One of the most common questions I get from staffing managers is whether it’s better to hire experienced or green sales people. Leveraging my years of experience, I can confidently answer that I really don’t know. I have come to this conclusion because I have seen both profiles succeed and fail. In the end, it seems experience level is a poor predictor of performance. This assertion is supported by a study conducted by American Psychologists Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, who discovered that basing hiring decision on experience level had only slightly better results than a coin flip or hand writing analysis. Neither of which is terribly effective. I’m not saying that experience should not be considered, far from it, the level of experience an employee has should play an important role. However in screening candidates, experience should be balanced by those difficult to define qualities that drive the focus and perseverance of most successful sales people. In their book “Never Hire a Bad Sales Person”, Dr. Christopher Corner and Richard Abraham leverage years of data to capture personality characteristics that are consistent with top producers. The compilation of these characteristics is what they refer to as Drive. Drive is that persistent motivation … Read More
Are the Scales of Talent Tipping?
From my discussions with many staffing owners and executives, things are getting better. Job orders are up, clients are moving faster and it seems more and more likely that the worst of the great recession may be behind us. This uptick is especially true for IT staffing. This is good news, but it does bring with it issues that managers have not faced in a long time including hiring and retaining top talent. Staffing companies live off of the need for talent, but we are facing a bit of a crisis of our own. I speak with staffing managers every day and the common focus area is hiring top sales and recruiting personnel. The sales side can be particularly vexing for managers that are just looking for “A hunter that can bring in business quickly”. These people may exist, but I make a point in my TechServe Rainmaker article that it is less a hiring strategy than it is wishful thinking. Similar issues are found in finding recruiting talent. The fact of the matter is for the foreseeable future in order for companies to build competitive teams, they need to build three critical capabilities: Retain Existing Talent: These last two years have been … Read More