The employment decision is the most critical one that any sales manager /supervisor makes. Get it right and you have good trouble-free workers. Get it wrong and you have designed in your problems for the length of time the employee works for you.

Reality Check,: Nine out of ten front line managers/ supervisors have no training in interviewing or selection of staff!

As result of this lack of trained know-how, how do front line managers usually make their selection decisions? Let's see if this sounds familiar........

You advertise in the media or give a job spec./ man spec. to an agency, and in it you specify...."previous experience of the industry an advantage". Big mistake! You are confusing "experience" with "expertise". Two quite different things. The fact that someone has experience of a job role does not mean they are doing it well. The evidence is that people continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly- particularly in the selling role- and do not learn from failures. Do not be taken in by the thought of the "good contact list" they will bring with them. What happens when they run out of contacts? Over 75% of customers stay with their original supplier when a seller leaves for another company.

Attracting Failure
If you have placed an advert in the newspaper, you will attract two types of applicant, and the 80- 20 rule will apply

The 20: Young, hungry, ambitious go-getters who see you offering them a better opportunity than their present job. These are likely your best candidates for high performance, energy, and effort. They want to prove themselves.

The 80: those who are under pressure or failing in their present job, and now would like to fail for you for more money! Very often this is indicated by someone applying for a job with you, in a role they are already filling in their present job.

Let's assume you get a good response to your advert. You are under time pressure. You cannot interview thirty people, so you use the application letter /form to eliminate twenty-five of the applicants, mostly based on their previous experience or lack thereof. The bad news is you now have a ninety per cent chance that your potential star performer is in the rubbish bin, doesn't even get an interview.

To back this up, I have moved from the advertising industry to selling concrete, biscuits, tobacco, and now coaching and training services. There is no relationship between these business sectors. I never applied for a job I was capable of doing, but I left every job in much better shape than when I started. Selling has been my profession and career, and I have never met a job where I could not learn a working knowledge of the product - sufficient knowledge to enable me to sell it -within two or three weeks.

Designer Answer to Unskilled Questions
Most interviewees learn interview skills in several ways- books, one-day courses. Those who come to you with a FAS (govt.) employment programme in their background have spent a minimum of one full week (39 hours) training in interview skills- it's the first item on the agenda, since FAS justifies itself by getting people back into employment. They are good at this. Beware!

A job interview is probably the most predictable examination we ever sit, with highly predictable questions, enabling interviewees to design " sexy " responses to tough questions and put a positive "spin " on their answers.

Assessment Critieria
When assessing candidates we can look at: -Knowledge and Qualification, -Skills and previous experience, -Attitudes, temperament and motivations.

When seeking to identify "high performers" for ANY job, it is attitude, temperament and motivations that will determine high performance, rather than skill and knowledge.

Check out the typical technical "geek". Hugely knowledgeable and skilled, but would you let him out in public to sell to your customers and clients?......hmmm, thought not.

Experience (track record of doing a job) is different to expertise (record of high achievement at doing the job), and is NO INDICATOR of a high performer. Expertise is what you are looking for, not Experience.

Ask any group of managers what is the biggest determinant of high performance in any job: knowledge, skills, or attitude, and without hesitation we will all agree that "attitude" is the biggest difference in our high performers.

Selecting high performers
So we'd like to select high performers, but base our interviews on their qualifications, knowledge, skills, and experience. What we need to do is get into their heads and find out what is happening in there. We need to be a bit of a psychologist to do this, and since we lack this skill, we convince ourselves that previous experience and skills, and "I'm a good judge of people" are the criteria for selection. If we are such good judges, why do we employ so many mediocre workers in the various jobs we offer, whether truck drivers, admin staff, or sales people? Would our ego, and unwillingness to ask for help have anything to do with it? Those with sales backgrounds are notorious for the daft thinking that asking for help is a sign of "not being able to cut the msutard".

The reality is that lacking the skill to determine an applicant's mental attitudes, we invariably select the applicant we believe to be most like ourselves. Human nature at work. "I'm a good guy. (S)he is like me. Therefore (s)he is good also". You may, in fact, need someone quite different to yourself to balance the team you are building.

The employment decision is too serious to be left to amateurs and "gut feelings"! If you have not had some formal training in the selection of high performing staff, it is well worth investing in the use of an expert analyst to help you. It is affordable and it will pay for itself a hundredfold....and if the investment is worrying you, consider the cost of getting it wrong.

Good Luck as you go for it.

Maitiu

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About the Author

Maitiu is the managing director of Great Expectations Coaching, based in Dublin. He specialises in sales coaching and sales training. He is a Graduate member and a Fellow of the Marketing Institute of Ireland. He helps many of his clients with the recruitment of high performing sales staff across a broad range of selling roles.