Subject: March Hire Score Newsletter from Barry Shamis
Welcome to the March edition of the Hire Score Newsletter. I want to start by thanking all of you who referred new subscribers this past month. I appreciate your support.
Also, thank all of you for taking me up on the challenge and pre-ordering my new "How To Hire The Perfect Salesperson" product. It is in production and will be available by the 15th of this month as I promised.
Now, I want to talk about the state of the economy. In the past month I have delivered four presentations to executive groups and in each case the feedback about the state of their business has been very positive. I am hearing this from most of the people I speak with around the world. There are still pockets of where things have not started to come back but this is the exception.
How does this affect your staffing plans? I hate to sound like a broken record, but NOW is the time to think about adding to and upgrading your staff. I read a quote recently that really hit home. It said, "If you don't hire great employees, you won't have a great company!"
That pretty much sums it up. So with that in mind, I want to spend the rest of this newsletter sharing a simple 3-step process you can use to get focused and get results. I call this the Selecting Winners 3-Step Hiring System. Here it is:
- Determine the template for the successful person to satisfy your business need.
- Recruit and find the best candidates.
- Choose the best people.
It certainly is simple and, as I am going to show you, it is very powerful. Before you begin, let me emphasize that you have to stay focused. There are lots of distractions when running your business. You will get pulled in a number of directions. But, this simple 3-step process needs to be part of your strategic planning and implementation.
Step One
You need to develop a template of the successful person. You always begin this process by analyzing your business needs. I have said before and I will say again, the only reason to hire someone is to satisfy a business need. You need to determine "what" needs to get done to meet your business requirements. Then you need to identify the results the person needs to deliver to satisfy those business needs.
Next, you need to identify the qualities and characteristics the person has to bring to the job to successfully accomplish the tasks. What does the person need to know? What skills must the person have? How does the person need to behave to be successful? These are the questions you need to answer to build a successful template (our performance-based successful profile).
You are not done until you feel completely comfortable that you have a clear picture of the perfect person to satisfy your business need. A worthwhile exercise is to visualize 6 months or a year into the future see what will be different in your business as a result of hiring this person. This should help crystallize your thinking and help you develop a better template.
A quick note about competencies. I know I went off last month on this subject but it is worth revisiting. Anything with competencies seems to be all the rage today. Companies are spending huge amounts of money developing lists of competencies. The problem is no one can tell me what a competency is. And, if your business needs change (Oh, I can't imagine that happening in this environment!) your competencies may no longer apply. Learning to develop performance-based success profiles that address specific business needs is a much better system.
Step Two
Recruiting is an on-going exercise that can have a greater impact on the success of your company than almost any other business practice. Great people make great companies and great people may not just show up on your doorstep. You need to develop a strategy, create a plan and then work your plan.
A great first step is to develop you Unique Hiring Proposition (Why should a person come work for your company?). If you haven't read my previous newsletters on this subject, go to my website at www.selectingwinners.com and go to the newsletter archive section to get up to speed. Your UHP will provide direction for your recruiting activities. It will allow you to work backwards from the target population.
The exercise you need to go through is to charge your entire organization with recruiting. Develop a recruitment mentality inside the company. A great way to do this is to hold people (especially managers) accountable for recruiting and hiring results. Make it a part of their evaluation. This will get their attention.
A quick rant. I recently had lunch with someone who ran the staffing function for a very famous high tech company. I was very impressed with his understanding of recruiting and staffing from a strategic perspective. But, alas, we did disagree on the key subject of whether or not to pay a bonus for successful employee referrals. His feelings were that people should want to have great people working for the company. I don't disagree but I have never witnessed a referral program that did not do better with a bonus than without.
In theory I am not sure who is right. But in practice, I believe results. What should you do? Test. Try it both ways and use the system that gives you the best results. This is great advice for lots of things. Try the stuff I suggest and use the things that work!
Step Three
Once you are presented with candidates you have to choose the best. Now more than ever you have to make good hiring decisions. Making good hiring decisions boils down to gathering as much data as possible. The more data you have about a person, the better decisions you should make.
You have two avenues to gather great information during your selection process. The first method is to ask great questions during the interview. The second is to use an assessment tool to test for things that may be difficult to determine in an interview. I have talked about both of these at length in previous newsletters. So rather than tell you what you should do, I will devote some time to telling you what you shouldn't do.
Stay away from any interview questions that causes you to have to interpret the answer. That means no theoretical, hypothetical or future oriented question. Stay away from any question that has multiple answers. (Don't ask, "How do you handle objections on a sales call?) Always get specific information.
Don't use any assessment tool that has forced choice answers. (Would you rather work with people or alone? Do you prefer to lead or follow?) Don't use work with a testing company that will not provide you with the technical manual (proof that the instrument does what it says it does).
Don't draw any conclusions that you cannot support with multiple data points. Stay away from opinions and stick with objective data.
At Selecting Winners we have proven through our clients that the methodology and tools we use work. Don't leave your staffing success to chance. We will be happy to help you.
Update
Last month I announced the pending release of my new product, "How To Hire The Perfect Salesperson". Thanks to all of you who took advantage of the pre-release special pricing. Well, the product is complete and in production as you read this. I shot the video last week and it came out great. The interviews I conducted show exactly how I question a candidate. You will see how I probe for additional information and how I control an interview. There really is no substitute for seeing done right.
The manual including all the samples and templates give you everything you need to recruit and hire great salespeople. The 400 interview questions will keep you away from the problems I outlined above.
As I said last month, I know this is the best product I have ever created. Now I am going to show you how much I believe that. I am including with this product an interesting guarantee. I want you to use this product for one full year. At the end of the year, if you have not done a better job of recruiting and hiring salespeople, just write me a letter explaining what did not work. And, I will provide you with a full day of my consulting services to make certain you get it right. I am guaranteeing this $297 product with $8500 of consulting services. I would love to see some of my fly by night competitors offer a guarantee like this.
To reserve your copy, send an email to reservation@selectingwinners.com. You will receive instructions for ordering next week. NOTE: those of you that pre-ordered your copy last month at the special price, please wait until you receive the email from me with your special instructions.
Great Read
My good friend George Colombo recently released a book that you should all read. It is titled, "Capturing Customers.com". George is one of the most respected sales strategists around. When he speaks, I listen and so should you. You can read more about his book at www.capturingcustomers.com.
Update on Tim Larkin Training
Tim is my friend who teaches the special aggressive mindset training I have discussed previously. Tim just returned from three standing-room-only presentations/demonstrations at YEO Mexico City (Young Entrepreneurs Organization) where 350 of the world's top young business leaders gathered last month.
Tim's 3- to 4-hour presentations were unprecedented as he was the only speaker given back-to-back-to-back sessions (most spoke just once at the event). His information truly resonated with this group. Besides filling a number of open training dates, the group has already invited Tim to its August extravaganza in Washington, D.C., where 650 leaders are expected to attend.
What's this mean to you? Two things. He is getting real scarce and real expensive. But, as I mentioned last month I got Tim to agree to hold a session for my readers (The one we did in January was a huge success) at a greatly reduced rate. I will send out a stand- alone announcement of the upcoming session within the next week. Please don't pass up this opportunity, as I am not sure how much longer I can keep twisting his arm to do these special programs for my readers.
Have a great month recruiting!
Barry Shamis
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