First things first – I’m not a Trekkie. But there is a good lesson from Mr. Spock in regards to qualifying. Basically, emotions kill good qualifying. What I mean is that salespeople who become emotionally shackled to a prospect or opportunity lose objectivity. Once objectivity is gone, the salesperson tends to abandon their selling system and rationalize reasons without pursing facts from the prospect directly.

The best salespeople we have encountered and assessed are the ones who are able to use their empathy to connect with the prospect and nothing more. They are able to build rapport yet stay emotionally detached so that stress, rejection, joy, anger and desperation do not affect their selling system. They stay on target and run their qualifying system.

Next time you are hiring a salesperson, look for these stoic qualities in their sales approach.

Ideally, contact us and we will assess the candidate for you.

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A quick note about expiring ads that we have experienced. Expect a small bump in responses as your ad posting is about to expire. We consistently see a handful of responses that come in within the last 3 days of an ad expiring. Although risky (the position may be filled by then), it is still an interesting and some times effective approach by candidates.

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I am a member of an online recruiter’s group and have a mild interest in their topics. What we do at Select Metrix is far from recruiting, but we often get lumped in with recruiters so I figure it is good to know the topics that interest them.

One myth I keep encountering is this Jurassic-era myth that good salespeople do not look at employment ads. Only the “unhappy” salespeople look at ads. Here is a direct quote from one of the recruiters:

People only look on job boards if they are unhappy with their job / boss / company. To recruit the happy people (happy typically equals good)…you need to direct recruit.

Talk about generalities! My word, this is either a shameless plug for their services or an obtuseness in understanding salespeople. Companies go under, commission plans change, territories get realigned, sales days become repetitive, better opportunities emerge. I would argue that these are but a few valid reasons for driving “happy” salespeople to look for a new position.

It would be most helpful if the author of that quote would have defined “happy” and “good.” Better yet, define how happy = good. I could ask 10 different people to define those terms within the context of the quote and I would get 10 different answers.

The modern worker consistently montiors the job boards for potential opportunities. We have seen stats as high as 66% of employed workers check the job boards once a week. These boards certainly make it easy with their automated search agents that will deliver an email to your inbox every night with jobs that match your specific criteria.

Information flows quickly and the younger workers are plugged in and looking for the latest opportunity for themselves. We have written about this topic in our article Hiring Adjustments for Generations X and Y:

Most people are familiar with the term €œcareer path.€ The Baby Boomer generation experienced a marketplace where preordained opportunities existed to climb the corporate ladder within the same company. Today€™s younger generations generally do not have such consistent opportunities before them. More importantly, many of the younger generation do not subscribe to the same loyalty as the Baby Boomers.

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We are rarely on the bleeding edge here at The Hire Sense so maybe this isn’t news. Well, it is news to us. I stumbled upon Google Base this week. It appears to still be in beta test, but it looks like a fairly slick offering from the search juggernaut.

You can post an item to a category whether it is from your blog, a want ad, a recipe, tickets, etc. It appears to be a real potpourri of stuff similar to Craigs List. We are checking out their job board to see what type of activity it generates. The site may be a bit too new to have much value in that arena. However, it is from Google so I suspect it will grow quickly.

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Being Minnesotans, we are avid hockey fans and follow our professional team – the Wild. I was reading this article this morning and came across an interesting quote from the Wild’s General Manager:

General manager Doug Risebrough demands fresh ideas from his advisers, and he praised Snow’s enthusiasm and work ethic as a journalist and his passion for hockey in announcing the hiring.

“Where he came from was really academic,” Risebrough said. “I always believe if you get really talented people, you put them in a good environment and don’t constrict it. I don’t know how it will look in two years, but we’ll see.”

The person he hired is a 24 year old beat writer for the Boston Globe. Suffice to say that is not a stereotypical hire for this type of position. Kudos to Risebrough for valuing talent over experience.

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I’m fascinated by this behemoth airplane from Airbus called the A-380. I watched a show on Discovery that documented the engineering feats that had to be accomplished to build this thing – quite impressive. Today, I am reading about the delays in delivering this product on time.

The plane is overweight which means it won’t travel the distances that the company claimed it would travel. The wings had a design flaw that has been “fixed” though strangely testing has not been completed yet. The plane will need to have a 10 mile gap behind it due to its jet wash which will require special handling by air traffic controllers.

Is it any wonder Singapore Airlines placed an order with Boeing today due to these issues? Yet the COO of Airbus states he “does not believe Airbus will lose any orders.”

Right.

I learned a good sales lesson years ago in the high-tech industry. It is far safer to sell what you have as opposed to what you hope to have. I was burnt by preselling a product that hadn’t been completed. The product was finished late and did not perform as we had been led to believe. You can imagine the fires we had to put out with our good customers once they received this underwhelming machine.

There is no problem in creating some buzz about an upcoming product or service, but I would suggest that customers are too hard to come by to risk on a hypothetical solution.

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First, the headline from the Pioneer Press article: State Jobless Rate Falls to 5-Year Low

Now read it and you will see the business-challenged reporting we are treated to here in Minnesota. The unemployment rate is typically lower than the national average even during recessions. Our current unemployment rate is 3.7%! Yet this 13 paragraph article spends the first 8 paragraphs trying to paint this stat in a negative light. Unbelievable.

But this statistic does bring me back to sourcing. With low unemployment in Minnesota, we are constantly looking for new sourcing channels for our local customers. We are consistent monster.com and careerbuilder.com users, but we have been branching out into other channels in our hunt for the strongest candidates.

Niche sites that offer a focused market or candidates are far more effective than the big boards in terms of delivering targeted candidates. We have found candidates from these sites to be of higher quality than the generic boards.

Another avenue to pursue is to ask candidates for referrals to others they know who may be a good fit. We have done this on a few occassions this year with strong candidates who ended up accepting a different opportunity. This approach has been quite productive in leading us to passive candidates with strong skills – especially in a technical position. For whatever reason, technical candidates seem to be quite willing to share an opportunity with their personal network.

Finally, we have explored some of the online communities like myspace.com but have not found much success in this area. I suspect these online communities will become an effective tool as they become more common among mature workers. To me, these online communities seem to cater to young people disproportionately.

Sourcing in this tight labor market is going to be the pinch point for all hiring activities. New channels will be need to be explored to reach the modern day, passive candidate.

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Admins Must Have the Write Stuff from monster.com provides excellent tips regarding proper email writing. The topics seem to be applicable to blog writing too.

Quick quiz for you – what is a homonym? (answer below)

I have broken almost all of their tips . . . recently. Anyway, I found this fact interesting:

Use the Right Font: Most default fonts, like Times and Arial, are hard to read on screen. “You can cut down on missed typos by changing to Verdana,” suggests Peha. “It was specifically designed to be read on a computer monitor.” If your company requires a certain font, compose your text in Verdana and then change fonts just before printing.

I didn’t know that, but we do use Verdana often in our electronic communications (like our quarterly email newsletter – thought I would put a shameless plug in here in case you would like to subscribe).

“Many people mistakenly believe that business communication should be impersonal,” Peha says. “But that’s a prescription for not being read.”

Guilty on that one too. Hopefully The Higher Sense is irreverant enough that it does not seem impersonal! Lastly:

It seems obvious, but most people don’t proofread their emails, and that can make you look lazy. Missing words and typos are an easy excuse for people to not take you seriously.

I probably have spelling errors in this post. I struggle with proofreading my own writing but do enjoy taking the red pen to the Select Metrix team. Well, this is a good, quick read article with many practical tips – well worth the read.

Oh, and I forgot this answer in the original post:

Homonym = one of two or more words spelled and pronounced alike but different in meaning.

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I’m of 2 minds regarding this article from CareerJournal.com – Is Your Style the Right Fit For the Job You Are After? We always encourage companies to assess candidates even if it is only for communication style. Although hiring based on communication style is the least predictive approach of assessment-based hiring, it is still far superior to gut-level hiring.

When looking for or accepting a new assignment, matching or adapting your personal style to the needs of the position can mean the difference between success and failure.

Well, that is an easy concept for which to write, but a difficult action to implement. Rarely is there a position that requires a specific style to be successful. Instead, it is better to look at the candidate’s style and discuss how they will prefer to attack the job. This is a myopic view to hiring, but still better than nothing.

Adapting communication styles takes energy from the person doing it. For example asking a high C to adapt to a high I is a tremendous adaptation. The energy exerted in this adaptation cannot be maintained for extended periods of time – maybe for 30 to 90 days tops. The employees who perform best are the ones who understand their style and use it appropriately in their position. If their style is completely unsuitable to the position (infrequently true), there is no way to adapt their style for an extended period. The employee will revert to their natural style once the stress of the position ratchets up.

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The latest report on corporate hiring – 31% of U.S. Firms Plan to Add Staff – is good news for the economy. However, the labor market is tightening up fast. This market is different from the tech bubble of the late 1990’s as the author points out:

On the whole, employers are still actively looking for workers in a variety of sectors, Joerres said. “They haven’t bloated themselves with excess people, so they’re consistently in the market. That’s very different from what we were seeing in 1999 and 2000,” he said.

If you are planning to hire, expect a slightly longer process to source strong candidates. We are seeing this fact in spades in our own sourcing activities for our customers around the country. The tightening market has been a steady progression and, by all accounts, will continue this positive trend.

The report marks the 10th straight quarter that more than 20 percent of the companies surveyed said they plan to add staff. The expected staffing increase was 30 percent for the second quarter of this year.

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