We at The Hire Sense have been focused on employee retention this year. Pretty smart of us, I know (especially when the national unemployment rate is 4.4%). Michael at Hidden Business Treasures pointed us towards the Herman Group’s Trend Alert e-newsletter and I received my first one this week. The topic - wellness programs and their impact on benefits.

This shocked me:

The financial impact of healthcare spending is indisputable. Starbucks spends more money in one year on health insurance for its employees than it spends on coffee for its customers. The US automakers will spend more money this year on health insurance than they will on the steel that goes into their automobiles.

Amazing, but then I read this nugget:

Also, employees who are in the middle of a weight-loss or smoking-cessation program are much less likely to leave. Reducing employee turnover also decreases benefit costs, mostly because there is lower utilization of the healthcare system. When you bring on new people, they have often avoided visiting doctors, because they had no coverage. Once on your system, it€™s time to visit the doctors. This increased system usage produces higher insurance premiums.

Yet another reason to put an increased effort into your retention programs. Turnover is expensive unless you have underperforming salespeople (then it is needed).

We have seen benefits enter the interview process earlier in the discussions. This approach used to be a flag for us back around 2001. Now we consider it a standard aspect of qualifying opportunities. If your company offers a strong benefits package, introduce the package early in your hiring process.

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If you think you are experiencing hiring difficulties, be happy you are not on Wall Street:

Fresh off some of the richest bonuses ever handed out, investment bankers and traders, especially those who deal with leveraged debt, are in high demand. In some cases, bidding has driven newly hired employees into the arms of a rival in mere weeks.

That statement seemed like hyperbole until later in the article:

Securities-industry employment rose to 804,000 at the end of 2006 after a third consecutive year of increases. The employment figure is just 4% shy of the all-time high set in 2000, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

The market is tight everywhere and especially in sales.  Old hiring strategies are being left in the dust.  If you are sticking to a newspaper ad, good luck.  If you are posting a job description as an employment ad, be prepared to wait.  The changing market requires a process for effective sourcing and selection.

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There is something about industry experience that is seductive to many hiring managers. The allure of a salesperson who has been “in the industry” for some time is almost irresistible.

The same infatuation seems to exist with salespeople once they are on the payroll. The salesperson’s ability to understand the company’s product and service offering is important to the position. But why are many new salespeople judged by their level of product/service understanding? Is this really the best determinant of sales success?

In a word, no.

At the risk of being overly simplistic, salespeople are hired to . . . sell. Their sales skills trump all other skills. These skills and abilities should be the measure of their growth in starting a new position. It is remarkable how many hiring managers take the short-term view of a new salesperson’s product knowledge.

Invariably some managers will think of salespeople who were never able to learn the product/service in enough detail to sell it on their own. I am reminded of a salesperson who went to work for a customer of ours who sells wireless scanners. This salesperson did not know the first thing about computers and although she was strong at selling, she was not able to have a qualifying discussion with a technical prospect. In those misalignments, product/service knowledge can nuke strong sales skills.

In most instances, salespeople may not have the fine knowledge needed to devise a proper wiring scheme, write a specific program or read a complex blueprint. But if they have the skills to get the deal to quote/presentation stage and can then close it, how valuable is that? If technical expertise closed deals, the right approach would be to move the most technical people in your company into sales. If you have been in sales more than a day, you know this approach rarely works.

Here is the crux of the issue - your company is probably filled with product/service experts of some sort. I suspect that top-level sales abilities are far less common within the company. If you hired well, this new salesperson brings these scarce sales skills to your company. This is the area in which to focus.

In response to this need, we are expanding our sales development plan and offering a new sales manager track as a new service. This focus will provide sales managers with a specific path to grow new salespeople into revenue quickly while developing a stronger long-term salesperson.

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We are asked from time to time about the best way to conduct an employee compensation review. I have to relay a story to you regarding a friend’s annual review. Here’s how it played out.

She sat down with her manager and recieved a very positive review. She was told she was one of their better employees - recieving 3’s and 4’s out of 5 in all performance areas. In fact, my friend is the top person in her territory and the territory is ranked 2nd out of 8 in a large corporation.

Everything was going well and she received a lot of verbal praise about her performance. Then the manager told her that she would be receiving a 1.5% increase in salary and it would be this amount. My friend interrupted her manager and told him, “That is my current salary.”

The manager asked, “Are you sure?”

He then looked it up on his computer. After about 5 minutes he said, “You’re right, but you are really going to like this then. You are actually going to be getting a 2% raise this year.”

This raise was less than $600 a year. Her manager told her that she really needed to bust her butt because he wanted to win a corporate contest and was not going to settle for second place. My friend is motivated by money so his statement was launched at the wrong time. He never told her what was in it for her: extra cash, a trip, recognition, nothing. The only thing that mattered to the manager was that he would not settle for coming in second place.

Suffice to say my friend was completely de-motivated.

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In a recent article from Workforce Management on new employee retention, 7 months seems to be the magic number when it comes to retaining newly hired employees. Office Angels interviewed 1,400 new recruits on this subject. Here are some of their findings.

In the first seven months the workplace is viewed as a trial period for:

1. The boss - is he or she ‘lackluster?’
2. Are there mentoring opportunities available for them?
3. Does the new job accommodate their lifestyle?

Another important opportunity new employees look for is the camaraderie between the team.

77% of the respondents find it essential for the team to make a trip to the local pub.

No, I’m not suggesting you make an emergency field trip to the local pub as part of your orientation/training program (not an unappealing thought though). But how much time are you spending with your new recruit during the all-important first 7 months?

We’ll be adjusting our hiring process to address this need in the near future.

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From Dick Costolo’s Ask the Wizard blog:

Briefly, the “No False Positives” school of hiring says that bad hires are worse than no hire because bad employees infect the company with all sorts of issues. Better to march on with nobody filling an important slot than to bring in a sub-par performer.

The hire fast, fire fast approach basically can be boiled down to “it’s really almost impossible to understand whether a person is going to be a killer A+ match before they start working with you day to day, so best to find somebody that seems close enough, and then remove them quickly if they don’t work out.”

This topic resonates with us and becomes amplified when you read further into the post:

You can hire fast, fire fast with sales people. It’s very very hard to comprehend a priori who will be able to best sell your service/product in a particular region to a particular customer base. Since this is an area of the company where people generally are responsible for very straightforward, measurable and explicit individual goals (ie, sales targets), it’s much easier to communicate and implement a hire fast, fire fast kind of policy with this group. You have to ensure you really stick to it however, and understand when company processes and products are causing the sales ramp challenge(s).

That’s my emphasis above and I have to disagree, in part, with his conclusion. First off, yes, you can have a priori knowledge of a salesperson’s ability to sell your service/product - that is what we do for a living. We work with a wide range of companies in a wide range of markets, but we see distinct patterns in hiring salespeople.

Here are 3 of the most common pitfalls we encounter:

Entrepreneurs
The sales manager would prefer to have a team of entrepreneurs. Successful sales does require some independence, but often sales managers abdicate their responsibility to coach, train, debrief, motivate and hold their salespeople accountable. In effect, they hire a strong salesperson, provide minimal training and then expect them to perform with no management. This is the most significant pitfall we see in sales departments and one that is exasperated by a hire fast, fire fast mentality.

Savior
The sales manager knows the revenue stream is drying up fast so the solution is to hire a savior to double revenue in half the time. In this instance, every facet of a new hire is turbo-charged. The revenue quota, if attained, should lead to the salesperson owning the company since it hasn’t been attained in years (if ever). A typical approach here is to attempt to hire a salesperson from a competitor who will bring their own book of business. This approach rarely works and is the forerunner to a churn-and-burn sales department.

Clones
The sales manager would prefer to have a salesforce comprised of clones. Typically, they would like to clone themselves. Any salesperson who varies in style, motivations or rewards is viewed marginal. The subtle truth here is that a sales department comprised of clones contains salespeople with the same strengths and the same weaknesses. One market change can render this team impotent.

The Wizard makes an important point at the end of his post - you have to understand what obstacles are affecting the sales ramp process. The first place I would look - the sales manager. Is he or she falling into any of the pitfalls above? What went wrong in the hiring process? What led he or she to believe this salesperson was the best candidate at the time and what changed (or was discovered after hiring)?

We do see companies hanging on to mediocre or worse salespeople when they should be upgrading the team. The belief that a warm body is better than no body rules the day in these organizations. But there has to be a happy medium - somewhere in between hire fast, fire fast and no false positive approach.

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Turnover is a symptom of a deeper disease in most companies. A consistent turnover level typically speaks to one of two problems - poor management skills or hiring the wrong employees. Corporate culture, compensation and other topics can come in to play, but I want to focus on the former topics.

One of our placements resigned this week after only 6 weeks in the role. This is not a sales position so it is somewhat outside of our expertise. Nonetheless, I contacted the former employee and discussed with her what went sideways. She laid most of the blame at the feet of one of the co-owners of the company and the fact that she was being asked to work on projects that were not the main focus of her job (for this co-owner).

I pursued the topics in detail and heard some real angst in her voice as she relayed the issues that led to her walking in and resigning at 8:00am. She painted a dark picture of her experience.

At the end of this discussion, I purposely stammered through one last question, “What did the other co-owner say when you approached her about these topics?”

The former employee tripped all over herself trying to answer and ended the call shortly after my question. She didn’t discuss it, she simply quit. The issue here is that she was doing well in the role and both owners were pleased with her performance up until this point.

I’ve come to learn since then that there are many personal issues occurring in the former employee’s life right now. My point here is that even though the employee characterized this situation as a management issue, the weak link was actually the employee. She was not the right fit for this position based on outside issues in her life.

The exit interview that I was afforded from her was the impetus for determining the root of the turnover. If you have an employee that leaves the company, especially in a sudden manner, it is imperative that you locate them to walk through an exit interview. Secondly, stay pragmatic through the entire discussion. Look for the gaps in the situation and ask an assumptive question. Sometimes you will be surprised by the answer.

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Does ‘Thank You’ Help Keep Associates? from CareerJournal.com takes a look at turnover/retention issues at a major law firm. Scary, I know. However, there is a good lesson in here in regards to retaining top employees.

First the setup from the article:

Faced with a surge in turnover of its associates, the prestigious law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP has been putting on a charm offensive to hold onto junior lawyers.

The presentation showed that the New York firm, now with about 625 lawyers, lost 31% of its associates in 2004 and 30% in 2005. The average associate attrition rate for law firms of about that size or bigger for 2004 was 21%, up from 16% in 2002, according to a study by the National Association for Law Placement.

30% turnover! That is a staggering number when you think of the highly-skilled legal profession. Now, since they are lawyers they needed consulting help on something that probably seems trivial to you and me.

To deal with low associate morale and high attrition, a confidential slide presentation reviewed by The Wall Street Journal urged partners to say things like “thank you” and “good work” to associates they supervise.

Yes, it would seem the lawyers needed a high-powered slide presentation to explain good managerial etiquette. This caught my eye:

What else should partners do? “Return associates’ phone calls as quickly as you would a partner’s or client’s,” said one bullet. “Be sensitive to not canceling associates’ vacations,” said another.

Canceling vacations? Ah, yeah, don’t do that. In all seriousness, it is fun to make light of lawyers but I have encountered this behavior in sales roles too.

I once worked for a difficult sales manager who rarely gave out compliments and when he did, it was little more than a throw-away line - “Good job.” That was the extent of it. Of course, he was often enthused to offer criticism. In those instances I would usually receive a dissertation from him.

That behavior establishes the culture of the department and defines the morale. I realize managing is difficult and being a friend is not necessarily in the best interest of the company. But a manager does need to respect the employee’s effort, be fair in their management decisions and make sure their empathetically aware of the employee’s perspective. I believe that approach will have the greatest impact on improving employee retention.

Even in a law firm.

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I’m a little late to the party on this post from Spherion’s The Big Time blog. The post covers many interesting topics. To start (emphasis mine):

• 23 percent of companies are already dissatisfied with the talent available.
• One-third of HR managers mention turnover/retention as a key concern.
• On average, employers expect 14 percent of their workforce to leave within the next year.
• 31 percent of workers believe there is a turnover or retention problem at their company, and 39 percent of workers themselves expect to leave in the next year.
• Less than half (44 percent) of workers believe their company is taking steps to retain its employees.

You can see where these survey results are leading - there is a disconnect between the employer’s perception and the employee’s perception of the same company. That disconnect is illustrated in the next section of the post involving the drivers of retention. The summary from the post:

Employers and employees wholeheartedly disagree on what drives retention. In fact, employers and employees ranked every factor of retention differently in terms of priority. The most concerning of which relates to time and flexibility. Work/life balance was the most important career priority for 86 percent of workers surveyed. It is ranked first on the employees list of retention drivers after standard priorities salary and benefits. Employers on the other hand ranked time & flexibility last among all factors relating to retention of employees.

A key point to all of these stats is simple - if you have a retention problem, you have a recruiting problem. Strong companies hire the right people that are rewarded by the culture. Any misalignment in the retention factors leads to a turnover problem.

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A couple of months ago we posted on an article from the Pioneer Press titled Speaking Up Helps Keep Star Workers. One of the surprising findings was that 47% of the 16,273 stellar workers surveyed are mailing out resumes, going on job interviews, even contemplating other offers.

I just recently caught up to an article from a WorkForce Management newsletter of a survey Yahoo HotJobs conducted on 5,300 people. They found that nearly two-thirds are open to switching jobs, with an improving job market cited as the chief cause for such optimism. Here are some interesting points they found:

• 39% cited unhappiness with wages as the chief issue
• 75% cited 2006 raises or bonuses were below their expectations

So where is retention on your list of priorities? You may want to put some thought into it because it is a safe bet that more than half of your employees are looking for new opportunities.

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