it will look like and feel like to achieve the organization’s mission and goals. It crystallizes an emotional connection between employees and the business. Critically, a formal statement of vision is not an end in itself. It is both the product of and a symbol of a process of generating shared understanding and shared commitment among employees.

The process part makes sense, but the entire vision statement idea just strikes me as an organizational development symbol that has little impact on the company’s machinations.  Strong leadership provides inspiration.

I went through the ISO 9000 whatever registration over a decade ago and came away with a fairly jaded perspective of the entire thing.  That experience, where we had to memorize the company vision statement and mission statement in case we were asked by an auditor.  The statements sounded good, but operationally they had no impact on the business.  In my estimation, they were little more than political spin.

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I thought the article was going to be anecdotal and humorous, but it is actually quite insightful. Inc.com offers this article – The Office: The Bad and the Ugly – which is well reasoned. Here are the 7:

1. The staff has developed guidelines for dealing with you and quietly passes them to new employees. “Never suggest that there might be another way of doing something,” they might say. Or “Act self-deprecating so he doesn’t feel threatened.”

2. You have one or two fanatical acolytes. Yes, such devotion may be a testament to your fabulousness. But often when a boss is perceived as universally loathed, the staff opportunist offers herself up as sole confidante and friend, seeking power and favor at the expense of more honest, critical employees.

3. You never see people walk by. Employees would rather circumnavigate the entire office to get to the coffee machine or bathroom than take the shortcut past your door and risk being invited in.

4. Your 360-degree evaluations come back short and full of generically positive comments, with one very mild criticism (“Sometimes she works too damn hard for her own good”) thrown in for credibility’s sake.

5. People don’t volunteer for your pet projects. The idea sucks, and they’re afraid to tell you, or it’s brilliant, but the consequences for letting you down are too terrible to imagine. And, of course, if it’s your pet project, you’ll probably work on it as well. Which means more time spent…gulp…with you.

6. You have legions of former employees, but they rarely give your name as a reference for new jobs. Either they don’t trust you to give them their due, or they worry that because they were so miserable working for you, your recollections will also be dismal.

7. You have legions of former employees, period. If your staff falls away like linty Post-it notes, ask yourself: Is high turnover the problem? Or am I?

Number 7 should be in bold. And italics. And a larger font.

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HR departments and third-party recruiters often go at it with hammers and tongs since each side thinks the other side is…problematic.  You don’t need an organizational development specialist to tell you this is not a healthy business relationship.

BusinessWeek.com approaches this topic in How Recruiters and HR Can Work Together.  The article starts with a tactical point that we encounter during every negotiation:

In my experience, the greatest service a third-party search partner provides to the organization, besides the strength of his or her candidate database and relationships, is the intermediary role a search pro performs during offer negotiation. I pride myself on good listening and negotiating skills, but if I’m inside the company, I won’t have the same credibility with a candidate that his ally, the outside recruiter, has.

So it makes sense to let the recruiter handle the delicate job (BusinessWeek, 11/26/07) of negotiating between the employer (“our offer is good enough already!”) and the candidate (“they’re dreaming if they think I’ll take this job for that salary”) when the stakes are high. We do it when we buy or sell a house. We know that our trusted Realtor won’t be as emotionally bound up in the negotiation as we very well may be. It’s the same in a high-level offer negotiation process—a place where the middleman can get us more quickly to a handshake and save egos in the process.

The author is absolutely correct.  In fact, some of our customers have us present the offer and work through the negotiation with the candidate.  As appreciative as we are to do this work, we still put the final close to our customer and the candidate.  However, we are able to have extremely candid discussions with the candidate; discussions I am certain would not happen directly with the hiring company.

Here is a good tip:

When I was a corporate HR person, I learned to invite my search partners into the office once every six months or so for a check-in meeting. In this way I learned that partnering with trusted search colleagues is one of the highest-yield moves an HR leader can make. Search pros will tell you things that candidates never would (e.g., “no one will work for Jane Smith any more—she’s a terrible manager”) and will fill you in on the state of the local job market with a level of detail you’d never have time to acquire on your own.

We’ve done this type of work frequently for our customers.  This type of information and insight is highly valuable from an outside source.

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One of the most important aptitudes in sales is a proper results orientation.  The key word is “results.”  Oftentimes we encounter sales managers who place their focus on activity orientation instead of results.

An example would be a salesperson who has a furiousness to their work…almost like their hair is on fire.  But no significant deals seem to close despite their frantic pace.

I used to work for a sales manager who would describe those salespeople as a horse-drawn wagon.  There would always be a cloud of dust around them, but at the end of the day, the wagon hadn’t moved.

Salespeople who lack a strong results orientation are often like that wagon.  Activity is important to success, but results are the actual goal.  This ability to drive for results can be measured in both your existing salespeople and potential sales candidates.

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Totally fascinating post from Steve Clark titled Why is change so difficult?

The human organism is resistant to change. The body tries to maintain what physiologists call homeostasis. This is the physical state of equilibrium or status quo. The body is designed to operate in a very narrow range of physiological processes. The brain is no different.

And now for the explanation:

Change creates psychological stress.

Change engages the prefrontal cortex, the conscious part of the brain that is responsible for judgment, planning and decision making. The prefrontal cortex is like RAM memory in a PC. It is fast and agile, able to hold multiple threads of logic at once to enable quick calculations. But like RAM, the prefrontal cortex’s capacity is finite—it can deal comfortably with only a handful of concepts before becoming overloaded. When it becomes overloaded it generates a palpable sense of discomfort, anxiety, fatigue, and frustration.

Like a computer the brain prefers to run off its hard drive or basal ganglia, which has a much larger storage capacity. This is the part of the brain that stores the hardwired memories and habits that dominate our daily lives.

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