Our latest article is finished and has been submitted for editorial review. Look for it early next week – can it really be that the Fourth of July is just over a week away? I was reviewing some of our previous articles and came across these paragraphs from Retooling the Hiring Process for Today’s Market: One key to properly retooling will shift the current focus from experience to talent. This fundamental change will be precipitated by the need to develop talent as opposed to hiring experience. The experienced candidate will become a product of a supply and demand marketplace. There will be more demand with less supply which leads to… Read More
Continue ReadingInterview Questions That Numb the Mind
100 Potential Interview Questions. Nothing we like more than a list here at The Hire Sense. Some of the questions from monster.com are utterly inane. I give you number 96: With your eyes closed, tell me step-by-step how to tie my shoes. I’m not kidding. Some I wouldn’t know what a good answer would entail if I were asking the question. For example, number 40: If you were an animal, which one would you want to be? I shouldn’t be too harsh since there are some good ones also in the list like number 27: Tell me about a time where you had to deal with conflict on the job.… Read More
Continue ReadingGhost Written Sales Resumes
Direct from an online posting at a job board: The job search is a sales and marketing endeavor. YOU are the product, YOU are the salesperson and YOU must define your customers and promote yourself to them via a powerful, focused resume. If you’re able to do that on your own, great! If not, let us help. Can’t stress it enough – make sure you read all resumes with a huge grain of salt.
Continue ReadingHiring Experience
I’m putting the finishing touches on an article we are going to release next week that deals with hiring salespeople based on experience vs. talent. We advocate sales talent first. A couple of points to whet your appetite: First, the vast majority of resumes are embellished. We have written about that topic at length. Here’s the rub, if you hire based on experience, I guarantee you are drawing inferences from their embellished resume. You will never truly know the scope of their experience since you cannot reconstruct every aspect of their previous positions. When you interview the candidate, they are going to put as much positive spin on their experience… Read More
Continue ReadingNiche Employment Sites
Sourcing will become the most difficult task in hiring within the next 5 years if it isn’t already. CareerJournal has an informational article today – Niche Sites Catch On With More Job Seekers. The article basically tracks a handful of higher level employees and their use of niche boards to land their new positions. We have seen a distinct migration to the niche sites and have had success ourselves with them. Dice.com is particularly effective for finding technical talent. The stat that caught my eye in the article: Specialized boards today make up some 70% of the roughly 40,000 job sites on the Web, compared with 50% or 55% of… Read More
Continue ReadingHigh D Behavior
A strange story from here in Minnesota is the founder and CEO of Lifetime Fitness. The CEO has had numerous encounters with the local authorities including his latest incident – allegedly harassing a teenager at a local high school parking lot after a driving incident. I bring this up simply for the fact that I would guess this CEO fits a specific selling style – a very high Dominance factor and a very low compliance factor. This style leads to a rebellious, quick-tempered person. This CEO takes that style to an extreme. We have a customer who once employed a salesperson with this type of style (we assessed him). He… Read More
Continue ReadingHow Not to Stand Out
From a generic cover letter of a person who claims to be a “walking think tank”: I currently have a job, which pays well, but does not allow me to allow my creativity to flourish. So here, I pose an offer. If you represent a company that can recognize an innovative mind with unlimited potential for improving your company, please contact me immediately. An interesting approach that makes them stand out. Unfortunately, it does so by sounding quite arrogant. “…unlimited potential for improving your company” speaks in what I term the infinitive condescension. My immediate suspicion is that this person is more concerned about meeting their own needs as opposed… Read More
Continue ReadingMarketing to Baby-Boomers
Let’s continue with the marketing-themed Tuesday posts. We have discussed Gen X & Y on this blog and we have published articles on how to hire them. Marketingprofs.com pens an article today – A Holistic Approach to Marketing to Baby Boomers – that looks at the largest generational group. Seems silly now, but we have conveniently ignored the boomers in our posts. Let me give you one reason why we shouldn’t ignore them: An American turns 50 every seven seconds. Staggering. I am intrigued by this point from the article: Although boomers are veering away from rocking chairs, research shows the desire for achieving a balanced life as they age.… Read More
Continue ReadingUpdated Home Page
Today we have completed some minor updates to our home page. Our goal is to make the page easier to navigate, offer a complimentary assessment and provide a news section for general announcements. We will have more updates and releases coming soon. And thanks to Matthew Mills at Piperdown Studio for his ongoing expertise in developing our relatively new website design.
Continue ReadingHandling Leads
Since our topic du jour seems to be lead generation, here is a very quick read from Sales&Marketing Magazine about how to handle leads once you receive them. Nothing revolutionary in the approach, but the author’s point is accurate – salespeople prefer to work only hot leads and ignore the warm to cool ones. The best sales management approach we have seen is to categorize the leads. That can be A, B or C or some other manner. The frequency of contact and focus of time needs to be defined for each level of lead. The A leads are obviously the priority, B is second and C is last. Simple,… Read More
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