Tag Archives: Interview

How Do You Hire Good Salespeople? Eight Points

Situation: A CEO struggles with finding competent sales people. Issues include both finding these people, evaluating their skills, and assuring that they fit with the culture of his company. What techniques do others employ to find good candidates? How do you hire good salespeople?
Advice from the CEOs:
• Hiring salespeople is one of the most important jobs a CEO has, yet is paid the least attention. In a small company the CEO is deeply involved in the process, while in larger companies the CEO’s role is assuring that those responsible for selection and hiring are bringing in quality individuals. In either case the important points for the CEO to oversee are as follows:
• Determine what you want the person to do. What skills do they need? How much can you pay? Is that competitive with the market?
• Advertise – use internet portals, print media and referrals. Beyond this, one of the most successful means of recruiting is to hire individuals who have proven their skills in other companies and who are known to and respected by your existing salespeople.
• Review resumes for basic qualifications and weed out all that do not meet those qualifications.
• Test potential hires. There are a number of good tests including: DISC, Meyers-Briggs and Identity Compass.
• Bring candidates in for interview. See how they react to pressure. Are they a good match for the company culture? What is their personality like? Are they comfortable with the company’s philosophy, size, reputation, products and services, and so on?
• Check references and contact their current customers to gather their impressions of the candidate’s capabilities.
• Remember that past performance does not guarantee future results – particularly if there is a significant change in what is being sold.

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How Do You Interview for New Hires and Promotions? Part 2, Eight Points

Situation: A CEO seeks advice on interviewing both for new hires and promotions. What advice and guidelines do others suggest to improve interviews? How do you interview for new hires and promotions?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Use an interview process that is consistent with the company’s plan and culture.
    • Start with the company’s mission statement.
    • Next develop the value system.
    • Draft a hiring plan that is consistent with the company’s mission and values and develop a process to support this.
  • Monitor the process over time and improve it through experience.
  • Assure that position descriptions reflect the individual(s) that the company wants to hire.
  • Before starting the hiring process, ask “What problem am I solving?” The answer will help to define the talents and attitudes desired in candidates.
  • Utilize “listening with a plan”.
    • Be clear on how the person being interviewed is delivering their message. Is their language positive, proactive, energized, or lethargic? Do they take responsibility for their own actions? Do they look at positive aspects of the company they work for and the people they work with? The objective is to make sure that the individuals sought for the job display these characteristics.
  • Hire for growth potential, not just to fill the current slot.
  • Hire consistent with the values and culture that the company wants to create and foster.
  • Hire to skills needed rather than value to yourself and the firm.
    • Don’t just hire on cultural aspects. Evaluate and check the skill set against what this person is supposed to accomplish. Getting the skills set right is just as important as getting the culture right.

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How Do You Hire and Retain Good Salespeople? Ten Points

Situation: Many companies struggle to find good salespeople. They find that few of those they hire last very long. Some individuals don’t have the skills to sell, others find the job more difficult than they anticipated, and some leave for better pay at another company. How do you hire and retain good sales people?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Hiring salespeople is most important job a company or owner has, yet it often receives the least attention.
  • Determine what the company needs the person to do.
    • What skills do they need? Is past experience aligned with the company’s needs?
    • Do they have experience in the company’s market.
    • How much can the company afford to pay?
    • Is the pay offered market competitive?
    • What is the pay scheme: salary, salary plus commission, commission only or commission only following a learning period?
  • Advertise
    • Use internet portals, referrals, ads in the local paper or recruiters.
  • Review resumes for basic qualifications and weed out all that do not meet those qualifications or who lack experience in sales.
  • Test or screen applicants using an instrument such as: Identity Compass, Sales Skill Assessment Scorecard, The Caliper Profile, Sales DNA, DriveTest, SalesGenomix, DISC, Myers-Briggs, Grit or Objective Management Group (OMG).
  • Bring interesting applicants in for interviews.
    • Are they relaxed and comfortable with those who interview them?
    • How do they react to pressure?
    • Do they seem to be a good match with the company culture?
    • Are they comfortable with the company’s philosophy, size, reputation, and products or services?
  • Check references – not just those provided, but talk to companies where they’ve worked in the past.
  • Call customers with whom they’ve worked.
  • Remember that past performance does not guarantee future results

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What are Best Practices for Interviewing and Hiring? Three Points

Situation: A company typically interviews candidates for open positions in a two-day process. The candidate talks to four or more people. The total time with a candidate is about 6 hours, and the hiring process, once a good candidate is identified, takes about 1 week. Is this typical of other companies? What are best practices for interviewing and hiring?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Extend the process – add some pressure to it.
    • All companies deal with pressure and stress from time to time. The team is frequently under pressure. Artificially create a pressure situation for a candidate – preferably later in the day when they are tired. This will help to identify whether they are cool under pressure, irritable or sloppy.
    • For example, put an engineering candidate in front of a computer and give them 30 minutes to do a job that you know would normally take 60 minutes. Don’t mention the mismatch to the candidate. The point is NOT whether they can complete the task, but to watch how they respond under high pressure.
    • This is not unfair to the candidate. It puts them precisely in a situation that they will find while working at the company. Give them the opportunity to demonstrate through their behavior that they either respond positively or really don’t want to be put into these situations.
  • Conduct thorough reference checks – including past employers or clients.
  • DISC profiles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) are used to improve teamwork and understand different communication styles
    • Identify an experienced local resource who can help to assess the DISC profile of the company.
    • This individual can advise human resources and hiring managers on the use and interpretation of DISC profiles of candidates to help assure good company fit.

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How Do You Address Employee Departures? Four Points

Situation: A CEO is concerned that three members of the R&D Team recently left the company. All were in their late 20s and were close. All three cited receiving better offers from another company. They have been replaced by what the company considers better talent. The CEO is concerned about the impact of this turnover on company morale and performance. How do you address employee departures?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • In working with Gen Y through Millennial employees, it may be necessary to adjust expectations in terms of employee loyalty, work ethic and longevity. Younger generations have a different perspective. Learn from this and adjust expectations accordingly.
  • Be frank with new employees up front. Plan their career progression out 36 to 48 months, and during this time give them great training. If they are interested in the company and career progression beyond this, discuss options with them.
  • Use outside resources to do a 2–3-month post-op on the three who left, as well as to help monitor employee attitudes on an ongoing basis.
    • The outside resource can conduct interviews by telephone, on a confidential basis, to assess the reasons why the employees left once emotions have died down. This resource should only provide summaries of the interviews without identifying which past employee said what. This will prompt them to be frank about their feedback. This can yield valuable lessons.
    • Similarly, use an outside resource to conduct confidential telephone interviews with random current employees on a periodic basis. Let employees know that they will be contacted by an outside agency on a random basis, and that their responses will be confidential. The purpose is to better respond to employee needs in the work environment. This will help to assess whether the departures were an extraordinary event or whether they are an early warning of more systemic challenges within the workforce.
  • The increased salary requests of those who left may be symptomatic of a “boom and bust” economy.
    • When things are heating up, and through an employment peak, there is increased pressure to raise wages, accompanies by increased turnover among employees who believe that they can make more elsewhere.
    • Most companies who are able to survive successive boom and bust cycles do not respond to the wage pressure, knowing that each boom is followed by a bust. Those who inflate their wages to keep up often end up dying during the bust.

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How Do You Recruit and Retain the Best People? Three Suggestions

Situation: A company is losing employees. Not the top ones, but the 2nd level. It’s not a manner of money but other reasons. Some don’t like the developing culture of accountability. Others are younger high potential employees who have performed well but have left for unexplained reasons. How do you recruit and retain the best people?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • It’s important to learn why they are leaving.
    • It may be a millennial phenomenon – this group may regard work as a transitory necessity.
    • Determine whether it because of accountability or other reasons.
      • Could they be unhappy with the level of growth opportunity?
      • Previous generations were used to moving to move up – are the younger employees less prone to do this?
    • Could younger workers see work as a job, whereas previous generations saw work as their livelihood – as their life.
  • What options could be tried?
    • Set up a hiring plan – over-hire to assure availability of talent – 15 people in the next 3 months.
    • During the hiring process employ a focused interview diagnostic to identify the key factors that will boost in employee retention.
  • One CEO has suggested an approach:
    • Start with a volunteer employee focus group that holds a series of meetings over lunch.
    • Use company channels to ask for volunteers.
    • Allow the group to relax and open-up over time. Then begin to drill down to the real issues, including legacy issues.
    • Use feedback from the focus group meetings to design a survey to establish metrics, validate the findings of the focus group, and establish benchmarks for long-term attitude monitoring.

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How Do You Get the Right People on the Bus? Six Points

Situation: A small company is growing nicely and needs more people. However, the CEO is struggling to find the time to properly interview and hire additional people. In addition, he is not comfortable in this role. Hiring the right people will be critical to the future success of the company. How do you get the right people on the bus?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Particularly if the CEO does not feel that hiring is a strength, hire an outside HR firm or consultant to screen and select candidates for interviews.
  • It is critical to decide, in advance of any search, exactly what the company needs in the individuals that are hired. A good HR consultant can help the company work through this.
  • Structure the agreement with the HR professional so that they are paid based on successful integration of the individual into the company. It may cost more on the back end for this type of agreement, however, it will save the CEO and the company valuable time and money far in excess of what the company will pay for this assurance.
  • Plan to only see the final candidates.
  • What does the company look for in an HR consultant relationship?
    • Generation of a job description and the key traits of the individual that the company seeks. This helps the HR consultant to select the right candidates for the business and situation.
    • Candidate recruitment, screening, and selection of final candidate(s) for company review.
    • The HR consultant will also prep the candidates to succeed in the company’s environment.
    • Assistance in identifying the key objectives and metrics that will be used to assess the success of the individuals hired during the first quarters or year in the company. If the HR consultant’s compensation is structured so that they are paid well for long-term success, it may cost the company more for the successful hires, however the company will only pay for success and will save considerable cash by averting failures.
  • In addition to making sure that the right people are put on the bus, work diligently to assure that they are also in the right seats, and that they change seats as necessary to complement the company’s growth.

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How Do You Hire Foreign Personnel? Four Observations

Situation: A rapidly growing US software company has an office in Europe. Prospects for key positions have been flown from Europe to the US for interviews. Two or three good prospects have withdrawn their applications before the company could make an offer, citing cultural incompatibility as their reason. How do you hire foreign personnel?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Cultural incompatibility can be an evasive non-response. It is important to dig deeper, perhaps with the assistance of a European-based consultant, to determine what the candidates perceived as the incompatibility. Do this with the candidates that have already rejected the company. Identifying the deeper reason will help to pre-screen future candidates before flying them to the US for interviews.
  • It is important to have a local leader. This appears to be the individual that the company is attempting to hire. The local leader will then do the hiring for the local office. Employees work for their managers and with their peers and will decide on whether to accept a position based on their feelings of compatibility with these individuals.
  • Given that the company is attempting to hire the leader of the European office, review and approval of the candidate by the CEO is important. Here are options to explore:
    • Spend some time studying the culture of the country in which the office is located (European countries vary according to local culture) and adapt the interview style so that it is more compatible with this culture.
    • Hire a European that the CEO trusts to do the recruiting, screening, interviewing and selection a final set of candidates. Ask this individual for their input on the best way of facilitating a meeting with the CEO. For example, instead of flying candidates to the US, once several candidates have been identified travel to Europe and instead of conducting formal interviews, have dinner with each of the candidates. This reduces the tension and makes the interview more congenial. Consider taking the head of HR with along and both of you having dinner with the candidates and their spouses. Again, this will reduce the tension in the meetings, and you will have two viewpoints on the candidates.
  • If, after trying the suggested alternatives, it continues to be difficult identifying a good European candidate, an alternative is hiring an American – someone with solid experience managing offices and operations in Europe – to oversee the European operation.

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Can You Effectively Manage Your Team’s Emotions? Six Ideas

Situation: A CEO recently attended a workshop on awareness of employees’ emotions. The message was that to effectively lead, the leader must be aware of both their own and their team’s emotions, and effectively address these in all communications. How have others acknowledged employee emotions? Can you effectively manage your team’s emotions?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • All companies have both cultures and ways in which employees and managers interact. These are either intentional or accidental.
  • It is important to develop a competency model for any company – skills and behaviors that reinforce company culture and guide both hiring decisions and personnel evaluations. Behaviors should be defined by competencies, including both technical and soft competencies.
  • Once a company competency model is established, position descriptions will be variations of the company competency model.
  • A competency model will help you to script candidate interviews. This works whether you use a panel or individual interview format. Questions should address past behavior in specific situations that the individual has experienced. Provide each interviewer with a set of questions that will help the interviewer understand how the candidate expresses soft competencies. Post-interview, get together and discuss how each candidate’s responses compare with the company model.
  • Supplement your interview results with a psychometric test which scores and effectively measure the key soft competencies expressed in your culture. Pair the psychometric test with cognitive testing to assess a candidate’s technical competency.
  • Use similar questions for employee evaluations or coaching situations. The difference will be that in the case of current employees, you will want to have the employee refer to situations and behaviors experienced at work or working with customers or company partners.

Special thanks to Maynard Brusman of Working Resources for leading this discussion.

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How Do You Tell Hunter from Farmer Sales People? Four Tips

Situation: A company hired a sales person who looked during the interview process like a hunter, but turned out to be a farmer. The company’s product-service mix is new to the market and requires a sales person who excels at landing new accounts. How do you tell hunter from farmer sales candidates?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The hunter sales person is naturally more aggressive and loves the thrill of landing new accounts. The farmer excels at follow-up sales and cultivating existing accounts for new purchasing potential. Neither is particularly good at the others’ job, and it is rare to find individuals who excel in both roles.
  • To differentiate between these two personalities, behavioral interviewing is better than tests.
    • Screen resumes for past sales success in companies in a similar size range as yours to select a group for further evaluation.
    • Behavioral interviews are very different from traditional interviews. They the focus on specific skills and requirements associated with the job and require candidates to give concrete examples of when and how they have demonstrated the skills needed for the job. The interviewer then follows up with probing questions to elicit more details. Responses can be verified in follow-up with references provided by the candidate.
    • During the questioning process, the interviewer may interrupt the candidate with a question like “what are you thinking right now?” These questions provide more insight into the interviewee’s personality and also help to filter out B.S.
    • You are seeking someone who’s “been there done that” in a company which resembles yours and who can convincingly demonstrate what they’ve done.
  • Thoroughly check references – not just those provided by the candidate, but dig and talk to others in the same companies.
  • Strongly align the pay and incentives for a hunter. Hunters prefer a comp package that is heavily commission-based and this will scare away farmers. If they don’t sell, they get paid little.
  • Offer an extended trial period with burden of proof on performance by the sales person.

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