Here is a new title from a sales employment ad:

Accont Exceutive

Honestly, if I could spike my coffee right now I would.  Whatever price this medical company paid for the ad has been wasted before a single click.

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My apologies for co-opting Woody Hayes’ saying, but I am from Ann Arbor and couldn’t stand the guy anyway.  I’m wondering what the Great Recession is going to do to resumes.  What I mean is this – many people have shortened tenures nowadays (especially Gen Y).  3 years is turning into a fairly good tenure for a worker.

This recession has cost millions of people their jobs.  Some will have to start their work career over, essentially taking a “lesser” job and working their way up all over again.  In many instances, they will have to jump from job to job to keep moving up during their now condensed work career.

This fact is going to have repercussions for future sourcing activities.  I have already run into this issue recently when sourcing for a sales position.  An older sales manager was focusing first on tenure of candidates.  I had to quickly point out some of these facts.  He seemed to receive my input at the time, but a day later he was back on the tenure train.

Whatever economy eventually surfaces from this deep recession will contain many, many, candidates who simply lack the traditional employment longevity that was so frequent just 5-10 years ago.

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I received my share of pink slips in my career so this title frightened me when I first saw it in the Twin Cities Business Magazine.  However, this strikes me as rather clever:

The party, akin to speed dating for the unemployed…

The idea is to provide an opportunity for job seekers to mingle with local recruiters in a more informal setting than a traditional board room. Job seekers should dress to impress, bring copies of their resume, and be ready to network, Virgin Mobile and JobsDirectUSA said.

The companies call the party “the most fun and laid-back job interview most who attend will ever experience.”

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If you’re talking you’re not selling.  That is an old axiom I learned early in my sales career and it is always true.  Talking does not equal selling.

Unfortunately, people not experienced in sales hiring often have the opposite view.  Their stereotypical belief is that the best salespeople are the ones who are perceived to be the best talkers.  This misguided view often leads to bad hires.

Here is where the mistake occurs – hiring managers assume that social skills are equivalent to sales skills.  Ok, maybe that is too strong, but the assumption is that the social skills are the key to successful selling.  Social skills are a component to selling, but they are not indicative of sales skills.

Social Skills

Social skills are important to sales and certainly are not to be ignored.  However, my experience has been that the truly terrible sales hires usually involved bad salespeople with good social skills.  These salespeople had excellent empathetic skills – they could read body language, adjust their tonality, find common ground with the hiring manager.  Again, all valuable skills.  However, they had next to no sales skills which became evident once they were on the payroll torpedoing good prospects.

The danger here is that these social skills are quite disarming.  They can be used to get the strongest of interviewers off their game.  I have seen many sales candidates who possessed remarkable social skills but little in the way of sales skills.

Sales Skills

These skills are the ones that lead to profitable revenue generation.  The main skill set involves qualifying.  If there was only one ability you could have in a salesperson, qualifying would be it.  This skill involves asking the right questions to learn about a potential customers’ budget, need, time frame, decision process and more.  This skill is where salespeople earn their keep.

Other sales skills areas are prospecting, influencing, closing and presenting.  These areas are also important to successful selling.  In terms of sales candidates, these skills are more difficult to discover.  The best approach is to assess for these skills and then follow up a face-to-face interview with the candidate to probe the information you have gathered through the assessment.

Objectivity is key and it is critical in making a hiring decision.  The strongest sales candidate isn’t necessarily the most talkative, humorous or outgoing.  Pay close attention to the questions they ask and the answers they provide to your probing questions about their sales skills.

And be sure to assess them.

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From a sales employment ad I read this morning:

Job Location: Minniapolis, MN

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How is this for a spam approach to applicants?

You have been accepted for a high paying work from home job.

Click the link below to get all the information:

Click Here

Sincerely,

Hiring Manager

p.s. Please claim your position today or it will be given to the next applicant.

The “p.s.” line is fantastic.

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Well, there isn’t any precedence yet, according to this StarTribune article.  Clearly the proper use of social networking sites during background checks for candidates is going to be a tremendously important legal topic soon.  This topic has been percolating for some time.  The article references an obvious starting point:

“We can suggest to employers that they include in their application process some statement that says ‘we do reference checking including use of information in the public domain’ and to make it broad enough that if they discover something online it’s fair game,” Ridley said.

I have always been one to note that the Internet IS a public domain so anything a candidate chooses to post online should be usable.  That only seems logical to me, but I know there are others who see it differently.  From the article:

Professional recruiter Gillian Gabriel said she doesn’t use Facebook in her screening process. Instead, Gabriel said, she uses sites like the professionally oriented LinkedIn where people often are looking for job and career connections. Gabriel also looks at blog connections posted on a candidate’s LinkedIn page.

“Whatever they put out there is fair game,” Gabriel said.

“Fair game” seems to be the preferred phrase for this topic.  Anyway, LinkedIn and blogs seem like a good starting point.  I would still choose to look at Facebook also.  I like to know as much as possible about a candidate and if it is online, I’m going to read it.  Just being real.

One last note that caught my eye from the article:

Schmedemann said employers are turning to social media because they “are under pressure to hire carefully” in an economy where there are plenty of job seekers and few jobs. “People fake their résumés much more than they used to,” she said.

Great point.  The difficult job market does lead to desperate acts.

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Breaking news from the big job board world (via press release):

Today, we are excited to announce that Monster has entered into an agreement to acquire HotJobs that will provide you with unprecedented access to job seekers and make Monster the leading site for job seekers in the U.S.
Upon the close of the acquisition, Monster will also enter into a multi-year strategic agreement with Yahoo!, becoming the jobs and recruitment engine on Yahoo!’s homepage for both the U.S. and Canada.

I’m not overly surprised by this news as I believe HotJobs has been fading fast over the past year or two.  I still believe the consolidation of major job boards is less significant than the migration to highly-targeted job boards.  Specialization is the future of job boards as they compete with networking sites for the primary channel to source candidates…in my opinion.

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I am hearing more discussions about incredibly large responses to sales job postings in this present economy.  Some of the companies I talk to are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of resumes they receive.  I went back to look at an old article we wrote back in 2005 when the economy was in a much stronger position.  In today’s economy, the points are even more applicable:

If your ideal sale starts at the VP level, state in your ad that a needed skill is the ability to communicate at the VP level.  If your sale involves many competitors, state in your ad that the successful candidate is able to close deals in a competitively crowded market.  You get the idea – stay focused on the successes you desire from the salesperson in this role.  The primary goal of the ad should be to move the sales superstar to respond.  They should see themselves, or better yet their abilities, in the ad – the skills they possess today, their motivations to succeed and the parameters for success in the position.

The key is always to write the ad with the ideal salesperson in mind.  Often I read ads that are clearly just job descriptions posted my HR on a job board.  Some are amazingly bad – listing amount of weight one has to lift, detailed dental insurance plans, obtuse software references.  There is a time an a place for these things, but not in the approach ad.

I always tell our clients to view the hiring process as a sales call.  Imagine a salesperson cold calls you and starts doing a detailed data dump about a product or service.  The salesperson doesn’t even qualify you for need, they just start rolling.  I find overwritten sales employment ads elicit the same response from me.

The better approach is to think of your ideal salesperson when constructing the ad and write the ad using the most salient points to illustrate the position.  This will keep your writing to a minimum while staying on topic.

And the reason why this is important is defined in this Businessweek.com article:

Such employees are taking a “scattershot” approach to job hunting, sending resumes for openings whether they are qualified or not. That can create headaches for an HR organization. One executive I met with recently told me he had received 200 resumes for a top managerial position. Twenty of them were excellent, but the rest were well-crafted resumes of people who were in no way qualified for the job. Better filtering systems are going to be essential to streamline the hiring process and keep time and costs in check.

Write a better ad.

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The thought of retiring is going to be a novel idea in the near future, at least according to a new abcnews.com poll.  In a recent survey of Americans (my bold):

Half the population in this new ABC News poll thinks both job security and retirement prospects in the years ahead will remain worse than their pre-recession levels. Four in 10 also see worsened prospects for the availability of jobs and advancement, and, consequently, their own spending power.

No surprise there.  The second aspect regarding worsened prospects for the availability of jobs is phrased in a negative manner.  However, it is only 40%.  This effect occurs in these difficult economic times – times will never be as good as they once were.

I have seen this effect in some candidates recently which is never a good approach to landing a new job.  As a recruiter, I am not looking for a naive optimist – the times are difficult and sales cycles are extended.  Yet there are still deals to be closed and almost every opportunity will be highly competitive.  This economy separates salespeople from pretenders in a fast mode.

My recent sourcing activities have involved finding sales candidates who acknowledge the economy while expanding on the modifications they have made to their sales process.  Increased prospecting, budgetary qualifying, time-frame discussions, etc. are all important adjustments that should be forthcoming from strong candidates in this economy.

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