There are three letters that all owners and managers must engrave in their brains every time the decision to hire a new employee is made. The three letters are TEC, which stand for Talent, Experience, and Chemistry.
The greatest chance of success when hiring a new employee is to make sure the people you hire possess these three characteristics: the raw talent to get the job done, the experience gained from having done a similar job before and done it well, and the chemistry adequate. to fit into the organization.
Now a critical question: For the second greater odds of success, which characteristic would you eliminate: talent, experience, or chemistry?
The answer, of course, is Experience. Why experiment? There is an obvious reason: because experience is all you can teach. Talent and Chemistry are innate or innate.
To test your resolve regarding talent and chemistry, ask yourself this question: what’s been your track record in changing people? I think most owners and managers would agree that changing people is almost impossible.
However, many owners and managers are more likely to think experience first, not last. They are looking first for a salesperson who already has product knowledge and hopefully someone who can bring a business book to the job.
Because when I interview vendors, I often learn that they’ve worked for two or three of my competitors, it’s easy to get the impression that many local owners and managers in my industry are recycling each other’s waste. Could this be true for your industry as well?
As many of my readers know, I majored in psychology and have administered and interpreted tens of thousands of psychological evaluations since I entered the business world. If there’s one thing I’m very confident in, it’s psychological test scores that produce the highest odds of sales success. Testing sales candidates is too cheap not to take advantage of this insight into a person’s observable characteristics.
Which is more difficult, teaching a new salesperson how to sell or teaching a new salesperson the product knowledge to serve a contracting customer? My experience has taught me that it is much more difficult to teach a new salesperson how to sell.
There are no shortcuts to hiring. Managers who have the best track record of hiring winners take the steps one step at a time. Here are the steps as I see them:
1. Conduct a brief prepared interview over the phone to determine if you want to take the interview process to the next step.
2. Administer a 15-minute psychological test to the candidate online to determine if they have the right stuff to move on to the next step.
3. Conduct a one to two hour interview with the candidates asking each candidate the same detailed open-ended questions. Note: this interview can be delegated if the interview is recorded.
4. Check references. Avoid human resources departments when checking references. Try to find people who used to work with the candidate and are no longer with the candidate’s current company. This is easier to do than you think.
5. Take candidates out to lunch or dinner to see how they behave. This is an important step.
6. Now is the time to make an offer or reject the candidate.
Avoid hiring pitfalls:
1. Stop selling until you are ready to buy. Don’t spend all of your interview time trying to convince the candidate of the merits of your company. It’s only when you ask good open-ended questions that you start to get information.
2. Hire the best of the bunch. If the first set of candidates doesn’t produce a candidate with the right stuff, get yourself a new set.
3. Remember how difficult it is to change people. If a salesperson has been selling for five to ten years and is still struggling to make a decent living, what are the chances that he can achieve above-average sales working for your company?
In his book, The Real Business 101: Lessons from the TrenchesJim Sobeck offers three chapters on the hiring process. I highly recommend reading these chapters. http://www.amazon.com
Hire talent, experience and chemistry for the best chance of hiring success.