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Sales Force Solutions: The Top Five Hiring Mistakes |
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The Top Five Hiring Mistakes
Hire the right way, and you’re more likely to hire the right person.
By Troy Harrison
One of the ways I serve my clients is by recruiting and/or helping them fix their own hiring problems. Too often, a small business owner will have a hiring failure, or a short sequence of hiring failures, and decide that “nobody wants to work anymore.” That couldn’t be farther from the truth. I do believe that it can be more challenging to find quality sales help than in the recent past, due to several different causes; but when I’ve needed good people, I’ve found good people. This month, I’ll share a few of the simple things that I’ve discovered that can help you separate the pretenders from the contenders. Let’s call them “the top five mistakes in sales hiring.”
Failure to Plan
You’ve heard the phrase: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in sales hiring. There are numerous variables in a sales hire, including personality traits, experience, activity patterns, selling style, preferred customers and other elements that dictate “fit” into the job. A salesperson that isn’t a fit for the job probably won’t be successful in the job. But if you haven’t planned and defined your job before seeing candidates, “fit” is completely left to chance. This causes more bad sales hires than any other reason; and, it causes our second issue.
“Hey, I like This Person”
Surveys show that most hiring managers (sales managers and business owners) make their initial hiring decision very soon after meeting the candidate; sometimes as soon as five minutes. They do this by making their first decision regarding whether they “like” the person or not, and the rest of the time they spend in the hiring process is a formality.
Here’s a clue: Most salespeople are likeable people and able to create this reaction quickly. “Liking” a person too quickly means that you ignore, or don’t smoke out, other information that could be red flags indicating a potential bad hire. Don’t be that manager. Let “I like this person” wait until the end of the process, rather than the beginning.
Single Interview Hiring
Many managers don’t think they have time to do multiple interviews, so they will interview a candidate once, take a shine to the candidate, and make the offer based on that single interview.
Here’s the problem: The interviewing and hiring process should serve as a window into the salesperson’s head. In some instances, you can learn much more about what’s in a salesperson’s head between interviews and meetings than you can in the interviews. A recent example was a guy that I interviewed (twice) for a job that was a particularly tough fill. He looked great on the resume and performed well on his first interview; however, he was so high maintenance during the interview process that I realized he would be a very difficult hire for this position. He even went so far as to call me and ask me what to wear to his second interview! Needless to say, he lacked the self-reliance for the position, and was not hired.
Failure to Do Due Diligence
According to a Wall Street Journal study a few years ago, 40 percent of sales hires were made without a single reference or employment history check. Which means if you’re a complete loser of a salesperson and can’t find anyone to say good things about you, you could falsify your entire career background and still have a 2-in-5 shot at getting the job. Does that scare you? It should if you’re in the habit of not checking backgrounds and references. In calling references in the past, I’ve called dead people; I’ve called people who had never heard of the candidate; and, I’ve called people who warned me not to hire the person. Those were candidates who were playing the odds. Don’t get played. Call references.
Repeating the Same Conversation with Different People
Many companies like to have candidates interview with multiple managers. The purpose is to seek consensus on the hire. This system works well if the different managers plan out their interviews beforehand and have different conversations with the candidate. It doesn’t work well if the managers end up having the same conversation, multiple times. In that case, it would be difficult not to achieve consensus. If you’re going to do the multiple-manager tactic, make sure that it comes with pre-planning.
Take an honest look at your own hiring practices, and decide if you are guilty of any of these mistakes. If so, make changes now to hire the right way, so you are more likely to hire the right person.
Troy Harrison is the author of Sell Like You Mean It—Outselling Your Competitors By Understanding Your Customers, and he is the owner of SalesForce Solutions, a Kansas City-based sales training and consulting company. You can get more information about SalesForce Solutions and subscribe to the free "HotSheet" weekly e-zine by visiting www.salesforcesolutions.net or by calling (913) 645-3603.
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