I just read an ad for a sales-related position – it is in the sales category but it is so vaguely written that I cannot decipher what the position entails. The ad discusses what the person will be responsible for managing and some of what they will be doing. It then flows into a bulleted list of requirements that include: Bachelor’s degree Minimum of 12-15 years of business experience Minimum of 5-7 years specific experience Previous management experience A specific certification I edited out the specific experience in the bullets above. The next piece of the ad is the closing information in great detail. Nothing in the ad describes the… Read More
Continue ReadingHow Not to Stand Out – Part Deux
More from the online resume board. Check out this excerpt from a resume cover letter: I will say this though – I have a master’s degree so DO NOT WASTE MY TIME WITH SALES POSITIONS (I’M NOT A USED CAR SALESMAN) AND POSITIONS THAT ARE BENEATH ME. Please also bare in mind that I live on the east coast so please take heed that it might be later for me if you call at a certain time depending on where you are from. I have the experience and the education to work in an actual position. ALL CAPS = Trouble. Let’s parse out one sentence in this masterpiece – I… Read More
Continue ReadingSelling the Failures
For the past 5 years, we have helped companies hire people who have started their own companies, worked as 1099 contractors or were freelance workers. Some companies shy away from these people since the natural inclination is to assume they have failed in some way. We strongly encourage companies to refrain from filtering these candidates out of their process simply for their recent experience. Their experiences and skills are often broader and richer than a career corporate employee. How to turn failures into selling points provides tips to candidates for explaining their recent career failures. The author provides coaching to candidates regarding their failures – I like this advice: Rather… 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 ReadingJob Postings, Rewards & Databases
Careerbuilder.com in their Small Business Advisor Section has a great article that takes you step-by-step in posting an effective online ad. As is to be expected, the article is specifically written to CareerBuilder’s site specifications. The information is still valuable and can be used to effectively write an ad for any of the online job boards. One tip that I would add that the author does not address is describing how the position is rewarded. One attribute that seems to appear in most ads is the desire to find a “self-starting” salesperson. This aptitude can be measured by our assessments. However, in order to maintain a self-starting aptitude, the salesperson… Read More
Continue ReadingVulcan Qualifying
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… Read More
Continue ReadingExpiring Ads
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.
Continue ReadingStats and Sourcing
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… Read More
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